Monthly Archives: July 2014

The Rabbit and The Circle of Time

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RabbitCircleTime4311

Much of the timekeeping that goes on in the desert takes place at night. Scattered throughout the golden sands are small timepieces that mark the passage of the evening. During the quiet parts of the night when the stars are slowly making their way through their appointed rounds, displaying for all who care to look the celestial passage of the heavens, a slight wind makes its way across the desert floor. It stirs the simple timepieces to life and begins the record of the passing hours.

The various timepieces that have been selected by Mother Nature are slowly rotated in place marking the nights passage for all the land dwelling creatures to see. The circular pattern created mimicking the heavens rotation by leaving the faint trail in the sand. This morning as the newborn sun rose to cast its morning shadows on the sand, a rabbit has passed by checking to see how long it would be until there was full sunlight and it should be hidden safely away before the coyotes come near.

Soon the heat of the day will bring its soaring temperatures and with it a stronger wind that will quickly erase the sand drawing made overnight. The day will pass with the measured slowness of the turning Earth and soon night will fall again and a new record will begin. If he was lucky the rabbit will be back and stop to check the time once again before calling it a night.

Temp Mid 90’s More to Come

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Sinawava27shotPano9900click to enlarge

We have provided the image above of the Temple of Sinawava in Zion National park taken in December when it was cool, to provide you with some relief and to remind you that once there were cooler temperatures here on Earth.

The following is your weather report from the meteorological center at The Institute. This is a copyrighted report and may not be reprinted, sold, or even told to your neighbor without our express written approval. Or you can just pay us as many dollars as you can cram into a fed-ex box and it’s cool. Please no personal checks. Cash, Money order, or Cashier’s check only.

These conditions have existed for the last 900 days on the *ISL scale. Please be advised that these conditions can be hazardous to your health due to the high heat index. They can cause swelling of your electric bill, a burning sensation all over any exposed body part, loss of memory keeping you from remembering what cool feels like, and the pain of listlessness and lethargy. Take protective measures. Stay inside areas with a temperature of 50° or less, take off all your clothes, taking selfies ok but optional, posting those selfies even more optional, (note: some things can not be unseen), eat food items with low calorie content like ice, or other hard water, ice cream, ice cream without calories but ice in it, etc. Keep any exercise above shallow breathing to a minimum. Take naps if needed. (*It Seems Like).

Stn: The Institutes’ Rocky Mountain permanent weather reporting station at our World Headquarters high in the Foothills of northern Colorado.

Temp: Present temperature  94°

MinT: Minimum temperature recorded over the last 18 hours –  94°

MaxT: Maximum temperature  recorded over the last 18 hours –  94°

Forecast: 94° for the foreseeable future

RH: Present RH (95-100%)

WndDir: Wind direction N- NW by S – SE

WndSpd: Wind speed 12-15 mph

WndGust: Wind gust 95mph

Rain_mm: Rain since last report – 4.9″ per day

Snow_cm: Snow since last report – There is no snow. Not Now NOT EVER

Hail mm: Hail since last report – Yes our local index was at “Grill Denter” stage which is just below DefCon 5. This is where the hail was big enough to dent the top of your gas grill while you still had it stored in the garage.

FFMC – Fine Fuel Moisture Code  –  We Don’t know what this is So we don’t use it. Sounds like it could be hot though.

ISI – Initial Spread Index –  100 % Yes this weather is spread all over the damn place

DMC – Duff Moisture Code  –   We Don’t know who Duff is. Never heard of him.

BUI – Build Up Index – The index that tells you when the weather conditions have built up to the point where you want to bite the heads off chickens. BUI presently 92% Hide your chickens.

DC – Drought Code – When you’re about to run out of Ice or the length of time you have been out of ice. Currently 40%

DSR – Daily Severity Rating – Oh yeah This is severe. On a scale of 1-10 this is a Q.

FWI – Fire Weather Index – 1 to 5 – as follows

1: hot

2: hotter

3: pretty damn hot

4: Ok this is hot enough

5: Spontaneous combustion.

Our local rating 7: You should have lived a better life

We hope this has provided you with enough information to allow you to deal with the current weather conditions. If not, we suggest emergency flights to Alert, in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada, which is the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world, they say it’s cool there. Check your local carriers for flight schedules.

Stay tuned for further weather reports if the weather ever changes. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up.

Day Sleepers

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2014-07-21OwlInsomnia6322

Back when I was young, yes there were Pterodactyls, we lived in a lot of blue-collar areas where shift work was prominent. Shift work is work at places where they run shifts, or 8 hours periods of work, and worked around the clock. You had the AM shift, usually 7-3, the PM shift, 3-11, and the night shift, 11-7 in the morning.

