Oh Rats!

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This post is as much a heads up that I may be out of the picture for a few days longer than normal. Harmonica Joe is coming to visit!

The Rat Pack (2 dogs, 2 cats and I) went on a photo mission last Sunday. The goal: come home with photos of pack rat nests. These critters are elusive unless you find them floating in a tub of water but their nests can normally be found everywhere out here in the desert. Not this Sunday however. The five of us hiked a half mile down the road but found nothing. I had one chance left and that was under the mammoth boulder right behind the barn, the very one which bested the Cat D8R last Fall.
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This is when I discovered that both ditzy Daisy and Brou love to have their photo taken. I squatted down on my haunches to take a photo of the rat nest filling the crevice under the boulder and both dogs immediately filled the view finder. The real target is between their feet.
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Above is what I was really after. You can see a tightly woven collection of twigs and debris to the left of Daisy's tail. This is your basic pack rat home.

As Slim will attest, pack rats do love to abscond with shiny items. He has yet to find the key to his Bobcat after laying it down on a salt block in his tack room. He disassembled the huge twig nest in one corner of the room but never found the key. Must have been a visiting pack rat who took the key home with him.

This is not just an impromptu desert nature tour here. I am going somewhere with all this so hold these thoughts and don't wander off on me, okay?
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I have been receiving some abuse lately for not exercising my truck. No one can accuse me of leaving my little carbon prints all over the place needlessly, that is for sure. Admittedly, the last time I used my truck was probably to chase a renegade cow off our pastures last summer. Now that I think of it, this mission is what prompted Mark to see if the truck still fired up last week - cow chasing!!!

From inside the Rat, I heard that loud tick, tick, tick and then nothing. Dead battery. Not good. But it's funny how some things that appear to be not good at the onset turn out to be blessings.

Mark's first natural inclination was to remove the battery and bring it over for a recharge. The next loud exclamation I heard was "Ohmigawd! Hey, you have to see this!" I got a premonition of what he had found and grabbed the cameras on the way out the door.
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Just as I had suspected! Some pack rat had decided that this long stationary truck would make an ideal home - off the ground and rain-proof. What a mess ... what a rat's nest!

While I am no where near as vehicle fussy as I used to be, I was completely aghast at what this ... this ... little ... creature ... had done to my lovely red Dakota!

Mark and I simultaneously exclaimed that it was a very good thing that the truck hadn't started up, what with all that dry compost to jam belts and ignite.
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While Mark trotted the battery over to the shed, I began grabbing handfuls of sage and chico brush out of the compartment. Who, I mean WHO would have thought that a pack rat would also drag in prickly pear cactus parts?!? I held my stinging hand up to the light to see the fine, hair-like needles which added to the fair-haired fuzz already there. Mark and I have had to deal with this misery before and I wasn't looking forward to myopically tweezing away at these needles, only to have them break off flush with the skin as usual. I cannot understand the nature of such a frail structure which is strong enough to penetrate calloused skin yet has absolutely no side-to-side strength. I suppose it is this quirky survival skill which makes them ever so memorable to anything which dares disturb them. But why a pack rat would be granted immunity to upholster his/her nest with them is even more of a mystery.
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I threw a pair of leather work gloves over to Mark and retreated to find the tweezers and work for the next half hour, using the long, hard rays of the afternoon sun as very necessary back-lighting.

Moral to this story? If you're not going to use a vehicle out here, at least start it up every couple of weeks and park it somewhere else - keeps the pack rats wondering where their perfect condo went. And DON'T leave your keys around!

Now remember, please, I might be gone longer than normal this week, okay?
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The Mysterious Rock Inscription

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Today we ponder the very incongruous etching left in the midst of many indigenous petroglyphs. .
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Above is a photo I downloaded from Red's camera after our big outing late last Fall. As you can see, petroglyphs can hide themselves from discovery very well unless you happen to be close enough and specifically looking for them This wider view shows the curious scribing in the upper left, the ones which I covered in more detail in "Slowing Down for the Curve".
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. Here is the detail from the far left of that panel. The images are heartbreakingly worn away by time but still faintly discernible as you draw to within feet of them. Our odd inscription trails off from the right side of this view.
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Here it is in the long afternoon shadows of the Fall sun, a form intense and boundary disciplined, imposed over the much older rambling expressions of the first humans to pass through or live within these canyons.
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Virgil and his wife stood with us last weekend as we took new photos and still, between us, no one wrested an intelligible message from between those two lines. European in influence ... had to be. But why incise very distinct lines above and below the figures? A lingering school primer mindset overly-enforced by hovering dark-robed proctors brandishing rods? Roman numerals? Surely there are too many strange figures to support the numeral idea. What then?

