Life has been interesting here. We
added on to our cabin so we have a separate bedroom. Picking up the
bed and putting it away each day was quite time-consuming and
crowded. Now the bed can stay up. It's also elevated—we're
getting too old for sleeping on the floor! Dusty likes it because
there's enough room she doesn't have to hide in her crate to avoid
getting stepped on!
On our trip to the ranch on Labor Day,
we decided to go out through Medicine Bow, then up the Fetterman Road
(which is marked as a county road but has no winter maintenance. The
photos show how winding and narrow it is. We drove through the fire
area. This fire burned in a mosaic pattern—large areas untouched,
other areas completely black. It was a surprise to me. I had only
seen fires that burned everything like the Coal Mountain fire and the
Casper Mountain fire six years ago.
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| Mosaic burn-Arapahoe fire |
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| Dead trees-Arapahoe fire |
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| Complete burn-Casper Mtn |
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| Complete burn-Casper Mtn |
Speaking of Casper mountain, Sunday
(9/9) the mountain caught fire. I was writing this while watching
the fire on the east end of the mountain from my front door. It was
quite spectacular. The temperature was 90 and we had a 25 to 35 mph
wind. There was little hope of containment. However, cooling
weather on Tuesday allowed the firefighters to slow the spread
significantly. Part of this fire burned in a mosaic, too, though the
east end of the mountain was totally devastated by the fire.
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| Mosaic burn Casper Mountain |
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| Mosaic burn Casper Mountain |
While on Laramie Peak, we got a flat
tire which did respond to fix a flat. The tire had a bad sidewall
and I needed new tires on front, so I bought four used tires on 9/5.
Saturday, 9/8, while heading to the ranch, we went across a cattle
guard and hit a bur on it, instantly flattening the rear tire. After
the inflator failed, we tried fix-a-flat. You know you are in
trouble when the fix-a-flat just squirts out the hole in the tire.
We dragged all the stuff we were hauling with us out of the back and
installed the donut tire. We then repacked the car and began our
slow journey home. Monday thereafter, I bought two new snow tires
and put them on the front, keeping the remaining tire from my
previous purchase for a spare. So much for the new tire idea....
We caught another swift fox in our
critter trap. I don't know if a swift fox is big enough to take on
my ducks, but I thought it's probably no safe for the fox being in
the development. There are too many big dogs. So I took him out to
an open field and let him go. September 15
th we caught
what looked like the same fox! Guess he didn't learn the first time! We turned him loose again.
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| Guess returning was a BAD idea! |
There are a large number of birds
around our place. Wilson's warblers are migrating through. They are
so tiny and cute. When I was weeding the garden, they would come in
and sit a couple of row over and eat seed off the weeds. As long as
I didn't move, they just ignored me. It was so cool! Sunday, there
was a woodpecker in our poplar tree (I didn't get a picture due to
camera failure). There are several species of sparrow and several
meadowlarks here also. One meadowlark keeps ending up in the covered
part of the duck pen. One time the ducks decided to attack the bird
and I stopped them. This did not keep the meadowlark from coming
back, however.
I also did not get a picture of the bittern that landed in our windbreak twice. I have kept watching, but he has not returned. We are a long ways from water, though I do have the tiny, ornamental pond. Maybe in a drought, any water counts.
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| Wilson's warbler |
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| Nighthawk |
The deer are also here sometimes. They
are changing to fall/winter color. Saturday, two fawns were in my
front trees watching me pack my car! Many times they seem to not
fear me at all. Or they like my trees and shade more than they fear
me!
We flipped our old metal shed on its
back and put a pallet floor in it. No photos—things were going to
well to pause for pics! We also finished the other shed, so I have
plenty of storage room now.
October 2: Gardening is over now. In
a typical Wyoming weather pattern, today it's 80 degrees with a red
flag warning (fire danger due to high temperatures and low humidity)
and there is a freeze warning for tomorrow night. Gotta love the
drastic change.
I did not get much from the garden. It
was so hot, there was .4 inches of rain all summer and the weeds ran
rampant no matter how hard I tried. I will take a summer of next
year and try to kill the weeds before gardening again. We talked to
weed and pest and they helped us with a plan to get rid of the weeds
so we can return to gardening.
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| Wild turkeys |
