Snow, Wet and Wind

Trapped by weather, am I. Not a new thing so I follow in a long list of those who waited out the weather. Like Polar Expeditions I can do nothing about it but pass the time without going nuts. Unlike Polar Expeditions I am not looking at starvation but the opposite. I could die of a food overdose. Not that I probably won't anyway. That won't be listed as the official cause of death but food tends to cling to me unless I can out-distance it. Even then it runs after me for a while. When I'm home I'll fiddle around in the kitchen. It is a place from which I should ban myself. So I hunker down with put-off reading or construct long musical play lists usually titled Rainy Jazz. And make lists for the next foray to the borderlands.

Searching for the Corner, endroit éloigné

There are technically six corners to the borderlands I have chosen to walk. Four of those corners touch three states, one touches two states, one touches four states. The map to the right illustrates this cartographic fact. (The pushpins are stuck in the actual corners but that is hard to see on a map this size - those are relatively huge pushpins.) All geographic corners are fully packed with much more than the two dimensional turnings of a map, as you would guess.

Wyoming, one of the closest to straight-sided square states, pushes its southwest corner deep into the natural corner of high mountain plateaus formed by the foothills of the north-south trending Wasatch Mountains and the (unusual for the U.S.) west-east trending Uinta Moutains. The legal description coordinate is just a short stroll from a road, hardtop gravel driving northeasterly and paved driving in the opposite direction (blue pushpin). Utah frames Wyoming in this ell, the borderlands there are either in one state or the other.

Some 97 miles due east then 276 miles due south is the quad state corner where Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona surround Utah and tourists can drive to the marked nexus of the cross to put alternate feet and hands in four states at one time, the only place in the United States where this is possible (green pushpin).

The corner for which I now search, where Idaho touches both Nevada and Utah, has no easy access and no tourist signs, no emblazoned cardinal directions and arrows pointing to the otherwise invisible borderlines that radiate from it. Four states touching is freakish, three states a more common trinity. More common and more complex at the same time. Trinities are not easily polarized whereas dualities are by definition polarized: yin and yang, gee and haw, toola rah and toola ray.

That last bit of foolishness comes courtesy of an Easter visit to le Barroux on the southeastern foothills of the Dentelles de Montmirail for what was supposed to be a morning of Gregorian Chants. That particular combination of French geography, historical timekeeping, and aesthetic vibration seemed a worthy trinity for a morning meditation from a former believer turned atheist. But although not recognized, God would still not be mocked, and his robed servants instead provided the full three hour plus service. Good and evil took full sway and the elocution of straight rail benches with steady calls to the naked prayer board made the message, though counterpointed by the French and Latin mass as clear as though through a dark glass: We rejoice to suffer. The chants felt truncated. What few escaped evoked the pure clear water of righteousness flowing from the tree of life. But truly, those brief moments? They were something. The rest was toolah rah and toolah ray

Searching for the Corner, Not Vagrancy

Pointed east and just through an open gate in a fence line I met a white pickup truck. Or parts of it were white showing through a gray-brown coat of dust. It was a Pinto looking truck - not like the Ford model but like the spotted horse model. All the dents, and there were many, had half-moons of dust and rust traced the upper boundary. The drivers'-side window cranked down and two eyes under the bill of a 400-year-old ball cap looked me over.

"You lost?"

And that's how I met the vagrant of Texas Spring. I will call him Larry here, although that isn't the name he gave after we talked for some time back at his camp. Larry was living off the grid and I had to respect that effort. He wasn't totally off the grid as he worked for the county from time to time, grading the rock/dirt roads that meandered through the borderlands and plowing snow off the public routes that eventually ended at somebody's ranch. He had a '58 trailer home - 1958, not 58 foot - squatting at the other end of the ruts by a spring. There was no power or phone line "and no god damn celler phone, either" I learned. No, Larry lived unconnected, thank you. He did have a diesel generator, which he used sparingly to recharge the batteries in his shortwave radio or for other unnamed emergencies.

