Where Nature Meets Culture—Plus Wildfire, Dogs, Environmental News, and Writing with a Southern Rockies Perspective.
Having driven out of the hills and onto the prairie, we stopped for a short break before going on to Pueblo. Where did this blog go? No, I have not quit blogging, but I was a little distracted during the month of July. At around 6 a.m. on June 29, a tree (it is believed) was blown into a power line near the little resort community of San Isabel, on the Custer-Pueblo county line. (Local residents…
It's a long way from the Southern Rockies, but this video fits the June 20 theme of " predators and fawns/calves. " A friend in Poland sent the video's link to the news site Notes from Poland. The European bison, sometimes called "wisent" (similar to ours but taller and slimmer) was extirpated by over-hunting. Its population has recovered in a few places due to re-introduction from captive herds.…
The suspect makes his first pre-dawn appearance. My "neighborhood" is a little too rural for apps like Nextdoor , but we do have a text-message network. It lit up a few days ago when a young (I'd say yearling) black bear started doing the equivalent of squeezing the door handles of all the parked cars. Before long he (?) was spotted at this house and that. Over the next few days he knocked over…
A week ago, Marco the Chessie and I were walking up a pedestrian-bike trail that goes trough "open space" by the Walking Stock golf course in northeast Pueblo. Suddenly he jumped sideways. I looked down and back — this bull snake was artistically coiled next to the wall that separates one of the adjacent upscale houses from the public path. Not a bad homestead for a snake—a secure den under the…
Paddleboarders on the Arkansas (Colorado Parks & Wildlife) Today's Colorado Sun reports that the low snowpack -- 24 percent for the Arkansas River basin -- means low runoff and a shorter season for the rafting companies: There are about 45 river outfitters in the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area between Leadville and Cañon City who host as many as 250,000 commercial rafting visitors every year,…
I read once about this Appalachian doctor who told a patient to take a certain medicine in the winter and to keep taking it "until snakes crawl" -- in other words, until warm spring weather. Tying the directions to the natural world was simpler and easier to remember than setting a calendar date. Now I have my reasons for avoiding rattlesnakes , so maybe I could just be a tech-user and watch the…
Antero Reservoir (Colorado Parks & Wildlife A ntero Reservoir, one of the two "saucer" reservoirs in South Park, as I like to think of them, is being drained to save water in the current drought . (The other is Spinney Mountain Res.) Denver Water announced Monday it will drain and close South Park’s Antero Reservoir fishing and camping spot to avoid critical evaporation losses in a tinder-dry…
Marco checks out a muddy arroyo in Huerfano County. I let March go by without posting. That's bad. I was deep into the most annoying book-edit of my life. Kind of like " Who's on first? " but with different drafts and different sets of corrections from different proof-readers. That said, I did get out in the weirdly warm and dry weather to investigate some public hunting lands-mostly Colorado…
Something there is that does not like a yellowjacket -- but loves to tear up the nests and eat fat larvae. * * * T his was a rough autumn in Wasp World. The tenant in our rental cabin, about 150 yards from the main house, reported being attacked by yellowjackets when stepping out on the back stoop. And he is sensitive to them, although not full anaphylactic-shock-death-sensitive. The wasps got me…
I'm using the broad definition, not the Kansas-centric one . And it's the Colorado Otero County, not the New Mexican Otero. But both counties are named for the same man, Miguel Antonio Otero (1829–1882). Now you know. Endless sky.