At least two of the figures appealed to my fancy as nearly Runic in form but this did not help me decipher the puzzle. Now it's your turn!
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In lieu of a comment, Scully has donated an image which might explain some of the motivation behind these petroglyphs. The 'fish story' surely has been around as long as there have been humans capable of hunting and fishing ... and drinking beer.
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The Cowboy Bar and Grill

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This is the continuation of our 'big night out' tale from the previous post.
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Above is a better view of the adobe walls and beams for Mushy and thud. In this photo, you can see how the thick adobe walls support a healthy beam across the large opening to the kitchen. You can also see the hand adzed marks on the central beam holding up the long main beam running from the back of the kitchen to the front of the house. The plaster finish on the walls attests to how solid this building is; almost no cracks in the wall finishes other than in a very low door header for which Slim claims responsibility in the course of a previous 'relaxing' evening. He even lifted his hat and showed me the original contact point on his forehead. Sold.

I was pleasantly surprised that I also captured a glimpse of the brick floor in this shot. Adobe buildings of this age were generally built directly on dirt; walls, floors and all. These dark glazed bricks were stacked together tightly without mortar in the last decade over the original age-hardened dirt floors. They are beautiful!
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. Slim returned from his grill management duties and settled into the dining room with his pile of spuds to peel with his picket knife. Without the young Tyrell here to help out, he surveyed the remaining help and decided that he was best suited to the task. Mark had already found some armaments annual to become engrossed in and clearly placed himself outside of the labor pool for the next hour.

Somewhere in all this, I perked up as I heard planes overhead. Slim looked up and grinned "Yep, that's some of your military birds out there." He knows. I looked disgustedly at their two dogs who did not warn me as Brou would have and then ran outside. Cool! What was taking place overhead was an aerial refueling! I had watched a mid-air refueling from the boom pod before but never got to see one from the ground so I ran back in to get my camera. Sigh, the photo sucked SOOO badly (likely caused by my buck fever moment) so I won't even post it here.

Meanwhile, back in the ranch house, the conflict of the chefs flared continually over when to put Clay's burgers on the grill. I sided with Slim in that rushed and raw potatoes would assail my sensitive stomach in horrid ways, and for several days to follow. With that thought in mind, Slim soon took to munching on raw potatoes, making sure to stand near-by to let their raw crunch ring in my ears as I sliced up his various peppers.

Somewhere in there, an impromptu auction banter was set up by Clay over the contents of the pass-through shelf to the dining room. I knew better than to stand in front of Mark and accidentally up his bids so I played ring man instead, responding to bids and calls for half-price and choice and yelling "Yep, yep!" and pointing to either Mark or Slim. Okay, so now you are getting an idea of why these suppers are not exactly drive-through fast food events. And maybe that is the whole idea - anti-rush.

Probably, oh, an hour later, we sat down at the table and had supper; Clay's burgers and green beans and Slim's canyon-famous grilled potatoes. Awesome good, all of it! Then it was time to head out and up to the bar, up those exterior stairs which I swear will kill one of us eventually. My gimpy knee likes neither the first nor the very last step spacing but, so far, so good (touch wood).

The pool table got a work-out that night. While Slim and Mark had a round of pool, Clay beckoned me over to the round poker table in one corner as he laid out cards and chips. ???! "You talkin' to me, bud?" "Well, of course! Sit down here!" "Uhm, I don't play poker ..." "C'mon .. five card stud?" "Nope". "99?" "Nope." He went through the litany of possibilities without a taker until I feebly offered "I can play solitaire ... ?". I gathered that this was the wrong answer as he let his head hit the poker table with a painful-sounding thud and sighed loudly, the cards sprawling out from his limp hand.

Meanwhile, Slim had donned his bright yellow flannel gloves gained from the kitchen auction. He would hold court at the long side of the pool table for the rest of the evening, holding up a hand in over-sized yellow flannel and offering guidance to the current shooter such as "Ohhh, Big Bird here wouldn't go for that shot, nope, unh-uh." As the evening progressed, he would admit his declining skills by placing his cowboy hat on backwards, putting his dark shades on and singing "Se-e-h-ven Spanish A-a-a-n-gels!" a la Ray Charles before a shot. Clay, on the other hand, and despite some heel teetering which I expected to turn into a backwards collapse at any minute, became more lethal in his shots as the evening wore on. Go figure. This was a vast improvement over his earlier flat-out-on-his-back sprawl after he had scooped up the supper condiments and then tripped over the low step into the kitchen. All four of us were suspended in amazed silence until (you know that someone had to break the shock and decorum here) I broke out in loud hysterics. At least it got everyone moving and abusing again. And poor Clay would wear and bear the abuse of being covered in condiments for the rest of the evening.

Other than that and my own gastric indignities suffered later on (I WARNED you that I had a sensitive stomach, didn't I?) which involved a short but brilliant aria from the second story balcony and some too curious ranch dogs below, the evening went splendidly and memorably. We followed Slim back up the canyon at a fairly safe distance until his turn-off and flicked the generator on back home at the Rat by 3AM. Wow! What a memorable evening out!
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This unimpeded view of the cowboy bar is for Buck. You can now get a better idea of the woodburning finesse of the young lady who sketched in the steer and the bucking bronc. Two of her prints were hanging in weathered window frames around the bar room as well ... VERY talented.

