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 Ghosts of the Winter Sage 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 throughout 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 (in the Piceance Basin of Central Colorado) 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 thirty 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, such as 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, while I 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 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 occasions.

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 century not long before 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 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 in 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 for 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 separation to 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!