Tag Archives: Northern Colorado

Storm of The Full Moon

Posted on by

Many of you long-term readers of the blog know that *The Institute has its own private highway, known as Hwy 287, here in Northern Colorado that connects us with the small hamlets in the area that support The Institute. By support we mean supplying us with foodstuffs, some services that we cannot or do not provide for ourselves such as nuclear power plant maintenance, a supply of interns drop-outs from the college located there, some medical services that our in-house clinic doesn’t provide, or for when we are over booked with those that we do. Just last month we had to send three intracranial reductions to the little medical facility in the largest hamlet in the area. Fortunately our helipad was not in use so we were able to get our patients out without having to ask the medevac helicopter to circle while we off-loaded some of our favorite guests.

Actually we need to clarify “owning” our private highway. It is a week to week lease arrangement with The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) which is a division of the United States Department of Transportation. They pay us a fee of several dollars a year to watch and “keep an eye out” for funny business on the stretch of highway that comes closest to The Institute’s holdings. That means watching for those using the highway and ascertain whether their use constitutes anything “funny”. The definition of “funny” is left up to our discretion. All we can say at this point is there has been a whole bunch of “funny” behavior that we have had to report. We have two full-time staff members on this program and they have their hands full, we can tell you. But we’re not here to talk about “funny business”. No we’re here to talk about the storm of the full moon.

Last night as we’re were returning to The Institute after having dinner with some of the visiting dignitaries in the area at a pizza joint nearby, not a chain, a local place, you wouldn’t know it, sorry we can’t divulge our friends names at this time but let it suffice to say that they are leaving office soon and leave it at that, they deserve their privacy just like you and we do. As we left they headed south, and we headed north up our highway when we were besieged by a fast-moving snow storm that came out of nowhere. This was a ground blizzard, a nasty little bugger, with high winds blowing horizontal snow across our highway causing extreme low visibility and ice on the road. Fortunately we were in one of The Institutes expedition vehicles that we use for our far northern explorations, so we were reasonably safe. However we were perplexed.

We had no storms scheduled in our weather modification department’s storm list. Again for those long-term readers of the blog you know about our huge weather modification program that has been in effect for some time here at The Institute. If you’re new to the blog simply type weather modification into the search box and you’ll have access to just about everything we’ve done, except for the secret stuff of course. The only people that can access that information is a legally sitting president that is not like totally nuts.

We hurried ahead slowly, reaching The main Institute grounds well after dark having had to crawl up the mountainside in double-low granny gear and headed up to the ready room in the weather department to find out what was happening. Sending our weather techs up to the observation deck way up on the third tower of the science wing they snapped the image above with our new weather intensive, highly functional digital DSL camera set at Holy Moley, which gave us some clues as to the make up of the storm.

Firstly, we didn’t do it. That alarmed us because it gave credence to what every one is calling that Global Warming. Global warming is apparently a phenomenon that is taking place where the weather goes all over wonky of a sudden on its own with no rhyme or reason. (Note to self: Get those weather guys on this global warming thing. We can’t be behind on this stuff. We’ll look like idiots.) Having had near total control over our local weather in the past this was a shock to us.

What we found was somewhat unusual in its own right and unbelievable on the surface when looked at with any common sense at all. It seems that some goofball Greek history students from the local college were sitting around in a micro brewery down on the flatlands, showing off, making extremely rude comments in Latin and stuff, about an obscure Greek goddess named Chione, whom I’m sure you all remember is the goddess/personification of snow and winter. As we understand it she is normally in pretty good spirits, kind of  a fun-loving chick as it were, but these asshats must have caught her at a bad time because she suddenly became all about burying their dumb asses in as much snow as she could muster.

To top it off her powers become multiplied when there is a full moon, and yes there was a full moon last night. So she let loose with a little Saskatchewan Screamer tailor-made just for this area. Those smart guys showing off are in so much trouble, I mean trouble, as their stupid clowning around caused our friends private jet to be grounded at DIA, and the only room they could get was at a Budget Inn over in Commerce City and to say they were really cheesed off is really an understatement. There was talk of re-instituting the draft just long enough to send these bozo’s to a forward observation site in Afghanistan. Plus they were permanently 86’d from the brewery. We wouldn’t want to be those guys.

