Sidetracked Charley

Calf Canyon/Kermits Peak Breathing   I am home now. That does not mean the fire which chased me away is out. There are times I think I can hear it breathe. I know where it lives. Where it sleeps when the winds are still. I watch the horizons in the morning as the winds begin to pick up. Every white puff in the sky gets queried. Are you a cloud? Or smoke. Forest fires lie down at night but they are alive in the pine needles covering the forest floor. Alive in the huge log emerging from the melting snow. And alive in the roots of the burned spar above the snow. All it takes is wind to bring them out of hiding and wake up the fire. We have had a quiet few days but the Fire Weather begins again today. A forest fire is not like a house fire on your street. It cannot be drowned out with a pumper full of water. It isn't easily surrounded and watched. The perimeter of the Calf Canyon and Kermits Peak Fire is 600 miles. It covers portions of five counties. It has compromised several state r...

I live in an unincorporated area of Colfax County. Black Lake is a recognized area of that county and the farthest from the county seat of Raton. In fact I am closer to Taos and Mora. I routinely get summoned for jury duty in Mora and have to deline. I do my grocery shopping in Taos. I have been assigned the Angel Fire Zip Code. And get my mail on my rural route through Ocate which is in Mora. My legal address is Black Lake, NM 87710 and because of that Angel Fire Zip code designation everyone from my short term rental agency to UPS and Google tags me with Angel Fire. That actually works in my favor when it comes to short term rental occupancy because nobody books vacations in Raton. Since the coal mines closed they have been slowly dying. The current population of Raton is now 5734, down from 9000 and still declining. Its current source of income is county offices. We drive two hours to respond to jury duty of apply for licenses. Which is what they want me to do. The whole county ...

  I have not liked this this time of year since my mother chose Thanksgiving as her exit time. For years my sister and I would get together for Thanksgiving and haunt all the empty state and national parks. On the 15th my sister left this earth. There goes Christmas. Mother was always afraid of ruining Christmas.  On the 16th we had a snow squall. Sounds innocent doesn't it? My experience with squalls had been sailing on the outer banks. And fortunately I sailed with a cautious and experienced sailor. They were things we witnessed from safe harbors. I now they happen on land and you can sink there too. Red River, Enchanted Forest Cross County Ski Area, and the Town of Taos have already applied for federal emergency relief funds. In fact the whole County of Taos. A friend in Questa reported the power just came back on. Do not get rid of your wood burning stove. And since solar panels fly it might be wise to stay connected to the grid. Yes, it was down but it is now back up. Tow...

Supposedly I am on the last lap of having my apartment ready for short term rental. I had a goal of being ready to take guests on the 1st of April. And per advice attempted a listing on AirBnB as of the 15th of March. Best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns.  After days of building my listing it still insisted it was in Taos, New Mexico. And nothing I could do got the attention of the site managers. Would have been frustrating enough without going through another virtual battle with Lowe's Building site to get a reasonably priced washer and dryer delivered. And then the plumbing issue. And Amazon failed me with their two day delivery schedule going to nine days on the little amenities required to please guests. Oh, did I mention the succession of snow storms. Whatever snow we didn't see in "real winter" we got shoved into a couple weeks in just before spring and after. I truly harbored thoughts of admitting this was stu...

Some decades ago I applied for a job working on an island. A small island.  One with only a couple miles of road. No car needed.  The company provided golf carts. And evidently boats for diving trips just off shore. I had just gotten my open water diving certification and it seemed ideal. Then someone raised the specter of island fever. I had been snowed in most of a winter in a Colorado ski resort and certainly understood cabin fever but don't we all want to be stranded on an island? Besides I would have thirty days twice a year to go back to the mainland USA. And in a moment of stark awareness I realized I would probably spend every single minute of those 60 days driving. Driving has been my way of escape since I was 16. No destination necessary. Just hop in the car and drive. I may have even fallen in love with photography because a camera in the passenger seat gave me an excuse to just drive.  But it doesn't take an island or a snow storm to close you into fe...

