Eroding the High Road

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While the photo above does not portray the erosion of the road which threatens to lock us into a very poor and sporadic alternative route, it does show the same severity of creek erosion at the very heart of this latest concern. You can see the wide and biting swing of the creek into the road bank above it. The creek has condemned as much as a half mile of road at a time with its ravenous appetite. Such stretches of road on our private lands were never restored for grazing by their principal users when they no longer served their immediate purposes. In other words, we were losing ground on both sides; to the wild and unpredictable creek and to those who sought to avoid it at the cost of our good and solid lands.
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In these latter days, lawyers are driving to limit their corporate liabilities and their bean-counters are pressing for foolish nickel and dime cost savings. They are trashing previous policies of helping landowners in other non-cash ways and I am wondering if we should close access to roads on our private land which they build but refuse to maintain to reasonable safety standards. To me, liabilities exist on both sides of the fence but I see mostly us on the giving side lately. Any advice and suggestions on this one?
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In the meantime, we made our trip up top to explore new home site options. In a future post, I will show the site which Mark, Slim and I selected during Thursday's drive around. It is still highly tentative and largely rests in the hands of the newest and very rude gas player out here as to its feasibility at all. This new outfit has even appalled and ruffled the usually unflappable Slim with its 'because we can' attitude of insufferable arrogance and its shameful under-handedness so far. The bad apple has arrived and the rest of the barrel will suffer from their greed and callousness.

Photos above and below show part of the new access road if we choose to relocate. It is uniformly wider than the road we have endured for two years now and has the advantage that it does not traverse the creeks and wide washes that our current road does. It winds down from the mesa top to the canyon bottom and crosses the killer wash with the help of a very respectable bridge which is open 24/7. This is the same bridge which we hope to reach after enduring the goat path.
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If the Rat can make it out on our own crumbling canyon roads, then these roads will be a snap to navigate with minimal damage. The question is, will it make it that far without serious damage or complete disaster?
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Saturday's Walk

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Yes, I'm back so soon with another post. Consider it my penance for missing so many days last week.

We both lolled around pleasantly absorbed in reading far too long on Saturday morning to consider a full day 'up top' looking for elk antler sheds seriously. Instead, we chose to wander up the road and across the creek for one last look over a piece of 'our' land before the gas field commandeers it into perpetuity (sort of a modern feudal arrangement and we be da serfs).

Since Brou and particularly Daisy are not inclined to ride in the truck but will chase it down the road to the end of the known world, it was to our great advantage that they both ran up the mesa after ... well, who really knows what. Mark and I ran to the truck and were soon high-tailing it down the road while I watched for frantic descending hounds to follow. Woo-wee! We did it!

After kicking up dust for just short of a mile down into our nearest creek crossing and climbing back up to the far side, we rolled over the newly graded well site and piled out at the far side. I had barely pulled my hiking boots (those beloved rubber boots) out of the truck bed when I saw a brief flash of black down the hill behind us. "Daisy?!!" Sigh ... and Brou. Both panting furiously but neither to be denied an adventure.

Mark headed off to the West and I headed East. The dogs shared themselves back and forth between us until they realized that Mark would return to the cab to finish reading his Wall Street Journal in just a couple of hours. I had paced through the sage to reach and follow the abandoned road along the base of the mesa and both dogs eventually became committed escorts for my hike.
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I dropped away towards the creek, somewhat south from the old road and, as we rounded a bend, I saw this huge boulder between the road and myself. Something didn't look right about this big rock which could have buried the back quarter of the Rat without a trace. It was sitting on a fresh bed of piled earth which had not yet flattened and smoothed out in the rains. I moved in closer and saw fresh white battle scars on its face and immediately thought of Quig and the D8R but there were no vehicle tracks of any sort on the road this far in, let alone grouser tracks.

Then I noticed orangish colored tree debris to the right. As I walked back closer to the road, I realized that these were the sparse remnants of two full-sized cedar trees and the story began to tell itself. This boulder had recently broken loose and thunderously bashed its way down a couple hundred feet to finally rest just beyond the old road bed. It most likely let loose from the light-colored area half-way up the mesa face where what looks like two dark triangular eyes and a nose stare down on us.
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You can click on all photos to enlarge

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I clambered barely up the foot of the talus field to take the above photo looking back down over the boulder's path. I passed another flattened cedar, massive divots and piles of freshly shattered sandstone to get there. If you placed a floret of broccoli on a block and smashed down upon it with your fist full force, you could not have flattened it out as completely as these cedars were now. This is also when I noticed a deeply trenched gouge across the road just behind the boulder. The monster had finally stopped bouncing and slid the last 15 feet across the road bed before running out of momentum. (These photos do not capture the scale at all; everything in this landscape is immense beyond what any of us are used to).

I then recalled hearing what I thought was a demolition explosion in the distance recently. I also thought about 'The Rock of Damocles' still perched over the Rat. These canyons are still changing at the prod of nature's rough and relentless hands.
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Humor of the Day (from the Katlady)

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We finally figured out why Mushy doesn't like cats ...
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Hiking Ms. Daisy

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Here is the conclusion to Just Daisy and Me Hiking where I discovered the Spanish rock inscriptions. I figured that you wouldn't mind less talk and more photos for a change. This is as much to let you know that we haven't fallen into a bottomless sinkhole yet. We're just both running tired with the growing 'To Do' list before the REALLY cold weather sets in. We have been enjoying high 60s daytime temps and balmy overnight temps of high 20s and low 30s i.e. no further pipe freeze-ups (touch wood!). Great sleeping weather with just the pilot lights burning on two of the propane wall heaters for the most part. The extra Rat insulation is paying off nicely.

