Lessons from a Stone

This is one of my most prized photographs. I wish I had a higher-resolution picture, but, for me, back in 2009, it was either my Blackberry or my faithful 3.2 meg Canon Digital Elf (the precursor to the PowerShot line) that I kept at all times in the glovebox of my truck. I carried that tiny camera with me since Canon came out with it in the  late 90’s. It was great for just about everything, including shooting video, except in the event that years later I’d want to have some of my many great shots blown-up into something of “wall hanging” size.  Still, I am lucky to have this pic at all as the subjects were virtually impossible to capture without the aid of a good telephoto lens.

I was living and working in Cortez, Colorado, running a new operations office for one of the larger natural gas exploration and production companies in the US. This one was  headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma with operations thoughout the Western US, including Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah. My job had me both driving long distances between assets and going back and forth between offices in Bloomfield, New Mexico, Durango, and Cortez in Southwest Colorado. Between where my work has taken me and my outdoor interests and activities, I have had the luxury of seeing wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, lynxes, wolverines, black bears, grizzlies, foxes, coyotes, eagles, ospreys, and virtually every prey species associated with that food chain.

My piece of the above project in North Central Colorado was relatively small in relation to the  total cost and seven-year build cycle, but it was an important role and pleased me greatly to be a part of such a team of engineers and project managers. Including construction hands, hundreds of people had a hand in the work. I was responsible for designing and building the station inlet and outlet piping and equipment for this plant, which, when completed, became the largest gas processing facility of its kind. The area was called the Piceance Basin, and its location provided me with incredible opportunities to go on long runs with my dog and view untold numbers of elk and deer, and make the drive to flyfish the Flaming Gorge of the Green River, in Utah. Traveling to and from the site from my office in Cortez gave me even more wildlife viewing opportunities, including herds of wild horses in the distance. Unlike the rough, high desert ecosystems of so many other places that contained these animals, I can remember thinking that these wild horses had it made. Plenty of grass, water, and suitable terrain. I don’t think these horses had cause for much travel and probably lived their lives within twenty miles of their birthplace. But the point I wanted to make here is that oil and gas basins hold plenty of wild horses, thousands, and the horses have remained in this county even during the construction of larger projects and they continue to inhabit these pockets of extractive industry like mining and oil and gas production. Employees generally leave these horses alone, so their fear of mankind appeared to be non-existent. As long as they are left to be wild horses and do as wild horses do, they have no reason to move from a perfectly good area. There were large pockets of private range held by the nearby ranching community, so these horses had abundant access to those lands, and the area got plenty of snow and rain each year to keep the tall grasses in excellent condition. Unlike other parts of Colorado and certainly rangeland in Nevada and Utah where there is too much competition from both wild and domesticated animals like sheep and cattle where the rangeland and all the creatures it supports are in serious need of management.

Over the span of thirty years in Colorado, I have had many otherwise rare opportunities to view thousands of animals in their natural environs. Wild Horses were among the rarest. The picture was taken in an area I had come to know well. It is on a slice of BLM land which adjoins the Southern Ute Native American Reservation to the south and the protection of Mesa Verde National Park to the east. The entry to this particular area was accessed via BLM road that was often open to the public. I would hike with my girlfriend and dogs, go for extended runs and ride both my mountain and motocross bikes all over the related trails. Seldom did I encounter another human being and it had become an area I felt quite strongly about. If I did run into anyone, it would be a hunter, or two, back in hunting coyotes. I was a hunter myself, purely elk, and almost exclusivley good-sized bulls during the month long archery season, and, though I don’t agree (and am vehemently opposed) to hunting coyotes for sport, their populations do need to be maintained and, in Colorado, a bounty could be applied to a corpse as long as the hunter held to the strict number of animals they could take with the proper licensing. Contrary to public opinion, these guys don’t tend to be monsters but are out enjoying nature in a fairly pure form, not leaving messes of campsite garbage in the field or, the thing that bugs me most, making all sorts of noise or breaking out a boombox and knocking back a few beers, and “plinking” (walking around with a smaller caliber gun and shooting at old cans and bottles as scattered about these kinds of areas, which really weren’t far outside the city limits). Depending upon where you are, the combination of drinking and shooting was illegal and I’ve put an end to these nefarious activities myself on many occassions. This particular location had become somewhat sacred to me because BLM could decide on any given day to close the main access gate out by the highway, so I didn’t want some group of lawbreakers ruining the access for everyone else. It was just a ten minute drive for me to get there and park, and take off on a long run with my dogs. You could say that I was vested in the place and didn’t want to lose such a recreational opportunity so close to home, particularly since I effectively had my own splinter-herd of wild horses to enjoy. Since I mostly ran with my dogs, I had them trained to leave the wild horses alone, but that was only when I made sure to keep us well away from them, at least by a quarter-mile, or so. While with the dogs, I maintained a rule for the three of us that we never got close enough to bother them in any way.

But there were days when I purposefully went alone to stalk  this small herd to get in close enough to observe them for a couple and hours and, with any luck, snap a few good photos. As part of the greater Mesa Verde herd, they numbered between ten and fifteen individuals with the usual hierarchy, a single stallion and possibly a smaller stallion as tolerated by the big stallion, six or eight mares and several offspring. Depending on the time of year, this would include a couple of this year’s foals and several yearlings from the previous year. This is what the herd would be comprised of at its healthiest. Some days I’d have to run several miles, including some doubling back, before I’d spot them amongst the thick pinon, juniper, and sage. Rarely were they out in the open sage as they are shown in the photograph, but it had snowed several inches of heavy, wet snow overnight and the change to morning temperature had come up just enough to cultivate a thick fog which gave them a sense of security. Plus, they were cold from the hard night and needed to be up and about grazing and trying to get warm, catching whatever few rays of sun making their way through the low-slung clouds. There was no wind, so it was an absolutely perfect opportunity to close most of the distance by walking through a draw filled with pinon trees and rocks. I knew this draw, and by the time it ended, I would be within seventy five yards of them. I remained in the cover of the top of the draw and watched them mill about, pawing the ground to get at the grass beneath. I probably observed them for an hour before the urge to carefully approach and try to get a series of pics took over.

This would be the closest I’d gotten to them. I crested the head of the draw and, standing behind a couple of small pinon trees, I slowly stepped out into the open and stopped, just standing there looking disinterested and away. Two things could happen. They could quickly collect themselves and bolt or, because I wasn’t acting like a predator trying to sneak up closer and I was in the open, in full view, coupled with the idea that these horses had gotten to know me at a greater distance, they might just hold their ground and let me approach by another ten or fifteen yards. I did not want to blow this opportunity, so I decided I’d go roughly ten more yards and take some photos. It was frustrating not having a camera with a powerful zoom where I would have remained in the sanctity of the head of the draw and gotten my pictures from there. But getting this close had worked in my favor because I got to watch them form a defensive circle, with the powerful gray stallion pointing himself toward me and the mares closing-up around the young. The lieutenant took a spot toward the back of the circle. I was now standing about fifty yards away and had begun taking pictures. I was pretty certain that they wouldn’t oblige me for long, so, after ten minutes, the lead mare gave the sign and began to walk off with the others falling in behind, and the stallion remaining in back, always between me and his harem. I marveled at his size, looking very much like a weight-lifter on steroids. His head, neck, shoulders and hind quarters were massive and obvious even under his thick winter coat. I watched until they all but disappeared into the mist and walked the two miles back to my truck. I’d been fortunate to locate them so close to the BLM road that morning. They could have just as easily been five or six miles into the sage to the south.

I’d had a triumphant morning but, because of the dim lighting conditions and snowy, monochromatic background, this one pic was the best I could get. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my girlfriend of the encounter. It was an extremely rare glimpse into the lives of wild horses.

The plight of the Amican Wild Horse goes back for centuries. Among scholars, it is generally thought that the American Wild Horse is a descendent of those horses which came over during the discovery of the New World by the Spanish in the fourteenth entury. Not long after the Aztec and Mayan peoples of Central America and Mexico vanished, many due to European disease brought to the shores of North America by the Conquistadors and other conquering factions, there were thousands of horses left behind, never to be shipped back to where they came. I could certainly be wrong about this as it flies in the face of what has been historically taught by people far more educated on the subject than me, but I believe that rather than a few horses wandering off and becoming feral, I contend that it was hundreds, if not thousands purposefully left behind rather than taking up valuable cargo space on the returning vessels headed back to their native European empires. It didn’t make economic or pratical sense to round them all up and return them by ship to their native lands in Europe, while most of the explorers would be returning by the skin of their teeth with all sorts of plunder. It takes a lot of effort to hunt-down and annihilate or enslave tens of thousands of lesser armed natives. There would be additional militant explorers traveling further and further north over the following centuries and, by then, native American cultures in Northern Mexico and the what would later become the Great American Southwest had discovered these beautiful creatures of European descent roaming about by the thousands. Over the next several hundred years, many of these horses would be domesticated and become the single greatest factor behind the advancement of the American Indian Horse Culture, which now spanned any number of tribes from the Great Plains in the heart of America to the great Pacific Ocean of what would eventually become California, Oregon, and Washington. The wild horses continued to evolve into mixed-breeds from various parts of Europe into a slightly smaller and stockier lineage that was predominantly from being once domesticated on the European continent and various other places in the world that had specialized in breeding their horses for a number of different purposes, to going back into the melting pot to take on new traits, as dictated by the new environments they found themselves in. Over the course of the next three-hundred years, more horses were brought to the Eastern shores of the New World, some of which would invariably spill into the American West both during and after the Indian Wars when various strains of horses from around the world were unleashed onto the Western landscape. There were also horses left behind from the American Civil War. As these horses were captured and reintroduced to domestication, the American West became a giant cauldron of domestication and breeding.

All sorts of factors would define what would become the American mustang and what their regional popultions might be at a given time. As natural predators were eradicated throughout the Western United States and the cycle of naturally occurring fire had changed drastically due to larger and larger areas of white settlement, the ecology behind the history of the American Wild Horse became tremendously complicated and mired in debate. I will not attempt to cover it here. Suffice it to say that Wild Horse management is complex and seldom will you find three experts in ten who agree on the kinds of policies that need to float to the top and become legislation. Combine that with the fact that environmental conditions for these animals change considerably from region to region and state to state. Each herd has its own set of special circumstances that combine to help that herd thrive or see it struggle, on the edge of oblivion.

The thing that I find most disconcerting is the language used on the many sides to the equation is different when it comes to defining what species of flora and fauna are truly native to this part of the world. This is because species that are determined to be native get first billing when it comes to the level of managed protection they are given. The debaters tend to throw wild horses (and centuries old populations of wild burro) in with cattle and sheep, though one could argue that wild horses have been here far (hundreds of years) longer. If the legislators at the top of the food chain were to view this one difference as point of fact and were to capitulate, it would change everything downstream of that single perception. But even this gets complicated because of good, old fashioned American capitalism. Ranchers of both cattle and sheep are paying custumers when if comes to range management policies. Though each rancher pays an inordinately small contribution to operate their leases on BLM and Forest Service lands, as a whole, it amounts to a tastey sum of funds to the goverenment. There are no users of public lands that pay the way for their precious Wild Horses and these animals, all ungulates, compete for the same grass and water, which, in the drought-stricken west, is at an all time premium. Still, look at the term “Wild Horses” and you’ll see the word “Wild” as the chosen descriptor. We all know that these animals represent the truest form of wildness, as we look upon them with nothing short of awe. I think we’d all agree that there is nothing more breathtaking in this world than fixing our gaze on a herd of wild horses out doing their thing, “being wild”. Why would we dare think that these animals don’t deserve every protection afforded other wild and native creatures?

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Some facts as put forth by Wild Horse Advocate Laura Moretti:

“Fifty million years ago, a small dog-like creature called Eohippus evolved on the North American continent. In fact, this forerunner to the modern horse was traced to the Tennessee Valley. After evolving into Equus and disappearing into Asia and Africa presumably 11 to 13 thousand years ago, the horse returned to our soil with the Spanish in the early 1500s. From their hands, a few escaped onto the American canvas and reverted to a wild state.”

