Tag Archive | Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park

Dry Lightning

Jul10
Topaz chittered at me when I dared to invade her private sleeping tower early this morning.

Apparently I slept through several hours of a lightning storm before it jolted me awake around six. Wren was panting under the bed. I tried to avoid getting out of bed, rolling over, dozing, dreaming that the fire trucks came down my driveway and I invited them through the gate to get to the woods, and worried how I would ask them to take off their boots to go up in my tower. It was dry lightning, and had been crashing since two or three in the morning, with only a couple of spatters of rain. A perfect fire storm: heavy lightning, no rain. I opened my eyes a couple times to see blazing strikes out the French doors, and finally decided I’d better turn off Do Not Disturb in case there was a fire. Certain there would be a fire.

Not two minutes later, the phone rang. “Yes, what?” I answered, knowing it could be only one thing. Dawn saw and smelled smoke which turned out to be on the canyon rim between her place and mine. I climbed the kiva ladder to the tower and scanned with bleary eyes, but did not see it. My view of the place it burned, I learned when I climbed up again this evening, had been blocked by some other trees. Fortunately, it was just one juniper, and a team of neighbors and at least one volunteer firefighter found it and put it out. We knew there was a forecast for serious winds this afternoon. Several other neighbors reported strikes that they also put out. It was a busy early morning on Fruitland Mesa.

Mr. Wilson took this shot of the folks who put it out. I’m fascinated that they dug all around and piled the dirt up around the trunk. So grateful so many people have their eyes and noses trained on the woods around here, and the threads of connections among disparate neighbors knit into a coherent communication network.

photo borrowed without permission from Rosie’s facebook post: the smoke as seen from her deck.

Only then mid-morning, the Watch Duty app alerted me and others to a fire on the North Rim of the Black Canyon, just twelve miles away, and shortly afterward to a fire on the South Rim of the national park. The North Rim fire didn’t appear to exceed a tenth of an acre, and was contained and put out pretty quickly. The South Rim fire grew exponentially, from 50 acres to 100 in less than an hour, then to 300 in another hour, then to 425 in another hour. Then there was an update vacuum until about 8:45 pm, when it had grown to 1640 acres. In between, around 4 pm, Marla heard from a neighbor who spoke with a sheriff’s deputy on the road that it was 600 acres and the Visitor Center was lost. This hasn’t been officially confirmed, and we pray it isn’t true, but…

This photo was posted on Facebook by Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park midafternoon. I’m grateful there’s still federal wildfire fighters and helicopters available. If the Visitor Center truly is lost, I wonder if the federal budget will allow a rebuild, or if the park will close. What a loss that would be to both Montrose and Crawford, in so many ways. And personally: I was planning to take an old friend out there this weekend if she was able to stop by while she’s in the valley for a concert.

Midafternoon, another fire was reported on the Uncompaghre Plateau northwest of Delta. Altogether, Watch Duty recorded twelve new wildfires this morning in Delta and neighboring counties. Most of them stayed small and were put out. The latest update from the Sowbelly Fire came in as I was writing this: it’s now 2,193 acres. Needless to say, we stayed inside all day. I could barely breathe out there. Honey Badger was so kind, she drove down to pick up my garbage, and made an extra trip to bring my mail from the mailbox because I was expecting a parcel. A couple hours later, when the smoke cleared a little bit, I masked and went out to feed the birds, then stepped out on the deck for a better view. On one side of my big tree, the horizon was just a little hazy.

On the other side of the tree the smoke was thick, blowing from the west and likely fed by both the Sowbelly and the South Rim fires. At the house, it wasn’t too bad, so I took the window of opportunity to take Wren and Topaz for a short walk to our west fence, where I could see the South Rim smoke still billowing. I cracked an east window when we returned to the house just to get a little cool air inside, but within fifteen minutes I could smell smoke again. So the house is closed up tight, except for the two tower windows I leave ajar all summer to funnel heat up and out of the house.

It’s the perfect time to cut the budgets for weather science and forecasting, wildfire prevention and protection resources, and FEMA. FDT. Among other things today, I’m grateful for my practice which has gotten me through a day of challenging external and internal weather, for my community of alert, responsive and competent neighbors no matter their political persuasions, and for an oxygen compressor to fill my lungs overnight.

Perspective

Aug11

I’m grateful for rain overnight which left the high desert refreshed, and gave morning light an extra vibrant quality. As we headed for the gate, I was tickled to watch a gnat-nado; we saw a few more of these swirling columns of insects rising as we walked through the woods.

Coming home we spied a sleeping sunflower bee, genus Svastra, waiting to warm up before flying.

It was a big day. A fulfilling class in the afternoon followed by a rare outing planned with friends and their visiting family. So the morning involved baking little apricot cakes as my contribution to the snack spread. I adapted the recipe for high altitude, and also added an element from the next apricot bake, an upside down cake, with a dollop of brown sugar in an apricot half underneath the batter. Naturally, I had to test them before I could share, so I had one for dessert after my cheese sandwich! Today’s was open face cream cheese on toast, slathered with apricot jam. Yes it’s a sandwich!

Meanwhile, Wren and Biko ate a little more healthy fare with some chopped romaine.
Wren enjoyed cocktails at the rim of the Black Canyon with the rest of us, and wore just the right coat to match her new best friend Tatiana.