He drove into Wells "at regular intervals" to pick up any mail sent his way care of General Delivery. The short wave and experience told him when to report for road patrol duty at the county. Scattered ranchers, Sheriffs Deputies and BLM folks turned a blind eye to his minor poaching. "I get along pretty good," he said.

Bank account, credit cards?

"Cash."

What about paychecks?

"Anybody will cash mine out."

TV, internet, Email?

"Not interested."

Jail?

"Some."

Sex? (Now I admit I did not asked Larry directly about his sexual habits. It came up in conversation more gradually and in pieces.)

"I've got some friends. Girl friends. Otherwise, I can get by."

Larry was not the Nevada edition of the Unabomber . He wasn't, it turned out, a great reader, not a great writer. He read some Louis Lamour and liked Max Evans. Larry had even read Evans', The Mountain of Gold, and remembered it. But he also read local history and auto mechanics, stuff he said he needed to know about. He had some political opinions but he was not the radical you might expect for a loner of his quality.

"I'm not particularly obsessive about any one thing. I smoke a little, watch the sky if it's good weather. I've got chores. Things tend to fall apart rather than the other way around so I keep busy."

Larry gave me what turned out to be very good directions and I headed out of his camp still intent on finding the corner I was looking for. When I was about 200 yards away I turned around and looked back. Larry was leaning against the side of his trailer with his arms crossed. He waved.

Searching for the Corner, Diamondfield Jack

Edward Abbey loved to make word songs from map names. One chapter in Desert Solitaire comes to mind in particular partly because Abbey titled the chapter "Tukuhnikivats," which became a mantra for me during rough times, but which at this date also resonates because that area around the Sierra La Sal contains many of the gas and oil leases the Bush Administration will auction off as it gives the finger to us all in its waning days. Abbey's desert is the red rock of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks where the human habitation is the biblically referenced Moab.

Abbey gives attribution and credit to the folk poetry of the pioneers and then goes on for 17 paragraphs of assigned names, the imprimatur of the newest conquerors, the labels of ownership like those new names given to Israelites by the conquering Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar in the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah. Like Nebuchadnezzar, the pioneers were renaming, not naming; claiming ownership from a soon-to-be-displaced population.

And so it is for the landforms of Nevada. Maps of Elko county hold precious few of the ancient names and of the pioneer replacements, too many are bland cliches: Fivemile Gulch, Cedar Mountain, Bald Mountain, Rocky Peak. So when your searching fingertip traces its way across Deadline Ridge your eyes swing up from the map and out onto the landscape. The ridge is a noticeable 400 foot uptick from the surrounding scrubland desert. It runs more-or-less north and south with one or two draws cleaving its flank. The California Trail swings to the south of it, probably more in deference to the water of Goose Creek than to its elevation. Why Deadline Ridge?

It could be a knot on the map string of trail progress, a point to reach by a certain time. Failure to do so might signal coming trouble in the high passes of the Sierras ahead, a backward-looking waymark to future Donner Party candidates? Something to look into.

Some part of the ridge's story is tied to the 1890's, after the railroad made wagon travel on the California Trail unneccesary. Deadline Ridge, it turns out, was the boundary between sheep herders and cattle ranchers. Sheep to the east, cattle to the west of the ridge was the gentleman's agreement between the two factions, and at least one infamous western "character" was hired to make sure the agreement was kept. Diamondfield Jack Davis unfortunately bragged about earning $150 a month shooting sheep herders around the time a double murder was being investigated involving just that. He was eventually caught, tried and convicted of those murders, but his story doesn't end there.