The face of the bar was built with new 1 bys and framed in weathered boards, a well-used rope edged the top, welded half-horse shoe brackets held up the rail at the bottom. You can even see where one brand was held in place a speck longer than necessary and flared a little. All in all, a very unique bit of work. Now I can't wait to start on our own saloon some day!
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An Unexpected Invitation

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What started out last Wednesday as a rare supper get together with the cowboys became just the beginning of four days of separate social occasions. This is unusual not only here in the canyon but probably set a twenty year record of some sort for us. And despite the utter enjoyment of it, I seriously doubt that us two cloistered old farts could survive a steady diet of it.

I also didn't realize that such a full slate would completely trash my normal blogging and e-mail time ... but it sure did. I am hoping to catch up on those lagging activities this week. Both of us have pretty much recovered from that nasty bug but one of my molars decided to give out last Friday and may throw everything off until I find a dentist to relieve this pain and fix the problem. In the interim, I won't be looking forward to meals no matter who cooks them and may have to rely heavily on the aluminum can feeder system while others pig out. ... grin
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Thursday's invitation came after Mark drove out to unlock the far gate for Slim and Clay. They had been out driving around on our isolated mesa to check out the pasture conditions and plan how to best drive some of Slim's cattle over there. These cowboys love driving around and planning almost as much as they love cattle. After checking out the water and grass and adding a little plinking brass to the road substrate here and there, they dropped down off the mesa and stopped by the Rat. "Supper over at Clay's place tonight? You bet, just say when!"

This time I would make sure to get more photos, too, because it is a pretty cool place that you might enjoy seeing. We waited until the appointed time to head over there and I forgot that taking photos so near to dusk would be a challenge. I tried to lighten up the color in some of the photos for you. Same for the interior shots.
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We drove along the main canyon road, taking in the big views ahead and all around us. I enjoyed these fading skies since it brought back memories of a day's end on the ocean where breezes would cool warmed, reddened skin and the salt water had already soaked the tenseness out of every muscle. It was that kind of comfortable and content feeling.
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I had to paste together two photos to show you the ranch. Even at a fair distance, the cameras could not capture this spread in one take. You can see the peach-colored bunkhouse at the left and the peach-tinted lowers with brown second story main house on the far right. The second story is home to the infamous cowboy bar and pool room of our tales. The airstrip and concrete pool lay somewhere in between it all. I wasn't kidding you, it really is a cool place.

So cool, in fact, that when the owner recently considered selling it, he was besieged by offers and backed off to reconsider its place in his holdings (and this wasn't even advertised!) i.e. ain't gonna be a steal if he does sell it off, i.e. Mark and I probably won't end up buying it either...(big long sigh here)...Probably the very best we can hope for now is that someone with a notch or two above rudimentary social skills and looking for a personal year-round home will end up with it. That would be a great blessing to our life out here.

So many really great ranches never hit the open market but remain within the old rancher network and change hands without public fanfare but that will be changing as demand from outsiders (like us) tempt the old boys to not leave any money on the table. Traditional ranchers and farmers are finding themselves priced out of new land due to development pressures. Their own existing land values also put them under pressure - continue a risky but much beloved lifestyle or sell out and retire comfortably. Wall Street's portfolio crowd and trust fund babies have added serious weight to the tipping scales (just to keep the records straight, Mark and I fall into neither of the previous categories). I have no doubts that big government's lucrative subsidies to not grow various commodities have enticed the former group to swallow up ag businesses and their lands by the greedy mouthful. I am inclined to forecast a sub-prime type fiasco in our food supply chain down the road as a result. Expect stunningly higher prices for anything involving meat, grains and vegetables on the grocer's shelves as just the starter. Don't get me going on the great pork barrel bio-fuel farce in contributing to this likely scenario because I try to stay away from touchy issues on this blog. But such frustrations are one of the reasons we get together with 'da cowboys' - to forget about all the pressures of the moment and the near future. So let's get on with the tour.
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Here is one of the original homesteader buildings. I fell in love with it and had to click a photo before darkness set in. Apparently cameras hold a different idea of darkness so I had to lighten this one up considerably as well. Look at the sandstone walls, the original small timber bough roofing, the rough door and window frames. Is that cool or what? And tell you what else; after New Mexico Magazine farted off my Rat entry for their schmancy Home issue, I'm not telling them about this one either. Hmphhhh ... yeah, would you believe they passed up on the Rat without so much as a polite 'get real, get lost' e-mail reply? . Hmphhh ... I have been thrown out of much better places ... so there.
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Here is a photo of the main room in the original adobe ranch house. The doorway on the left confesses to how thick the walls are. Genuine adobe works so well here in the desert. When we were here in the 90+ degree swelter last year, this dwelling was still invitingly cool by day's end.