We could see smoke, we guessed from the Little Mesa Fire SSW of Delta, which fortunately has grown slowly to only 450 acres in a wild area. As I drove to the canyon, I listened to The Pen and the Sword on KVNF, which featured an interview with John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. The book is about the 2016 apocalyptic wildfire that consumed the Canadian city of Fort McMurray, the chief supplier of oil imports to the US. Ironically, the fire was unquestionably driven by fossil-fuel induced climate chaos, as Vaillant demonstrates, and “was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.” It was chilling to listen to this interview after watching news of the catastrophic Maui fires this afternoon: precisely the scenario Vaillant cautioned about in his book that came out this summer. (I hope the interview will appear on KVNF archives shortly.)

I’m grateful for perspective, which reminds me that we humans and our follies are just a gnat-nado in the context of geological time, the kind of time that created these 1.8 billion-year-old metamorphic rocks, and the millions of years of uplift and erosion that formed this spectacular gorge.

After the drama and adventure of the evening, I was grateful to drive home in my energy-efficient little old car, through pastoral landscape, with a glimpse of sunset in the rearview mirror. I contend daily with the conundrum of how to live lightly on this fragile planet while also relying on the very source of its greatest threat.

I hope the clouds part overnight this weekend so I can rest in the reassuring perspective of the Perseid meteor shower. If pondering geology gives momentary respite, contemplating our place in the vast mystery of outer space provides an even deeper peace.

Black Canyon

Oct1

Little Wren was cold and uncertain this evening at the rim of the Black Canyon. We joined a few friends for cocktails at the canyon, each bringing our own beverages and some kind of snack to share. Black Canyon is one of the more dog-friendly national parks, and three of us brought our dogs to the overlook along with our picnics. After a couple of hours of warmer sunshine late afternoon, clouds rolled in again and the temperature dropped just about the time we arrived. As we gathered, we observed a massive wedge-shaped cloud over the south rim, which gradually moved closer. We are hardy souls and typically brave the elements when we’re enjoying where we are, but I called an abrupt end to the gathering when I watched one woman’s hair slowly rise until it was standing on end. Synapses fired in me that went something like this: static electricity>⚡️> leave now! I’m grateful for the time spent with friends, for the amazing Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, just a beautiful half-hour drive from home, and for coming home again.

Erosion

Aug27
Little erosion…
Medium erosion…
Big erosion…

I’m grateful for erosion. Without it, we wouldn’t have canyons. Imagine that. None of the drama, beauty, adventure; no more of the unique habitats, microclimates, and endemic creatures of canyons… like the adorable canyon wren with its unmistakable song (be sure to click ‘Listen’ in the link). No Grand Canyon, no Black Canyon of the Gunnison (pictured above), none of the other fabulous canyons around the world. Not that I’m a huge fan, and not that it will be feasible for much longer, but no hydropower dams which admittedly provide electricity and irrigation water to a lot of humans… Besides forming landscapes, erosion can also benefit the planet by distributing nutrients…

I realize that I’m in over my head, because as I search the internets for benefits of erosion, I find a 10:1 ratio of articles about “why erosion is bad and benefits of erosion control”: Not many specifics about why it’s good. It depends on your point of view, I guess. For certain, erosion doesn’t play nice with human efforts to control the environment, and the more intensely we have tried to shape the planet to our will, the more we have decided that erosion is a problem to be reckoned with rather than accepting it as a natural force of evolution. So I’m gonna be grateful for it anyway, because of canyons.

A peppertastrophe today as a result of yesterday’s deluge, perhaps. The main trunk of the huge, healthy scorpion pepper broke! None of the peppers have entered their final ripening stage, and they won’t ripen off the plant until a certain trigger point is reached with the perfect combination of daylight and temperature. I’m grateful for equanimity and ingenuity. I was disappointed but shattered as I might have been a few years ago, and immediately set about trying to salvage what I could.
After a few efforts to stabilize the plant in water I was grateful to find the perfect rock to hold it in a bowl. I’ll figure out something more stable and permanent tomorrow if it doesn’t drop dead, and try to limp it along hydroponically for a few more weeks until the peppers start to turn yellow.
And in kitchen successes, yesterday’s dilly beans above, and today’s bread and butter pickles below. I’m grateful for another precious day alive in this beautiful world.

Melancholy of Caring

Jun15
Twisted piñon on the rim of the Black Canyon
A silvered juniper skeleton serves as a fence to keep people away from the precipitous edge of a sheer cliff.

I’m grateful to live so close to one of the most spectacular canyons in this country, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, protected as a National Park. I’m grateful to live near the North Rim, by far the less visited part of the park. Usually on a summer Wednesday morning there might have been one or two cars parked at the ranger station, a couple of tents in the campground, and no one else on the rim drive overlooks. I guess with Yellowstone closed for flooding everyone decided to come here. I’ve never seen so many cars at the ranger station, a dozen at least, and four or five at the nature trail parking pullout. There were people everywhere!

The Painted Wall, the highest cliff in Colorado

I’m grateful for the sweet melancholy of caring enough to miss someone I barely know when he’s gone… enough to grieve the wild world, the ancient trees and fragile lives in this park, for the state that the human species has brought this planet to… enough to wish the best for all beings, even humans, even so… I think I prefer this to not caring.