A couple of days ago, I checked the trail camera nearest the house, located about 80 yards up the ridge in back. With apologies for the infrared flash on the ten-year-old camera, this is one photo of a sequence. Photo taken about 9:30 p.m. on December 13, 2025. M. was out for a walk as I was checking the photos on my laptop. "Guess what I got," I said when she same in. "A mountain lion," she…
A straight road in the Pawnee Nat. Gransslands. Not CO 71. S ome years back I was flying from London (Gatwick) to Denver, across the Atlantic at night, then over the frozen wastes of Labrador, moving on and on southwesterly towards Colorado. It was December, and the aircraft was only about half full in coach. Behind me were two twenty-something English guys, who had purchased a ski package tour to…
The Northern Lights seen in eastern Colorado (Colorado Parks and Wildlife). This past week has seen the Northern Lights visible as far south as Texas Here in southern Colorado they were photographed in the San Luis Valley, at a latitude of 37° -- pretty far south, I live surrounded by hills and ridges, with no view of a horizon anywhere except a hint to the northwest. On Wednesday, November 12,…
The last bobcat, ready to be sent to his new temporary home. The half-grown bobcat hissed and snarled as Tom Sanders of Wet Mountain Wildlife grabbed him with a noose pole and lowered him into the carrier that I held open. Unlike the other bobcats we had released last July, he was bound for another facility. Wet Mountain is winding down, and today's wildife transport might have been the last I…
Search dog and handler (Front Range Rescue Dogs) A recent article in the online Colorado Sun by J ason Blevins describes how Vail Mountain Rescue Group member Erika German used twenty-year old maps and reports t o develop a new search strategy for the remains of hiker Michelle Vanek. Vanket disappeared in 2015 on Mount Holy Cross in central Colorado. German's work was intelligent and "outside the…
The lone horse grazes at the Blue Heron Ponds near Florence, Colo. S ometimes when headed north I stop at some old gravel pits (now full of water) on BLM land by the Arkansas River, now managed by Fremont County as a kind of basic, "undeveloped" park, which is just how I like it, thanks very much. No picnic tables. No soccer fields. Just a few people walking around or fishing for catfish or perch.…
Search and rescue volunteers are briefed before heading out. (Conejos County Sheriff's Office) The search for two missing bowhunters, Andrew Porter and Ian Stesko this past week in southwest Colorado really got under my skin. Obviously I did not know them. I have have messed around on the upper Los Pinos River drainage just a little, but they went in farther. Their bodies were discovered on…
Oshman's 7 x 35 um . . . optical instrument I inherited this/these from my stepmother, Catharine. She was no outdoorswoman, but I can imagine her using them at Air Force Academy football games (she used to have season tickets). The label is Oshman's, a once-major Texas chain of sporting goods stores. Oshman's history tracks the collapse of brick-and-mortar retail stores : started by a Houston…
Young porcupine at a rehabilitation center in Colorado. W hen I was a boy, my dad was a US Forest Service district ranger. That meant he was in charge of a "district" within a national forest, a forest having usually four to six (or more) districts, depending on geography. He had a crew chief and a crew whose size varied seasonally, a half-time secretary, and a full-time assistant ranger (also…
I've always looked out for her virtue, but I went into a shopping mall Barnes & Noble, and when I came out, Blanca, my refrigerator-white Jeep Wrangler Unlimited (that's the 4-door version) had lost her virtue. She had been ducked. The evidence was right on the driver's door handle. We got our first Wrangler in 1997. (M. is still driving it.) Never got ducked until now. But it's a thing -- I had…
"Displacement of eroded sandstone by Ursus americanus." I live at the bottom of a steep ridge wtih exposed sandstone rock strata at the top. Pieces fall off Over centuries and millennia huge boulders have rolled partway down and stacked up upon each other. Once while visiting a favorite place, I found new rock shards everywhere and worked out where maybe a dumpster-size piece had come down since…
The bobcats in June, hostile and ready to go wild. I not only got to release some bobcats recently, but I got to pick the place, which felt good. There was a certain canyon more or less torched by a forest fire nine years ago. Lots of the conifers are gone, except down along the creek where the fire skipped them, but the Gambel oak has sprouted copiously. Steep slopes, thick brush, lots of rock…
Close-up of buffalo in a squeeze chute. (Owen Preece for HCN ) High Country News ran this article last March on the work of the "head bison wrangler" at the American Prairie Project in eastern Montana, Pedro Calderon Dominguez: " The Art of Moving a Buffalo ." At American Prairie, Calderon-Dominguez works with about 900 bison, divided into two herds. Each herd grazes at least 25,000 acres. The…
What a change a week makes. Last week my email blew up with responses to the possible sale of public lands in the West, thanks to language inserted in the "Big Beautiful Bill" by Senator Mike Lee (R- Deseret ). Now the bill has passed and been signed by the president but without that language, thanks to a huge outcry by organizations and ordinary Westerners (and others). (I don't like huge…
On May 4, 2025, a 47-year-old Florida man was gored by a bison in Yellowstone National Park. He survived. “We see about two or three (bison attack victims) a year,” Dr. Kirk Bollinger with the Emergency Medicine department at Cody Regional Health told Cowboy State Daily in May . “I haven’t seen a lot of goring injuries where the victim’s guts are coming out. The big thing is the internal…