I also wanted you to see the hand cut beams which support the roof. Slim and I boisterously argued semantics over 'hand hewn' versus 'rough cut'. I am funny about such things and these beams had been laboriously hand worked down to roughly square using an adze. To me, 'rough cut' refers to lumber which rolls off the end of a mechanical saw mill but not mechanically planed afterwards. To call such beams as these 'rough cut' would discount the hours upon hours that someone spent hand whittling down round logs chip by small chip. These particular beams contain the history of much sweat, blisters and ambition. They are simply gorgeous. I will show you a slightly better detailed photo of these in the next post.

At the back end of this view, you can see Clay starting prep on our cowboy supper while Slim is out fussing with the grill. This will be Clay's short 'quiet time' before the other chef and associated help turn the kitchen upside down with teasing banter and horseplay.

To be continued!
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Mud to Dust and Back to Snow Again!

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Pre-ramble: I had every intention of posting the curious inscription beneath the petroglyphs of the last post. I went through my files and realized that my photos were poor at best, at least as far as offering any detail for you to study and consider further. Although I had scaled the talus gingerly with my gimpy knee that day, I did not make the last few feet up to take a detailed photo of it. Getting up to a location is not so daunting but, in the wisdom of my later years, I have come to appreciate that gravity and inertia will complicate any return downwards many fold. And so it was my intention to return to that location this week to capture better photos this time. The weather and this lingering illness apparently had ideas of their own. Fine, be that way, next week then!

The bug: Mark succumbed fully to this latest nasty bug on Sunday . Today, he is 95% recovered. I am at about 70% recovered, enough to start this new journal entry. And as Slim would say "Well, that's GOOD!"
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Our inevitable mud of spring has finally cried and dried itself away. Dust has taken its place without apology. What you see above and below is the dust created by the heavy construction traffic to the new well on our land across the creek. The heavy rolling tires only aggravated the already lustful appetite of the young Spring winds and I have no doubt that over a ton of dust was uprooted and offered up to their pleasures.
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The mood of the canyon can change within the hour. The tantrums of the ever-restless skies above can turn your best-laid plans to naught just as quickly. Above, a sudden darkness is elbowing out our normal deep blue sky and voluptuous white clouds. Below, you can see the 'big picture' of that encroaching weather bully. There is something incredibly humbling and inspiring about being able to see the weather around you at this broad a scale.
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I can tell it's a Wednesday night despite the lack of calendars around here ... the cowboys are arriving for supper. If you enlarge this photo, you just might see something in the far background which may alarm you - not to worry however. I will cover that story at a later date.

It's funny how a ritual can be established without any planning at all and Wednesday has lately become our default dining get together. And it is a joyous one, an occasion to laugh and indulge and catch up on the previous week's news. Above, Slim and Clay pile out of Slim's truck. When I questioned Slim's odd parking angle to the porch, he unveiled a nicely premeditated plan to have the tail gate fold down at porch height and thus giving dogs easy access to the world and cowboys easy access to coolers. That boy is always thinking.
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I eventually pulled the thick pork steaks out of the oven. They had been slow and low baking since lunchtime in a thick sweet and sour sauce along with half-fried, half-baked seasoned potato slices and a long pan of cornbread. I replicated Clay's bacon cooked green beans and upped the ante a little with some finely diced pepperoni added in for good measure.

The banter, laughing and conferring never stopped throughout the evening, even when a more dignified version of Blazing Saddles set in after supper. Poor ol' Brou, I suspect, has become the classic scapegoat for errant flatulence; his reputation a curse which will 'dog' him in perpetuity. God bless that pup and his long patience at being conveniently and unjustly accused!
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Before the cowboys left that evening, a much colder wind and heavier gray clouds had over-shadowed us under the cover of darkness. Slim's dogs took shelter under the 45' trailer as snow started to fall. Above is this morning's remaining snow covering. Am I feeling more convinced that winter's last hurrah has come and gone now? Better but no cigar just yet.
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Slowing Down for the Curve

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A confession: I feel and look like death takes a holiday. When I feel this 'good', I just don't feel like blogging, computering in general, e-mailing or phone chatting. Not that there isn't plenty going on in the canyon but I don't have the heart to keep up with it right now. The move possibility is still pending and depending on pretty much everyone else but me. I will bring you up to date as soon as I have any truly tangible news. And maybe I am just a little blue that I will be losing an old friend. He's always been a fighter but sometimes the odds are just too overwhelming for even the toughest of them. Another chunk of my heart will go with him unless miracles avail themselves in very short order.