“According to Western writer J. Frank Dobie, their numbers in the 19th century reached more than 2 million. But by the time the wild horse received federal protection in 1971, it was officially estimated that only about 17,000 of them roamed America’s plains. More than 1 million had been conscripted for World War I combat; the rest had been hunted for their flesh, for the chicken feed and dog food companies, and for the sport of it. They were chased by helicopters and sprayed with buckshot; they were run down with motorized vehicles and, deathly exhausted, weighted with tires so they could be easily picked up by rendering trucks. They were run off cliffs, gunned down at full gallop, shot in corralled bloodbaths, and buried in mass graves.”

“Like the bison, the wild horse had been driven to the edge. Enter Velma Johnston, a.k.a. “Wild Horse Annie.” After seeing blood coming from a livestock truck, she followed it to a rendering plant and discovered how America’s wild horses were being pipelined out of the West. Her crusade led to the passage of a 1959 law that banned the use of motorized vehicles and aircraft to capture wild horses. In the end, it was public outcry that ended the open-faced carnage — and it came from the nation’s schoolchildren and their mothers: in 1971, more letters poured into Congress over the plight of wild horses than any other non-war issue in U.S. history; there wasn’t a single dissenting vote, and one congressman alone reported receiving 14,000 letters. President Nixon signed the bill into law on December 15, 1971. And so the Wild Free-Roaming Horse & Burro Actwas passed, declaring that “wild horses and burros are living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West; that they contribute to the diversity of life forms within the Nation and enrich the lives of the American people; and that these horses and burros are fast disappearing from the American scene.” The Act was later amended by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 and the Public Rangelands Improvement Act of 1978.”

Credit: Laura Moretti in “The History of America’s Wild Horses”, American Wild Horse Conservation

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• 19th Century: According to historical accounts, the number of wild horses in America during the 19th century reached more than 2 million
• Early 20th Century: Many wild horses were conscripted for combat during World War I, and by the mid-20th century, their numbers had dwindled due to various factors, including being hunted for their flesh and sport
• 1971: By the time the wild horse received federal protection under the Wild Free-Roaming Horse & Burro Act of 1971, it was estimated that only about 17,000 wild horses roamed America’s plains
• Early 21st Century: The population has begun to recover, and by the most recent figures, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) estimated the total American wild horse population to be 33,000 animals
• 2024: The BLM’s 2024 estimates show a marked difference of 73,520 federally-protected wild horses and burros on BLM-managed public lands as of March 1, 2024. I have no idea as to such a major discrepancy from 2023 to 2024, but using the higher number as a reference, almost 74,000 is nearly three times what scientists estimate public lands can sustainably support.

I say, “says who?!”

A quick Copilot AI search reveals these population estimates from the turn of the nineteenth century to most recent estimates. You’ll note that wild horse numbers over the last two hundred years are very similar to estimates of North American Bison over the same period, though I have seen estimates during the highpoint of bison populations as high as sixty million. I have also read 6 million. Who the heck knows except to say that, at their peak, various species of American Bison were found throughout North America and not limited to the American West and they were mighty and many.

Wherever you choose to get your numbers, what is important is that the populations of American Wild Horses have fluctuated wildly over the centuries.

More recent numbers reflect the ongoing policy, efforts (and failures) to manage and protect the wild horse populations in the United States. One thing that stands out since 1971’s Free Roaming Wild Horse and Burro act is the misuse of the term “federal protection”, which is front and center in the language of this act, but has yet to be seen while these horses have been administered by BLM and other agencies acting under the auspices of the federal government.

Because herd numbers naturally vary considerably on their own and land use policy is an ever-changing storm, and, because the wild horse is generally out of the public eye unless it is in severe difficulty (when their numbers drop so low that herd gene pools are no longer viable to create healthy individuals) or someone catches a BLM helicopter which is alamingly close to the horses being rounded up for warehousing, public sale, or shipment for euthanization, and that one video gets loaded to YouTube and goes viral, the public finally gets to see what’s going on public (BLM administered) range-lands throughout the Western US, every year. The media only covers their plight when numbers become dangerously low or when verifiable reports of mistreatment get leaked to the public. Each time this happens, perhaps once every six to ten years, there is a huge public outcry to save these animals. Things go so far as to get heated between members the government and wild horse advocacies or people who simply care enough about what’s happening to take action and take a militant stance. Personally, I’m currently of that mindset myself and believe, as with many controversial issues, there comes a time when it becomes a final solution. The only solution. The debate has been raging since long before I was born (in 1961) and, while important legislation has been passed which should have been the template for protection of these precious animals, the government allows its agencies free reign in acting in any manner they choose. The time has come for anyone and everyone who feels a deep affinity for these key players in the history of the American West, the beautiful and historically necessary creatures that evolved alongside mankind, to choose a side: that of the American Wild Horse or their nemesis, the United States government. I want nothing more before I pass than to see this issue resolved once and for all, leaving the grandest symbol of the American West to run free for generations to come. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t care how it happens, as long as it happens. Time always tells and I have a deep-seated feeling that if we simply leave things to time, there will one day soon be no more Wild Horses to debate over. They will be forever lost to time.

Please do something. Give to a wild horse advocacy group, educate yourself on the subject. Go to YouTube and see what happens during these BLM Wild Horse roundups. I guarantee that once you come to know what’s actually happening out there on “Public Lands”, you won’t be able to help yourself from getting involved. Many people travel to these Wild Horse roundups (the times and places are a matter of public record) to prevent mistreatment that would otherwise happen, well away from watchful eyes. The more eyes we put on them along with obtaining the names and positions of those responsible, the more we can provide much needed pushback on agencies such as the BLM and the local infrastructure that is in place for them to hide behind. Many people have a hand in the destruction and are compensated for their part in the doing.

They say that having memories prior to age four is uncommon. But I’ve verified with my parents and some extended family that my memory is selectively accurate back to age two and three, where there’s not a lot, but the preponderance of the things I do remember are outdoors related, like skiing on the little hill behind our then home in Lakewood, Colorado, when I was between two and three, or the time we were traveling through Oregon and my father made the decision to snuff-out a grass fire along the shoulder of the road. The fire must have just begun, ostensibly either from an errant cigarette toss, or from the exhaust pipe of a passing  motorhome. This form of grass fire used to be quite common, with thousands of motorhomes heading west during the summer and making dozens of pull-off’s to snap some photographs from the relative ease of the highway shoulder. I’ve been badly burned when working on my truck and misjudging the heat of a tailpipe with the engine just turned off and cooling down. It left a two-inch, half-moon shaped scar in the crook for my elbow which took tewenty years to fade. Anyway, you get the idea. Just a few seconds with the tailpipe in the grass is enough to do the job of igniting a fire. These fires don’t need much time before they are considered “out of control”, so stopping them quickly is something we should all pay mind to. My dad kept a military shovel folded under the driver’s seat. While I was still very young, I remember watching him out there in his sweat-soaked tee-shirt and being enveloped in a certain feeling resembling what I would later come to know as pride. My dad dutifully tended to the fire and squashed it before it had time to get a toehold in the tall, dry grass. I have numerous other memories of the outdoors that are still hot, like those embers glowing in the evening breeze.

I spent my youth in the shadow of the Adirondack mountains of northern New York and the birthplace of our family, in the High Peaks region, harkening back to the 1850’s. It was as if I was formed as a direct byproduct of those mountains, learning everything I could about what it meant to be an “Adirondacker”. When we were kids, my brother, sister , and I would hear the term “God’s Country” as used by our parents to describe our home territory during the two hour drive north to see our grandparents and relatives. The term “Adirondacker” is a colloquialism meant to describe a particular type of mountain man, native to the region. I would take these skills of hunting, fishing, and woodcraft with me when I moved to Colorado, immediately after college. There, I would live for almost thirty years, working and playing in the mountains of Colorado.

When you do your growing up in a place like the Adirondacks and have ancestral lines that go back some 170 years, you can’t help but have that be a driving influence in defining who you become. I would take what I learned as a mountain athlete and jack of all trades background and apply it to my entire life, making conscious choices to take the “high road” and live in the mountains no matter the length of the commute or other sacrifices that come with it. I didn’t sign on for a life of convenience, so, between holding down a good job as a project engineer for a mining and minerals processing consulting firm in Golden, an hour below and the pursuing the lifetime of mountain activities that occupied so much of my being, I had no “free time”. Certainly not of the kind it seemed so many others had, watching fooball and “knocking back a few” when the weekend rolled around. I’d have been bored out of my mind and burdened with guilt over not making the most of my time. I wanted every waking moment of my life to count for something, and knew well that I was exchanging my early to mid-twenties to become a Colorado mountain athlete of some reknown for doing what I’m sure would have made my parents more comfortble, getting a master’s degree which they believed would invariably make my life easier over the long-term. Though I agreed with them from a career perspective, I went ahead with my plans. For an athlete, there is a narrow window of time when you’re better than you’ll ever be again, and this doesn’t tend to last more than a decade, that is, if you’re fortunate enough to not aquire a significant injury or other problem that would lead to being sidelined, perhaps forever. I felt an almost equal pull but in the final analysis, I erred on the side of maximizing my young aduldhood as an athlete and would figure the career part out when I got to that bridge. When it comes down to it, neither way can possibly be construed as the “right way” and, while I’m certain that my parents weren’t overjoyed with some of my choices during that time in my life, they didn’t attempt to stand in my way and, for this, I have been eternally grateful.

After spending almost twenty years in the mountains north and west of Golden, I was about to pull the “crux” move of my lifetime and leave the relative security of the life I’d cultivated there, and move seven hours southwest to run my girlfriend’s cowboy-realtor father’s land-clearing business in Durango, one of Colorado’s last bastions of remote wilderness. I remember knowing that it wasn’t going to be easy making a living with a capitally intensive startup business, so I spent a month considering the opportunity. The business was solid in concept but I knew that clearing brush with a backhoe-sized, purpose -built machine all day every day might not be enough to keep me intellectually satisfied. I tucked away some ideas and said yes to the opportunity.

I would take that business and, within the span of two years, morph it into a forest restoration company working throughout Southwest Colorado and Northwestern New Mexico.

For the next eight years I owned and operated that business and lived in the place of my dreams, often staying on-site in my travel trailer, well off the beaten path and, of course, off the grid. I’ve spent a good portion of my life living in and amongst the mountains and natural world. Evenings would come, and bone-tired from the nature of the work, I would have dinner and read myself to sleep while spending some quality time with one of both of my dogs at the time. The forestry work was fulfilling in a way that nothing else ever had been. The work was necessary for the health of the ponderosa pine ecosystem we restored and there was a perfect blend of physicality and intellectual wrestling with the running the business and handling clients, which kept me extremely fit for my sports and running the business kept my brain occupied. I can remember walking around a site with Judd, one of my full-time four-footed companions, in the evening and looking at the areas we’d already completed. The before and after difference was something to see. I would feel an immense sense of pride well up inside me. But, in the end, the work proved to take more than my back could give and, for the first time, I came to know a kind of pain I’d never before felt. My lower back was failing me quickly and, as hard as it was to let the business go, I was fortunate enough to make a reentry into engineering and project management, though instead of the mining industry, this time it would be for the natural gas industry. This was a shining example of a brand of luck I wasn’t all that familiar with.

At that point, I had had a thirteen year run in Southwest Colorado and nearly twenty year’s on Colorado’s Front Range when I purchased my retirement property, fifty acres of land located just twenty miles from downtown Durango. It was as remote a place as I could find without putting myself hours from some town. I was working for one of the larger gas producers based in Bloomfield, New Mexico, and from April through mid-November I lived on my land, completely of the the grid and working between offices in Bloomfield, Cortez, Northern Colorado, and Wyoming. I’d even put in a 1.2 mile motocross track on my property and kept all of my outdoor gear in a nice shed I’d put on the property, right next to my travel trailer. I could get home and take Kelpy for a run, and change into my MX gear and ride for an hour before dark. At night, Kelpy and I would go on moonlit walks listening to the sounds of the night. There were black bears, bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, eagles, rattlesnakes, prarie dogs, and even a badger that had taken-up residence on the property. Kelpy had become so adept at thinning the prarie dog a jackrabbit populations, I’d only need to feed her regular dog food a few times a week, and that was just so I could be certain that she was getting her nutritional needs met. On weekends, I’d take her for long runs on the area mountain trails and go flyfishing while she cooled of in one of the area trout streams. One Saturday a month, I’d have the same group of friends up for some barbequed elk and a bonfire, where we’d sit and discuss various solutions to the world’s most recent problems. Some time between two an three AM, we’d climb into our sleepimg bags and stay there until I had the coffee fired-up, probably an hour, or, so after daybreak. In the fall, evening temperatures would drop into the thirties and Kelpy would tuck-in so close to the fire I sometimes worried she’d be awakened by the smell of her own singed fur, but, of course, she was too aware for anything like that to happen to her. I swore that she slept with one eye open, as there were plenty of arousing sounds in the night that needed tending to. She was a once in a lifetime dog, my fifth at the time. I’ve gone through most of my life with a dog or two by my side. I could never imagine life any other way.