As we crawled up out the clouds on The Institutes long entrance way we could clearly see the extent of the storm and how cleverly it was put together. The Institute is located at an altitude of approximately 6400′ and you can see quite clearly the top of the storm down in the valley below, which is approximately 5000′ in altitude, as it moved through our section of hwy 287, which is located at the bottom of that storm cloud. Having satisfied her desire to wreak havoc rather quickly Chione went back to whatever pursuits goddesses have and with lack of attention the storm gently dissipated and broke up leaving a small amount of windblown snowdrifts and a lingering cold.

The moral of this story if there is one, is, “Don’t be sitting around getting hammered making fun of people you don’t know anything about. It can come back and freeze your keister off. Big time. Or get you sent to Afghanistan. Or both.” So be nice.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Moon Painting

Posted on by

2016-07-23RedMoon9658-Edit

Several days ago we ran a post titled Cloud Cutting http://www.bigshotsnow.com/cloud-cutting/ where we showed off our new weather modification process we have developed here at *The Institute. Using full disclosure you should know that we have “Applied for a Patent, Trademarked it , Branded it, and are protecting it by (American) gun-toting thugs”, who help us convince patent stealers to cease and desist. We have some of the best thugs in the world right here in our own country and they are all certified pure-bred American thugs with no ties to any other country. Period, End of Story. So rest easy only our real American thugs will call on you if you try to steal our patents. The Institute prides itself on buying American and keeping our hard-earned American money working here at home.

What happened was we forgot to tell you about one important aspect of our new technology. It is also as new and revolutionary as our Cloud Cutting program. We have named this new process Moon Painting. We know it’s not a very original name and doesn’t have that new pizzazz that some of our other high-profile programs do, but we wanted this new process to be identifiable by everyone, even if you have trouble analyzing new ideas or English is your seventh and final language. ( Hey we’re not knocking non-native English speakers. We applaud you on your efforts and thank you for trying). Half of our interns do not speak English all that well. In fact many of them do not have a discernible language of any sort, we communicate with them by American sign language and flash cards and loud yelling. It is a fact that if  you yell loudly at them in a language they do not understand they will many times nod as if understanding your meaning and go away and do stuff. Sometimes it is even what you want them to do. Sort of.

But back to the important topic at hand, Moon Painting. Here’s how it works. The moon comes up many times after dark during the month and always it is the same old boring white. Boring being the operative word here and white being the accepted moon color for ages. Our surveys show us that frankly, the majority of you are sick of it and would welcome a new color. This was electrifying news to us as we had been secretively working on the now released Cloud Cutting program, which was only financially viable during the day. We needed another revenue stream that would fill in the rest of day, the dark part, with money generating ability. It was then when someone at one of our interminable staff meetings, we forget who, yelled out “Hey, what about the freaking moon, eh? It works at night. We should like, work on that.” He said ‘eh’ again, which is so redundant the 100th time you hear it that we have chosen to omit it from now on, we don’t care how many times he says it.

But how to paint the moon? What we needed was a “long Throw” projector. Hitachi, NEC, Christie, all make a long throw projector but we needed a very Looooong Throw projector. Like 238,900 miles long. We tried daisy-chaining a bunch of them together to get that extra reach, but that didn’t work. We tried using big fat mirrors the way the huge telescope at Arecibo works but that didn’t work either. Then one of our senior staff members who spends way too much time on Craig’s list found an old used Hubble telescope that had returned not to bunged up to Earth that we could buy really cheap. Like $260 bucks cheap although we had to pay for shipping which added like a humongous charge to it. Those folks at the Post Office even made us come and pick it up. They refused to deliver it and were snotty about it besides, which is something we intend to bring up to the Post Master General the next time we’re hobnobbing at the White house.

So, we built our own. That’s right, our very own long throw projector. After all we had our old unused ShopSmith woodworking tool, an intern with most of his fingers intact, and the hearts and minds with the collective will to do the impossible to make it happen. Yes we used the Hubble as our core and also three of those Hitachi Cp-WU8461 at ten grand a pop, our second largest expense, and using our own proprietary procedures that we’re not at liberty to disclose, built an adequate but serviceable projector. We say adequate because it does have a few wrinkles to work out yet. We use Thomas Edison’s largest light bulb ever made which is 14 feet tall, weighs eight tons, and shines like the dickens to provide our light force. We could point it at you out there in the heartland or even farther but we don’t want to put your eye out. This thing is bright. You can actually see the last one (we bought the last dozen of these bulbs they had in storage) at the Edison Museum and Memorial Tower in Edison, New  Jersey. However big as the bulb is it only lasts for about 26 minutes at full power and about two and a half hours at half-strength which produces a washed out color that isn’t all that appealing. At full strength though Virgil, it’ll flat paint that moon any primary color you want. See actual image of moon being painted above. This was taken just two nights ago and we were able to keep that moon painted nearly 8 minutes before that old Edison bulb blew, taking out the mounting ring at the back of the projector, bending the mounting tube on the Hubble’s rear flange and the wall behind it. Scared the bejezuz out the operator and most of the county below the proving grounds down there on the flat lands. The lights below the moon are from the interns’ village where the substitute interns live and wait for their rotation up here at The Institute.

