Country life at 7,000 feet
Since I haven’t completed my follow-up post for the treehouse curtains, I need to stall with a “Name the Photo” contest.
The winner of this contest gets a lovely box of Rocky Mountain Chocolates.
The story of this filly can be found here, but the story of the picture can be found in the title… if only I had a title.
Thanks for playing!
Suzy and Kristy built a remarkable tree house out of bits and pieces.
There is a lot of agricultural work to be done, and it’s easier to get labor if you can offer a place to live. The treehouse is nestled among the gambel oaks.
Such a nice entrance, and I can’t help admiring that lovely curtain.
This is the kitchen sticking out next to the back porch, with Jessie being quietly helpful. She has been inside and figured out where she would lie down if we stayed there, and now she’s scoping out the perimeter of the property, seeing how much she’d have to manage.
This is the sleeping loft above the chair and table below.
These spaces are pretty tightly packed, but they feel just right for one person.
Here’s the kitchen nook (the sink drains into a five gallon bucket) where the whole system works as long as you just have one pot and one pan. It’s a minimalist’s dream.
In its own way, this treehouse is a perfect one-person living space. But since it is uninsulated it can be very cold in the winter, and we thought thermal curtains would help.
I’ll tell you about them tomorrow.
The road on the other side of the valley was closed by a mudslide. The mud was four feet deep across the road, and it took two days to get the road cleared.
This is where the mud entered the road.
A major irrigation ditch runs parallel to the road. It’s not filled with water yet, so mud filled the ditch and flowed in both directions. The road crew cut a hole in the ditch so the mud could flow down into the orchard and out of the road.
That red triangle of earth is a cross section of the far wall of the ditch–the near wall is under mud so you can’t see it. The road crew cut a notch in this hundred year old irrigation ditch so the mud could drain from the road and hopefully from the irrigation ditch as well. Below, a section of the rail fence was removed so the mud wouldn’t sweep it away. There is a lot of mud being held in by the solid fence on the left.
I realized the next day that I didn’t have a shot of the rockslide where this material originated. Today was overcast so the picture is a little bland, but you can see how the color of the mudslide matches the color of this high altitude rockslide.
This is technically a debris flow, not a mudslide–it’s not topsoil that’s moving, but subsoil. In the San Juan mountains, these debris flows are triggered by water; this one in particular is from last winter’s heavy snowpack and the quick meltdown. In some places, mudslides are a product of human interventions like deforestation, agriculture or road construction; here they’re a function of the region’s geology, and of water.
The debris flows start when the snowpack melts, and continue intermittently through the summer. A big rainstorm can move the mountains as well as the melting snow. In this area, water moves the earth.
One of Sam’s favorite dishes is pasta with white sauce. This white-on-white meal is classic comfort food. It’s like macaroni and cheese without the baking, and it’s made out of stuff that I’m likely to have in the kitchen.
Here’s the tower of ingredients: flour, butter and Parmesan cheese (or Romano or Asiago), heavy cream, milk and some kind of vinegar. It’s the dash of vinegar that balances the fats and makes it complex and delicious. Use a white wine vinegar if you want a lighter note, or balsamic vinegar for a bolder tone. I forgot to put the prosciutto in the picture, and by the time I realized it the Parmesan was gone.
First you take a chunk of butter: I measured it especially for you and found I liked starting with 3 TBS butter.
On low heat, you melt the butter and wisk in an equal amount of flour–3 TBS.
Wisk it until it is nice and smooth, and then wisk it as it thickens.
Wisk in 1/2 cup heavy cream, and it’ll keep on thickening.
Wisk in about 1/2 a cup of milk, until it’s the exact white sauce consistency that will thickly coat the noodles.
Grate a pile of cheese, and stir a handful into the white sauce; keep wisking until it’s completely melted. You could add the vinegar and call it done at this point, after you salted and peppered it. But we’re going one step further because it’s a payback for shovelling mulch.
The prosciutto has to be fried until the fat is clear, and the meat is slightly browned. Sam thinks this is a crucial step.
Then you wisk it into the white sauce, and add a dollop of vinegar–somewhere more than a tsp and less than a TBS. This works some alchemy with the fats to make the sauce taste cleaner and brighter. Sam is a big fan of vinegar.
And that’s it, except for salt and pepper. (And maybe thyme, it you’re so inclined.)
If you put it on spinach pasta, you won’t have a white-on-white meal. But even if the colors aren’t inspiring, it’s a nice dinner.
The geese were not a bit happy to see me.
In fact, Yampa started making a federal case out of me being there at all.
He started getting really aggressive.
He said, I’d really prefer it if you’d leave.
He said, now would be a good time.
and he puffed up his chest and said, I have good reason.
I really do.
And he really did. It turns out Yampa the gander is a goose after all.
The elk were lounging around on the east side of the valley. 
Here are three bulls, each heavy bellied and magnificent,
and here is their harem.
I tie on bars of Irish Spring soap to deter deer, while Bob uses a less subtle approach: he sprays the foliage with a product called “Liquid Fence”, layering the chemical soap scent with the odors of rotten eggs and garlic.
