Courtesy of my weather station

Shouldn't come as a surprise - it's January 27th.

Traveling In Circles

Turning away, from the expanding city to flyovercountry 

        – yes, I see you up there, sky travelers! I see your winking stars signal 

           progress, east to west, west to east, toward your coastal destinations – 

           I've sat wedged into that same seat, rapt in airtight metal and plastic, 

           watched the tiny proxy plane skim graphics on the screen before me 

           while out the fogged windows, fuzzy smudges flow below, 

           fungal inflections sliding slowly behind in the darkened landscape. 

           I've looked down, too . . . somewhere below, where now I stand, 

           looking up, watching as you pass – 

yes, when you make that move, expect to hear, “What are you doing here?”

Read the pattern, connect the lines – triangulate an answer.

At the trailing end of a final arc, I uproot myself from occupation

        – inhabited over forty years – the last share in unchallenging retirement, 

           all expenses paid, base consumption and reduced usefulness – 

           radically transform the terms of my life, concluding function of an unsolved equation 

           begun – oh, decades ago, though I was unaware of calculation, off-course, 

           heading in retreat – landing here ('til the end? some other bearing?) 

The Future rushes forward to articulate my newfound position with uttered words,

in a place still strange and unknown, outer worlds beyond my window, 

beyond the country road threading this snow-covered mesa, beyond 

the ghostwhite peaks, impending – compassed constellations in the clock of the sky 

careering out of control towards . . . an avalanche, unraveling. 

         One of a certain religious disposition (which I am not) thinks of this 

         as the re-animationof ancient prophecy, or karmic reimbursement – 

                    – though I have told myself tales, in times past, 

                       of dark foreboding, I've not wandered about 

                       to slam to a sudden heart-stopping 

                       terminus. 

          No – not on the iron rail of divination but as a sum of tributaries too numerous, 

          large and small, gravity-made, on a mountain of opened presents heaped up in the past, 

          spread out before us. Track the turning points (they fall like flakes outside my window), 

          survey the landscape, even with the biased glass of urban eyes, 

          scry the general shape and flow of the watershed, its downward trend . . .

Coming of age in earth-awareness, the globe altered – a wounded stag, 

assaulted by our gang of hungry predators, steadily wearing it down, 

weakening and bleeding it out – could we but change: modify our diets, 

mitigate our desires. We could turn away from the path of prehistoric drive.

The Old Ways fail us – but, just in time, the new will forge 

a different track: to the garden we would go and the leaping stag recover. 

         – it has fallen many times – revived to continue running, dodging like a stream, 

            seeking a course invisible before it, inevitable after – still, 

            nothing comes to its rescue, and the untiring pack pursues. 

Is it possible, I wonder, to turn the famished mob aside – invest it in some other current, 

another soil, a tract someplace we once passed by?

            Return to stolen lands and plant the seeds. Winter encircles us, springs to follow. 

            Snow melts and pools beneath the sun of a warming world, turning away.

                                                                                        – Los Angeles - Paonia

                                                                                           January 2019

Oil & Gas

An ongoing problem around here is the push to achieve what's called "energy dominance" by the current administration, applying pressure through the Interior Department to lease BLM public lands for oil and gas development -- specifically, for purposes of fracking. The North Fork Valley is right on the front lines of this fight -- just to the north of us, extraction of coal, once a cornerstone of the economy here in the valley, has left a toxic time bomb in its wake in the form of methane leaking into the atmosphere from the mines that have shut down. Ironically, it's the abundance of natural gas that has kicked the pins out from under the market for coal, resulting in the mine closures.

Colorado passed a new law last year requiring the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission to put the health and safety of communities as the top priority in assessing additional development, and, possibly as a response to that regulation, COGCC has started to include flow line information to their GIS online site. Good to know if you need to start digging somewhere.

The little red cross at the center of the map (14S91W) is my location. The little brown dots seem to be existing well pads. The green circles seem to be potential drilling sites. By the way, that cluster of existing and potential well sites to the north of us, running along the 133 highway, also is one of the most geologically unstable regions in the state.

You can add to or subtract from the visible layers on the map, so I thought it might be a good idea to have a look at the surrounding watershed (below).

Rivers and streams in the neighborhood (the expanded blue areas around some streams are apparently regarded as "buffer" zones.

Where does the water come from (when it's on)?

The violet line near the top is a pipeline running from the Minnesota Ditch over there on the right side of the frame, delivering water collected up on Mount Lamborn and conveyed by gravity. The ditch, when it's running (usually sometime in April/May), is divided by a weir according to a precisely calculated placement.

The water eventually runs downhill to a pump house over on the left side of the frame, adjacent to a storage pond. The pump lives at the junction of the violet line and the yellow line on the banks of that pond and an overflow stream. There the water starts it's long journey uphill again in the yellow pipeline. Head pressure will take the water back up again to somewhere just below the lower pipe, midway in the field, but the pump is necessary to push it all the way up to the top, where it was formerly used to flood irrigate the field. As I see it, that would have sent a lot of water off to the sides of the central ridge, and off the property altogether.