Some say that all good things come to an end and Kelpy and I were about to be shown the door. The country was headlong into a recession and, because I’d made the decision to be in the capital projects group at work (as opposed to, say, operations, I would come to lose my job. Capital projects meant new spending on designing and building new infrastructure, the first thing companies stop doing in a significant downturn. The work was exciting and could be insanely busy, requiring lot of hours and, as a project mananager with several projects under construction, being on call. I had planned to transition into operations, which was more secure, after I’d gotten closer to reirement, which was still a fair piece away.

Hearing of my pending layoff, this year I moved from my property in Hesperus to a house in Cortez, about thirty minutes away for the winter. My girlfriend, an aerospace engineer working on the space shuttle program at the Johnson Space Center west of Houston, had just recently left her job to join me in Colorado. Chalk if up to really bad timing because we would, the two of us, soon be out of work. I’d never dreamed in a million years that I would be looking for work as far away as Pennsyvania, but that’s how bad things had become in my industry. The Marcellus gas play was second to the Dakotas as being the last place where capital projects were seeking new and inexpensive ways to keep the collective oil and gas pipelines running with new infrastructure. I landing a job a director of operations for a large engineering and construction company based in Houston with a new Northeastern Regional Office in the Pittsburgh area. Part of the job had me travelling back and forth to Houston and the other part running a full-scale engineering office in Pittsburgh. This lasted just two years before my soon to be wife, Genie, and I, and our two dogs, Kelpy and Sage left Pennsylvania for greener pastures in Texas. She fell immediately back in with her old company, only this time she would be working in the oil industry for BP at its headquarters in the Houston area. I had just had two back surgeries and was completley laid-up for almost a year. I knew one thing and that was that I wasn’t going to make it in the urban sprawl of Greater Houston and, after three years, we had our sights set on moving to Central Texas, not far from where Genie, now my wife, had grown up. Sure enough, she landed a solid job in San Antonio and I found us a literal diamond in the rough. A small country home with some outbuildings on some property in Central Texas, about an hour from San Antonio, and the dream, though dormant for the last five years, was back on course. We fell in love with our new home about seven miles from the small town of Lockhart, equidistant from Austin and San Antonio. Here, I once again felt at home, though I obviously would continue to miss my old life if Colorado. I’ve always been a serious cyclist and competed for years in Colorado. I quickly went about riding thousands of miles of rural “Farm to Market” roads up into the Hill Country and down below in the rolling Central Texas ranchlands.

We just celebrated fourteen years together and our ninth here in this house. While I struggle every day with severe back pack pain and have had six surgeries precluding me from almost every one of my all-important activities, I spend my time working on our place, reading, writing, doing yoga, and playing guitar for a couple of hours every evening. I have become not only a player, but a collector, and my “all-things-guitar” hobby keeps me busy rounding out my days. It has been a long and winding road, my love affair with mountain and country life and attempting to live my entire life around that core. I have spent decades chasing after refuge from the world of ours and, while it hasn’t been easy, I can honestly say that “I did it my way”and I wouldn’t change a thing!

Jett, Josie, and Ginger (The Next Generation!)

My brother and I were recently discussing the effects of looking into a sparkling pool with a beautiful blue bottom and how mesmerizing the sight can be, with a plethora of sunlit reflections interacting between the surface and the bottom. It can be as addictive as staring into a beautifully made fire. You don’t want to look away, not even for a moment. When we were kids, our grandfather would bring home bits of various metals such as copper and zinc from a number of construction sites he was working on and would place small pieces into a hot fire burning in his beautifully crafted Adirondack granite fireplace. My sister would join us as we peered into the mixture of flames, now filled with gorgeous greens and blues flitting about, a byproduct of the the burning off-gasses. It was nothing short of spectacular, that primordial sense of fire coupled with the intense new colors dashing here and there, as if the fire was alive.

I was similarly transfixed when peering out onto a winterscape with the vast amount of blue light put forth by the sun shining into gazillions of snowflakes, either out in the open or in the shade of a forest of spruces which subdued the harsher light and allowed for even more blue light to filter through the spectrum, as seen by the human eye. These blue shadows were something I would chase my entire life. My mother and I have talked about the effects of all that blue light and how it must trigger the release of naturally occurring opioids such as serotonin and dopamine, an experience identical to how we feel after a long aerobic workout, churning-up a mixture of brain chemicals designed to make us feel good, euphoric even. A “runner’s high” or simply “being high on life”. I get my love of the snows of winter from my mother, along with a love of the brittle cold even on the most overcast and snowy of winter days. Days where many people are plagued by the “winter blues” and worse, cases of substantial depression. Throw in incessant strong winds and you have the equation as to why, as states, Wyoming and Alaska consume more alcohol and have higher incidences of suicide. The Adirondack Mountains of northern New York are tradionally one of the coldest regions in the country and, back in the 70’s and 80’s, one of the snowiest. But I don’t recall ever being impacted in such a pernicious way. Global warming has led to a shift in the amount of snow that falls there, but it can still be considerable during some winters.

I developed my love of skiing from my father who made sure that my earliest experiences came before I hit the age of three, watching me and my homemade ski suit lovingly crafted by my grandmother, slip and slide around our then backyard in Lakewood, Colorado. I have a clear memory of the occasion. I would have been two and a half years old.

After a lot of traveling around, following my father’s adventurous path as a young project engineer for the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), working on new roads and highways as this infrastructure was being laid down throughout the 1960’s. Ultimately, he put us down near the Adirondacks with a job with NYSDOT just before the birth of my sister and my brother, a year later. The year was 1965 as we settled -in to a new master-planned community thirty miles north of Albany and a hundred miles south of my parents’ childhood homes in the High Peaks Region of the Adirondack Mountains. My ancestry on my father’s side can be traced back some 170 years, to the 1850’s, and, while there were many generations on my mother’s side, I don’t have a number. Probably similar. I was smitten, and my affection for these mountains grew considerably with each passing year. I spent my youth hiking, fishing, hunting, and skiing these Adirondack Mountains and, though I don’t recall feeling like I was missing anything, I knew I could take my skiing up a notch, or two, skiing the big mountains of the Western US. Whiteface Mountain, near Lake Placid, New York had been a two-time location of the skiing events, first held in Lake Placid in 1932 and the second occurred when the town was once again awarded the winter Olympics in 1980. I was eighteen, and an accomplished skier at the time and skiing the famously ice-ridden slopes of Whiteface had made me that way. Throughout my younger years, if I was to be going skiing the next day, I had much difficulty in falling asleep and would instead lie awake dreaming of what that tomorrow would bring. This would continue, on and off, throughout adulthood, particularly if I had traveled to some new-to-me ski area which was well known for it’s deep snow and steep terrain.

I landed in Colorado at the ripe old age of twenty-one, leaving for the West immediately after graduating from college. I would teach skiing at Loveland Basin and work in a Denver area ski shop tuning and selling skis for the first couple of years I was in Colorado. After that, I endded up in Steamboat Springs where I was introduced to a new form of skiing called “Telemarking”, named after its namesake village of Telemark, Norway. I grabbed the seminal book “Freeheel Skiing”‘ by Paul Parker, which was extremelely well written and chock-full of diagrams showing the various techniques used. This form of skiing is quite different from alpine (or, downhill) skiing and is ancient in Scandinavian culture and lore. This was the way people travelled during the long winters asssoicated with that part of the world. In a nutshell, instead of using two shorter skis with the bootheels locked down on each ski and skiing the downhill portions of a mountain with the skis essentially held parallel to one another to achieve enough flotation for the skier to remain pimarily above the surface and, in the old days, using one long pole as a sort of keel to slow down or change direction. This is how skiing developed in North America and how mail was famously delivered to the hundreds of remote mining camps scattered throughout the West. The difficult part was in navigating flat or rolling terrain where a modified “cross country” technique was used. Climbing with skis on was difficult, so the skis were often taken off altogether and carried over a shoulder to the next extended downhill effort. In a word, the techniques involved in this kind of skiing were “inefficient”. On the other hand, the Norwegians (and others) used two much longer and thinner skis which, when combined with “climbing skins” on the bottom (these were literally various types of animal hide affixed to the bottom of each ski such that the direction of the fur was aligned so the ski could slide forward, but there were be considerable resistence when being pulled by gravity in a backward downhill direction). “Skins” are still in use today but are obviously no longer comprised of fur, but some sort of polypropelene material with a powerful, waterproof adhesive on one side to stick to the bottom of the ski. Various ski waxes can also be used to either add glide to each stride, or supply some level of rearward resistence. When traveling through deep snow, the idea was to “drop a knee” and push one ski out ahead of the other and have the trailing leg handle the trailing ski, in effect turning two long, thin skis into one long but much wider one. Modern telemark equipment is tremendously effective for traveling long distances and venturing away from ski lifts and into backcountry settings where you “earn your turns” but pay nothing but a bit of gas in getting there for the priveledge of doing so.

I was tremendously intrigued by watching these guys on “Skinny Skis” navigate their way down the hill, going just as fast as good skiers riding alpine skiing equipment. I invested in the required gear, where the only fixed contact between boot and ski was at the toe, leaving the skiers heels free to drop the knee and initiate the turn. It required a higher level of balance to become a true-blue “free-heeler”, that, and quads made of steel becouse you’d be doing thousands of one-legged deep knee bends each day on the mountain. Leg strength was essential for skiing steep powder or moguls. This kind of strength could take several seasons to acquire, bolstered by cycling, eiher road or mountain in the off-season and lots of steep trail running or hiking. If you were serious about advancing your abilities as a telemark skier, you would do all sorts of training during the off-season. It was that important. Even the muscles you get from logging dozens of days eack year and “downhill” skiing at the ski area, you could’t hope to touch the kind of strength required to “tele”. The year was 1985 and I was in early on what was to become the biggest trend in the history of North American skiing.

Because I had such a strong technical background in alpine skiing and ample power from being a serious cyclist, the transition to telemarking came both easily and naturally and it only took me a half-season, or so, to beome highly proficient. Telemark skiers coming into the sport from a cross-country skiing background took to the change, but the learning curve was steeper and more drawn-out. It was rare for a non-skier to pickup telemark skiing from scratch, but, with today’s equipment, it would certainly be doable. Like alpine equipment, telemark skiing equipment has evolved by leaps and bounds over the span of fifty years, making both forms of skiing much less daunting than they have traditionally been.

Out there somewhere in a backcountry winter-wonderland, I discovered something I’d never known to exist and that was a series of backcountry “huts” scattered throughout Colorado, with the largest private organization being the 10th Mountain Trails Assocition (TMTA) of around eithteen “huts”, like the one above, built in a triangular area ranging from Leadville, to Vail, and on to Aspen. The system was named for the famed 1oth Mountain Division of the Army during World War II. Never before had we had a regiment of troops trained to speciaalize in the art of winter warfare, but it became abundandlty clear that in doing battle on the Western Front, there would invariably be some level of mountain warfare in the Alps. We were about a hundred years behind the eight ball and the 10th Mountain Division, based in Leadville, Colorado at an elevation of 10,000 feet was set in place to play catch-up. I am pround to have had two uncles who trained in Leadville, one of whom would make the switch to the skies, as a 101st Airborne Division paratrooper (“Screamin’ Eagle”) who saw action in theaters such as the Battle of the Bulge, in Belgium. The other remained with the 10th and saw considerable combat in the European Alps. They both survived the war only to come home and never speak of it. They didn’t have labels like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Sydrome) back then so they both came home, had families, took good paying jobs, and lived into their 80’s and nearly 100, respectively. I’m certainly not comparing modern soldiering in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and the hellish experiences contemporary troops face while in some faraway land where there are no longer clear rules of engagement and war has become so politicized. I’m sure that my uncles came back just as damaged as soldiers of our our times, but they were probably treated better and, with the post WWII boom, there were far more good paying jobs to transition to. The fact that neither of of them ever spoke of their experiences says enough. They did have what they called “shell shock” back in the day and I’d go out on a limb to say that it was that war’s moniker for PTSD.

