SkyWatch Friday: Smoky Sunset

The skies over the Rocky Mountains are very smoky and hazy due to all the devastating wildfires in the region, the worst of them an epic, tragic firestorm that's blazing in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Closer to home, a 26,000 acre grassfire was burning out of control a few miles to the south of us. The smoke from it and several other wildfires in Wyoming and Montana filled our valley, obscured the mountains and made for difficult breathing for a couple of days. 

It has also made for some spectacular sunsets, like this one I photographed last evening from our neighborhood... 

But we'd trade the colorful sunsets in a heartbeat for some much-needed rain over the Rockies and an end to these fires! 

Visit SkyWatch Friday to view skies around the world

(I can especially appreciate Raf's SkyWatch post this week!)

What happened to October?!

I know, I know... I've been a bad blogger! A thousand pardons. Where DID October go? Well, I spent part of it in California, attending the McDougall Clinic's 10 Day Live-In Program in Santa Rosa (a most awesome experience, so more on that later!), and the rest of it was spent doing the usual - dealing with the fire aftermath and Fall Cleaning, both of which continue (though much has been accomplished fire-wise, and it's slowed down for now as we merely await the contractors who will tear down the old shop, prep the new pad and erect the new building! Yeaaa!)

We also brought Mocha home the day after I returned from CA, though we had to spend a lot more time cleaning up all the fire debris in his big pasture. But that's all done, and he's once again enjoying the run of the place and we're so happy to have him home again! We again send huge thanks to our friends Sue and Morris who took such good care of him while he was an evacuee, and Mocha sends a big shout-out (whinny-out?) to his dear friend Bugs! :-)

All the other critters are doing well, and I'll try to do better about blogging! For now I'll leave you with some photos taken at the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens in Santa Rosa, CA, one of our fun McDougall Program field trips. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with him, Luther Burbank (1849 - 1926) was a horticulturist who introduced more than 800 new varieties of plants including over 200 varieties of fruits, many vegetables, nuts and grains, and hundreds of ornamental flowers (including the Burbank "Idaho" Potato, the Shasta Daisy and the California Poppy.)

The Luther Burbank home...

In the gardens: Susan from Colorado, Perry from Australia, me, David from Sacramento...

One of Luther's beautiful roses...

The Gingko Biloba tree...

And finally, Yours Truly, dwarfed by Luther's huge prickle-less prickly pear! (We ate a piece of the fruit for dessert that night!)...

Hot Enough For Ya?

I really should be doing other things (oh, and I will be! *sigh*), but felt compelled to share this fire souvenir first.

All the lush plant growth in the ravine behind our house burned, leaving nothing but charred stumps and ankle-deep ash... and revealing several years' worth of trash that some slob (I'm being charitable) who used to live here tossed there from the deck, shooting much of it during its trajectory - cretin that he was. So I've spent several hours cleaning up all the beer bottles, beer and soda cans, shards of clay pigeons, shotgun shell casings, etc, finally finishing that infuriating chore on Wednesday. The fire burned so hot down there that most of the intact glass bottles were as thin and fragile as eggshells, crumbling as I picked them up, and rocks were actually split in two by the heat. But I think this melted beer bottle illustrates it best...

And let me conclude with the righteously indignant observation that people who throw trash in Mother Earth's face should have hot tar poured in their nostrils.

Blogging Slump

I cannot believe it's almost September already! Mea culpa for not blogging in a while. When I've had driblets of time, I've lacked either the energy or inspiration, or both. Not much to blog about, really... my days have been filled with post-fire cleanup and paperwork crap, trying to chase down and meet with contractor-type people (think "herding cats"), and getting MRIs for my annual neurology appointment. Boring, yukky stuff and dismal blogging fodder.

Since I was starting to feel badly about neglecting my blog, this afternoon I took a photo of our first red tomatoes from the garden. Always an exciting event (and though we always get the earliest-ripening varieties and plant them as soon as we can - given that we get blizzards in freaking JUNE - you can see how late in the season it is before we can enjoy a few garden-ripened tomatoes!) Anyway, so confident was I in my camera and photography skills that I ate half of the tomatoes for lunch on a vegan BLT* and for dinner on a super-deluxe salad before I downloaded the photo. Big mistake, since it turned out blurry! Re-photographing the remaining three tomatoes seemed a bit silly, so here, for what it's worth, is the blurry original...

And why didn't BW get to share in our garden bounty today, you may wonder? Because he's working till 9 pm. (UPS sucks!)

Mocha is still at our friends' and Sue reported that he'd found an old broom she keeps by one of the outbuildings and was having a jolly time with it, grabbing it in his mouth and shaking it back and forth with great vigor. What a monkey he is! I visit him as much as I can, and we hope to have our new fence done and Mocha back home by mid-October. Meanwhile, he's very happy at Sue's, getting spoiled with carrots and apples, playing with his broom, and standing hock-deep in grass. Here he'd just be sucking dirt, since his pastures both burned up (though we see green sprigs popping up here and there already!)

I'll blog more when my general funk has lifted and I've crossed more pressing stuff off my to-do list (last MRI tomorrow, last contractor out on Saturday to do an estimate, yippee!) Meanwhile, for your enjoyment, here's my BLT "recipe" and a Dan Piraro Bizarro cartoon I found quite amusing. :-)

*Yummy Vegan BLT

Two slices Ezekiel Organic 7-Sprouted Grains bread, toasted
Two slices LightLife's organic tempeh Fakin' Bacon, fried
Organic tomato slices from the garden
Organic "Red Sail" lettuce from the garden
Grapeseed Oil Vegenaise (vegan mayo)

Fire aftermath

A few more photos of the fire's aftermath, along with some "before & after" pics (click on them for larger versions)...

I took this one on June 18 from our deck. That's fog (not smoke!) above our neighbor's house...

And this one I took yesterday. You can see the same neighbor's house and where the fire stopped. Fortunately, it stopped short of a huge, beautiful aspen grove (out of the photo's frame to the right) and all of Soda Hill...

This pre-fire picture shows Spahn's B&B and some of our buck & rail pasture fence (so much time, money and effort we spent to build that!)...

And this one shows the same area, post-fire...

This is what our fence looks like now. The cross bucks burned completely; they're just X-shaped ash with tidy piles of spikes in the center of them. (Spahn's house in the background)...

Our burnt shop building. You can see one of the melted fiberglass skylights, the burn damage to the metal roof, the scorch marks on the exterior walls, the busted out window (which BW has covered with some sheet metal), and the warped metal walk-through door with a bootmark on it where a firefighter kicked it open...

The interior of our shop building...

Some Colorado firefighters perform mop-up in the ravine behind our house...

A helicopter flying low over our neighborhood, looking for hot spots on Friday, a week after the fire started...

Little Goose Fire

Well, never thought I'd have something quite this dramatic (or even this mehitable!) to write about, at least not so soon after starting to blog! The photos tell the story better than words can, but here's some background...

This fire was started by lightning in a remote area of a canyon a few miles south of our place last Thursday night (Aug 9), but wasn't spotted till Friday morning about a half hour after I left with Willow to visit my mother in northern Montana for the weekend. So I didn't have a clue what calamity I was leaving behind in my rear view mirror, or what I'd be coming home to!

The fire got bad on Friday - BW could see the smoke from his route and thought he'd have to go home, and neighbors started packing up to evacuate. But then it cooled off, the winds calmed, that night there was a little rain, and skies were clear that evening and all day Saturday.

Sunday morning, however, the wind picked up and shifted so that it not only fanned the fire into an inferno, but blew it straight up and out of the canyon and over "Stumpy Ridge" right toward our subdivision. (Does it bear mentioning that the wind NEVER blows from that direction?!) BW called me that afternoon to tell me that there was a huge fireball visible from our kitchen window and the neighborhood had been ordered to evacuate immediately. He'd loaded Mocha in the trailer and the dogs and everything of value that he could think of and/or fit in the pickup truck, and drove to our friends Sue and Morris' house about six miles away, where he spent the next two nights. He boarded Josie and Tess at our vet's on Monday, the day I was supposed to have returned. Needless to say, I got almost no sleep that night and was in no shape to make the seven hour drive home the next day. So on Tuesday BW checked into a Sheridan motel and Willow and I met him there when we got back to town.

We were allowed to return home briefly that evening to gather a few more things and assess the damage. We had a mixed reaction of "It could have been worse" and "OMG." It was very surreal and disorienting, with so many trees gone, fence gone, the smoke and the charred landscape and the helicopters constantly flying overhead. There were some amazing heroics, especially by the local volunteer fire fighters - despite 40 mph winds and flames 15 feet high at our house on Sunday night! We lost almost all of our fence, a lot of landscaping and vegetation, and about half of our shop building (luckily not the half we recently stacked our hay in!), but don't seem to have any damage to the house. And though cabins and outbuildings burned, not a single home in our neighborhood was lost.

It was too smoky to stay here so we've been in the motel till this morning, when we checked out and I got Josie and Tess out of hock and came home. :-) (It's still smoky, so we'll see if we can stand to sleep here this weekend.) Jane Doe & Co. have yet to make an appearance at the house, but we've seen lots of does and fawns in the neighborhood areas untouched by fire (too far away to identify, though), and someone has been eating the food and drinking the water we've left out for them each night. Lots of birds, bunnies and chipmunks running around our place, so we're confident our wily wildlife came through this ordeal unscathed. (But I'll sure be glad to see Jane and her babies sauntering up our driveway again!)

9:07 p.m. update: Jane and her 3-year old daughter Sugar showed up for cookies a little while ago! They looked and acted no worse for the wear... just hungry (as always!) :-) Hope to see their babies soon!

Mocha's still happily (and indefinitely) ensconced at Sue and Morris' and we're still waiting for the claims adjuster and trying to round up contractors and cleaning people. Less than 24 hours after we were first allowed to go check out the destruction, BW was ordered back to work lest he be fired - no pun intended. >:-(

Anyway, here are some photos. Click on them to enlarge. (The ones of the fire were taken by various people from various perspectives and most were forwarded to me by friends, so I don't always know who the photographer was)...


Below is our neighbor's place, Spahn's Bed & Breakfast, just up the hill to the southwest of us. The house, an outbuilding and a few trees were saved but they lost the guest cabins and a couple of garages along with most of the surrounding forest.

(Photo by David Withrow)

(Photo by David Withrow)

A before & after:
Our house on July 11, 2007...

And on Aug 15, 2007...

I'll post some more "aftermath" photos as soon as I can.