Movin' On Up!

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Update: I am now on my second day of having to perform the miserable duty of accessing and pulling the spark plug and squirting gas directly into the cylinder to start the generator myself. So far so good.

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I think we can finally announce a certain candidate! But it was a brutal, tiring process of getting there. I finally had to call in Slim, Virgil and Earl to help sway my number one super delegate and CFO.

We had gone through the neverendum meetings with certain gas field companies and that had left Mr. Pragmatic with serious concerns, and they are very real concerns, no doubt about it. The part of our ranch which we hope to relocate to and which I will show you below, has been recently acquired by a new player; a gas company known for ruthlessness and a penchant for picking up under-performing leases. And they will generally tell you anything to get their way i.e. 'lie like a rug'. Our big concern was building on one of the few sites that they haven't already disfigured, only to have them come in a year from now and plant a well right in our faces ... complete with a VERY noisy compressor AND jack pump. Our survey of the field and the feds say that these guys will likely do it, good neighbor policies be damned. In the end, we did meet with one of their people who seemed willing to give us a vague idea of where they may likely drill next and where they might not. Of course, if he is a straight-shooter, he might not last long with this outfit anyway. Verbal and gentlemen hand shake agreements are a thing of the past unless you are a complete fool looking for a guaranteed let-down.

As clarification here; as a land owner with no mineral rights, you basically have no rights if an energy developer wants to take over parts of your land. When we first heard the term 'split estate', we thought "50/50 ... guess we can deal with that". But split estate, in this case, is more like a split between Lord and serf. If they want your virgin daughters or your best treed elk habitat, they can pretty much take it at their whim. The only thing stopping them is some new NM lip-service legislation on surface owners rights and their own 'good neighbor policy', which some clearly do not possess. I normally don't like to mention names but ConocoPhillips has been very good so far despite a few shameful logistics screw-ups but is ever striving to improve and does try to make amends when at fault. This new three-letter player out here, however, remains seriously in doubt by all accounts.

In the meantime, we have decided to take our chances, given the improved overall year-round accessibility of the new location. Yes, it is a daunting move for us with so many things to arrange for and the last disastrous move still clearly too recent to not effect our enthusiasm. That move left us very drained emotionally and didn't help our opinion of mankind when given a chance to take advantage of or not. But we have some time on our side now and some trustworthy allies to help us out.
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What is this thin and curious strip of an image?! Well, this time you are going to have to click on the image to find out. It's under 250K though and you won't regret the view.

It is a roughly 160 degree panorama from the proposed site of Rat Town. I am not kidding when I say that the views are BIG out here. I had to splice together 5 different photos to show you what you would see if you pivoted around on your heels from not even quite North to South. At the very extreme right of this photo, you can almost see the new Rat site. If you could see over that dark ridge of trees for a couple of miles beyond, you would see the Rat's current home in our canyon.

Virgil and his wife came out for a visit a few weekends ago and we headed up there to check out the new site possibilities. They liked! Then Slim weighed in later, noting that it would be a lot easier to find his way home from there after one of our supper evenings. And then Earl cast his vote, noting that grid power for running shop tools was less than a quarter mile away from the new site.
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.Here is the view looking directly north from the second potential site. The first site was sitting a little low to take in the mountains to the north shown here.

Now don't be thinking that my next blog entry will be from 'up top' - just ain't going to happen. In fact, this move may take a few seasons to complete and, since unattended things are ripe for pillaging and scavenging even way out here, we might be trying to inhabit two sites at once for some time to come. Not my idea of a good time but I am not the Rat's grand fuhrer of our resources either. A decision one way or the other is still good news to me even though my original enthusiasm has waned considerably in the process. Guess I'm just one of those 'do it or get off the pot' types.

If you've been following along with us for a while, you are familiar with our current cozy canyon along with its blessings and drawbacks. What is your gut feel?
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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.
. I cautiously stepped a few feet closer to the edge to show you what happens when the creek takes another bite and the clay walls submit to the logical consequences. Sometimes you are warned of imminent collapse when you see a long stress crack three foot in from the bank's top, sometimes not. It might support a mega-ton rig as it did this morning or it might let loose under something as light as our pick-up truck.

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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