Though I would continue to both “area ski” and venture ino the backcountry for the next twenty-five years, I would generallly be skiing on telemark equipment. I had gotten good enough that, even in extreme terrain, I loved the much lighter weight equipment and the freedom of my heels to navigate very difficult terrain. I was essentially at the same level in both modes of skiing. For years, myself and a very close group of friends would venture into the different TMTA huts, sometimes for four or five days, but it was difficult for each of us to get away, so it was typically over a three of four day weekend. There was a core group, those responsible for organizing the trips but good news travels fast and that number would climb to up to sixteen of us on a single “hut” trip. I keep putting that word in quotations because, at least in terms of the TMTA, these structures were up to 1,800 square feet and were closer to some trophy mountain home than a miserly hut. If you wanted a hut, you could hit any of the seven San Juan Huts Association cabins in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, located in the southwest protions of the state between Ouray, Ridgway, and Telluride. There’s even a small sytem of yurts in the area around Creede and Lake City. A couple of huts it the TMTA system had sauna’s, though that ended when the largest hut, the Polar Star Inn, burned down from an overheated sauna that got out of countrol. They rebuilt the hut but this time without that particular nicety. A couple of other huts have saunas but they are well detached from the main structure. While I absolutely adored TMTA, I found a different but equally enjoyable experience in the San Juans. These huts were run by the SJHA but were each on National Forest property, with far more basic leases than those struck between USFS and TMTA. The huts were designed to meet forest services specifications which included the ability for them to be moved to different sites via helicopter so as to not disturb any one location for a prolonged period. They were literally 16′ x 16′ sheds built by a company called “Tuffshed” and, as opposed to having bunks for up to nineteen individuals were limited to just eight. After having just six of us on our initial San Jaun Hut, a thirteen mile ski-in to the North Pole Hut, we decided to never again bring more than five. If I remember, we self-limited the rest of our trips to these huts to just four. Per person, it was twice the price, but these huts are such a value (at the time, roughly $25 per night, per person) none of us minded one bit. You can only dry so many wet, sweaty socks and underwear at a time and still have clean, mountain air to breathe!

While there may have been differences in the structures themselves, all of these huts were well off the grid. There was propane for cooking and lighting and each party was reponsible for melting and boiling snow for drinking and dishwater. Outdoor latrines were there, generally set twenty, or so, yards from the hut itself. You were expected to haul in your own food and haul-out your own trash. Though there were basic canned goods at a given hut, they were to be left for emergency situations. Of course, the centerpiece of every hut was the pot-bellied cookstove which meant taking turns at chopping and supplying plenty of kindling and leaving a nice stack behind for the next group of guests.

The above pic serves to show all that blue light I’ve been writing about. It was taken ten minutes after sunset from a mile or two from the hut. We’d been at it since early morning with a break for lunch and were all, each one of us, completely exhausted, but only in the best of ways. We would get back to the warmth of the hut an hour, or so, after dark and take turns, two at a time, making dinner. My good friend Bill was famous for bringing in something extravagant, like a some twelve-year-old scotch and Cornish game hens. One year, he went to the considerable physical trouble of hauling in a ten pound turkey, which he put in the oven after breakfast that morning and returned after a full day of skiing to find it cooked, perfectly.

It wasn’t unusual for a couple of us to set back out into the moonlight for one last ski before hitting our bunks. We’d head back in a join-in for a hand of cards or a game of cribbage before it was “lights out” somewhere around midnight. We’d awaken on our last day and quickly set about making breakfast and straightening up around the hut, sweeping it out and bringing in plenty of firewood for the next party, along with making them a fresh basin of meltwater from the stove. The idea was to leave the place better than you found it and to that end, we strived. I’d mentioned that this hut was thirteen miles in. All of the huts are located proximal to some very good skiing and situated at treeline, so there would be a typical elevation gain of 3,500 vertical feet, which meant the journey out would be a lot quicker than the journey in. We’d set out ripping down the trail going as fast as we could to see how quickly we could make it out. We made a game of everything and knew that the following day meant returning from our “Alice in Wonderland” experience to our day jobs and all things, by comparison, completely mundane. I dreaded going bak to work but was thankful to hve a job that paid me enough to enjoy my quiver of mountain sports.

A quick stop for lunch and a few libations to celebrate yet another great adventure, and we would part ways for the four to ten hour drive home, back to the Denver area and me to my mountain home an hour above.

Alpenglow on Sunset Mountain

The link takes you to a guitar I recently acquired, one that I’ve had my eye on since the brand was conceived five or six years ago. This new kid on the block has gone from having just one or two dealers to becoming a brand to watch and you can now find them in some of the finest guitar shops throughout the country. They’ve made the bold move to go head to head with some of the brightest names in the world of boutique acoustic guitars and, I, for one, wish them the best of luck! The US guitar market is not easy to break into, let alone thrive in, which is precisely what appears to be happening for Iris.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/zRjohoYD1xx5G9vA6

Both Iris and its parent company, Circle Strings are located in Burlington, Vermont. Circle Strings is a small consortium of well regarded master luthiers predominately from the Northeast. They have brought in a handful of talented luthiers who, under the auspices of Circle Strings, craft some of the finest guitars to come out of that part of the country. The things that make Iris Guitars so successful as it has become in such a short time are the fact that that their guitars are modeled after Gibson’s most popular designs in the company’s hundred plus year history. The biggest thing that separates Iris from other guitar companies competing in the same “boutique” market is their proprietary finish options. The primary sunburst motif is now being done using some formula of open-pore satin nitrocellulose lacquer which yields a beautiful, vintage-inspired, antiqued patina without over doing it with the relic’ing process. You can order the strait open pore antiqued finish with or without additional light to heavy relic’ing. Personally, though many builders have come out with a line of relic’d guitars, replete some scuffs and chips, I don’t care for the aesthetic and would prefer the do any relic’ing to one of my guitars myself, simply by playing it for many years. Iris offers a light relic’ing and a heavier relic’ing, but they remain on the conservative side and are careful not to overdo the affect. Iris is also happy pleased to offer its customers a traditional natural finish, which appears to be spot-on in both color and patina.

I also like the split between “Old World” luthiery tools and practices combined with the use of state of the art machining. It is difficult to nail down a formula that works just right as you can obviously build a lot more guitars, for instance, using CNC machining for flawless accuracy. and time savings. I also favor their hybrid, bolt-on neck design which is combined, I believe, with a mortise and tenon joint. It appears to be a lightweight and strong design without sacrificing tone for bulk.

My recently acquired AB model with no distress (relic’ing) is a marvel and I couldn’t be happier with the guitar I received. It is not only beautiful to look at, but this is my first small jumbo guitar and I find it to perform with an extremely balanced tonal spectrum without the thumpier bass that is a typical byproduct of many dreadnought sized guitars. There seems to be more midrange on tap with crystalline highs, great note to note separation, sustain, and projection. It is also a very comfortable guitar to play from both the seated and standing positions. Just beautiful. I can envision spending a lot of time with this guitar….perhaps, even, a new daily driver!

Behind the link at the beginning, there are over one hundred and fifty photos of the guitar. The guitar has such an aura about it that I got a little carried away. Checkout the link and the photos and let me know what you think. I can picture playing my Iris AB Small Jumbo for many years to come. It came with a K&K Mini, which I have installed in several of my guitars and have come to enjoy the simplicity and transparency. So, kudos to this relatively small guitar manufacturer from Burlington! I spent a considerable portion of my youth across Lake Champlain, in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack mountains. Someday, I’d like to add a shop tour to one of my visits!

I know no other way than to speak my mind on things I believe are just plain wrong. I have far more experience with the “Opioid Crisis” than I would wish on anyone. The link will lead to a Google Photos photo album and my story detailing my involvement as a “card carrying” member of the pain bearing society and my thirteen year battle attempting to hold on to both my sanity and dignity. I have learned to have only limited expectations of my fellow man who has watched me squirm under the thumb of the “pain industry”. I call it an industry because that is, over a period of twenty years, what it has become. This is a sincere and serious story about one man’s battle to live without the fear and retribution I have come to know over something which, in the beginning, I thought I could control while maintaining my dignity, ethics, values, and moral principles. After many years of learning the hard way, I no longer believe in that personal level of control; that I was master of my own destiny and, if I worked hard, made good decisions, and was diligent in pursuing my goals, that my life would go according to plan. But, something terrible has happened to me and no matter how hard I worked to mitigate the damage done, it went down anyway.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/LaAmmXAQgKAHorzM7

I first found Luminox, a military watch supplier in 1991. It was Christmas-time and I was visiting a watch store when my eye caught something different, something highly unique. I was shopping for my wife, but you know how that goes! I was more than a little curious about these luminous”tritium” watches, in a case of their own showcasing a number of different models. I picked one out and the store manager took me into a dark storeroom so I could see this watch do its thing. For each hour marker, there was a tiny tube filled with tritium, a phosphorescent, radioactive gas. The tips of the watch bands had even tinier tubes of this material. The lume was absolutely amazing and I knew that I had to have this watch.

Luminox is known for designing its watches to meet military specifications, including having a case that can withstand a dive depth of 200 meters and handle dirt, sand, mud, and be highly shock resistant. Today, the more expensive models are built around a stainless steel, titanium, or carbon fiber (Carbonox) case. These are some of the most durable watches on the planet. Back in the 90’s, I believe Luminox had an exclusive agreement with the Swiss-made owner of the patent for tritium, as used in its watches but by the year 2000, there were several other manufacturers that became Luminox competitors, also offering a high level of build quality and made to either the same or similar specifications. Names like Praetorian, TAWATEC, Armourlite/Isobrite, and others had come on line and were offering well-crafted, tritium designs. Various militaries around the world began contracting with these companies to supply their special forces.

It was about this time that many outdoorsmen and extreme athletes had come to take notice of this new watch phenomenon.  Watch enthusiasts and collectors everywhere had come to find what the fuss was about. Casio G-Shock had long been a military supplier with its bombproof models designed for extreme use and is, today, one of the biggest suppliers of tactically -oriented watches to the US military. Many soldiers simply purchase their own time pieces and the burly, large-cased designs appeal to many young people in the military. These are not your “el Cheapo” Casio’s that you can find for $50 to $125, but much more seriously built models that start at around $400 MSRP. The company even makes a number of models ranging in price from $600 to over $1,000 and are highly thought of in military circles. But, even with such stiff competition, Luminox is still among my three favorite brands. My only gripe is one of case diameter. Luminox’s early designs were spec’d-out with a case dimension of 44 mm, which seemed large enough back in the day. In thirty years, that dimension has only grown to 46 mm, which is a bit smaller than some of their competition. G-Shock’s tactical designs are between 51 mm and 55 mm, and most of the other companies have most models dimensioned at 47 mm. Some, even larger. The trend has long been for larger, more robust designs.

About five years ago, I discovered a brand I hadn’t before seen. It’s a relatively young company called “Nite”, based in Christchurch, UK. I had an overnight infatuation with Nite’s “Hawk” model. My last two watches, including my daily driver, have been acquired through Nite’s sumptuous website, which is the only means of buying one.  I have a Nite Hawk blackout and the same watch, but with a cool orange face. Like other companies, Nite’s watches are designed in one place (the UK) and manufactured in another (Switzerland…the same country in which the tritium is produced). With its Hawk series, you can see a strong resemblance to watches made by Luminox and Isobrite, Traser, and Marathon, with large (51 mm) and burly cases, all good for diving to 200 meters and withstanding considerable abuse, as would be seen in the military. Nite has four or five lines. with a watch for everyone, but only the Hawk is 51 mm. The others are quite a bit smaller but are beautiful timepiece examples with a more sophisticated look that would work nicely at the office or on a night out with friends.