Diamondfield Jack was tried in 1897 in the courthouse in Albion, Idaho, a borderland town near where I went to high school. He watched his gallows being built there but the day before he was slated to be hung he was granted a reprieve on the basis of confessions from two other men who had confessed to the murders but were found innocent of the charges. Then the Idaho Legislature said all executions had to be performed in Boise at the State Penitentiary, so Jack, still under a death sentence, was transferred to Boise. That was in February 1899. By December the Idaho State Supreme Court overruled the legislature and returned Jack for execution on July 3, 1901. But Jack had friends in high places. That death sentence was delayed and the sheriff only found out three hours before the execution was scheduled.

Jack was shipped back to the state pen to serve a life sentence but received a pardon in 1902, moved back to Nevada, made a fortune there in mining and lost it. He finally was killed, in Las Vegas in 1949 - by a taxi cab. Part of Diamondfield Jack's story was featured in season 12, episode four of Death Valley Days on October 1, 1963. He was played by Frank Sutton, the actor who played the nemesis sergeant of Gomer Pyle.

Jack also was remembered by the USGS. Diamond Field Jack Wash quad is a topographic map in Nevada, located at latitude - longitude/GPS coordinates N 39.18742 and W -118.56347 to the north of the Walker River Indian Reservation and quite a ways south and west of where I'm looking at Deadline Ridge.

David Grover wrote a book about Jack subtitled, A Study in Frontier Justice, and has a little different take on Jack's innocence. He also brings in the anti-Mormon and the cattle v. sheep sentiments of the times.

Deadline Ridge. I'll leave the connections to you.

Searching for the Corner, Wild Horses

August 15, 2008

Elko County, Nevada, had 1,505 wild horses in 2003, by count of the Bureau of Land Management. Wild horses are a pain in the ass to modern ranch outfits and together with wild burros were even legislated against back in 1971 in something called the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act. The picture to the right is not my own but was taken by BLM Wild Horse Specialist Shawna Richardson to illustrate the 2003 Elko Resource Management Plan for the four herd areas (HAs) recognized in the county: Little Humboldt, Rock Creek, Owyhee and Diamond Hills. These hosses don't know it but the BLM has a population control program in place.

The official HAs were all west and south of where I now was but straight ahead of me appeared a herd of about sixteen horses and no fence in sight. Their group photo is on the BorderWalking sister blog. They didn't look wild but they were skittish and wouldn't let me close enough to see whether they were shod or showed evidence of having been in the past so I can't say if they were a wild bunch or a domesticated string on holiday. What I can say is you could almost believe in God when you run across horses like these where the sky touches the horizon with no sign of intelligent life, including your own, in any direction.

This will offend the horse people among us but even they will eventually admit the truth that horses are not particularly smart (especially so when they stop defensively recounting the handful of examples that demonstrate supposed exceptions). It isn't how smart a horse is that crowds in on your emotions and puts that catch in your throat when you talk about them after they are gone away - either from you or from everybody - for good. More often, in fact, it is some example of particular knotheadedness rendered in graphic detail at length that begins a story of horse love. Some, but definitely a minority, start with a grudging admiration for skills. But here's the deal: Horses are catlike not doglike. Even the best-trained roping or cutting horse does its work aloof from a rider's supposed control. Even in the most synchronous performance between horse and rider, where they act as one unit, one vector of flow, one couple in a dance of motion, the horse keeps a superior presence apart.

Yes, we worked together well in that but only because I allowed it to be so, the horse all but says out loud. Noblesse pouvoir, rather than noblesse oblige, not a noble obligation but a noble power deigned for human use by a being that could as easily crush. I will dance with you because I allow myself to do so. Sadly, as with so many things, humankind has managed to crush, in their turn, submission from some of these animals but I met none of those this day. This day, alone under the sky, I was allowed into the presence of horse.

Searching for the Corner, Badges

Still August 15, 2008

Silence is one aspect of border walking. Or at least a reduction of human-induced noise. Another is aloneness - you don't usually run into many people or critters. But the Nevada borderlands were about to get almost crowded with both.

As I squatted on the knoll measuring the distances a decked out 4WD appeared, coming up the dirt road very slowly in an apparent nod to its accompanying dust cloud. It had a rack of spotlights on top framed by a pair of blue law enforcement flashers, currently off. I stood up and walked over to my truck which was half in and half out of the roadway. When I parked it, there didn't appear to be any traffic to worry about. The big-tired vehicle coming at me had 'Sheriffs Department, Elko County, Nevada' writ big on the side. It pulled in behind my truck and a large, handsome blond woman got out.

"Trouble?"

So we ended up chatting a bit. She was much younger than I first thought, probably late twenties. Her name was Stephanie and her assignment was to cruise the back roads and do law enforcing and Samaritan rescues. That seemed a bit risky for a young woman but remembering details - when she came around her vehicle to greet me she had her hand casually atop her holster and her thumb on the release snap, she had her knees slightly bent and legs spread a little wider than her shoulders, she moved to a position that kept the sun out of her eyes and more in mine, her smile was big and her eyes without fear - I figured she could probably handle herself. She had also undoubtedly already called in my license plate as she approached.

I told her what I was up to and she seemed genuinely interested and helpful. She thought my GPS unit was pretty cool but also cottoned on to its weaknesses. We spread my topographic map on the hood of her vehicle, which brought it pretty near eye level, and she traced some possible routes to the corner.

"But," Deputy Stephanie said, "I don't think there is a road like this shows that goes that close. You may have to walk it." She offered up a couple of more possible routes and then folded up my map and returned it to me. "Good luck, I hope you get there," she said, and climbed back up to her driver's seat perch, turned on the engine and idled around my truck and down the road to the south. I was alone again, but not for long.

Searching for the Corner, Silence

Returning to Nevada, August 15, 2008...

The dust pulled up by the truck is killer stuff. I have to keep some speed up to stay ahead of the engulfing cloud which is a little tricky on a winding dirt road with no shoulders. I am now lost in the maze and have backtracked two or three times to see if I can't find a road that continues east and south. I am stubbornly staying away from using the GPS unit, which is a hand-held model. I want to see if using the topo alone will work. Besides, every time I have to stop to read the GPS or to get away from the truck so the compass won't be affected by the metal the dust settles - on me.

I finally reached a low ridge where the dust wasn't so bad. There was a round-up corral and uninterrupted views in all directions. I got out and took a water bottle and the digital camera. This is where I got the photo of the beef skeleton in the earlier post. I found a small outcrop and sat.

Often in places like this you expect it to be quiet and are surprised by the insect hum or other background environmental noise. I wasn't surprised to learn that you carry some noise with you - that after driving or riding a horse or running or walking it takes a few minutes for your inner ear and nervous system mechanisms to turn off. When that finally happens the low-range noise around you can crescendo in a startling way. So I waited. Nothing.

In Sedona, Arizona, there are people who believe the earth itself makes a noise, a sound you can hear, a vibration that you can even feel in moments like this. In Taos, New Mexico, it has become iconized as the Taos Hum and can be googled as such. Scientists have recently pinned vibrations to the north Pacific in winter and the Atlantic off Brazil in the summer on wave action in the two oceans.

I was hearing and feeling nothing. Then a very faint whistle of far off wind and more silence. Finally, as if some unseen hand was turning the terrestrial volume knob, the insect noise became discernible, then more wind sounds.

I have to check this out. I don't know if I caught a convergence zone in the waves of sound that canceled them out, or if it was a 40-second nap time for living things and the wind. It was a wonder.

Dispensing with guilt

I just finished Andrew Sullivan's Why I Blog piece in the November Atlantic. And I watched his interview video called Your Brain on Blog that is attached to it. The guy is being driven by his blogging addiction. He says he gets a thousand emails a day. He says he can feel the collective breath of his audience waiting for his next every-20 minutes response. He said when he took some time to collect his thoughts his audience thought he was dead, fired, or muzzled.