Our plan is to have the kinks worked out of our projector by the end of October, hopefully in time for Halloween. There are plans for many novelty projections on the moon such as a Smiley Face, Peace Symbol, Ying-Yang symbol, caricatures of your favorite or most disliked politicians, the list is endless. Plus some corporate advertising, we got to make this thing pay for itself someway. For more information or pricing please send Self-adressed stamped envelope and six dollars American money, preferably gold or silver certificates, to Tell Me More, The Institute, Northern Colorado. Please allow six to eight weeks or an even longer undetermined amount of time for delivery.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind.

Fire In The Meadow

Posted on by

2016-03-29FireInTheMeadow4214

There is a special meadow near a village called Red Feather high in the Rocky mountains of Northern Colorado where magical things happen. If you sit still and watch you may see a coyote slowly hunt across it’s grass-covered surface, pausing here with cocked head to listen, leaping there if it hears a mouse scamper through the new grass. Or see a Red-tailed hawk glide majestically out of the surrounding timber to splash its shadow across the land below as it too looks for it’s next meal.

Hummingbirds flit from flower to flower sipping the nectar from the new blooms and helping to pollenate the plants in this untamed garden. Before long the grass will be knee-high and cover the shorter blooms leaving you to discover them as you walk slowly through the dew covered stalks early in the morning.

There is an old fence line that divides the meadow into unequal portions, meaningful to  the humans who like to section things off and say that’s mine, but meaningless to the life that occupies or uses the ground on either side of the old rusty wire. Silent things that grow and stand tall and wave in the fresh breezes that occasionally wend their way down from the Never Summer mountains, their color dotting the meadowland like jewels left to catch the sun.

Now that the last of winter’s snow is making up its mind whether it will melt or not the earliest of the spring flowers are starting.  The Lenten Rose and Pasque flowers are peeking out beneath the snow close to Easter. Winter Aconite and the Common Snowdrop are breaching through the snow-covered meadow displaying their blooms, plus a favorite of all who see it, the Wyoming Indian Paint brush is beginning to appear. That pyrotechnical colored perennial that migrated down from the open plains of Wyoming and Montana to gently settle here and become a favorite native in this high meadow. It’s red and orange and yellows the exact colors of newly lit campfires. Scattered throughout the tall grass these brilliant flowers give the appearance of fire in the meadow with their brightly colored heads waving in the wind.

Spring is here, even though we just had a blizzard that produced a couple of feet of snow. The snow is nearly melted already and leaves in its wake what the locals call Mud Season, those several weeks of melting snow and saturated ground and mud everywhere. That’s spring in the high country. Enjoy it while you can. And while you’re at it go see the fire in the meadow. That’ll make you feel good.

And thanks to those gentle stewards of the land, Jack and Peggy, for the opportunity to photograph there. Enjoy your special place.

A Tree Grows In Arches

Posted on by

2016-03-05ATreeGrows5828

It’s Spring and a young man’s fancy lightly turns to …. the Southwest. Well an old man’s thoughts turn to the Southwest, anyway. There’s more than one kind of love you know. It’s still cold at night and nippy during the day here in the mountains of Northern Colorado but you can tell we’ve turned a corner. Sure we’re still going to get some snow and it’ll be cold for a short while but nothing like the soul-numbing cold of deep winter.

Right now the conditions are almost perfect for visiting the Southwest. It’s warm enough during the day that you don’t need a jacket but not the skin block sneering, turn you bright scarlet heat you find mid-summer. The desert is waking up. Trees are budding out, some of the earlier wildflowers are poking their little noses out of the ground. Animals are more visible as they go about getting nests ready for having their young. The rangers are nice because they haven’t seen all that many people yet and the oppressive clouds of tourists are still a month or so away so they’re not as quick to shoot you in the leg if you happen to stray of the trail a wee bit.