Sooo ... what I am going to do is post the odd photo or two here every four or five days in the interim, just something to let you know that we are still out here. Don't feel obliged to leave a comment since I will likely not feel up to answering them or be around very often to blog visit for the next little while .
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Here is a very strange petroglyph which we discovered while out exploring with Red last Fall. Being sheltered beneath a huge overhang of rock, it has survived the ages quite well. Oddly enough, we found it after failing to find the remote Spanish inscriptions which Virgil had shown us earlier that year. Quite the consolation prize.
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Here is a better detail of that find. You can see that someone added 'the barbell holder' at a later date.

I will try to be back by Friday with a most curious inscription from that same locale.
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The Impromptu Sunday Hike

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I know ... another post without any news of the possible move to 'up top'. We are still in that irritating phase of dragging through the mire of appointments with those who have more influence on our future here than we do on 'our' bought and paid for piece of the dream. To say that this process is frustrating and disheartening is pure understatement so please bear with us. We are hoping for a satisfying conclusion and will pass it along as soon as (and IF) we get some tangible reassurances from those parties. In the meantime, let's blow off some pent-up steam and go for an impromptu Sunday hike.
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Brou and Daisy were keeping up their vigil from the front porch but obviously waiting for some spark of new adventure. I was in that same stage of restlessness after the events of last week. Mark set down his newspaper and we headed down the road in the Dodge, Brou in the bed and Daisy following as usual since she still refuses to jump into the truck for any reason. He dropped us off at our hike site, Daisy caught up and he continued on to the main canyon to pick up his fresh newspapers in the mailbox. The dogs and I headed into our hike zone after he departed but not before some wild attempts by the dogs at following him.

My wild hair objective was to find Mr. Greer again. Well, not exactly Mr. Greer himself (unless this was a burial marker) but the rock carving he left probably a hundred years ago in a most unlikely and secluded cleft in the massive stone boulders that rest tumbled and haphazard at the foot of these mesa walls. That is the most tormenting characteristic of these canyon lands; that you may find a fascinating feature one day and never, ever find it again. It is this tantalizing and maddening aspect which has driven treasure hunters to complete obsession in the past. This will be the second attempt to find Mr. Greer's immortal inscription so let's see what we can find today.
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Even if we don't find Mr. Greer today, the hike through the monster rocks will be worth every single foot fall. It is our own private sculpture park tour, free from any elbowing spectators and the sole featured artists are Mother Nature and Time. How did they ever accomplish these works? So many, all so unique.
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Here is a natural sculpture which I see as the kindly mountain lion and the house cat. You may see something entirely different - what do you see here?
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We continue on, the two dogs frenetically lacing their paths across ours, covering ten paces for every one of ours. I am already tiring from watching their activities rather than from my own by now but they stop long enough to focus on a new find of 'ours'. When viewed dead on, these boulders offer a four foot wide shelter between themselves but this photo was taken as approaching from the side.
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One thing that I have noticed is that you start readily noticing the difference between what is natural and what is an anomaly amid nature's usual themes. There is something odd about the four impressions well above human head height in the rock on the right. They are not the round impressions worn by water and time but more like brutal impacts from human endeavor. The top of the rock on the left would line up perfectly with these divots as though someone had planned to place four pine logs across the opening and notching them in to the rock on the right to support a sheltering roof over the gap. What do you think? Spanish sheep herders, Anasazi, Pueblo, Navajo perhaps? So many questions, so little expertise but the questions are thoroughly titillating and satisfying enough for one day's adventure.

Okay, so we didn't find Mr. Greer this time either but there will be more fine days and excuses down the road to look for him again. Tomorrow ... or maybe the tomorrow after that one, or that one. Mañana ... it's as good as a life can get.
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Getting Buzzed

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I won't be doing any new posts on the possible move of Rat Town to the mesa top until a couple of important exploratory phone call messages are returned. A curious superstition that I picked up from the boss at a bike shop was to never talk about a deal more than necessary. He'd rip by on a roll saying something like "Hey, we might have the Munch Mammoth sold to Leno" and be gone. Somewhere in there, I was supposed to start the computer and paper trail rolling. When I grabbed him by the scruff once and sat him down to explain his abrupt and cryptic messages, he confessed his obsessive superstition; "If you talk too much too soon about an exciting deal, you will jinx it. You-will-queer-the-deal!" That curious superstition stuck with me even after I moved on. So, right now, you know as much as we do about the possibility of a move. Mum's the word then, loose lips sink ships!
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Fine then, I will talk about the various man-birds flying over and say no further about the subject most on our minds this week.
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Above is an assortment of low-flying military birds (two B1s and a pair of F-18s - thanks, Buck and FHB) which flew over the Rat in the last couple of weeks. The photos might not be great but the boys don't exactly warn you ahead of time or allow for digital cameras to set themselves up for a shot. It is the sound which I wish I could share with you; for a couple of old farts out in the middle of nowhere, there is nothing more exciting than having the hair on the back of your necks stand straight up as you rush to catch a second-long glimpse of war birds on a mission.
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Above is a more low-key buzzing run. We had heard of the flying pipeline inspectors but had not seen any fly up our little canyon until this year. There is more than one gas field operator who has cursed these planes after slamming their heads into the steering wheels of their trucks when they thought the low flyer would rip the roof right off their cabs.