That is nuts.

There was another Atlantic article in the July/August issue (yes, I do read other magazines and newspapers, and unlike Sarah Palin I can tell you the names). It was by Nicholas Carr and was called, Is Google Making Us Stupid? with a kicker above: What the Internet is doing to our brains. You may have seen it.

This whole project of mine is about telling stories, about combining new media with history, geography -- with trying to see what comes from walking in places not many people walk. Some of the writing needs and does try to employ journalistic standards - facts (such as they are) not opinions. Some doesn't and I've tried to label different approaches so as to not be misleading.

What happens here are pieces of a longer form. Maybe it will fall under a non-fiction heading. It may turn out to be more correctly labeled as creative non-fiction. Either of those are worth aspiring to. What it isn't is thoughts forced up from a mental stew every 20 minutes, cooked or not.

So if and when you visit here know that. You may want to actually look at some of the older posts, knowing how I'm working this. Or not. You might want to flit off somewhere with fresher roadkill.

Research Paper Hiatus

Work on a research paper is causing a brief hiatus. Will continue posts in the near future. I feel a bit like a slacker because several of my classmates (whose blogs appear on my blogroll) seem able to both keep their blogs updated and do their schoolwork. I can't seem to. I'm struggling to push the development of a new communication model dealing with bias filters in encoding and decoding toward a final thesis and some phase of that, hopefully, toward a dissertation.

Walking the borderlines is a retreat into sanity for me. Writing about it the way I want to write about it here, involves more research. The NW corner area of Utah is open to a large sky and at the same time loaded down with history, dimensional history, that moves in all directions in time. Often what you see on the ground in the time you are walking looks sparse and skeletal as the bleached bones in the photo below. But if you carry with you the perception of past and possible future events there is a pervading sense, if not sight of the small photo above.

Searching for the Corner, Dust

August 15, 2008 - Friday

Driving south on Highway 93 from Twin Falls, Idaho toward Wells, Nevada is hot work in August. The air conditioning in my truck hasn’t worked since I bought it. You pay $3,000, you take some chances.

The map shows a maze of roads leading eventually to the northwest corner of Utah. Or the northeast corner of Nevada. Or the southern border of Idaho where it meets Utah and Nevada. Such tri-part borderlines on a map are mysterious, beckoning. On the ground, especially in the big emptiness of the west, such corners are marked only by an embedded pipe with USGS runes and maybe the butt post of a fence line.

The landscape is open, what movie cowboys might call wide open, and brown shades predominate. All of the shades of brown are washed with a hot chalky white. Even the fault-block battlements, purple in the distance, are striated by chalky veins. The sky, normally indigo or blue-black, is tan.

Turning left from the Highway onto Shoshone Basin Road the truck immediately pulled dust around itself. I stopped to check the GPS. I use a Garmin Colorado handheld and it takes its time coming on, then I have to fiddle with the screen lighting if it’s daylight to see what’s there. I get a fix on my position and orient the topo. Between me and the border is a lot of grazing land. All the dirt roads go to new graze, most to scattered water troughs where the water is hauled in, but the roads are also used by semi’s pulling filled livestock trailers. The roads are rock and gravel based to support the weight in rare rainy weather and to give some permanence to these minor transport arteries. But dust blows in from topside and works its way up from the underbelly. There won’t be a way to avoid it.

Phosphate Mining in SE Idaho Borderlands Targeted

U.S. Water News reports a legal battle shaping up between environmentalist groups and the J.R. Simplot Company over the company's phosphate mining operations in a southeastern Idaho wilderness area just 10 miles from the Wyoming border.

An Earthjustice attorney, one member group of the environmental coalition, said an expansion plan granted by the U.S. Forest Service "is going to turn substantial acreage of roadless land into an open pit phosphate mine." Only the head administrators of the Forest Service, BLM and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne are named as defendants, but the suit is aimed at expanded mining by J.R. Simplot, which operated other phosphate mines along the border of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where all 17 are designated under Superfund status as environmental threats.

