Country life at 7,000 feet
We had almost no rain until recently: 0.02 inches in May, 0.04 inches in June, and no more than a few drops until two days ago. The bear and deer are normally up in the high country now, but without rain there’s no food. They started trickling down to the valley (and the river-fed vegetation) a few weeks ago.
And we finally got rain, a little in the day, more at night, and it’s raining again today.
The insects and birds are singing in jubiliation.
The first is a structural conundrum: you don’t worry have to worry about thin ice.
A two-inch skin of ice can support a tank (that is, a WW2 British tank). Thin ice is very strong, but on a pond or lake the thickness varies. It’s not the ice that’ll get you, but the holes in it.
The second thing I learned at my father’s knee is that water has three phases, shown below:
ice, water, and vapor/solid, liquid and gas/
and each of us are composed of these three parts.
The moral of this story is, you can never predict which lessons your children will take to heart.
This is the far end of Missionary Ridge, near the edge of a 73,000 acre fire that burned in 2002.
You see that band of scrub oak blazing yellow and orange? It’s the same tree as the ones framing this shot, but quite a bit higher.
These photos are taken really high, near the top of the ridge. One of the peculiar things about forest fire is that not all of the trees burn. Here’s a Ponderosa pine that was scorched while its neighbors died.
Here are two dead pines near a stand of untouched trees,
and here you see scrub oak as the real winner after this fire: it was scorched and the big trunks were killed, but today scrub oak predominates in many areas that were previously mixed.
Here’s a little watershed denuded by the fire: the big scrub oak in the foreground are dead, and so are the aspens halfway up the slope.
Here an aspen forest stands burned and dead, with a new aspen grove rising from the roots.
and these really tall little aspens came from the root system of the really tall dead aspens, scrub oak in the foreground. Fall hasn’t hit these baby aspens yet, but it’s coming.
This is the La Plata River. It was diverted last week.
There are more water rights owed on this river than there was flowing in its banks, and all that is left of the La Plata is an empty riverbed.
The smell of rotting fish lays over the entire watercourse, because this was flowing until last week. This is what passes for water management in this part of Colorado: when too many people own water, the river is drained entirely.
It’s not that there isn’t any water; it’s that the water is owed downstream to irrigators. The irrigators are growing hay for Texan horses. You’d think this was illegal, but it’s not… and the only fish left alive in this river are minnows
swimming in the small, unconnected ponds that remain where the river once flowed.
These refugia are too small and too warm to support big fish.
Where do the great blue herons go when the river runs dry?
On September 15th last year, I took the goldfish out of the pond to remake it as a native pond that could host frogs and salamanders. The goldfish moved to a tank in Hesperus.
I lined the pond with rocks from the river, and took the flat rocks away from the edge.
This is how the pond looked Oct. 1, before I planted the perimeter with thyme.
For a healthy pond I am supposed to have five native species of plants in the water; I have four. I am supposed to have native pond fish in here, and instead I have a little school of guppies that will die next winter. They’re eating the mosquito larva, but are too small to bother the tapdpoles. Which I don’t have.
I think it’ll take another year to get frogs in here, but the pond is coming along.
An old friend who is a professional photographer took us on a hike in the Weimenuche mountains. He said, you’ll want to bring a tripod, so I did.
You’ll want to take a photo here, he said. So I did.
This would be better backlit at about 6 o’clock, he said, but you might as well take it. So I did. It’s an aspen forest, with a few pines.
Down on the valley floor, there’s the ruins of an old cabin. A hundred years ago someone was living up here, maybe with summer cattle.
These magical mountain valleys always depend on the stream running through it. This time of year the creek is too bony to pass, but in the spring the water runs high.
Deer came as Bob and Dan soaked their feet in the stream,
and I don’t know if you can see how beautiful this water is but here’s a try.
This is the confluence of Lime Creek and Cascade Creek, and you can see from the size of the rocks how high this water runs in the spring.
Here is water at the confluence of the streams.
True confession: I carried that tripod 7 miles and didn’t use it because I didn’t have it properly set up beforehand…so the only photos that came clear are the water shots.
Go figure.
My friend Joanne organized a little ducky expedition down the river. A ducky is an inflatable kayak.
We’re sharing her tandem ducky, which is sticking out of the truck bed.
Three other ladies brought one-person duckies.
Here we’re gearing up. The water is cold, so people who don’t have wetsuits wear polypro wetshirts and wetshorts as an underlayer; for a top layer most everyone has waterpants and kayak tops. By the time we have on our PFDs (personal flotation devices that used to be call lifesavers) and our sunshades or helmets, we could be wearing burqas for all the skin we’re showing. Women who spend too much time on the river without covering up are called River Hags for their wrinkles; we’re trying to avoid the title.
We went six miles. You can see here that the river is getting bony in places–that’s river talk for when there’s too little flow to fully cushion the ride so the bottom of your boat sometimes bumps on stones. We went through some pretty impressive rapids that we stopped and planned our path through beforehand. We didn’t scout them, which is when you get out of your boat and plan your route from the bank; we just talked through the various features and knew we should go left right left. I told Joanne that I was willing to flip and ready, but didn’t want to (we did great). At the end of the rapids we eddied out by the side of the river to talk. One lady said, I was so scared I almost shit my pants.
That’s classic river talk too, but it doesn’t need a translation.
Eleven months ago, the ditch company brought in heavy equipment to rebuild the mouth of the ditch.
Five months later, the ditch was off, the river flow was low, and a tree fell across the ditch and part of the river.
Animal tracks go up each side of the river, but they aren’t crossing here.
Six month later, there’s a new trunk across the river, and the one that fell earlier is now pointed towards us, foreshortened. A good scoured trunk is a sign of an undammed river–the water was high enough to uproot trees, and the trunk has been in the water long enough to lose its bark. Dangerous, too.
A snowfed river in spring can eat you for breakfast.
The US team members for the upcoming kayak world championship were chosen in Durango this weekend.
The dust storms earlier this month put a layer of soil over the mountaintops, and the snowmelt is peaking weeks early. The river is running high.
The top 50 kayakers in the United States came to race. Each gate is suspended from a cable that goes across the river, and you run the green gates with the river, and the red gates against the river. For some races, the gates are hung to make an easy course. Not for this race.
Each kayaker made several runs. Their points are based on time and faults.
In the simplest terms, kids rode down the river and walked their kayaks back up.
More holistically, people drove from all over their country in station wagons stuffed with gear, and a couple of kayaks strapped on the roof. This guy came from North Carolina. Since kayaking doesn’t have much sponsorship, he may be camping out.
And here’s why they came:
a shot at the world championships, and big water.
They had a good day
riding the spring run-off. An undammed river is a wonder of nature.
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