I'll use the system as it stands in conjunction with the top swale to initiate the planting of trees, but I'm hoping I won't have to depend on it for long into the future. If I can infiltrate water at the top of the property, I can start to build the earthworks necessary to get it where it needs to go.

Profile(s)

So, based on the Google Earth contours and slope profile, here's a picture of where I decided to dig out a few swales by hand last year. Again the actual, on-the-ground measurements put those swales in slightly different positions. And, they don't precisely follow the contours at the edges, since I want to direct whatever water flows there in, across the valleys, towards the center ridge (or into a series of storage ponds.) The only swale that is operationally functional at this point is the one up by the house - and it's covered in snow. But eventually these contours may serve as guides for ripping the subsoil in parallel lines down (i.e., heading north) the hillside.

Profile

One probably shouldn't lean too heavily on Google Earth (certainly not for exact measurements), but it can give you a pretty good approximate visualization of what you're seeing on the ground - in this instance the central profile of the center ridge on the property. According to the stats, I'm looking at an elevation gain of almost 53 ft., north to south, with a maximum slope of 18% (climbing that center ridge) and an average of 5.7%. Here's another view:

Looking south

Underground

The Sharon Springs Member beneath the topsoil.

See that dark green mass labeled "Kmss"? It's sitting up there on the top of the hill (and under the ten acres) and extends in a patchwork fashion over small areas here and there in the valley. It's a geological formation known as the Sharon Springs Member, and here, courtesy of the USGS (https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/0728/report.pdf), is a description of what's down there:

"The member consists of black, slightly bituminous shale, with which is interbedded dark-gray shale in the lower portion and about in the middle of the member. The shale is full of the remains of small fishes, which were probably the source of the bituminous matter in it. The small scales and bones of fishes can be detected in nearly every piece of the black shale. 

"The Sharon Springs member can be conveniently subdivided into Upper and Lower Sharon Springs. The Upper Sharon Springs, which is about 65 feet thick, can be recognized by the abundance of concretions, many very large, whereas in the Lower Sharon Springs the concretions, none of which are large, are very scarce and in many places practically absent. The shale of the Upper Sharon Springs is also somewhat different from that of the Lower Sharon Springs. Some beds of the former resist weathering more than the ordinary shale of the formation and appear as slightly prominent bands in the outcrops. 

"For the present investigation a threefold division of the Sharon Springs is recognized: the lower unit, about 115 feet of dominantly dark-gray soft flaky shale having a few concretions of yellow chalky limestone, is referred to as the 'dark soft shale unit.' The middle unit, called the 'organic-rich shale unit,' consists of about 90 feet of hard buttress-weathering shale, is rich in organic material and in varied limestone concretions, and has yielded abundant vertebrate and a few invertebrate fossils. The upper unit, about 10 feet of hard-platy-weathering slightly phosphatic shale that contains numerous layers of soft highly weathered phosphate nodules, is referred to as the "phosphatic shale unit." 

So, what's "slightly bituminous shale"? Here's what another site (http://www.futura-sciences.us/dico/d/geology-bituminous-shale-50005403) has to say about it:

"Bituminous shales are rocks containing organic substances called kerogens. When there is a sufficient quantity of kerogens, they can be exploited to produce oil and gas fuel, however, it's a low profit, polluting operation, not to be confused with oil sands.

"Geologically speaking, bituminous shales are not 'true shales' because they are not the result of metamorphism -- modification in a solid state by means of temperature and pressure. Moreover, they have no precise composition. Nevertheless, they are divided into three families:

• carbonate-rich shales;
• siliceous shales;
• carbonaceous shales.

"Kerogen can be transformed into oil by a chemical process called pyrolysis. The rocks are heated to a temperature of 450 to 500 degrees in the absence of air. The vapour formed is then distilled to produce shale oil (a form of oil) and gas. On a worldwide scale, 2800 to 3100 billion barrels of oil could be produced from these rocks. Bituminous shale can also be burned as such but the energy quality of the fuel is then less."

OIL! There's black gold down there! And down there is where it's going to stay, unless some particularly diligent tap root or a particularly industrious prairie dog drills down that far.

"The exploitation of bituminous shale is not very profitable since the processes that must be applied to the rocks are long and costly. Furthermore, the extraction and processing of the fuel are harmful to the environment. The water used in the mines is acidified and enriched in metals. Large emissions of sulphur-containing gases and particles cause substantial atmospheric pollution. Furthermore, the production of oil from shale produces a larger amount of CO₂ than the traditional petrochemical industry."

Objective

When I first began to consider managing a larger piece of property, I had to ask myself why - or rather, what was it I was actually taking on? Did I want to become a farmer? No, I did not - at least not this late in life, though I might have considered it earlier on.