Day Sleepers were usually found in blue-collar jobs, like working in the mill, or being a nurse, or being a cop, or a taxi driver, or a shelf stocker down at the A&P. But the majority of the ones we lived near were steel mill workers and guys who worked in the paper mills. Everybody pulled the night shift once in a while. Some guys hated it and counted the seconds until they could return to the daylight, other guys loved it and stayed on the night shift permanently. You could usually tell those guys because they were pale, and squinted a lot when they weren’t working. I say guys all the time because it was rare after WWll to see a woman working the night shift unless she was a nurse. There probably were plenty but we never saw them.

What all these night shift workers had in common was they needed to sleep in the daytime, hence the term Day Sleepers. If they lived at home you could always count on seeing the windows blacked out with heavy curtains or dark shades and you knew not to make noise around their house lest you woke up the sleeping bear. Woe and despair to the door-to-door salesman that didn’t heed the sign saying “Day Sleeper Do Not Disturb”. Remember this was before the days of anger management classes and the cops did not listen with any sympathy to the salesman’s explanation of why his eye was black or his nose was skewed to the left. It was almost always to the left as most of these mill workers were right-handed. These shift workers were normally pretty tough guys, kind of like dock workers, and they always settled things fairly swiftly and that meant the salesman usually had to hobble down to the clinic to get his salesman’s case out.

Even with all the precautions of dark windows, kids playing quietly near their house, signs on the door, it was tough getting enough sleep during the day. It just isn’t natural sleeping when it’s light out. Having pulled a few night shifts myself I can attest to this fact. I was always glad to get off nights and rejoin the living.

 About the only true night shift workers in the animal world are owls. They have been the work at night, sleep during the day, symbols of reversed life styles for as long as we have noticed them. That ‘s why it always feels so strange to see one flying about in the broad daylight. It’s like they must have a serious case of Owl Insomnia. This is a Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulosa), I know Latin this early in the morning, right, and he has seriously turned his behavior around and is awake and active at 11:00am and hunting for all he’s worth. Perhaps he’s on to something. If they see that good at night, that they can catch-all those little rodents who are out scurrying about in the dark, how much better could he see in full daylight. Those field mice are toast. We could be seeing some sort of evolutionary change, owl-wise, happening right now.

He has the look of an ex-Day Sleeper to me. So far I have only seen this behavioral change up in Yellowstone but I intend to watch carefully from now on to see if their behavior might spread to other owl species. If it does I’ll keep you posted.

Can’t We All Just Get Along

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CantGetAlong6388click to enlarge

While visiting the McCullough Peaks wild horse herd near Cody, Wyoming this summer we had an opportunity to spend several hours with them. As trained observers we immediately were able to learn everything there was to know about them as horses in a non-horse world. There is not one fact pertaining to wild horses that we were not able to observe and interpret so that we might impart this knowledge to you, our interested readers.

For instance, we were able to determine through very close observation that these animals are known as quadrupeds, due to the fact that they have four legs each, one on each corner, which aids in their ability to move around. They have a prominent head which is conveniently placed near the front of their bodies which contain all the necessary features they need to go through life, a mouth, two eyes for binocular vision, ears, etc. This isn’t exactly David Attenborough stuff. This is all pretty obvious, any third year grad student could figure these things out, so we’ll move on to the less obvious things we learned.

One of the most striking facts about them was they have a fairly uncomplicated judicial system. If there is a disagreement they simply bite each other until it’s solved. Consequently events are handled with the minimum amount of litigation and disputes are settled immediately. Their incidence of major crimes are very low. Murder is practically unheard of and if it is, the winner ( the one left standing) was obviously in the right and the rest of herd goes on about its business as usual. They do tend to give that individual his space from then on but that seems only prudent. Carjacking is unheard of. Malicious mischief is primarily a juvenile crime and is treated by a substantial nip from the closest adult to the perpetrator. Social services are provided by the herd in general. It takes a herd to raise a child. And divorce is handled simply by one stallion biting the bejezus out of the other and taking his old lady. This is a term used by the herd and does not indicate any sexism on the part of the observer or the rest of the horses.

However it obviously worked and worked well. While we were there they had any numbers of disputes and one divorce but the entire system held up and justice was served. There was also a noticeable absence of litigators in the herd. The one we did see was completely covered in bite marks and had a part of its ear missing, so it looks like the herd believes that one should keep its snout out of other horses business. This is an unprofitable occupation to be in when you have a system that handles its own problems.

There were other important observations made such as their ability to navigate without a GPS. Another was how they were able to distinguish one individual from another when all the white ones looked alike. To be fair and unbiased all the brown ones and grey ones looked alike too. A biggie for our observers was how they overcame the language barrier and were able to communicate without being able to speak English. A simple whinny produced the most amazing results.