The specific site in question is the Smoky Canyon area in the Webster Range at approximately N 42 degrees 44' lat. and W 110 degrees 58' long.

Check out "Sheep Bitch"

There is a new Tall Tails, Damn Lies posting on the fiction sister blog to Borderlands Traverse. I have been promising this story for quite awhile now so I'm understandably cheery about finally getting it written, rewritten and posted. Please take a look and see what you think. Just click on WALK THE LINES, TELL THE STORIES in the Main Links list below right. Warning: the language, as you might guess from the title, has not been sanitized.

Storytelling Along the Way

I just ran across a fascinating reference in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower (2006, Viking, New York, p. 105). Philbrick says on one of their first trips inland from the Plymouth settlement in July of 1621, the Pilgrims ran across a group of local Indians who had been gathering lobsters in the harbor. The natives explained the circular, foot-deep holes that could be seen all along the trail they were following.

The holes commemorated "any remarkable act" and it was the duty of person's traveling the path to keep them in repair and further to tell others what had happened there with the hoped for result that "many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory."

Philbrick goes on to quote (italics) from Edward Winslow's account of Plymouth Settlement about what he felt were the reasons for this. He notes that he and hyis companion on the inland journey, Stephen Hopkins, "began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past. 'So that as a man travelleth...his journey will be less tedious, by reason of the many historical discourses [that] will be related unto him.'"
"

No Snake John ferrets caught in survey

Did receive an email from biologist Brian Maxfield apologizing for missing our connection in the ferret roundup, which I thought I would just share. I was unable to connect Thursday or Friday because I was away from a cell phone so Brian and I are still playing phone tag.

Kris - I am sorry that I never touched base with you. The entire week before the ferret surveys I was in the High Uintas Wilderness area doing pika surveys. I was not able to check my phone until Monday morning. We did conduct the ferret surveys for the entire week. We only surveyed the Snake John Reef area for two nights then moved on to Coyote Basin. The only ferrets we captured were wild-born ferrets so they were not included in the plague-vaccine field trials. We did not actually catch any ferrets in Snake John but we did observe several.

This week the best time to call me would be Thursday or Friday. I will be setting trap lines for flying-squirrels in the mornings and evenings and will be in areas of questionable cell coverage so don't try during this time. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I will be flying during the late-morning through afternoon for mountain goats. As you can tell, this is a very busy time of the year for me. Again, I apologize for not talking with you.


Brian Maxfield
Sensitive Species Biologist
Utah Division of Wildlife Resources

BorderWalkers - New Mother Blog Site

I just finished putting up a new Mother site for the Borderlands Project called BorderWalking. It is the latest iteration of this whole idea. Borderlands Traverse will remain as my personal BorderWalking site and for use as an idea port for other BorderWalkers. The BorderWalking site is designed to carry the narratives of other BorderWalkers. I'm excited to see how it goes.

The photo to the right here was taken on my most recent borderwalk from Franklin, ID going east toward the Naomi Peak Wilderness Area. I was able to complete about 5 miles only because I had to return via the same route to my vehicle. I'll be posting some additional stories about this part of the borderlands and other regions visited during August.

Missed Connections

It happens. My date was a no-show. Or more accurately a no-answer.

Brian Maxfield, sensitive species biologist for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources invited me along on a survey/roundup of black-footed ferrets introduced into white-tailed prairie dog communities. Of the 31 introduced, Brian and his coworkers had inoculated 10 with a serum designed to protect them from sylvatic plague.

That plague, carried by ticks and other small pests, can decimate prairie dog communities and the ferrets that feed on them. Black-footed ferrets only recently made a comeback from the very endangered species list.

Maxfield is away from cell phone service areas most of the time. His work puts him in the heart of country where it can be rare to see humans, let alone cell towers. His office in Vernal, UT, can't get him most of the time either.

