Tag Archives: Arches National Park

When Yellow Trees Shine Brightly

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Arches National Park is not really known for its forests or its trees. In fact you can walk a good long way and not see a single one. But when you do it is a marvelous surprise. To see the strong dark trunks rising up out of the arid plain, limbs with their lime green leaves in the spring, bright riotous yellow in the fall, is more than a special sight in this water-less, some say desolate place. It is nearly miraculous.

Although the deep earth tones of the sand and rocks are beautiful in their own way, the addition of these brightly colored wonders make them even more so by the contrast between one lifestyle and another. The hot enduring reds of the cliff faces, the firmly grounded tans with its shimmering heat waves rising up towards the heavens, the occasional dusty burst of color from a flower are the mainstay of this country, but  there is always the special place hidden in a shadowed arroyo where water flows slowly and fitfully under the ground and in rare miraculous occurrences on top of it, that allow the trees, especially the cottonwoods to grow and survive, when by the look of the place they shouldn’t be here at all.

Such is the case with this image taken in late October in Arches National Park. For the high desert it is cool now, the water coursing along beneath the earth as it has been too hot earlier for it to flow on the surface. The sun has been kinder the last few weeks and the trees noticing, have changed their colors to prepare for winter when all things except the wind and snow and occasional jackrabbit and the coyote following it, stop, and it is quiet and still throughout the dark days and nights of that long season until the warmth of Spring returns and the cycle begins again. But that is still a time in the future, right now when yellow trees shine brightly it is a good time to be alive.

The Last Giant

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As you all know if you’ve watched the Animal Channel at all, is that big things once roamed this land we live on. Really big things, like totally humongous things that were Elephant shaped. Only our modern elephants would look like these guys calves if they stood next to them. Mini-mammoths if you will. Then they died and turned into fossils that we go out and dig up if we can get the proper funding.

The largest that we currently know about is the Mammoth Columbi (Mammuthus primigenius). Even its name is big. It was like several of those double-decker busses that they have in London put together. Mammoths lived in the Pleistocene epoch, or about 400,000 years ago which as you also know, is about 382,000 years before the Earth was formed. Our scientists, which are pretty smart guys, are still trying to figure that one out.

However regardless of niggly little facts like that it cannot be disputed that they were here. We got their bones. You can go to any Mammoth Bones display place and for a small fee walk right in and see them. Some places even let you touch them if you’re careful. Can’t hardly argue with that even if you are really bull-headed. So far with the limited funding we’ve been able to scrape up we have only been able to unearth the skull and part of its trunk and the shoulders. We hope to work on getting the tusks revealed soon. Perhaps with a new administration our funding will be restored.

But what a lot of people do not know, even if they are avid watchers of mammoth based shows on the tube, is that there were once even larger mammoth kind of things walking the earth, way earlier than when the regular run-of-the-mill mammoth columbi were out and about. I’m not even sure how that fits in with the time line of when the Earth was formed. I know it sure throws a monkey wrench into the logic, but then that stuffs hard to figure out when you’re limited by really dumb facts.

What we do know however is that back when these really big guys were walking around, give or take several hundred thousand years, they were the biggest animals to live on the earth whether it was here or not. (We try not to take sides when we’re having a serious scientific discussion about this stuff.) How do we know that? Why are we so sure? Because we found one. Not a live one mind you, but a dead one that had the good graces to stay out in the open where you can see it, touch it, walk around it if you have the time, stick your tongue on it and taste it ( it tastes like chicken) and generally be amazed and in awe of its overall size. That’s what you are viewing in the excavation photo above.

The size of this unnamed beast, we are proposing mammoth dwighticus horribilis hoping the fossil naming society will accept it, is close to unbelievable. That trunk sticking up out of the ground could very likely pick up your average sized office building. The tusks are buried in the ground but you can still get some idea of their size as several hundred feet away there is one point sticking up out of the ground. It is taller than your average basketball player and you can’t even chunk a rock from the base of its skull and hit the tip of it.