There was a never-ending flurry of horse facts that filled notebook after notebook until it was time to leave. We feel that we have increased the knowledge about mustangs and wild horses in particular, to the point where we can answer any question you may have about horses, their attitudes and general belief structures, and how they make a living. If you have any questions please send them along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope and we’ll try to get them answered for you. Easy ones will get an immediate response while hard ones may take a month or two.

Friday

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Grand Canyon 5616

It’s Friday, and you know what that means, we’re going to have a brand new show! And if there are any of you out there that watched the Mickey Mouse Club show as religiously as we did then you know that the phrase “And you know what that means, we’re going to have a brand new show” was actually said on Tuesday and it was “And you know what that means, we’re going to have a special guest”. Then they’d bring out somebody to do something goofy and we all thought it was the neatest thing we had ever seen and we called our friends to see if they were watching it too. They always were. But that doesn’t fit in with what I want to say today so I changed it. I can do that because I am the Overlord of this site and I can pretty much do whatever I want to.

Friday is always kind of a lost day where you go through the motions but you’ve got the weekend off and your heart isn’t in it. You’re not sure what you’re going to do, you have no big plans really, but you don’t want to waste it. After all Monday is just a couple days away. Maybe you’ll have some people over and just hang out. It would be a good time as Aunt Pheeb and Uncle Skid haven’t got out of the hospital yet. So you could have kind of a drama free day. Everybody knows what happens when Aunt Pheeb and Uncle Skid get wind of a party.

The reason they’re in the hospital is Uncle Skid heard that there was an all you can eat Crawfish boil down at Big Leg Kathy’s Shrimp Shack out on Hwy 11 and there was a $40 prize for whoever could eat the most crawfish in an hour. He talked Aunt Pheeb into going along with him and since Aunt Pheeb had been into the gin since about quarter to seven that morning she was game. Uncle Skid thought that if they both entered and won they’d win $80 bucks and that would go a long way towards getting the boot off the Skylark so they wouldn’t have to walk when they down to Ruby’s for cigarettes.

Uncle Skid had a cunning plan to win. It seemed like a sure thing and once he explained it to Pheeb they thought they had this thing knocked. Being Skid he was already trying to figure out how he could skim a little off the top of that $40 bucks so that Pheeb wouldn’t know and he could buy that cool Eight Ball spinner for his steering wheel he’d had his eye on for months. They could still pay off the parking tickets and get the Skylark out of hock. All they had to do was win.

The way everybody with any sense ate crawfish was you grabbed one, bit the head off, sucked out the rest of it from the shell, and then threw the shell at your neighbor. This has been the excepted practice for generations. Uncle Skid, using what small amount of animal cunning he had, noticed that this took about 5-7 seconds. His plan, and this is where the brilliance comes in, was to bypass all that mechanical stuff of shucking and sucking, and just eat the whole thing shell and all. And if you didn’t have to chew that was even better yet.

Well, that was three weeks ago and they may get out of the hospital the end of this week. The 40 bucks are gone. Skid didn’t read the flyer right and missed where it said ‘whoever’, singular, not plural, eats the most etc. so the most they could win was $40, and the hospital took that before they’d even let them sit in the emergency room waiting area. It didn’t matter how loud Aunt Pheeb moaned or tried to get at the receptionist they were going to wait. Security was there, they’d had these two in here before.

It seems that when you ingest over 14 lbs. of crawfish shells it does stuff to your lower alimentary track. It all bunches up like, and forms a ball about the size of a small cat. Apparently Nature does not have a system to take care of this naturally. The staff there at Our Sisters of Eternal Misery hospital have a wall of miracles they call it, where they post the dumbest things live people have done to themselves and/or each other and this little episode is posted right up there at the top. There were Doctors, Nurses, Residents, Interns, Candy Stripers spitting milk clear across the cafeteria tables when they heard what happened.

Pheeb swears she’s going to lobotomize Skip with a bread knife and a cantaloupe baller when they get out. Skid is worried that the Skylark is now at the impound lot and he’s going to have to come up with not only the parking ticket money but now the impound fees and they’re going to be walking to Ruby’s for cigarettes for the rest of their lives.

So there it is then. Have the party now before they get out and maybe it will be one that doesn’t involve police and paramedics and the guys from Power and Lights having to re-string the neighbors electrical lines because Skid leaned that aluminum ladder against them so he could crawl up there and look over the hedge at the guys wife. We all know how that turned out.

And if a party doesn’t float your boat why not drop in at the Grand Canyon and take in the sights. It’s pretty there, mostly quiet and since the Skylark is out of commission Uncle Skid and Aunt Pheeb won’t be dropping in.

Stone Kisses

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Deep under ground in secret places where the light of day rarely reaches there are beings, ancient ones, that live at a different pace than we do. Vastly different. Where we scurry and rush and frenetically hurry through our lives, they move slower, so slowly that we can only imagine their movement.