In this shot, the pilot is climbing up a little before sweeping into a wide curve and dropping down again to inspect another long straight run of pipe. You can clearly hear the throttling up and down as they approach and then disappear into the distance. Given the outspoken geology of the canyonlands, aerial pipeline inspection is a challenging and dangerous profession. I have been working on a blog friend to return to the southwest and do this job for a living, to no avail. It would appear that all ladies 'of a certain age' will eventually succumb to practicality and common sense (taunt, taunt, taunt!).

Meanwhile, I'm thinking it sure would be nice to know the pilots, maybe even have them land on the road out front and taxi in for lunch once in a while. We welcome friendly visitors in all conceivable forms of conveyance. The future Rat Town will have hitching posts and wheel chocks.

Hopefully, I will be back by Thursday with some good news and an update on the moving possibilities.
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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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As the Road Turns

.We took a drive 'up top' last Sunday through our connecting canyon which is Mark's confessed favorite pure leisure drive. In this photo (if you click and enlarge it), you can almost see where we would previously drive straight ahead instead of taking a new curve off to the right. If you attempted that now, you would plunge over a cut a dozen feet deep, probably taking out a high pressure gas pipeline in the process. Ill-advised.

In case you missed the heads up, I am about to get metaphorically obnoxious here so return your tray to the upright position and extinguish all smoking guns.

Just like that road, we have found that what seemed like the clear and obvious path of our plans out here can change in a matter of months or even from hour to hour. The Rock of Damocles was a minor concern but what a gas field rep said yesterday was not. What he learned yesterday was that the five mile road to our Rat Town was not classified as a road used by several gas field operators. What that meant, ominously, was that if the creek gnawed further into the hard rock of the mesa walls in a few places and washed out this elevated road, it could be officially abandoned ... and not replaced. As you might imagine, this was not joyous news to these two people living at the very end of it. The alternative routes are just as seasonally affected (or more so) and would add at least an hour to our established and already prolonged access to civilization.

Now I am wondering if the delay in receiving our pre-fab new buildings was not but more benevolent works of ethereal allies. Having pragmatically ignored such synchronicity in the past to my detriment, I am inclined to have the new buildings delivered 'up top', far removed from these crumbling roads and the The Rock of Damocles . This is where the oddball and the engineer often clash with a brilliant display of sparks, where the unseen and intuitive collide with calculable hard data modeling.

Tomorrow, I would like for the two of us to journey up top once more, to revisit that area which we had both considered a good future home site last August and then compare it with the other possibilities Mark has come across since then. It may well help decide if we should change our time-line abruptly now or remain in the Rat under the Rock until further notice.

I will return in a few days with the results of our exploratory trip. Rat Town might well arise three hundred feet above my lofty dreams of just last month, then again, it might not. So many logistical, natural and human factors to weigh in so little time.
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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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Chillin' and Freezing Your Assets

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I'm going for the largely technical/pictorial today. All this heavy socializing (a once a week complete joy for two weeks in a row now!) has left me severely adrenalin-depleted. Yeah, pretty darned sad when you think of it. So I am slipping off into the technical end of off-the-grid living, something that I can do without the emotion I need to address the intrinsic rewards of this lifestyle. Also, I have to admit, I am very saddened by Fat Hairy's loss of his dad yesterday. I don't accept sad events happening to good people very well at all.
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Above is our first big dollar purchase early on. This is an 18 cubic foot propane-fired refrigerator made by Crystal Cold. Compared to the usual electric refrigerator, it was pricey at $2500 (without shipping) but going for the extra capacity was money WELL spent for a situation where you might not be able to access civilization for a few weeks at a time. The unit has preformed very well and dependably in these past two years (touch wood as always). Other than having to vacuum the collected debris from the rear cooling coils once to get it restarted, it has performed very well. Mind you, defrosting is a necessary function every couple of months. I know, NOBODY has had to defrost a refrigerator in the last 20 years but, still, you take what you can get in this limited field of offerings. I took this photo during a defrost and you can see the Coleman cooler to the right which is keeping the vacated contents somewhat cool during the process.

Over the very top shelf within the cabinet, you can see the radiation coils which provide the cooling. These will form a thick frost which needs to be removed occasionally. You can slow down the defrosting ritual considerably by taking care not to store items which readily release moisture. Our dry desert climate also helps as far as minimizing introduced outside moisture collecting on the coils. Fuel consumption will go up and adjustment of the cooling controls will need to be continually tweaked if you ignore the defrosting task. Still, this is not an utterly daunting task.