There is a lot that is unknown about these big mammoth animals but we can surmise a few things. They ate grass. One of the reasons there is very little vegetation left in the areas where these remains are often found is that these guys ate it all. We know that the smaller, more dainty Mammoth Columbi ate up to 400 lbs. of grass and vegetation a day so you can imagine what these big fellas ate. We figure each molar alone was the size of Volkswagen Jetta, the diesel one not the gas model.

Also many of the small pockets of water, little ponds, small lakes and such were likely caused by water filling in their hoof prints or their dust wallows. Like modern buffalo or elephants these mammoths had to roll around in the dirt to remove parasites and sand burs. Just thinking about how big the ticks must have been to fasten on to one of these guys is enough to give you the heebie-jeebies. We also think that they were Vegan, prone to bump into things, but social if clumsy animals. We don’t think astrology played an important part in their lives. They may have used the Julian calendar but our guess is that they figured time by how long it took to consume several cubic tons of fodder, then make it to the nearest water hole and drain it dry. That may be why this one became dead. He was late to the water hole. No water, no life.

If you’re still a skeptic and we know that there are some of you out there, just go to Arches National Park and Mammoth burial grounds and see for yourself. Sometimes fiction is stranger than life.

High Desert Sunset

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We had a beautiful sunset this evening at The Institute and it got me thinking about other sunsets I’ve seen around the area. Like this one down in Arches National Park. Because we travel so much our schedule gets pretty darn hectic you know, what with having to look at stuff to see if it’s pretty enough to photograph, then get in a good spot so all the photographic bits are in the right places, finding the camera and getting it untangled from under the seat where it got kicked when we made a burger run and the lens hood got all cocked funny and you have to wrench it off so it sits right, then figuring out the settings and making adjustments to the camera, getting all cheesed off because the flash card wasn’t formatted and you have to stop and do that otherwise the sky comes out all maroon color, I mean it’s lucky we get a sunset picture taken at all.

Then of course there’s the timing of the shot. You got to get it just right otherwise it just looks like noon or 3 in the afternoon or 11:30 in the morning. Some photographers make a big hairy deal about getting to the picture site real early and getting all their gear sorted out and acting like they’re all professional and everything, but then by the time sunset hits they’re all whacked out, bored stupid, and taking a nap in the back seat and miss the whole deal. Other’s have been dawdling, stopping to read all the signs on the side of the road, checking their email, making calls, letting the dog out to do its business, watching other photographers to see what they’re shooting, eating the rest of the potato salad from lunch so it doesn’t go bad, and then they realize “Holy Mackerel it’s dark out, I’ve missed sunset”.

We at The Institute are trained professionals and don’t make dorky mistakes like that. We have it together. We instinctively know where the best shots are, exactly what time the sun will be perfect for setting, how to get all the stuff in the picture that makes it one of those that makes you go “Whoa, man, Look here, this is far out”. This is why we’re so freaking famous. If you check out the photo closely you’ll see that everything that is in it is supposed to be there. There’s ground and sky and rocks all over the place, mountains, bushes, everything you need. We pride ourselves on that. We don’t leave good stuff out. The timing in the shot is like super excellent for the right sunset spectacular lollapalooza look, because we got that stuff down cold and we even got the right kind of clouds in there. Have we got this nailed or what.

There’s some kind of rule or fact, or probably somebody just pulled it out of the back of their long johns, that you have to take like 12 billion and eight sunset photos to get one good one. We here at the Institute say BullPucky! our results are better than that. In fact we’ve gone out when the sun was going down and gotten hallway decent shots of sunset activity several nights in a row. We’re just that good. But then that’s just our and half the English-speaking people of the world’s opinion, so what do we know. Tomorrow when the sun goes down we’re going out and photograph it, I bet those shots will be good too.

Long Winter

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Well it’s been a long winter here at The Institute and there was a point where some despair was settling in, but as often happens when you set your resolve and say ” Darn it, it’s been a long winter and I sure as heck am sick of it, but I know that Spring will come, because I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me” things will change and they did.