We must seem like a constant blur to them if they can even see us. Down here in this silent place their lives take place over millennia, their movements so infinitesimal that we can only record them through years of study and careful measurement. Yet these ancient ones have lives, they love, possibly hate, they grow old and surely at some point they die.

This couple has shared a kiss, when and for how long only they can tell. They are slowly moving apart now. The periodic floods with its high rushing water that occasionally flows through their canyon aiding their separation by slowly erasing minute particles from their faces. As they separate, slowly moving away from each other, perhaps they take time to tell each other secrets only they can know. How long have they been lovers… centuries, thousands of centuries, imagine what that would be like, to be in love with someone for nearly an eternity.

It gives one some little comfort to know that as our lives flash by there are things that go on forever whether we’re here or not. Like these two and their stone kisses.

 

Foggy Foggy Dew

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FoggyDew0973

The other day when we were up on Mt. Evans investigating why Mountain Goats didn’t get struck by lightning we observed other baffling but explainable weather phenomenon.

Fog for one. Fog is a condition where at one moment you can see clearly as far as you want to, and the next, the air changes to a semi-solid, opaque substance that gets all around you and fogs up your glasses so you can’t see where you’re going and you stumble over the rocks and ding up your lens hood. It also makes it scary to drive when you can not see your hand in front of your face and you have drop-offs of hundreds of feet just a foot away from your wheels. Fortunately we had an intern that we made walk in front of the vehicle tapping the roadway with a stick to determine whether it was solid or not. It, the intern, also made foghorn noises at the top of his voice to warn other fools that we were on the way down. As we had only one intern on this trip we couldn’t afford to lose it so we tied a rope around him and fastened it to the bumper on the jeep and whenever he would wander off the road we could feel the rope jerk and could stop and haul him up. His foghorn noises were always noticeably louder after we hauled him up. That made us feel a little more confident and we would be nudging him forward with the front of the car as we felt better about our chances.

When the fog arrives at Mt. Evans there’s none of this “entering in on little cat feet” stuff.  No way Jose, It slams in with all the force of Bill Clinton pushing his way to the front of the line at McDonald’s. One moment you’re fat dumb and happy looking at the wonders of a clear mountain day, the next you’re wet, cold and lost in the wilderness. But that is life in the mountains, always extreme but always exciting.

The question at hand though, was, How do animals, especially Mountain Goats, handle the fog. What do they do. They don’t have running lights or any kind of internal radar our instruments could pick up. How do they manage to move around in the fog without going over the edge and falling for two days. It seemed a mystery tailor-made for The Institute.

As we were frozen in place by the fog and terminal fear we had time to closely observe the animals and found the most amazing fact. The pure white coats of the mountain goats acted as a solar collector and stored up energy to be released on their command whenever they needed it. This ability to release an energy force acted as a “Fog Dispersal Device” and would dissipate the fog for a distance of approximately three or four feet in all directions allowing them to maneuver about the mountain as if they had good sense. We stuck close to them and it saved our lives as we heard the screams of those not so lucky as they plummeted past on their way to oblivion. Eventually this pair of mountain goats, a mother and her kid, led us back to the parking lot where they happily licked our Jeep’s tires for the salt remaining on them. It seemed a small price to pay for our safe return.

If you look closely at the image above you will notice that the fog around them is dispersed to a distance of several feet allowing them to comfortably forage as they slowly wended their way back to the parking lot. This ability is what keeps the mountain goats fed and safe as they wander around places that are extremely hazardous to humans. The glow they emit is subtle but effective. As the fog would ebb and flow you could see other little bubbles of light, sort of like fireflies, blinking on and off as various small groups moved around the mountain completing their daily chores.

There must be some expenditure of energy to produce this phenomenon as they didn’t keep the lights on constantly. Maybe they were part of some larger co-op that charged them according to the power they used. Or it worked like your cell phone and if they weren’t careful they’d zero out and be without lights just when they needed them most and they’d be stuck in place until the sun appeared again and they could recharge. We saw evidence of rationing this ability as you can see in the image below.

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Here is a goat with the Fog Dispersal Device turned off. Notice that there is no glow around it and the fog has completely encased it. This goat is here for the duration if he squandered his usage. It could be that he’s also eaten his fill and is using this down time to catch up on things. Check his email, have a latte, or just people watch. Whatever the reason it clearly shows lights on, lights off, and although we need more time to study all the ramifications of this ability I believe we have pretty much figured it out.

As you can tell by the fact of this posting we made it down the mountain safely although our intern’s hair turned white. We could laugh about it as we applied a natural herb salve to his rope burns, and decided we would schedule another trip to observe this phenomenon more closely the next time fog was scheduled. We would bring more interns too.