And the light. The light of early Spring in the afternoon when the sun is just considering going behind the mountains is as gorgeous as any place you will find in the world. If you pay attention and don’t forget to click the shutter you can sometimes stumble upon a scene like this. After you get the picture it’s ok to just stand there and let this experience fill your soul until it is not only brimming over but saturated to the point where you will remember it forever. It is time to fire up the Bokeh Maru, load the camera gear, and point it south, no roadmaps needed. Just follow the color. When you think it can’t get any better than this you’re there. Enjoy.

Something Feline This Way Comes

Posted on by

2015-11-11Something Feline1412

If you’ve ever been stalked, pounced on and partially eaten by a tiger, this is probably what you saw right before it happened. There was this blur, a sound something like oiled death sliding across bare ground, then a crunching noise as one of your arms was like completely tore the hell off.

There wasn’t anything personal in this, unless you had been rude or disrespectful to the tiger earlier that is. In that case yeah, you could consider it personal. Tigers don’t usually attack people, unless you live in India or something. As far as it can be researched no one in Northern Colorado has been killed and/or eaten by a tiger here in years.

There was one case where a guy had gone to India just to mess around with tigers and he got attacked and everything removable was bitten off. They sent him back here wrapped in one of those black garbage bags, the ones with the red strips you pull out to tie it shut with, and he died. But that was his own damn fault for going to India in the first place. We all told him, “Don’t Go to India Dude, you’ll get your ass bit off by  a tiger.” Did he listen…No.. so back he comes, assless. Some people just can’t be helped.

Many people ask “Why is that picture so blurry?” Well just look at it. That’s a tiger coming at you. Do you want to wind up like assless Harry? No I thought not. What you do if you have this much warning is you put your camera up over your head and run like a bastard for that tiger-proof dugout over there. Hopefully there will be someone behind you that isn’t as fast as you are.

Tigers are not our friends. You do not see touching stories on YouTube of young women who frequently lie down with wolves or bears or even lions doing so with Tigers. No that’s because tigers are equal opportunity biters. They will bite anything, man, woman, child, land rover, chickens, guys who like to look at tigers, anything, simply because they are tigers and that’s what they do. There will be some skeptics out there that will say ” Yeah but, what about those pictures of people feeding those baby tigers in the Zoo? What about them?” ( the huh? is understood) I hate those kind of questions. The asshats that ask those questions always act like they “got you” by asking stuff like that.  (they are probably related to Assless Harry) The answer is easy, all of those tigers that can be handled by people are animatronic. That’s right they’re not real. They’re like little furry robots. They have all these air tubes and wires running out of their butts that you don’t see because of clever camera angles. All they can do is lay on their back and drink milk out of a bottle and squeak. You put them on the floor and they take two steps and fall over their little tiger legs still moving like they were walking. The big ones out in the yard are real tigers. You don’t see anyone laying down with them all friendly like. They’re professionals. The people not the tigers, wait, the tigers are professional too now that you think about it. They know that they’ll get things bit off if they go in there.

This has been a quick little lesson if you will, about tigers,  how to approach them, or how not to approach them. It has been presented not so much as a life lesson, but if you learned anything that’s great and just might help you out some day, but more to let you know that if you see a tiger loose in your neighborhood, don’t approach it. Don’t attempt to give it treats to win it over. Don’t listen to its velvety voice telling you that it is a friendly tiger and he wouldn’t mind if you wanted to lie down together for awhile. That would be a big mistake. Just ask old Assless Harry, Oh wait, you can’t.

An Afternoon With Lady Moon

Posted on by

LadyMoon1016

Yesterday was one of those days where you looked out the window and said “Ok that’s it, I’m out of here.” It was too beautiful a day to stay inside. The sun was shining, there was a slight breeze, a huge sky filled with gorgeous clouds and the seductive possibility that one could spend the afternoon with Lady Moon.

Lady Moon is a valley near Red Feather Lakes in Northern Colorado. It’s a long valley situated over 8000′ between the gently sloping valley walls, it feels close to the sky. Always filled with lush grass, and wild flowers so densely packed it is difficult to walk without stepping on one, it is a hike to take whenever your spirits are low, or even when you’re so happy you can’t stand yourself. The South fork of Lone Pine Creek, a slow moving stream and its attendant wetlands, take up much of the valley floor and meanders down to join other streams helping build the watershed that provides our water. Beautiful stands of aspen in all of their finest greenery line the edges of the valley. It is truly a beautiful place.