I normally drape a heavy blanket over the door to keep the door shelf contents cool in place rather than find more cooler space for them but I removed the blanket for this photo. This unit is very reasonable on gas consumption when properly serviced. It is also available pre-jetted for natural gas use but switching the jets from one to the other fuel is easy enough later on.
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The new freezer arrives! Plenty of supervisors! Above, Slim, Sammy, Chase and Big Dog all supervise Mark approaching the unloading task in the skid-steer.

The gift of that elk carcass forced this issue on the postponed desire to have a full freezer here. It's yet another pricey addition at $2375 without shipping but we are looking beyond the one year cost of storing a processed elk to the new prospect of being able to stock up on truly exceptional sales of meat and dairy products and having these food items available should we become stranded longer than normal. Given how many millions of dollars worth of food has spoiled during severe ice storms and subsequent power outages in the last decade, this is an option that even on-the-grid dwellers should consider.
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. Temporary home of the new freezer. It spent the first few days out on the hydraulic lift gate of the 45' moving trailer but it became apparent that being under the scrutiny of the returning Spring sun, the gas consumption would increase dramatically so we moved it into the trailer. The shelter within will provide temporary shading but we hope to juggle a space for it inside the more insulated main buildings as soon as possible. The other incentive for moving it inside (although the manufacturer said that many people keep these units outside) was that the strong winds of late continually blew out the pilot light. .
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While it poses a bit of an obstacle in this new setting within the moving trailer, we are willing to sacrifice trailer content access for shading until the situation changes. I would say that patience has become our number one necessary lesson in moving off-the-grid. Anyone driven to immediate gratification will not psychologically survive for very long out here unless they have an unlimited budget - and that rules out 98% of us right up front. Note that the cooling coils are situated on each side of the unit as opposed to the rear (you will read more about that curious feature below).
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.What is so very different about this freezer when compared to our gas refrigerator (or even the standard electric models) is that the cooling coils are not located at the rear. From the photo above, you can see that the designers obviously retrofitted a standard electrically cooled cabinet - there is a large open area below the inner cabinet which originally housed the electric compressor unit. This space is wasted and empty since the gas tank powers TWO separate cooling systems, one on each SIDE of the cabinet.

The glory in having two independent cooling systems (one on each side) is that you can run just one side if the freezer is operating in an fairly sheltered and cool environment. We will be running on one side only and saving considerable fuel until the summer weather hits.

Immediate drawbacks? These appliances are a truck-freight item and it is required that you inspect the item at the shipping dock before loading it and noting any damage if you want to make a damage claim. Given the very rough 2 hour ride from the dock to the Rat, we didn't want to clip the steel banding and disturb the protective shipping wrap. In both the case of the refrigerator and the freezer, we later found hidden freight damages not apparent at the dock. You can see some of the damage in the middle photo of the freezer; a deep ding in the coil cover about ten inches down from the top of the side cooling system cover. It was just a chance we took and lost - had we uncrated the unit for inspection at the dock, it might have sustained worse damage on the trip in.
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Our Big Night Out - Part 2

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Here is today's view of the sun setting. It appeared as though the sun had nested like a platinum egg inside the lower clouds and was lighting them from within. Just an hour before, the clouds had been unleashing small opaque hail upon us. Just the night before, the clouds had left us a half inch of snow before morning which the new sun soon dappled into a vibrant pinto print of white on the brown soil. We are not done with winter's last little pouts.
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So back to our big night out:
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With the goat path now a super-highway, we were soon crossing the bridge to civilization in record time. The setting sun began to break through the overcast skies as we rumbled over the cattle guard and through the gate to motor up the long drive to the host ranch. No less than eight dogs surged forward to bark, inspect and greet us as we pulled in behind a cattle trailer. One dog shouted guttural warnings from inside the house; a less than friendly and predictable hound that the hosts considerately decided to shut inside. That was good since I have had my fill of Kujo critters and stitches.

Slim met us on the flagstone patio and escorted us up the exterior stairs of a separate two story building. I made a mental note that the stairs were not always at constant and predictable heights, a situation which could be disastrous for those with abilities impaired as the evening wore on.
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We found ourselves in a delightfully dedicated bar room and soon at home with 'da boys' which included our hosts Clay (behind the bar) and his young ranch hand Tyrell (who was prepping food and readying the grill down at ground level when I took these photos).

The rustic bar in the left corner was a recent addition and very nicely done; a combo of new and weathered wood and branches, rope and old horse shoes. Its front panels were decorated with burn-ins from area ranch brands and two well-executed word-burned sketches.

It took all of about 5 minutes before we were comfortable and settled in like this was a second home with nonstop laughter and teasing being the order of the night. I can't imagine a more pleasant way to spend an evening anywhere.

Slim slipped away long enough to prep and grill his famous canyon potatoes after a boisterous competition over who could better peel a potato with his pocket knife. Mark and I restrained giggles at some of the very small surviving spuds. But this is a ritual, you see, part of the entertainment and it doesn't matter if you start with five pounds and end up with two, that's simply not the point at all. The point seemed to be that we were going to hang out like kids without a care in the world, far away from feed and fuel prices and just have fun for the evening. Count us in!