The last part of the quote we borrowed from an intern named Stuart who used to work for us and is one of the few that went on to bigger, and some say, better things. In fact he was the only one we know of that isn’t still on public assistance after leaving here. However the jury is still out on whether that is an improvement because becoming a bigwig in the government isn’t everyone’s idea of bettering themselves.

But we made it. It looks like Spring is here, our Aspen have those tiny little neon green leaves that nearly glow they’re so bright. There’s small little red buds peeking out from under last years canes on the rose bushes. Stellar Jays have arrived in flocks of indigo blue flashes as they flit from tree to tree. One day not long ago an entire herd of robins came and sat in one of our snags and completely filled every spot available for sitting. Usually you just look up and there’s a few robins but that day there were dozens and dozens. That’s pretty darn spring-like.

We wanted to show you some pictures of Spring here at The Institute but our cameras are still in storage and we can’t find the blowtorch to thaw the lock on the door so this shot of Spring in Arches National Park will have to stand in for us. It’s pretty close to what things look like here anyway so we didn’t think it would matter that much. The green on that tree is almost exactly the shade of our green, you just have to disregard the sand though as we don’t have nearly that much lying around.

Spring always causes a flurry of action here at The Institute. The snow melts away and we find the road again right where we left it last fall. That’s going to make our coming and going easier. The overflow of interns we had last fall begin to dig out of the caves they spent the winter in. We had a larger than normal number of interns for some reason, we think it was for the free food and the chance to watch HBO up at the big house once in a while. The dorms were packed and couldn’t handle even one more body. We need to pay attention to the fire code here as having over ten or more people in a single room often leads to friction and that leads to heat and that leads to fire and it’s awful. Plus we don’t need anymore adverse publicity after that fiasco with the Intern Riots, Fall of 2014 where they nearly burned The Institutes main center down. The only thing that saved us was that the main building’s first four stories are made of pre-stressed concrete and are very hard to ignite. However most of that crew is gone.  But being young and cunning and thinking more about survival, the more resourceful of them, at least the ones that didn’t perish in the cold, dug substantial caves and apparently made them quite homey.

Spring is always a time of renewal and it’s always a welcome sight to see the interns emerging from the cliff side, wan and somewhat emaciated but cheerful never the less, blinking and rubbing their eyes as they see the sun for the first time in months. They seem eager for the spring routine to begin where they’re run through the communal showers, shorn and issued their new spring work clothes. It’s a wonderful start to the year. Spring brings out the best in everyone and we’re looking forward to great things as The Institute gets rolling again. We have big plans. Stay tuned for further adventures.

Note: Due to an unexpectedly high mortality rate amongst our interns we are now accepting applications for employment. If you are considering a change of pace and want an action packed, semi-dangerous occupation with the opportunity to accomplish little or nothing of value at a criminally low pay scale please send your resume to the  Director@BigShotsNow.com We are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Stone Woman Walking Revisited

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To celebrate our 500th post on BigShotsNow we are republishing some of our more popular posts. This post first appeared on January 5th 2014. If you have any suggestions of previous posts you’d like to see again drop a note to dlutsey@enchantedpixels.com and we’ll try and honor that request.

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In Arches National park you can occasionally see the Old Ones going slowly about their business. They move quietly through the canyons of stone intent on their purpose and pay little attention to the soft mortals that scurry ant-like about them. Their journeys are slow and ponderous seeming to us, but then we live in a world that travels in a headlong rush and we must accomplish much in the short period of time allotted to us for we have the desperate need to scratch our mark on the walls of time. Those in the future must know we passed through here. How temporary we must seem to her, if she even contemplates us at all.