As a photographer this is where you want to be on a day like this. Add getting to spend the day with good friends and it becomes a very good day indeed. The other photographer vying for the attention of Lady Moon is a local resident who is fast becoming known as the Prince of Red Feather for his more than accomplished photographic skills. He led the trek which was supposed to be a short hike of a mile or so but turned into a mini marathon. This was not specifically his fault as the person he was shooting with was one of those types that would dart off in a one direction to shoot a picturesque clump of aspen, then dart back to rejoin you only to dart off again in another direction to shoot a clump of mountain iris, rather like when you walk with your dog off the leash and he runs 75 yards ahead, and when you don’t catch up to him quickly enough runs back to you only to run off again to repeat the process. At the end of the walk he has walked 30 miles to your three. That was how a short walk of a mile or so turned into five.

All in all the day couldn’t have turned out better. We arrived back at the trailhead with a camera full of pictures, tired, wet from giving up all attempts to stay dry crossing Lone Pine creek dozens of times and thoroughly satisfied with our visit to Lady Moon. Plans were made to visit Lady Moon again in the fall. Those aspen are going to be absolutely spectacular then.

Life in A Cloud

Posted on by

LifeInTheCloud3326

For those of you new to the blog you may not know that The Institute, the source of the many excellent but interesting posts you receive daily, sits high in the Rocky Mountains in Northern Colorado. Not Andes high or Himalayan high, but moderately high at just under 6500′.

So what, you might ask, if you were the rude type. Well, it means that at this altitude, 6500′, we get a lot more weather than folks living lower than us. What might be a rain cloud high in the sky to them may be a raging hail storm at this elevation. They’re looking at the bottom of a cloud and don’t see what’s going on inside it. Or a brisk wind down on the flats might be 70 mph up here and that will scatter your lawn chairs all over hell and back.

Lately we’ve been getting a lot of “fronts” moving in which brings clouds over and around us and often below us, usually all at the same time. I say fronts because we rarely get “backs” unless the clouds move backwards for some reason, which it does sometimes for reasons known only to itself. So I guess that could be considered a “back”.

The Institute buildings sit prominently on a point just below the summit of a world-famous mountain, it, the mountain not the Institute, being featured on many maps and even Google Earth, jutting out into space and consequently into the weather whenever it occurs. Visualize all the many imposing Schloss’s or castles you have seen in magazines, movies, and your imagination along with craggy rustic buildings set in high lonely places and mix them together and you have an idea of what The Institute aspires to look like and fails dismally at, and you have an idea of what we look like.

But getting back to the fronts we spoke of earlier. When they bring the clouds in to envelope us in misty darkness, they are loaded to the very gills with water in the form of suspended droplets completely filling the inside of that cloud. There is simply no room left for anything else. Not even lightning. It is packed tight. When the cloud moves back and forth due to some climatic reason it bangs into whatever happens to be there, like say, The Institute, and as it collides with our buildings the water inside the cloud just adheres to them. Sticks to the sides, saturating everything with impunity, and creates problems that are different than one gets in a rainstorm. The water doesn’t just fall downward and run down the sides like rain, it instantly saturates everything, walls, roof, under the eaves, into every single nook and cranny, sort of like running your house through a car wash. Think grabbing your house by its roof and plunging it into a vat of water until bubbles come out of its little chimney and you have some idea of what it’s like to live in a cloud.

Now before you think that that is a totally bad thing, it’s not. In fact it’s kind of cool. If you’ve done all your proper caulking and waterproofing that is. You can stay inside and light a fire in the fireplace without fear of accidentally burning down the forest from errant embers. You can read, pull your chair right up to the window and watch the cloud move back and forth. Drink hot tea. Think about stuff you don’t normally take time out to think about. Ponder, some. Call your neighbors and say “Hey, you got cloud?” They almost always do if you do. It’s a time to relax and say “Well I don’t have to mow the lawn today.” and just enjoy the weather.

There are other good parts too, like when the clouds move in and when they move out. If the movement happens at either end of the day, like sunrise in the shot above, you get a bonus of seeing morning in a different way. That alone makes up for some of the crap side of living in a cloud. Shortly after that image was taken the cloud moved backwards up the hill and we got wet. But for a brief moment you got to see paradise. Living in a cloud isn’t always a bad thing.