Fall approaches. I am not one to go by dates on a calendar. I think it is time for a major readjustment of the Georgian. Living on the land I find I pay attention more to the winds or lack there of or their direction or something as subtle as how they smell. Generally there is a day in mid August when a subtle shift comes and whispers of a change of season. I really have not felt it yet. Others are talking about winter around the corner. Frankly, the far corner. But we are a ski resort historically and everyone starts predicting the winter to end all winters months ahead of time. They want their condos and vacation homes booked for the increasingly shorter ski season. When I began skiing in the late 1960's the ski areas generally opened the weekend before Thanksgiving, and ski instructors and patrol had been on the slopes practicing the week before that. And ski slopes did it without making any snow. And when they closed after Easter it was with snow left on the slopes. And...

Stand up I went to a Carson National Forest Planning meeting yesterday. I confess it has been a long time since I participated in this sort of meeting. Twenty-Five years ago I was deeply involved in saving our forests from clear cutting by logging companies. I lived in Questa and the logging trucks roared down our rural road. One day the brakes failed on one and it tumbled over into my front yard. There is nothing like that to wake you up to where the trucks were coming from and if they even should be on our road. The election of Donald Trump is a bit like that logging truck. It had no brakes, it was suppose to be taking the logs out by another route which was not lined with houses, he was driving too fast. And as it turned out he was clear cutting an area of the forest when his contract said specifically he was suppose to be leaving old growth islands. It was all about making the most money with the minimum amount of effort. I joined an organization called Carson Watch and we w...

I need to take a long lonely drive to Raton to reflect. But life has been rather busy of late and empty road time not on the schedule. Frankly the schedule of late has not allowed a lot of space for reflection in the studio or behind the camera or walking with the dogs. So, oddly enough, I am looking forward to the dentist today. That is an hour drive to Questa through the Moreno Valley and over Bobcat pass and through Red River. And after the dentist it is off to Taos for the passport renewal before returning through Palo Flechado canyon to my side of the mountain. Without the errands and appointments this route is called the Enchanted Circle. For me it is in a lot of ways a passage through the past. I once lived on the other side of the circle in Questa. Red River was a frequent jaunt for work. And I drove the route from Questa to Taos more than I wanted. I hated Taos as much then as I do now. And, in fact, frequently went north to shop in Alamosa, Colorado instead. After l...

Shadows and light in Taos Once again I have been asked about where to live in Taos. And once again I had a difficult time explaining to the friend of a friend that I do not live there. Would not live there. I lived in Taos County for nine years and so wanted to leave that county I was willing to get a divorce to do so. I live on the other side of the mountain now. I try to explain to people how very different this side is. The Mountain Between us We're the wet side. We can drive through the pass to the other side in 45 minutes to an hour. But there is a huge cultural divide between the two sides. Taos was on the Camino Real and settled by the Spanish who took the land from the Native tribes who lived there. Then they enslaved them. The Moreno Valley was settled by miners at Elizabeth town and homesteaders who took advantage of the 1862 homestead act to settle the Black Lake area and the Moreno Valley grasslands. The Trujillos and Torres built huge ranches by blending...

Cattails in the Snow I live in Black Lake, New Mexico. It is five miles south of Angel Fire, 2 1/2 hours from Santa Fe, 45 minutes from Taos, and two hours from our county seat of Raton. And, most importantly at the moment, a 40 minute drive from my post office of record. Ocate Post Office is on the other side of the mountain, and in another county. It has no grocery store, no court house, no feed store, no WalMart, and no UPS store. In short the only reason to go to Ocate is to go to the post office. When I first moved here,14 years ago, we had no mail service. Most of us of Twix, Tween and Beyond Black Lake rented a box at the Angel Fire Post Office. It did not come free because our post office of record (your US government at its best) was in Ocate. The Angel Fire Post Office then was not a government run post office but contract, and fees for boxes got expensive. After some lobby efforts we managed to get rural route delivery three days a week: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday....