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