When it comes to luminescence, tritium is not the only option. Many companies, such as Citizen, use luminescent paint, the best of which is called “Superluminova”. This stuff is like the luminescent paint used on many watches by Seiko back in the day, except on steroids. With a bright light charge for a few minutes, these watches will luminesce through most of the night, getting linearly dimmer with each passing hour. Still, they are extremely good watches built to a large watch case. These, too, meet military specifications for build quality and waterproofing. I very much like Citizen’s “Eco-drive” Professional models. These can be had for a little more than $500, MSRP, and there are automatic chronograph models which are priced at around $800. I got both of my Nite watches on sale for $450. Most Luminox’s are $600, and up.

In terms of longevity, Luminox states that its tritium tubes last for an average of twelve years but they say 25 years on its outer limits. Since the tritium tubes are all sourced from the same Swiss company. results can be expected to be the same across the board. Luminox has an all-encompassing warranty of two years, but you must buy from an authorized dealer to get the warranty. Other manufacturers offer a warranty period of one to two years.

While tritium is radioactive, it is well contained and well below hazardous limits. A quick search reveals several Swiss companies that are associated with tritium, but the company that first came out with the tritium watch tubes is MB Microtec. You can learn more about tritium at:

https://mbmicrotec.com/en/

One of the earliest watch makers to use tritium is Ball Watches with its “Engineer” dive model which has expanded into the Engineer I, II, and III. This is an extremely beautiful and well built dive watch which can be found at a higher price point of between $2K and $3K. They use multiple colors, larger tubes, and light up the night like a Christmas tree. I would be.ore comfortable wearing these for a night out than having it get battered around while I’m wrenching on my ATV. It’s just not that kind of a watch but more like a fine timepiece. But, I wouldn’t have any hesitation to recommend it as a dive watch, which is where the design features lie. Unlike some of these other watches, Ball’s Engineer would be just as at home at a black tie affair.

MTM is a lesser known company making bombproof watches. This brand is truly top-tier, extremely well made with handsome designs. But, for me, the case size is a bit on the small side (42 mm to 44 mm). In contrast, there’s Casio’s G-Shock Rangeman which is a monster of a watch. At 55 mm, it’s not only big, but is built like a tank. It runs on Casio’s solar technology, so battery life isn’t an issue. Casio has yet to utilize tritium technology but instead uses a powered backlight which requires the user to depress a button to illuminate the watch just long enough to catch the time. These watches, along with several other G-Shock models, are extremely popular with the military. They represent a real value in the marketplace, and, with their robust design and large size, they appeal to the younger, military segment. It’s safe to say that Casio’s G-Shock watches have spent more time in extreme conditions than any other watch made.

One of my all-time favorite guitars with a torrefied Adirondack top and high-grade mahogany back and sides. I hope that not too many more years go by before I feel justified in having a Collings such as this one. Collings guitars are viewed by many as the cream of the crop. But it’s a competitive world and there are other small (boutique) builders that rival Collings’s best work. Whenever possible, I believe in spending my money locally, and the Collings facility is in Austin, just forty-five minutes from my country home in Central Texas.

There are some jaw-droppingly gorgeous photos of the D-1 AT on the other side of this link.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/UZdM1fgsbC8nDcs38

The guitars I’m posting wouldn’t be complete unless I included my first and favorite electric guitar, a 2011 “Telebration Series” reclaimed redwood Telecaster.  It was one of twelve guitars, each celebrating a month in the 60th anniversary of this iconic guitar. There are just two other such icons of the guitar world, the Fender Stratocaster and Gibson’s venerated Les Paul. All three made their debut in the early 1950’s, and all three have successfully been around ever since.

We’ve all seen our guitar heroes wielding at least one of them, but in the course of their respective careers it’s likely that every one of them played all three.  My personal favorite is the Telecaster which is typically lighter weight and of simpler design. As you’ve probably heard many people say. Leo Fender got it right from the beginning.  This is akin to a Ford Fairlane or Chevy Bel Air, with only slight modifications, continuing to be manufactured and lovingly driven today.

The link is about my personal experiences with my favorite guitar.  Included are a number of photographs of the guitar taken from every conceivable angle. I feel what can only be described as a magnetic pull in my relationship with this guitar. While some would argue that there are more beautiful guitars on the market today, including the Stratocaster and Les Paul, but the rudimentary and rustic aesthetic calls to me even while I’m playing one of my racier makes or models. There’s also something truly unique and pleasing to the ear when captaining a Telecaster.  It is a clear and resonant tone, one reminiscent of a simple slab of wood, a maple neck (offered with or without a redwood fingerboard…I prefer maple), single coil pickups, and a longer 25 1/2 inch scale. Plugged into a quality tube amp and played with just a handful of analog pedals, and a Telecaster is capable of playing across multiple genres like blues, blues rock, country, and rock, along with myriad playing styles. There is no single guitar that has captured the hearts and minds of so many guitarists over its now seventy-plus year reign.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/86xDLYpQ8k6sBR5g6

When it comes to absolutely gorgeous paint jobs, whether on an electric or acoustic guitar, Gibson is famous for its bursts. The Gibson Advanced Jumbo, which first came out (I believe) in 1934, comes in “Traditional Sunburst”…not far off from the pre-war offering (the ten, or so, years before WWII are considered the “Golden Era” for guitar manufacturing). Luthiers had access to old growth trees from all sorts of woods considered to be “tonewoods”, woods that help promulgate the lustrous tones we hear when a fine guitar is being played by a seasoned player. Guitar tops are typically constructed of various species of spruce or cedar, and side and back sets run the gamut from various species of mahogany, rosewood, walnut, ebony, cocobolo, grenadillo, maple, ash, and a host of others. The same holds for a guitar’s bridge, fingerboard, and headstock veneer (head plate).

In my opinion, the Gibson Advanced Jumbo, or AJ, is the flagship of Gibson’s acoustic lineup, built by the Gibson Custom Shop in Bozeman, Montana. It is not only an aesthetic masterpiece but is one of the best sounding guitars money can buy. Many guitarists feel the same way.

The link takes you to a photo album showcasing the guitar in detail, and a writeup of my Gibson AJ experience.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/QtDMmun8pLHheehu5

Big Bend National Park is a very special place located in Southwest Texas, several hours southeast of El Paso. It is a vast region, significantly different than any other part of the state. It looks and feels just like high desert found throughout portions of New Mexico and Arizona, except that BBNP occupies a portion of the Chihuahuan desert, which runs north to the edge of park and south, extending well beyond the border.

As everyone knows, Texas is a massive state. What people don’t know that east to west it changes from loblolly pine forest to the brush country of Central Texas (which, for hundreds of years was open Texas Prairie), to the Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio, to the juniper country which opens to the high desert of West Texas. To the deep south, there are the Coastal Plains and to the far north, the Panhandle area which has places like Palo Duro Canyon (several thousand feet higher than Houston and the Gulf region). This is my second favorite area of the state that extends as high plains into Tucumcari, New Mexico and beyond, reaching elevations greater than 4,000 feet. I enjoy spending time in places like Lubbock and Amarillo. Very much home to many large cattle ranching operations, wide and open. I simply refer to it as “Big Country”.

But with all of that to see, I still favor Big Bend which holds Emory Peak at well over 7,000 feet in elevation. In February of 2014, I did a solo mountain biking, hiking, and trail running trip lasting a week, camped at one of the park’s backcountry sites where I ran into just four other people, not counting the few park employees I crossed paths with. It was, at the time, one of the most remote places in the lower forty-eight. It is still remote but it has been discovered.

The following link captures some of the highlights I’ve experienced during my stay in 2014, and another trip I made to the park with a friend, in 2016.

photos.app.goo.gl/xD8CyWHnHjFJocUS8

My love affair with the bicycle began at an early age, near the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York, during the 1970’s. Very few kids were chasing the sport of cycling, but I’d seen pieces and parts of the Tour de France, which, back then, was covered as much as a public interest story as a grueling team sport. But I could readily see why this bunch of diminutive guys should be respected. My dad must have noticed my fascination because I got my first, good quality, “ten speed” around the age of twelve, followed by a sky blue, French made racer as I entered college. By the time I entered my freshman year, I’d already logged thousands of miles, even notching my belt with a couple of “century rides” (hundred miles). In the time between high school and college, I’d managed to find just one friend who wanted to do that kind of riding. The late ’70’s and early ’80’s unfolded well before the bicycle craze of the ’90’s, so, and though I would play as well (soccer would be my specialty) American team sports like baseball, football, and basketball were still on top.

In college, I met a few like minded people who wished to be referred to as “cyclists”. There would be four of us and the atmosphere was very much as it was defined in the “coming of age” film “Breaking Away”, which featured a very young Dennis Quaid in his breakout role. “American Flyers” with Kevin Costner would come a few years later. My college town of Oneonta, New York had its “preppies” and “townies” just like in “Breaking Away”. I hung out with an eclectic crowd which included both factions, plus our small group of “independents”. The hills and mountains that surrounded town ran along the northern edge of the Catskills and were perfect training grounds for cycling hopefuls like us.  We rode several times a week together, leaving time for longer rides on weekends. These rides typically hovered around sixty or seventy miles. While I had no real idea as to how “good” we were, we entered a couple of regional events during our junior and senior years and didn’t see any way that we could encounter riders who were far better. Some, yes. That level of confidence was about right, as we all placed in the top third finding ourselves better than most but lagging behind the best. It was a wakeup call, one we could use to push ourselves harder. As a group, we entered no more races. Had we put in more time than we already were, we knew it would affect our studies as we worked our way through to graduation. As I was carrying the heaviest course load as a dual major, it took me an extra semester and I would be the last to graduate. I haven’t seen or heard from my group of cycling buddies since but through the grapevine I came to know that I was the only one to take cycling to its pinnacle. By then, I was hooked and, after I headed west and landed in Colorado, I had become a rider to be reckoned with. The mountains of Colorado would become my training ground and I logged tens of thousands of miles climbing, often in the saddle for six or even seven hours and climbing and descending multiple mountain passes in a single ride. Some of these rides took me on a course where I would climb some 18,000 vertical feet in a day. In Colorado, that equates to four or five mountain passes. I have profound memories of many of those rides. One ride that comes immediately to mind came on a Sunday when I’d planned to head into the office and catch-up on a half-day’s work and do a forty miler in the afternoon, getting home in time to complete a few chores. Instead, I found myself riding from Golden, at roughly 6,600 feet, to the summit of Mount Evens at over 14,000, and back down those three big mountain passes. At 50+ mph and coming all-too-close to hitting a mountain goat, I got back to my office well after dark. I was racing, predominantly of the mountain bike variety, whenever I had the chance to breakaway for a weekend, typically finishing in the top five for my age group and category (expert/elite), one group removed from professional riders. It was about as good as you could do with a day job and no sponsorships. Not to take anything away from their talents, pro riders make a living. however meager of profitable, living in the saddle and don’t generally carry a career as a doctor, lawyer, or engineer on top. There are only so many hours in a week, and being a professional cyclist takes all of them.

By the time I hit my early-30’s, my career in mining and process development became more and more immersive. I would say that my chosen field was quite demanding, with more than a little pressure. With the amount of training (running, mountain biking, road riding, and skiing) I was doing on top of a 55+ hour a week commitment at work, I began to feel an overwhelming sense of daily exhaustion and was generally unwell. Like some insidious disease, the feeling seemed to have crept up from behind while I was unaware of its presence until it had taken root and begun to spread. I sought the help of a doctor who prescribed a stress-test and a suite of blood work. He found that my heart was fine (I think it was protocol to check on my heart relative to the symptoms I was presenting), but I was anemic, low on protein, and had high levels of cortisol and adrenaline in my blood. From those results, he also suspected that I had depression. It seems that I had “hit the wall”. The thing is that unless you push yourself to your personal limits, you’ll never know quite where “the wall” is for you as an individual. I began taking antidepressants because my brain was getting mixed signals and the major swings in serotonin were eating away at my mental health. My doctor thought that I’d benefit from counseling and I was accepting of the idea. I knew that my problems could not be handled from within because the matrix of variables was far too complicated for me to fix without qualified help. Not if I wanted to continue to have the kind of life I’d laid out for myself. I would go on to meet a therapist who would change my life.

