Saturday, July 7, 2007

This week has been hot and dry around SpringTowne.
Moving about and keeping the garden alive has been a bit of a challenge, though I am grateful that water restrictions haven't been any more restrictive with the unseasonable heat and dry weather we've been going through since, well, since early March.
There is a big wildfire over the mountain, mentioned below. It was started in the same way as the one back up on the Horseshoe back in '97, with a helicopter and uniformed government types playing with napalm guns. The '97 fire was started late in the season, so it didn't spread much. It was supposed to improve Elk habitat and get rid of climax species such as spruce and other conifers. The only significant result was severe erosion the following summer, along with degradation of our irrigation system that persists to this day, ten years ago. Good old NPS.
Anyhow, the fire raging right now was supposed to be a 'controlled burn' to last throughout the summer, begun on the 28th of June. I don't really know what school of forestry that the managers who decided on this one went to, but no one I've talked to thinks it is a very good idea. It's been upgraded to a 'uncontrolled wildfire status, with fire crews on task to try to get it back under "control" , so that doesn't bode well, though it isn't at all surprising.














Another case in point is the Milford fire that started just yesterday and has burned over 150,000 acres already. Today, we've been under a pall of smoke and ash all the way up here, over seventy miles north.



Who knows. I'd better get the Husky tuned up if I need to countermand my mother-in-law's wishes and cut all of the brush away from her cabin up the road from here. It's just too danged hot and dry this summer.

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