I thought about driving out to the Snake John Reef area and looking for headlights that night (the roundup takes place after dark). But anyone who has been in the borderlands around that area knows how futile that would have been.

So I'll have to see the ferrets another time. To learn more about black-footed ferrets check out this website.

The whole trip wasn't a waste, however, as I tracked some additional border points and walked another stretch along Ut/ID. More on that in another post.

Off To Look In On Black-footed Ferrets

I'm heading out to hook up with Brian Maxfield, the biologist with Utah's Division of Wildlife Resources for the black-footed ferret population survey in the Utah/Colorado borderlands. Not sure what the wifi/internet connections are like and I'm taking my laptop with the shaky hard-wired RAM that acts up from time to time. So if you don't see regular posts here for a week or two, that's why.

I also want to stop and and see my partner, Bob Marshall, and also meet Bruce Peterson and his horses before we ride through the Naomi Wilderness border area on the Idaho/Utah line. I'll post if I can or when I get back.

Another Straight-line State... Well, Almost

If you haven't checked out StrangeMaps yet, you really should (The link will stay on the Main Links list). I tune in often but almost missed this July 25 post about a proposed new straight border state back in the '30s. The folks at StrangeMaps were tipped of by some regular readers to a New York Times article that appeared the day before, and the source for the map that appears to the right. The photo at top left is from the Jackson Hole (WY) blog courtesy of the Sheridan (WY) library, and purports to show Ms. Absaroka holding the newly stamped state license plates. We are not told which of the ladies is the title holder.

The Times suggested toward the end of their article that Absaroka may just have been a tall tail so we may have to reassign this to our Tall Tales, Damn Lies sister blog.

But on the other hand we might just dig into this a bit when I return from doing some more border walking. One thing I appreciated was that both StrangeMaps and the NYTs added the pronunciation guide: "ab-SOR-ka."

As someone who grew up in the West with its own pronunciation for words drafted from French and Native American languages I am still smarting from some flatlander I met on the trail in the Tetons. He asked where we had been and I said we just summited Nez Pierce, pronounced without the French overtones as spoken by tribal members where I grew up.

"Oh," he said, "you mean Nay Peer Say."

Well, I didn't mean that at all but he was obviously sincere.

Don't Stick Your Flag There!

As Arctic ice melts and open waters expand, most likely from the effect of Global Warming, territory grabbers are getting itchy fingers. The Russians planted their flag at the North Pole and a lot of other people pretty much said, "Back Off!" So the Brits have drawn up a map to help inform and perhaps ease the conversation.

It was also the British who drew the map of the Middle East after World War I. The borders they came up with were an absolute marvel of arbitrariness and of course went a long way to creating a lasting peace - not. The best recent read on that effort and all the machinations around it is David Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace." Note in particular the straight lines that predominate in the area shared by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Those kind of straight lines don't make much sense when you've got some personally experienced sense of the borderlands. But they do make a nice path for some hairy disputes.

Crossing Another Kind of Border

My good friend and former business partner is about to cross one border that all of us will only cross once. Diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's Disease, he is traveling in the borderland where crossing the line means going from everything we know to everything we don't know.

Most of us don't get to choose that journey. He is one of those who will and has. ALS is incurable, it is a matter of when, not if, you die from it.

Bob was diagnosed a few days after he qualified to run the Boston Marathon. They gave him four years then, it won't be half that. He ran in Boston, finishing near the last with nearly useless arms and shoulders drooping in exhaustion.

Some months ago he agreed to have a ventilator put down his throat into his lungs so he could breath. He has decided to have it removed on a certain day in September. He'll cross that border shortly afterward.

We haven't talked much on the phone lately. Not much really since we sold our newspaper company and his powers of speech were stricken. When they put the ventilator in, Bob had to have them take it out to talk with anyone. It was talk or breathe. He was understandable only to his son Dan and some of his other four kids and his wife Deb. Although his mind is as sharp as it ever was, the muscles that control his speech and most other parts of his body are sapped.