Holding a master’s degree in counseling and fifteen years of experience, she seemed to “get” me from our first session on. Her name was Pie Frye, which made me smile. In the beginning, I would see her twice a week, after work. Though there wasn’t much information available at the time in the way of holistic medicine and what would later be known as living “mindfully”, this was her area of expertise and I was lucky to have met her. My first assignment was to read Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. It was an eye opener and I used many of the suggestions in the book, including compartmentalizing my life to add structure and maintain achievable goals. Then there was a chapter on learning how to say “No”. Like many diligent and hard working perfectionists, I was all about “being all things to all people” and this meant that “saying no” to my boss was just something I didn’t do. With how busy I was chasing competing goals (like being both a top notch endurance athlete and the best project engineer at my place of work), I was the perfect example of the downside of being an “overachiever”. This cycle of push and pull had brought me to a level of extreme exhaustion and frustration where I began to see my boss as the enemy. After all, it was he who stood in the way of my taking my endurance sports to the highest possible level.

As with many people who move to a place like Colorado, the relationship between work and play can be a difficult one. Many people view adult athletes as kids that just never grew up. That we couldn’t possibly be any more driven than they were. I remember how I’d once said that it was easier to live life as a “workaholic” than it is to be a top level athlete while simultaneously managing a professional career. This was a time when I needed to do as my therapist would have me do and that is to begin to chip away by tactfully learning to say no when a chronic “yes” would continue to foster massive frustration. My boss was a religious man and I knew for a fact that he respected staff with families who were church-going, standup citizens. That is what he could relate to and he had absolutely no respect for my chosen lifestyle. I elected to live at 9,200 feet in the foothills of the Front Range and take on the hour-long commute to and from work so I could train at altitude in the same way many endurance athletes do, for precisely the same reasons. Colorado is full of them so I had no trouble finding like-minded people outside of my workplace. There is far less oxygen available at 9,200 feet and above than at sea level, or even at an “endurance athlete mecca” like Boulder, which comes in at a mere 6,000 vertical feet. I didn’t want to be “as good” as these highly-gifted, hard-working athletes who “lived below”, I wanted to be better. To this end, and not just in one sport, but a half-dozen, I trained like a maniac. If I wasn’t working, I was training. At one point (which lasted for more than a decade), I was focused on how long-distance running could be a boon to my mountain and road biking, so, along with riding a couple of hundred miles a week, I was running sixty. I had dropped so much mass that, at six-four, I was just 175 pounds and less than four percent body fat.

Push came to shove and I’d just had a successful mountain bike race to celebrate my 32nd birthday, which, that year, fell on a Saturday. I placed second and, after going out on the town that night with my wife (also an elite mountain athlete), we did the long drive home on Sunday. That Monday, my boss announced that we had just signed a big contract with a new client and were going to be running a pilot plant 24/7 for the next six months, seven days a week. Then there was the thing that completely put it over the top. We were to perform the process refinement work in the high desert of Nevada, two months on and seven days off. At another time in my life, this wouldn’t be a problem but at that time it would eradicate my plans for entering at least eight mountain bike races over that same period. As with most sports, the athlete has a finite window of six or eight years when they’re in their prime. I was smack-dab in the middle of mine and, good or bad, being a high-level athlete had become the most important thing in my life. It had taken an incredible amount of work, discipline, and sacrifice to get to where I was and I wasn’t about to blow it all off for one project at work.

I’d chosen a steel-toed boots and hardhat path in my field because it was safely within my capabilities and my plan was to simply work a forty-five hour week and be paid just enough from which to lead an athletic,  adventure-driven lifestyle. The mountain sports I chased took years to cultivate and I was now good enough at each of  them to never turn away. My career goal was to end up as a middle manager at most and continue to work well within my comfort zone, with a reasonable amount of overtime like most of my friends managed to do. I was capable of landing something in my field that was at a higher level, but I’d have invariably been chained to a desk, stuck in someone else’s idea of a life. This was the career sacrifice I had made to live a mountain lifestyle like I’d dreamed of since I was in my early teens.

I was exhausted from my weekend race in Gunnison and walked into my boss’s office to ask the hard question: “Was I to be appropriated to the team that will be spending the next six to eight months in Nevada? He answered “of course…you’re the best “float guy” (flotation is a chemically complex mining process) we’ve got”. I was slated to be a project lead. My head was spinning and before I knew it, I said “no thanks” and that I would be happy to work some long hours supporting the project from our facilities in Golden, Colorado. I knew that that would be a viable alternative, but he had already picked his “home team” and the reason given was that these were “family guys”. This presented me again with my thoughts on being a workaholic; that it was commendable to work long hours and make personal sacrifices for those with families to feed but could always use something like “Johnnie’s baseball game” as an excuse to take a pass when they needed one. They would receive no demerits for not pulling their weight in the same manner that some of the rest of us did. This particular manager had a dim view of dual income (“DINC”) husband and wife teams with no parental responsibilities. It was almost as if he thought of us as evil…seriously. Those of us who were either single or married without children were thus the backbone of his group in the company and were expected to rise to meet the challenge such that those who were fathers (or, in a few cases, mothers) could expect to work more standardized hours but enough time on top to be considered by their families, friends, and peers s “workaholics”.  I had nothing but disdain for this wholly American paradigm. I knew something about European culture and most countries had a completely different view of what life should entail.

I couldn’t have ended up with a boss who was anymore different from me and it left me wondering if this was some sort of test from on-high. To make a long story short, I decided to regroup and make another run at him the next day. To me, the issue remained unresolved, though I’m sure that he already understood my sentiments.

I woke up the next day at my usual time of 5 AM to get some sort of workout in before I showed up at work by 7:15. A typical workday found me getting in a two hour ride or run before arriving back home between 8 and 9. My wife and I shared the responsibility in seeing that our two wonderful dogs got their exercise needs taken care of and that they were as well cared for as most people’s kids. We spent every available moment with them. I was also putting in some of my “spare time” as a volunteer firefighter and head EMT for our mountain fire department and rescue team. I was completely maxed-out. My boss knew of my commitment to community service but seemed to give me zero credit for it. To him, it was just one more reason I had to juggle my time. To him, I was nothing more than an enigma and not of the variety to empathize with. By now, we had a grave dislike of one another. I had zero respect for his life and he had even less for mine.

I’d asked that he meet with me at 9 AM that Tuesday morning. I would have just 20 minutes of his time to try to get an impossible point across. When I asked if he’d had time rethink anything, like my being able to remain on “the home” team in support of the field work in Nevada, he simply replied “no”. From my perspective, and from experience, I knew there would be plenty of work to be done for the same project at our facilities in Golden. He gave me a clear picture of his intentions for me and I felt the wall behind me closing in. I sat there for five minutes and he didn’t budge. My back was now against that wall. I sometimes wondered if, in some twisted way, he was trying to “break me”. But, I had a certain level of confidence in that I was well thought of within the greater company and had already met with executive management on my struggles with my current boss, who’d already been having his way with me for three years. John’s (my boss) responses to anything I proposed in lieu of spending the next six months in Nevada were to the negative. I remembered the book I’d read and just this once I was going to hold my ground and say “no” to the Nevada project, particularly if it meant virtually never being home for half a year.  In saying “NO!” I had followed through on a promise I’d made with myself. I let him have it with both barrels and he threatened to have me fired. I did him one better and quit. I refused to allow him to have free reign over my time. I was already averaging 55 hour work weeks and was very good at my job. I’d proven myself as a performer within the company and had acquired a broad based skill set in terms of the business of mining and minerals process development and could confribute effectively to any of the six or seven groups within the company. Not even 24 hours after I’d walked out I got a call from our VP of operations asking me to layout the things that would make my job more enticing, if I were to be assigned to a different program manager, one whom I happened to know well and with whom was a personal friend. We came to an agreement, which came with a promotion and a raise and I was told to take the rest of the week off, with pay. You could have knocked me over with a feather!

Thus, a new chapter opened in my life and I would never again have to fight so hard for what I believed were my rights. The biggest change came after seeing my therapist for about a year and reading several more self-help books on living mindfully and “how to live your best life”. For the rest of my career, I worked my but off and was happy to do so as long as my needs as an individual were respected. Sure, there would be gaps in my training at times when I believed work needed to come first. It was always a difficult balancing act, but somehow I managed to become a top notch cyclist, riding (and being ready to ride at the drop of a hat) at any opportunity that presented itself. The key was in being effective with the time I had and, quite often, being short on sleep. I would continue on this insane path, being so driven that I absolutely had to be among the best at whatever I did. Ultimately, I would begin to have problems with my back which would lead to my demise not only as an athlete, but as a professional person. Regardless of not wanting to end up in some executive level position in my career, that is where I landed. My last mountain bike race was just days before my 44th birthday. I placed second. I continued to pursue mountain sports at a high level until I hit 50 and all hell broke loose with my lumbar spine. Somehow, I made comeback after comeback, from one surgery to the next. I’ve had five spine related surgeries, an emergency gall bladder removal, and several near-death hospitalizations. I was able to recover and continue to remain on the bike until my 58th year. I had a final road cycling event that I went on to win in 2014. I was 53.

Between my first major spine surgery in 2012 and the second in 2019, I rode over 30,000 miles. I have what I call “100,000 mile legs” in terms of my lifetime on the bike. I have been forced to quit every sport and activity that ever meant anything to me and am currently having difficulty walking. The pain is otherworldly. I do not know everything that the future will bring, but, at 63, it isn’t looking good.

I still have dreams of riding again but my back is diminishing faster than I can maintain it. I have learned to let a lot of things go and focus on a simple life, living with my beautiful wife and incredible three dogs in rural Central Texas on some property. I am thankful for the amazing times I’ve had throughout my life and am attempting to live alongside the depths of the unknown in terms of how much time I have left on this earth. But, having known the highest of highs and the lowest of lows is something I signed up for with such high expectations of what can be accomplished in one person’s life. There is a cost to even the best decisions we make. On balance, I will die a happy man.

After an exhaustive search for the right Gibson Las Paul, I finally came across one that met my criteria for this make and model. No guitar collection can be complete without this icon of blues, blues rock, and rock music. It has been copied many times by other manufacturers, changing their particular take on the guitar in subtle ways to distance themselves from copyright infringement, and, though some have gotten close or even comparable to Gibson’s original version, I have found nothing better than the venerable Gibson Les Paul. As is the case with virtually all goods and services over the COVID pandemic, prices have skyrocketed for some Les Paul models, Gibson has shown itself to be a socially conscious company and has kept the price on its flagship “Standard” model down relative to some of its other Les Paul models.  Always perceived as an expensive guitar, the Les Paul Standard of today is priced as a real value amongst myriad competitors.

The link is to a photo spread and write up on the specifics of this particular addition to my collection.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/6aMfaxps2Nnu2mY47

I grew up in the outdoors skiing, hiking, hunting, and fishing and logged mile after mile literally following the size 13 footsteps of my father. I learned my way around a rifle and was taught how to shoot by the time I was seven. At twelve, I got my first gun, a still in the box Winchester 94-22 given to me as a Christmas present by my grandfather. My first deer hunting experience came at fourteen and I hunted archery season that same year. Even back then, I had a preference for archery and my dad and I would practice all spring and summer preparing ourselves for the late September/October whitetail deer season.

Other than some wonderful time spent with my dad, the things I enjoyed most about bow-hunting were that it was an entire month long, you could dress normally (camo would come a few years later) and weren’t required to wear blaze orange because, particularly in 1976, there were so few other hunters in the woods during archery season. In fact, it wasn’t unusual for my dad and I to go an entire season without bumping into another hunter. Our hunting grounds were located in central New York and north into the Adirondack mountains not far from my boyhood home near Saratoga. Both of my parents were from tiny towns in the Adirondack High Peaks region, a place we used to call “God’s country”. I spent every opportunity in my youth running around in the Adirondacks and communing with my grandparents and extended family. I learned much of what I know about life and the type of lifestyle I wished to pursue well before my eighteenth birthday.

I’d travelled through the deep Rocky Mountains on a fishing trip with my father and brother when I was twelve. If I remember, we spent two weeks fishing the great trout streams of the West including the Madison River near Ennis, Montana, and the Wind River along the Wind River range near Lander, Wyoming. Being the outdoorsman my dad was, these weren’t little stops we’d make along a main road that snaked its way along portions of these famed trout fisheries. That just wouldn’t have been the experience my dad wished to engrain in us. Instead, we’d backpack into a remote place along these rivers and fish for food. On occasion, we’d come into a town to rest up and get a much needed shower. Once or twice, my dad talked a diner waitress into throwing that day’s catch on the grill. That was the cherry on the top of another perfect day.