My friends and I, living in Denver in the early 70s, had an interest in gardening - one even worked at the Botanical Gardens for several years, and I had a brief stint in the nursery business, in addition to my backyard urban kitchen garden efforts. But for us, it didn't seem like a viable career choice, and it altogether lacked the context of environmental repair or restoration. Permaculture hadn't even been invented yet, so far as I know. But Drop City, near Trinidad, Colorado, was already abandoned.

Thinking of it now, I return to that scene in the film "Easy Rider" where the back-to-the-land hippies are broadcasting all sorts of seeds out onto what is obviously unmulched dry-as-a-bone desert soil. Dennis Hopper (high as a kite, if I recall correctly) laughs off their earnest effort, predicting these folks are going to starve. His buddy Peter Fonda, squinting into the distant future apparently, says something like, "No, they're going to make it."

But who in the world wanted to fail at that? And why?

So, here I am, some fifty years later, somewhat better prepared but still asking myself those same questions. What is the purpose of this little venture, at this late date? Here's the short answer: I'd like to help repair the damage done by my participation in that other choice, some fifty years ago, to travel a different path. I want to plant trees and repair the soil, and I think I know how that might be accomplished, if there's time.

Contours

I've described the field as north-facing, but in fact it has all sorts of interesting topographical features that I encountered as I dug some shallow swales across the landscape last spring, including an abundance of prairie dog mounds, screwing up my contour lines.

The land shapes tell you where to place things - that and the flow of water downhill and off the property. I used an online contour creation tool here to give me a rough idea of what I was dealing with, and the overlay I produced (easily applied in Google Earth Pro) has served as my roadmap (see the first post in this blog).

Ordinarily, one might want to place the house down from the ridge, and store water up higher. But this placement looks at the house (i.e., the roof) as a rain catchment device, so I'm locating it near the top of the hill and hoping it will catch and store water in an adjacent pond, which can also be filled from the irrigation pipe. And the domestic water line hookup runs along the top of the ridge as well.

Also, the view is better.

The contours make it fairly easy to see the central ridge, and the adjacent shallow valleys on either side. The bright green line in the image below is a swale (surveyed first with one of those A-frame DIY levels, then corrected with a self-leveling laser) that should, in theory, feed some additional water into the pond. But will the pond remain filled in all seasons in this high and dry desert country, with the impact of climate change breathing down our necks and the many days of sunshine evaporating precious moisture into the air? I'm hoping that plantings and increasing the shoreline "edge" will help out on that score: the shoreline won't be a simple curve as shown.

The field in June

This cow is on the wrong side of the fence. I didn't buy the cow.

June of 2017 when I signed the papers. It had been a fairly wet winter (notice there's some snow still up on Landsend in the background.) A nice field of bindweed and prairie dog habitat, apparently an open invitation to the neighbor's cow. The fence has since been repaired.

Buying the land

So, I bought a field.

It's a ten acre field on a slightly north-facing slope, a former oat, barley, and alfalfa field that had been fallow for probably a couple of decades before my purchase since it was part of a bundled development deal with additional adjacent parcels set-up for "suburban" housing in the mid-nineties, or - if you squint and use your imagination - small "hobby" farms. There were two ten acre parcels on the upper side of the hill, three five acre bits down below (in this case where down is north, at the base of the hill) with water and utility hookups in place.

I'd been interested in one of the lower, five acre parcels, but when I got a look at the Covenants and Restrictions in place which included a complicated formula for divvying up the irrigation rights, I backed away and turned my attention up the hill. Besides, the view was better. I had no idea what I might do with ten acres, but it was what was available that met certain criteria - one of which was that it be within walking distance of the town. Apart from that requirement, I was open to whatever the field wanted to tell me.

It told me to buy it.

Cold frame

Temps in the single digits last night, light dusting of blowing snow and every plant in the landscape received a coating of lovely crystalline frost, frost which has since melted away. Still, things are holding on in the cold frame, although outside air temperature is only in the twenties.

Slow Melt

We're still looking at temperatures hovering just above freezing during the day, and dipping well below at night. The main roads are dry, but our driveways are still covered with a powdery snow.  We've had several visitors (deer) crisscrossing the property in the wee hours, nibbling at some of my trees, and the chicken wire wraps don't seem to discourage them much. Hoping that this winter pruning will inspire new growth when the weather begins to warm up in a couple of months - that what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-stronger kind of thing. The moon's waxing gibbous, and has already risen here in the mid-afternoon, hovering over Mt. Gunnison.

Snowpack

Twenty-one degrees outside currently, up from seven degrees this morning when I got up. We've got about six inches of snow on the ground outside my window, more drifted into the odd corners here and there. According to the latest figures, we're at about 114% of normal here in the Gunnison Basin, and the state as a whole is at 123% - good news, but not the whole story. How the watershed holds up over these next couple of months will determine our irrigation story for the rest of the year. Things can go from good to bad in just a couple of weeks, absent snow- or rainfall, up here in the dry high desert.

Current reading

Mark Shephard rewrites P. A. Yeoman, with better pictures.

Skyhill 10

The plan, from outer space. Well, actually Google Earth with overlays.