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These cacti are the first of their kind which I have come across here. Don't ask me what they are (Belle - any ideas?) but I have noticed that so many desert plants out here may only grow in one small area. This is why I was so upset with the new well location up top when they failed to give us notice and time to survey and salvage any unique plant specimens per our agreement. I'd rather take a chance on transplanting them than having them dozed under with absolutely no chance of survival.
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Here is another view of the creek. Hard to believe that a creek which spends most of its time sleeping in this deep, dry state can inflict such damage when it awakes.
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At one point, the sandstone wall rises dramatically straight upwards to the first bench. For one exhilarating moment, I thought I had found the eerie of an eagle. Follow the yellow arrow and notice the accumulation of white bird dropping just below a dark hole (you might have to click to enlarge to follow this). The crow who showed up and circled above it quite vocally told me that it was probably his nest though.
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Here is a view of Rat City from our hike. It gives you a better idea of the scale of the mesa behind us. Compare this view to the view in The Rock of Damocles. The rock is resting at the very top of that mesa.
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Above is the last inscription treasure that we found that day. This one had survived the weather better by its location under the shelter of the much larger rock shown in the initial account. There were some fainter, intriguing inscriptions above it to the right but the shadow hides them completely. Wait 'til you see the petroglyphs we discovered yesterday though! Woo-hah!
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Erode the High Road

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As much as this is a brutally tough and rugged appearing land, it is also a very delicate and sensitive one. It will bleed profusely when scratched even ever so lightly. As time goes on, I will show you more photos of what even the fairly benign elements of wind and rain can do to this landscape sporting the tough-guy facade.
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Mark decided to go east to start this week's sign posting chores 'up top'. We had not been through the locked gate at the ranch's end since mid-summer and he was back within the half hour, insisting that I come see the summer rain's work on the road beyond for myself. "No, you won't really appreciate what I ran into unless you see it for yourself, I kid you not. C'mon, jump in the truck!" Since Daisy won't jump into the truck but WILL run herself to death following us, we tethered her to the moving trailer and headed down the road with the ever well-behaved Brou in the back seat. Mark did the honors at the gate and began his play-by-play narration; "Okay, so I'm through the gate and mostly thinking about the crossing at the creek itself when I hit the brakes because I am suddenly looking down eight feet, dead in front of the truck ... right about ... here!" Thanks to that impressive re-enactment, my breakfast was now requesting an instant replay. "Yes, thank you, I can see how this might have commanded your full attention, I can, really."
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Then he noticed a new trail blazed through the rough grasses to the west and pointed the Ram's head to follow. It generously skirted the old road (now a committed arroyo) in a rough and bumpy manner and finally met up with the work of a back hoe which had placed a bridge of dirt across the new gap at a narrowing much further up. At this point, we parked on the other side and walked back to the edge of the old road.
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This photo above was taken after we found a less treacherous path down into the wash. I have placed a yellow line in the photo to indicate the original path of the road as recently as July. Although I cannot describe our rains this season as being exceptional or even plentiful, there must have been just the right downpours in this exact area to incise 8 feet of earth away from the road bed here.
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We wandered down the arroyo to find the matching end of this now defunct road (marked with a yellow spot). It was nearly impossible to imagine this much material ripped away by one season's rains. I thought of a ditty occasionally murmured by an eccentric engineer I once worked with in phone plant; "Rooty-toot-toot, Rooty-toot-toot, We are the boys from the institute, We are not rough, We are not tough, But - we - are - determined!" He'd always turn to face me for that last line, one index finger up in the air for accentuation and that madman grin on his face that I so adored. Now, that may seem like a strange recollection to make at this moment but it struck me that this was how our rains operate; not in vicious assaults but by gently overwhelming their surroundings with a doggedly patient determination. No tsunamis, no crashing white waters, just a constant relaxed flow, unebbing and thoroughly resolute.
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We wandered even further down its now dry course to where its path was less incised, to where it was beginning to make concessions to the normal grade of the land at either side. This photo above shows Mark standing in front of a pile of flotsam caught in an exposed gas pipeline. Perhaps that debris pile will someday become a starter bed for new silts and sands to form a new deflecting bank. In our lifetime? It is more likely that the 40 or 50 feet of newly exposed 6 inch pipeline will rupture and fill our canyon with gas at impressive compressor-driven volumes. I followed the fresh tracks of several cows up to and either over or under this line. Since there are far more hazardous cases of exposed pipeline in the region which have gone long unaddressed, we don't expect any miracle of responsible maintenance to occur any time soon. Tell you what; if you hear of our demise by massive inferno, the first one of you to investigate and prove that it was corporate negligence, you get what's left of the ranch, too, okay? There will still be a goodly amount left, I can assure you. I will only hang around to haunt the corporate bean-counters and budget wonks responsible ... promise. I'm sure any one of them would freak if I performed my infamous Daytona hairspray blow torch demonstration in their living room but it's okay for them to do it to us on the Russian Roulette macro scale.
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I did get a consolation hike in the process. Mark was quite willing to hang out by the truck while I scaled a new mesa bench with Brou. I will admit that it took longer than I had planned (AS USUAL) but it was such a joy to wander through the trees, over one odd formation of worn terraces and rocks to another and yet another. Soft, dense area rugs of pine needles under foot, the natural sandstone steps, the smooth open paths of old rains, the strewn gravel of old glaciers, the hidden niches and shelters in the worn rock. Occasionally, I would pass by a shard of ancient pottery which whispered to me that someone else had once loved this place as much as I. It is in these places where I am most free of time's shackles, most fully aware and most joyfully alive. I hope you all can find a place like this in your lifetime.

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