Sometime during that trip, I decided that after I’d graduated whatever college was in my future, I would head West in the way the idea of “Manifest Destiny” drove our  forebears to carve out a life for themselves in the quickly developing West , or pushed on to California and Oregon.. I worked the first twenty years in the Denver area and living in the foothills of Colorado’s famed Front Range Then came the move of my lifetime to Durango to run a forestry business and eventually start my own with some novel ideas on restoration thinning. Our work would place me in some of the best mule deer and elk country known to hunters everywhere, though instead of buying some out of state tag for $450, I was a resident hunter paying just $45.

In total, I spent nearly thirty years in Colorado, working across three industries: Mining and Metals, Forestry, and Oil and gas. The first and last ten years involved working on a career in process development and refinement as a project manager, and for almost ten years in-between, I owned and operated a forest restoration company which took logging to a much more refined level where we were far more ecologically advanced and our highly selective thinning work was designed to take ponderosa pine forests and restore them, mechanically, to pre-settlement times. This required tremendous physical work and I all but destroyed my lumbar spine in just that one decade. Sports like mountain bike racing and motocross were also taking their toll.

One final move for a job took me to Pennsylvania for my first back surgery and subsequent retirement. My ten years younger wife wasn’t yet close to retiring and landed an engineering job in Houston followed by another in San Antonio, not far from where we live today in rural  central Texas where we have a wonderful but demanding country home on some property.

My last hunting trip to Southwest Colorado and my old hunting grounds came just seven months after a major spinal fusion surgery in late 2012. I recovered from the surgery and trained my butt off before the trip, wherein I decided to bring my Australian Kelpie (my then six year old daughter named her Kelpy which I thought was clever, so it stuck). Aussie kelpies are well known in Australia for their sheep and cattle herding capabilities which include toughness, endurance, and intelligence. When I was with Kelpy, I never felt alone. As a trip companion, there’s no one I’d rather have as my copilot. She was (RIP, 2020) a marvel to watch, her movements, quick but smooth as if planned. On my property in Southwest Colorado, she kept the prairie dog and jackrabbit populations in check. As we were waving goodbye to my lovely wife and other beloved dog, Sage, I knew we were in for the trip of a lifetime. For good measure, I’d racked my mountain bike and packed my flyfishing and running gear. I would need to run Kelpy for six or seven miles every morning before I could hunt for the day, traveling miles and often not getting back to camp until well after dark, between nine and ten. Including our runs, I would cover up to twenty miles in a day and probably averaged sixteen with a 30 pound pack strapped over my shoulders. Kelpy would dutifully lord over the truck and camp, often waiting ten or more hours for me to get back.

It was archery elk season and we were camped at 9,800 feet for the bulk of September. Years ago, I found that a surplus military M-105A trailer suited my lifestyle and was the ideal setup to haul my MX bikes around from track to track, and to camp out of on prolonged mountain biking and hunting trips. This one was my second and was brand new off the Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah. It was painted alpine forest green, brown, and black camo and had a matching heavy duty tarpaulin cover making it all but water and snow proof in the heaviest of weather. I’d done some work on it to ride level behind my truck and I installed a variety of hitch that lent itself well to off-roading. This meant that I could select places to camp well off the Forest Service roads and back it into the dark timber where no one could find it without proper instructions.

By now, you might have guessed that when it comes to hunting, I think of myself as a purist. No RV camps with ATV’s strewn about. I hunt alone not only for the solitary experience, but to help prevent something foolish from happening. I’d hunted just enough with other people that I just plain don’t like it. The mountains aren’t some sort of human playground, particularly during hunting season. Parties, bonfires, alcohol…NO THANK YOU! I tend to look at it through the eyes of the creatures we’re there to hunt. Sheer terror running from encounter to encounter with no safe place to run to that doesn’t involve some level of luck in finding. I was there for the express purpose of calling- in and putting an arrow throu-h a trophy -size bull and having other hunters around me wasn’t going to help. Thankfully, this was archery season and, though its increase in popularity over the years was significant, you could still get in before the season to scope-out an area of interest regarding elk movement that year and find a camp location that was well off the beaten path. This is important for a number of reasons including theft. It’s rare, but on occasion some ne’er-do-wells take advantage of hunting season to pillage camps while the hunters are off hunting for the day. But first they need to stumble upon your camp, which is why I go to some trouble when choosing a viable site. I have the added benefit of having a protective dog to watch over things while I’m away. I had told my wife and my good friend John where I was going to be in case of an emergency. Being diligent and maintaining a neat camp can go a long way towards personal safety. So does paying attention to what you’re doing. I have found other hunters (a “hunting party”) to be nothing but a dangerous distraction. I have, myself, done things I’m not proud of  when in the midst of a group and have found that the only person you can control is yourself. My camps are so well hidden in the woods that someone would have to be roaming about and literally bump into it before locating it by sight. Having a protective dog to mind the camp while you may be many miles away lends a fair amount of peace of mind to the situation. I don’t worry about Kelpy because she’s smarter and more sensible than most people I’ve met and can take care of herself.

It was 1984 when I first went archery elk hunting. It was a wondrous experience with miles of terrain between hunters. Archery hunters tend to be a different breed from their rifle toting counterparts. Among other things, you have to find ways to get closer to your prey. Elk are highly social and intelligent animals who are in constant communication, particularly during the rut when they are distracted by the primal need to pass on their genes and their hormones are raging, particularly for the bulls who, during the rut, act more like teenagers than giant, mature adults who have all of their senses employed in the name of the survival of the species. Outside of the rut, these animals aren’t easy to find. A good hunter learns how to exploit this annual behavior by masking their scent and learning how to mimic a variety of calls. It takes years of practice for a hunter to be able to “communicate” with their prey.  My favored offense is to locate a small herd with a herd bull and a dozen, or so, cows and play that bull against a number of small bachelor groups in the area. This entire group of animals represents a splinter group which has broken from the main herd (which can number in the hundreds) due to hunter pressure during archery and then rifle season. Once you’ve located a splinter herd, you can set yourself up to hunt that one group for the coming days or weeks before the season ends. How much time is remaining determines your strategy. Naturally, once you’ve chosen a splinter group to hunt, you need to keep your own wits about you. Otherwise, you could spend days or even a week waiting for that one golden moment, only to “blow your cover” and scatter the herd to the four winds, at which point, there may or may not be enough time remaining on the clock to start the process over. My experience has shown me that you get one shot at all of this in a season. Blow it, and go home empty handed to think about whatever it was that you had or hadn’t done to blow the entire season.

Life has its way of getting in the way, and it had been four years since I’d last hunted. To make it even more challenging, I’d had a tri-level spinal fusion surgery seven months before leaving for Colorado, in late August of 2013. The destination, near Cortez and my old home in Colorado, took seventeen hours of drive time. I was hauling my military trailer, so I stuck to the posted speed limits. The area we were hunting was about thirty miles on a Forest Service road, off the  highway between Cortez and Telluride, a location I knew well from hunting there more than a few times and dirt biking and snowmobiling all over the area. Over my many years in remote, backcountry settings, I had acquired some very good navigational skills and was quite comfortable as long as I had a good map of the area, a well made compass and altimeter, even operating at night. I believe in having a keen understanding of how to navigate using traditional means, but I carry and know how to use a high quality GPS as backup. It had been unseasonably warm in the last week leading up to the September season and then the entire first week was in the mid-80’s. In all likelihood, this meant that the elk would be remaining higher in elevation to avoid the heat and probably wouldn’t be coming down lower until the first snows moved them a couple thousand vertical feet to where they’d overwinter in some place more to their liking. Contrary to what you might think, it is the herd’s matriarch cow, and not the herd bull, who makes this type of decision. The remaining herd follows wherever the matriarch takes them. This is something every hunter should know, though it’s not always possible, never to shoot a matriarch cow for she holds the secrets of a thousand matriarchs that came before. If your wish is to see that an entire herd vanishes in the pending winter, shooting the matriarch would be the way to do it.

With any luck, cooler weather was right around the corner and would trigger the rut (the time of year the elk breed and bulls exhaust themselves fighting for the right to keep a harem of cows to themselves) and mating season would be on. There’s a lot at stake for a herd bull who’s been at the top of his game for several years while once younger bulls have grown much larger and want to give it a go. These fights can go from a brief sparring session with the older, more experienced bull winning easily, to grave, extended battles, sometimes to the death. These big, nature bulls who have “ruled the roost” for a number of years eventually find themselves old and worn out, ripe for a de-throning or worse, injured or dead. If injured, autumn in the Rocky Mountains isn’t a good time for convalescing. And the the herd bulls aren’t the only bulls that are so thoroughly impacted. Younger, less experienced bulls can completely exhaust themselves, losing so much body mass that they die from exposure and starvation. But some bulls do everything just right to make it through the winter and go on to fatten-up and put on muscle mass through summer, they are the ones to become the next generation of herd bulls. The resilience of youth sees them to the coming warmth and bounty of spring. Pregnant cows that made it through winter begin dropping their calves in March. It’ll take three years for this year’s crop of baby elk into mature versions of their mothers.

Kelpy and I drove up to the campsite we’d located a couple of days before opening day. This year, with such a long drive from Texas, I’d left us no time to locate some elk, only to find an awesome site to stuff the truck and trailer. After getting the trailer leveled, we unpacked only the essentials for building fires, laying out ten gallons of water, and broken out the camp stove, lantern, and what I would be preparing for dinner. If you’ve packed well, in anticipation of what you’d need day to day, you can minimize potential theft and unwanted visits from bears. Keep a neat and clean camp as if you were in your own home, and you’ll save time and frustration when on the road. We’d planned for three straight weeks being camped up high, and five days for the drive to and from Colorado. Unless I got a nice bull early on, this would have us breaking camp and pulling out by the end of closing day, September 27th that year. For those of you who know Colorado mountain weather, particularly in Southwest Colorado which is infamous for its inordinately deep and heavy snows, you know that it can go from good to bad before you’re even aware of it. It is generally still relatively warm for the first week in September, considerably cooler by the end of the month, with potential for significant early snows. Though rain is generally out of place that time of year, particularly at elevation, we had every kind of weather imaginable. Hot, 85 degree days to start, followed by several days of heavy rains, followed by eight inches of fresh fluff. We spent two straight days in a hurricane type storm in the trailer, unable to do anything but sleep or get blown around and soaked, a good way to get sick or injured. It would have been better had I ever taught Kelpy how to play poker!

After the weather broke, I’d already lost six days to conditions. I hunted during the warm days, but in warm weather, the elk generally sit pretty tight on some steep, north facing slope in the thick timber. Stalking them when it’s that “crackly” underfoot is virtually impossible and you run the risk of scaring the elk out of the area. But, during letups in the wind, I hunted in the rain and located a small herd of elk. They weren’t “talking” yet, something that increased with the flurry of the rut. Any calling I might do would probably alarm them more than than draw them in. I stealthily reconnoitered the area where I’d found them, making sure to not be smelled, heard, or seen. I formulated a plan for the coming days and it was after 10 PM before I’d hiked the eleven miles back to camp. I was cold, wet, and hungry and made a late dinner to be enjoyed around the fire. I fed Kelpy first thing upon getting back that night. As much as I wanted to offer it to her, she ate her Kibble and was satisfied. She was an incredible, once in a lifetime dog.

We were two weeks into it and had developed our routine. I’d feed Kelpy around first light and take her of a run on the Forest Service road, well away from where I’d been hunting. After doing five or six miles we’d return to camp and I shoot some practice arrows and be on my way for the day an hour later. I was now hunting a good distance from camp but didn’t want to potentially disturb the elk I’d found by relocating closer. Plus, there were places within a mile of camp where the elk could end up after getting pushed down by the ensuing cold. The snow came during our third and final week, on the heels of some heavy rains, just horrible weather…wet and cold. My hunch about where they’d be dropping down when the cold weather finally came was off, but not by a lot. The elk had drifted down the next drainage to the north, putting them about halfway back to where I’d planned.