Pure devil as always, Slim took advantage of my concern that he had thrown the steaks on with the potatoes that half hour earlier. He knows we are staunch 'medium rare' fans. "Yep, I threw them on, heck, had to be an hour ago! What ya don't eat, I plan on making some fine bridles with so no big deal."

With a clockless instinct that defies logic some time well into our bar reverie, Slim stood up and announced "Well, it's time to eat!" and led the grateful stampede down the ill-proportioned steps to the main house. We milled around the kitchen until each of us was outfitted with a full plate and found a seat at the big table. Tyrell had cooked up bacon to a crisp and diced it into a big pot of French-cut green beans and let it all simmer long and hard, DEE-licious! Then he fried up mushrooms in butter to top over the steaks. Slim brought in his famous grilled canyon potatoes - ultra thin slices done up with bacon, jalapeno dices, spices and butter, wrapped in double aluminum and set to grill away until soft and browned - heavenly tasty. He returned with a big platter of his own rib-eye steaks and pointed out which Mark and I would like for doneness. Spot on - juicy, tender and so tasty. The only background noise was old Kujo who had been sequestered to a back bedroom before we came down to eat. The banter and laughter continued on through dinner and saw us back up in the bar in due time.
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Slim spinning a classic cowboy yarn
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Mark and Clay interspersed the evening's philosophizing with a game of pool, mostly drawn out by Clay forgetting that it was his turn to shoot between his bartending duties and subjects of conversation that especially sparked his interest. Yep, we solved a lot of the world's problems that night.

I wish I had taken photos of this ranch for you (Mark is ordering a larger memory card for the new camera as I type). The main house is a 100 year old adobe structure with immense, dark hewed beams running here and there atop thick interior support walls. It is even on the grid and has the semblance of genuine limitless running water! I was enjoying every moment of this and even felt compelled to use the porcelain throne ... if only 'just because'. It is simply a gorgeous and comfortable place to call home.

We so regretted how soon time had passed and finally got grown-up enough to head home and let these cowboys get their beauty rest. I stopped by the kitchen to retrieve my left-overs and dishes. I had forgotten about ol' Kujo. He hadn't. What a charming pup, a short-haired muscular and fawn-spotted biting machine; reminding me of some odd and accursed mating of a dingo, a ridgeback and a hyena. And he was now giving me (who was too far in to run) 'the look' and the talk. I thought back briefly to the hound who had ripped up my face twenty years ago. No, that wasn't something I wanted to deal with again. The cowboys were up in the bar, Mark was pulling the truck around. Well, it's just you and me, Kujo, huh? Lovely.

As he closed in on me with menace and malice in mind, I decided to do my best Miss Romper Room personae. "WELL! Aren't you SUCH a GOOD boy?!" He paused, as such dogs often do, to mentally crunch this strange and unexpected input. I wasted no time and turned, my only concern being that he might be a butt-biter as I stooped to grab the leftovers from the fridge. So far, so good - buttocks still intact as I straightened up and spun around towards the door. "Well, yes, oh, you ARE such SUCH a GOOD boy!" I tried to ignore the ample salivation from curled lips revealing serious fangs and took heart in the twitching of his eyebrows from right to left as he crunched this strange input once more. I managed to slip out the latching screen door before he decided that he had been duped. And, honestly, that's all I cared about at that point. I nipped out to Mark's waiting truck to a background of maddened barking and lunging at the screen door. Ya-hoooo! Kind of put a satisfying closing edge on the evening!

As always after our rare social outings, we nattered enthusiastically, playing back all the highlights of the evening as we drove along in the dark. The canyons were now black velvet dark except for what a toe-nail moon offered through the occasional break in the mesa walls. Even the goat path turns and miles were now ticking by without effort. At this late hour, we had the roads to ourselves. Well, not quite. From what seemed like 50 feet away and emerging out of solid rock, headlights suddenly split the darkness just ahead of us on this largely one lane road!

The beacon lights of this new intruder stopped in their advance and we decided to creep around the corner of this rock-curtained hairpin to investigate. The alternative was backing down the narrow road behind us to a wide part which may not have even existed within the last quarter mile. Tall lights staring through the dust blinded us as we made the turn. Oh great, it was a water tanker, one of the bigger gas field vehicles! Wisely, he had stopped at one of the only spots big enough to allow both of us to squeeze by, but barely. Both trucks had to carefully inch into the wider space abdicated by the other.

But it worked out as it most normally does out here and soon we were back on our last miles to home with only a coyote pursuing a cottontail charging out just 15' in front of us. We got home to the frantic fawning of Brou and Daisy and simply had to sit and chat for another hour before the joy of the evening would let us sleep.
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