Stone Woman Walking has been making this journey for eons. Wrapped in her blanket to ward off the chill of centuries she is not much affected by the ravages of time and little notices the conditions around her. Snow blankets her softly but is gone in moments. The sand-laden wind blowing through the canyons slowly erases her youth but it is of little import. She has had her time. Now the contentment that comes from her journey through the ages settles around her and enhances the constancy that is her beauty. She is not eternal, for all things pass, but she seems so to us. This somehow brings comfort to some of us as we see the fleeting moments that are our lives moving past us at an ever accelerating speed. There are things that last. There is purpose that will continue long after we have faded away. I like that.

The Infirmary

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Wolf Ranch cabin   Arches National Park   click to enlarge

Many of you have written in asking about The Institute. What is it? Is it legal? What do you do? Whose your daddy? ( I know who wrote that one and she better stop) Do you do good work? How large is your staff? (Again she better just quit it) Do you treat them well? Do you accept large contributions from anonymous donors?

The answer to those questions is, yes.

For example, here is a picture of our infirmary. Yes, I know it appears to look a little ramshackle but that’s just how it looks. Inside it is a state of the art medical facility with everything a casually trained medic needs to heal the sick and salvage the wounded.

We have scissors, rope, tins of peaches for the dehydrated, bone saws, things to bite on during amputations, illustrated medical books, (2 of them, one in Latin), formaldehyde, tincture of roses, a needle for suturing, a needle for sticking, tons and tons of torn up petticoats, buffalo chips to heat water, several kinds of thread and sinews to sew up those lacerations that don’t require amputation, a brand new gray market, Siemens overhead tube crane x-ray machine with the tilting upright and latest extremity system option, a very efficient solar panel with a converter for 12v to run it, trash receptacles, operating table with sheets, corrals so you don’t have to hobble your mules after transporting your injured here, the very latest POS system to handle your claims, invoices and credit processing, no more irritating dun notices, you pay before the first limb is cut off, a small bottle of pills with the label missing that we think are for gout, a magazine in the waiting room, a waiting room, two large window areas, both filled with glass to allow our crack medical team to see what it is doing at all times, except at night of course, and a hospice nurse on call if the weather allows, to assist with the grieving.

I think that about covers it. There’s probably more but that’s all I can remember at the moment. Countless staffers have been treated here, even though they might be begging and screaming to be sent to that quack hospital down in town, and several of them have had successful recoveries. Take the case of Castaway Rodriguez.

Castaway was one of our more daring animal keepers and worked primarily as bait to train our three grizzlies to act vicious while on camera. Some of you may not be aware that we rent out various animals for movie work as a sideline while we wait to see if any of our many grant proposals are accepted. Grant proposals for our various research projects are our mainstay and are the thing that allows us to operate at the level we do. We need that free money and have no less than 35 or so grants in the works at all time. But I digress.

Castaway was continually pushing  the envelope and placing himself in danger simply because he himself was untrainable and if the truth be known, stupid. I mean who in their right mind would drop kick a grizzly cub in front of its mother simply because the cub ate his shoe. Nobody blames Lizzie, our resident grizzly mom or her two kids, Rhett and Scarlet, for reacting like any mother would and tearing off one of his legs, his ear and biting him a lot. As you can imagine this put Castaway in a tight spot. He was barely able to drag himself to the door where the film crew was shooting to get help.

You’re probably thinking, Well, this isn’t going to end well. But actually things didn’t turn out  too bad. Some quick thinker threw him on the salt wagon and hauled him down to our infirmary and the rest is history. Our crack medical team sent in their triage unit and stopped up all the worst bleeding. We were able to recover the lower part of his leg after explaining to Lizzie that Castaway would be reassigned in the morning and she didn’t have to work with him anymore, and reattached it. Unfortunately we couldn’t retrieve the knee part, as the kids had made quick work of it, so we had to reattach the lower part of his leg to the upper part sans knee, to save his life and give him some mobility. Yeah, this made his leg about nine inches shorter on that side but look at the alternatives. We all chipped in and got him lifts for that shoe so he can walk. He has a slight limp, but he can walk, sort of. He can’t hear out the left side of his head and won’t ever, but he didn’t listen anyway. The tooth mark holes all over his body are almost the exact size that a 38 police special, armor piercing shell makes, so he gets some mileage out of telling the tourists about the various gunfights he’s been in.