The price tag on this gallon jug reads “$124.99″. He must have bought it when he bought trees, because that’s the only way he could have justified the cost. Our deer herd could take down a young tree overnight, and this is the only deer repellent I’ve seen with a money-back guarantee (and it’s organic). This is the second year he has been using this single gallon, and it’s still 2/3 full. Liquid Fence’s motto is “It Really Works“, and it does… so when you think of it as a garden-saver, the $40 of Liquid Fence Bob sprayed on the foliage last year was a bargain.
Meanwhile, two longtime gardeners I know swear by their old-time homemade deer repellent:
Beat together 2 eggs, a cup of milk, and a few cloves of pressed garlic. Add a dollop of cooking oil and good squirt of dish soap, shake it well, and put it in a tightly capped jar for a few days of sun. When it is ripe, add it to a gallon of water; spray liberally on any foliage you want deer to avoid. (Vary by adding a tablespoon of cayenne.)
When I read the fine print, it turned out that the ingredient list for Liquid Fence is putrescent egg solids, garlic, sodium laureth sulfate (soap) and potassium sorbate, a preservative. So Bob paid $125 for a jug of rotten eggs, garlic and soap, the exact same deer repellent that our friends make in mayonnaise jars. Woops!
It makes me think that while the people at Liquid Fence use the motto “It Really Works” on their label, they might have a different motto in-house. I’m guessing it’s something like “I can’t believe that people will pay such inflated prices for rotten eggs and garlic.” Of course, now that I have the recipe we’ll never ante up for Liquid Fence again. And now you have the recipe, too.
Excellent recipe.
Several people have requested an update on the little mustang filly who was trapped in the snow all winter. I took three trips to the middle of nowhere to get these shots (the first time I forgot a piece to my camera; the second time it was snowing with a flat grey sky that didn’t make interesting photos) so if three time’s the charm, well, here we are:
Little Thankful has grown a lot.
There isn’t much snow now, but there still isn’t anything for her to eat. The ice has melted and there’s no way to cross the river at Suzy’s house. Instead of skiing east to feed her, Suzy drives a few miles down the road and hikes in with hay from the other direction.
The trouble is, Thankful is still skittish to the extreme. Someone has brought her hay every day since early January, but no one ever sticks around. So I brought in some equipment–a beach chair, a bottle of water, my good old dog and the NYT crossword puzzle–and I settled in right next to her food.
She paced back and forth. She pretended she wasn’t hungry and walked away; she came back. This took the first chunk of the crossword.
Then she started making a slow, step-and-pause approach to the hay
and finally dared a mouthful with a human being sitting six feet away. Not such a big step, really.
She calmed down enough to eat, and to look at me while she ate.
and she listened to me tell her what a good nice horse she was.
And whenever she forgot, for a moment, that I was there, she’d shut her eyes as she ate, and pause to take a deep breath that was filled with the scent of hay.
By the time Bob and I were through with the Seed Savers catalogue, we had ordered 12 varieties of tomatoes and that was just the beginning. The seeds arrived a few days ago, and it was feeling like spring. So I picked up potting soil on the way over to Suzy’s, and brought along a bag of worm castings (we call it pixie dust and sprinkle it on the flats when they’re planted).
Such a nice set-up! It’s a passive solar greenhouse in the background.
We filled the flats with potting mixture, and put in the seeds.
We put up the shelves, and filled them with newly planted flats. Each flat has 66 plugs, and this side has 11 flats so you’re looking at 700+ little plants-to-be.
Suzy is stringing heating wire under the flats, because it’s still chilly at night.
Three days later, Suzy said You should come over and look: the greenhouse is stuffed.
And it was.
I puzzled over what to do for April Fools, and my mother suggested that I write about turkey sex. This is a reverse April Fools: it is something that you’d think was untrue, but it’s true.
Turkeys can reproduce asexually. (So can many fish and some reptiles, but there aren’t a lot of birds that do and certainly the turkey’s the biggest bird.)
A turkey hen can hatch a clutch of eggs without ever seeing a male. Somewhere between a few percent and 30% of all turkey eggs are self-fertilized, and it’s believed that the chicks from these self-fertilized eggs are always male. So a turkey hen can go and make herself a man.
Here’s my theory on why: Tom turkeys are mild mannered most of the year, but when their hormones hit in the spring they put on a stunning display. Here is a turkey who is thinking of food
and here is a turkey who is thinking of sex.
OMG.
I’ve read accounts of Toms strutting in a figure eight, wearing a track into the ground, gobbling furiously. I think they get so inflamed with hormones, so intent on their interest in mating that anyone can kill them… and they do. There stands this poor Tom, swept away with passion, and so stimulating to the hens in his florid display that it’s worth dying for.
And if all the males get killed during mating season, no worries, because the hens have figured out how to carry on alone for a generation.
You know the old saying Handsome is as handsome does? I don’t think that turkeys ascribe to it.
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