There’s a lot of strategy in hunting, particularly if you’re hunting solo. Most of it is based on years of experience and gaining a pretty thorough understanding of the big game you’re after. Deer and elk operate quite differently, and mule deer differently from whitetail. All I put-in for is a bull elk tag as that is where my interests lie. Mature bulls are extremely difficult to hunt, particularly with a bow where you need to be much closer to get within range. Most responsible bow- hunters don’t shoot at anything much past forty yards. I’ve taken elk with a rifle from as far away as 400 yards. When the timing of the rut coincides with the kind of weather we’d had over the past week, before it cleared but stayed cold, I was in a great situation. The cold keeps your scent from travelling as far and the eight inches of snow we’d encountered made for good tracking opportunities and quiet stalking conditions. Though it can be uncomfortably cold and wet, it’s about as good as it gets for an archery hunter.

On the next to last day of the season, the elk had begun to vocalize a lot with the coming of the rut. The small herd that I was working contained a large bull, a lieutenant, and a dozen, or so, cows.  My plan for the day involved a six or seven mile hike which I did that morning, before stationing myself well out of sight and about a half-mile’s distance from the area were now in. I found good cover, took-off my pack, peeled-off a damp layer and put on a dry one, while settling -in until dark. I spent the first thirty minutes listening and heard a few cow calls… just checking in with one another. It had gotten thick with fog. Perfect. I let out a few cow “chirps” and gotten a response before I let out a few more. It was getting late and I decided to be aggressive in my tactics. I donned my gear and began to wind around so I could approach them from uphill. I let out a full-on bull call, a challenge to the two bulls. I got a response and slowly began to approach while letting out another challenge bugle. Sure enough, I heard the muffled crackle of dry leaves under the snow when about sixty yards distant. It was an hour before dark as I slipped over to a think stand of young fir trees and a few larger aspen. There was this perfect little hollow and I managed to crawl over to it and prepare myself before letting out another challenge. These were the culminating moments of three weeks of hard work and suffering through some pretty severe weather. The day before, all of the other hunters in the area had packed it in and broken camp, headed for a warm bed wherever it was that they came from.

I let out a lost cow call and a full-on bugle. It didn’t need to make sense.  Just something to really get them “jacked up”. They kept coming but did not vocalize. “Oops” I thought. Damn! I stayed quiet. By now there were at least two cows that had crossed over to investigate. This would raise the bar as there were now many more eyes and ears to avoid. To my advantage, this particular spot was thickly timbered with lots of deadfall. What I needed to worry about was having some cow that I hadn’t seen smell or spot me. I hunkered down as they continued to approach. The choice bull was massive and the lieutenant bull was well worth bragging rights.  I made a giant gamble and passed on a broadside shot at the younger bull. The herd bull had just two more steps to make and I’d be able to draw as his head passed by a tree that obscured my location. I would have just a second. He hit his mark and I drew back, unaware of the cow that had come in behind me. She had me, dead to rights and let out an alarm as she turned and bolted. That was all it took. My bull hadn’t quite stepped into the opening at just twenty yards. All hell broke loose and they quickly disappeared like ghosts in the fog.

What a rush! I sat for ten minutes or so. It was now too dark to shoot and I had nothing left to do but hike the six or seven miles back to camp.  By the time I got back to my trusted dog for a warm greeting, I’d gone over the scene in my mind, prying to see if I could find where I went wrong. Getting that close to a bull of that size was a once in a lifetime opportunity, particularly now that I was living in Texas and no longer hunting every year. The fact is that, relative to the circumstances, I’d made no mistakes. I felt good about the experience and had a memory that I’d be able to recall for decades to come. Tomorrow would be closing day but I knew that I’d had my one chance and was too exhausted to hunt another day. Better not push it.

I got the fire going and made a dinner of one full box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, had a couple of margaritas, and put us to bed. We had a big day that lay ahead, pulling up stakes and getting on the road for the sixteen hour trip home.

That would be Kelpy’s last trip to Colorado, where she was born and spent the first seven years of her life. I am left with a memory that is hauntingly beautiful and will never let me forget her. I’ve had many dogs, but she has been, and will always remain the dog of my lifetime.

In this recently taken photograph of my Australian Kelpie dog, Kelpy, there is a clearly discernable scar seen running almost five inches from a point just below the left eye down to just underneath her left lower jawline. This scar of hers, something I can’t help myself from seeing every day, is a constant reminder of her life and death struggle with a single, full-on rattlesnake envonomation and of the innate toughness of our beloved canines relative to we, the “owners”…homo sopiens. She took the hit delivered by a four and five-foot Western diamondback, on the night of Christmas Day, 2016. I recall the event as if it were yesterday. I was in our upstairs loft quietly playing acoustic guitar with Kelpy lying at my feet. It had been a chilly, rain-filled Christmas day here in Central Texas. I’d spent the entire day at home alone with the company of our two dogs. My wife, Genie, had been visiting her relatives at the family farm in Cibolo, roughly an hour’s drive from our place. We have a small home and a couple of outbuildings on some property seven miles west of the small town of Lockhart. Genie had gotten home earlier that evening and we enjoyed a late Christmas dinner. Afterward, she’d gone into our main living area to watch some TV while I retired to our upstairs loft to play. The rain had let up perhaps fifteen minutes before the big event and I remember checking my phone for the temperature, which was 58 degrees and the time was 8:30 PM. A moment later I heard Sage, our wonderful Chow-mix, barking outside in the kennel which is connected to the back room of our house by way of doggie door. Sage is an extremely proficient watch dog and has a vocabulary of various growls, woofs, and barks ranging from a mild, low growl to a full-on, high pitched, three alarm bark! She continued on for perhaps a fifteen seconds when Kelpy rose from her position on the bed, tore down the exposed wooden stairs lickety-split…just about leaving sparks it her wake. At full force I could hear her fly through the dog door as if it had all been summarily done in one grand motion. It wasn’t five seconds later that I heard a shrill and troubled yelp and Kelpy reappeared in the house, frantic. She’s a rough and tumble alpha female if there ever was one, chock full of outdoor life experience at her then age of ten years. I’d never heard her in her life yelp in pain, nary even a slight wimper. I looked her over closely and two streams of blood had begun to pool just below her left eye. Like raining tears, the blood began to trickle down the left side of her face and, on closer inspection, I could see two tell-tale puncture wounds a good inch and a half apart. Sage was still out it the kennel barking furiously when I ran out into the night after quickly flipping on the back porch light. Standing her ground just eight feet to my right, Sage was trying hard to point out the threat. But it was dark and the porch light left a surreal presence in the muffled fog as I looked and I listened for what was by now just a faint rattling in the leaves. It was cold and I’m certain the snake was by now tired and feeling every bit of the chill. Naturally, I was being cautious as all get out but there had been no time to don my snake boots so I was tip-toeing around in an old pair of Merrell clogs and shorts. A ha! I spotted the snake, a big one for this locale and opened-up on it with my 9mm Ruger. After shooting the snake full of holes and removing its head with a five-foot garden hoe we keep on hand for precisely such duty, I finally had the chance to check Sage over. I turned again to make absolutely certain the snake wasn’t going anywhere without its head as I brought Sage inside to both inspect and settle her. She was frothing at the mouth, lathered from the effects of adrenaline and salivary glands gone postal, but I found nothing…not even a scratch. In all that excitement she’d managed to keep both her head and her distance, for she’d not been bitten. It dawned on me that by the time Kelpy showed up the snake would have been completely riled. I feared that this was far more dire than a typical dry bite warning snakes often give.

By now, we, all the four of us, were inside with the headless snake left outside to be cleaned up later. Genie was on the phone with our vet who lives several towns distant and turned out to be unavailable. It was Christmas night, after all. After listening to his voicemail message we decided to call our secondary vet, a larger operation just eight miles away and in town. Amazingly, a live person picked up on the line and said they had one particular vet who’d been placed on on-call status for the holiday weekend. The answering service gave us the name and cell number of the vet on call and Genie immediately dialed her up. We were in luck and, while knowingly interrupting her own Christmas dinner, we were consumed by our feelings of good fortune. A vet on Christmas night! Someone was smiling down upon us from on high. The vet, new to the clinic but a Baylor Veterinary School grad, met us thirty minutes later at the main clinic in Lockhart. Keeping Kelpy calm and as motionless as possible was easy…she knew full well where we were going and that papa was now in charge. Having spent ten years with this wonderful dog we, she and I, had crafted a way to communicate through body language, gentle and firm commands and, from early on, the uncanny ability to know what the other was thinking and going to do before doing it. Genie drove while I sat in the back seat of our SUV smoothing-over Kelpy’s coat and using gentle words in a soothing tone. Keeping her calm would help save her life.

We arrived just a few moments after our dedicated vet knowing it was going to be a long night. Amazingly, (because of the cold weather) there were two other dogs being treated for snake bite who’d arrived just an hour before we rolled-in. I carried Kelpy to the emergency room area of the clinic and walked along with the vet providing her with every relevant detail. From the moment of envonomation just forty-five minutes had elapsed. We were darned lucky and we knew it. After I got Kelpy settled the vet and an assistant took over while I watched them go to work. While new to this clinic, our vet was moving deftly as if she and her assistant had been partnered-up for years. Once transfer of care had taken place I was told to corral my wife and head home for the night. The clinic doesn’t carry insurances for people on-site, only their beloved pets. I understood the rule but it would be the most difficult goodbye of my lifetime. They were doing all they could and viscerally I knew my dog was in good hands, but mentally I just didn’t want to leave knowing my dog might not make it through the night. Then logic began to take hold. It was now hovering around 11 PM and Genie and I, and Sage, could do no more for our sweet Kelpy. She was in the hands of professionals and what little time I did spend at the clinic that night, that fact had become abundantly clear.

Sleep came slowly but we were, the three of us, exhausted and I eventually drifted off. The vet had indicated that she’d be there all night by Kelpy’s side, administering anti-venin, IV saline, and horse plasma. Over the millennia, horses have developed a tolerance so plasma taken from the blood of a donor horse has within it special antibodies to quell the damage the venom would otherwise do. This is Texas and this clinic had been weened on snakebites.

Morning came quickly and I drove up and went into the clinic at precisely 6:30 AM. I sat and waited for what seemed a lifetime but in reality was less than twenty minutes at which time I was called back into the ER to see my dog. I was astonished at the size of her head and the open, gaping, and draining wound around her neck a full six inches from the bite zone. The vet said that she’d taken a really potent bite but that the worst was over. Kelpy had made it through the hellish night. We talked and I conceded to leave Kelpy there for two more days and nights of round the clock care. The vet believed if we did so, if we gave her the best of care for a couple of days she’d pull through. The vet then allowed me to walk Kelpy outside in the neighboring grassy area to “go to the bathroom”. My poor dog. My heart sunk as I watched her once bright but now lackluster eyes meet mine. I could only hope. Hope was all I had. I took pictures that to this day others have seen but I’ve not had the heart to show to my wife. Brutally grotesque. Though different, her bond with Kelpy is as strong as my own and they can be inseparable at times.

On day four I awoke early…somewhere close to 4:30 in the morning. I was anxious to see my dog for today was the day the vet had anticipated her release and I’d be taking her home. Again, I arrived at 6:30 AM and by 8 AM Kelpy had been discharged into my care once more. This tough, wonderful, creation of a dog had pulled through. I never doubted her…not for a minute. I put her on her favorite blanket in the passenger seat of my truck and we headed home for a joyous reunion. I’d cleaned up the snake’s remains before I’d gone to get Kelpy and tossed them in a cow pasture to be eaten by vultures just up the road a half mile from our home (the mess was gone by the following day). I pulled into the driveway with Genie and Sage out at the gate and we drove in. I helped Kelpy out of the truck and within seconds she went into the kennel where the nastiness had gone down, sniffed around at the remaining blood spots and with Sage yielding her alpha sister a wide berth, Kelpy turned and as if nothing had happened and casually marked the spot. You’d have to know our beloved alpha female Kelpie, Kelpy to know the significance of that mark. It meant that whatever happened during those four days surrounding Christmas of 2016, not once did she forget who she is. And aside from the yelp when taking the bite, I never heard her whimper. She is thirteen now and is as tough, dominant, and willful as ever.