It’s those kind of heart-warming stories that just produce a warm glow when I think of them. If you can, try and catch the film, “Poachers on Grizzly Island”. Most of the Castaway incident is in there uncut and it’s exciting stuff. I hope this answers some of your questions about the Institute and our facilities. One last note, if you visit The Institute and heaven forbid you get injured, please remember that we do not accept any type of hospitalization insurance, or American Express. So bring money, it costs a lot to maintain a facility like ours, and we don’t do pro bono.

Rock Art Redux

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RockArtRedux5729Ute Panel – Arches National Park

Way back in the winter of 2013 one of our field researches was trying to locate new and unusual features in one of our nation’s most celebrated National parks when he happened to stumble across this panel of really old Indian drawing. As you know The Institute is constantly sending out explorers, researchers, bill collectors, real estate agents, used car salesmen, pan handlers, reformed alcoholics, unreformed alcoholics, dentists, appliance repairmen, bible salesmen, airplane mechanics, mercenaries, ninjas, paranormal psychologists, dog groomers, and cable installers, anyone and anything we might make a buck on, to increase our revenue stream and to bring you new and interesting scientific discoveries.

What we’re really interested in here at The Institute is scientific material that we can exploit, because we live in an age where lots of people with money really like all this old stuff and will pay through the nose for any cool discoveries that they can vicariously partake of from the comfort of their barcoloungers. Besides this stuff really reads well on our grant proposals so we are in a much better position to get funded than say, some respectable stuffy old university or government program that has ethics and stuff and has to stick to the truth and facts to make ends meet. Unburdened by those sticky regulations we can easily produce really neat research that reads like a Indiana Jones novel and is difficult to refute without looking like an old stick in the mud professor or government stooge that has to do things correctly and is just mad  because our stuff gets published and made into movies. They’re always bellowing like a scalded hog when they find we’ve altered the facts to fit the story. Like anyone cares, except for some old academics and the scientific world at large. Last time I looked they weren’t making my Mercedes payments.

When our researcher discovered this panel of Ute Indian rock art he was overjoyed but excited because here was something he could really sink his teeth into. It was what they call a eureka moment in research-speak. A panel of historical value that he could claim discovery of because there was no one else there when he stumbled across it. The research was completed by some archaeologist a long time ago who had left a bronze plaque with his version of the events captured, and who probably didn’t know any more than he did about this thing, and besides he could make up a better story than that guy. And it photographed well.

What our researcher concluded was this was an event that took place sometime before 2013 and conclusively proved that the Utes had domesticated not only horses and dogs but the wily Desert Bighorn sheep as well. The activities shown in the artwork describe how the Utes, using nothing but their wits, horses, herding dogs, GPS, and BLM grazing permits would bunch up a herd of these Desert Bighorns and make them stand still for long periods of time. Why they did this is still up for debate (and the possibility of getting another grant to study the issue further) but it is likely they did it so the artist creating this image in stone, had time to work. They didn’t have digital cameras back then, this was the old days. They had to have everyone be very still so he didn’t screw up and draw it wrong.

The reason this post is called Rock Art Redux is our researcher found another panel, a previously secret undiscovered panel that nobody but us and now you, knows about, located a little further back on the cliff. Apparently someone, one of the sheep or dogs, moved. Maybe one of the Indians was goofing around and held his hand up with two fingers making the rabbit sign behind another guys head, who  knows, this was a long time ago. Someone’s always got to clown around when a picture is being taken. Anyway, they moved and the artist had to basically x everything out and start over. You don’t erase in rock art you just have to scratch it out and start over. Apparently those guys were real sticklers for accuracy.

The Institute doesn’t like to leave unanswered questions just lying about willy-nilly so we intend to study this problem more, at great length actually, or as long as we can milk the grant for our expenses, so you, our loyal readers get the real story or as close as we can get to it. Stay tuned.