Having a business partner is a crapshoot mostly. I had one of the best. I'm putting some things on hold in about ten or fifteen days to go down and visit him.

When he told me, through Dan, that he had decided to have the ventilator removed on a certain day, all the air seemed to go out of my own body. I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea of knowing that particular border was visible not too far ahead, and that everything across that border was at best a dearly held belief, and even in that circumstance shrouded in the impenetrable blackness of high country in a summer thunderstorm.

How High Are We?

On a return flight to the Northwest yesterday we flew at about 39,000 feet cruising level over four borderlines dividing five states. Not an unusual event for travelers these days. In fact, most national flights will cross many more state borderlines and states.

A few people craned their necks to look out of the window, most didn't bother. On this particular plane with three seats on either side of the aisle, only a third of the passengers actually had window seats anyway, maybe another third could get a partial view from their cramped middle seat.

There were fires in the West, and down below, when the clouds didn't obstruct the view, the young girl in the window seat in front of us asked her father what the long lines of black and gray were. "Probably just clouds, honey," he said, barely looking up from his computer screen.

"Hmmm," she said, and the doubt in her voice was audible.

She continued to look out the window but she didn't ask any more questions.

Naming Names - Tread Softly?

That meeting I mentioned in the last post? Well, I had it - or more accurately, half of it. I spoke to the Executive Director of the organization but the person I really came to see called in sick. That's life. I really hope she feels better soon. I'm hopeful we'll get together shortly and see if there are some mutually shared interests.

If you happened to check the blog between now and yesterday, you saw a version of this post that included this person's name and the name of her organization. I have changed that after giving it some thought.

As explained in the description of this blog it is a beta site, meaning in this case that I am experimenting and learning as I go rather than the technology is being improved as we go along. One of the ideas worth discussing in the back-and-forth of the blog comments is the idea of when to use another person's name and when not to use that name. If you are dealing with a living person there are some things to consider.

One aspect is whether the person is a public or private figure. Public figures, like politicians, movie and rock stars, for example, have entered a public arena. It is logical to assume that the majority of people who write about John McCain or Barack Obama, have not spoken to them directly and received personal permission to use their name. Private individuals being interviewed in narratives for publication are in a different category. If you were the one being interviewed or named you would like to know that fact and also make the decision about whther to include your name.

Between those two extremes is a band of grayer ground. Professors and business people have an expectation of privacy but at the same time if they have high public profiles or published works in the public sector they have less protection than a purely private person. I did not ask Donald Trump or Professor Clyde Bentley (University of Missouri J-School prof) if I could use their name and there is little they can do about the fact that I did other than be irritated.

But, if I intentionally or unintentionally use Clyde's name to boost the value, perceived or real, of an enterprise in which I am engaged without his permission, there is an ethical concern. Plus whatever friendship we have may suffer.

That, really, is why I changed the preceding post to omit personal and organizational names. Until I have received permission or a relationship is formalized, I think such naming is inappropriate. I offer a sincere apology, also, to any parties offended by my action. And although the attached photo may describe the situation with the number of people who actually view this blog in its current unpublicized state, if even one person gets the wrong impression from doing that, I have contributed to playing on someone else's good work.

It is something worth serious consideration when publishing to any online medium.

Hit the Dirt, Make History

I have a meeting tomorrow with a historian extraordinaire and one of the best people you will ever meet. She is allowing me some of her valuable time to explain this project and ask for the endorsement of the organization she chairs at a large western university.

If the organization endorses this project, or if it decides that may not be compatible with everything else on their table doesn't matter as much as being able to talk about it with someone as knowledgeable in her field. She has such a deep and abiding love and knowledge of western American history I can't help but come away enriched. She is the lightning rod for and one of, if not the, founder of a vital new approach to the history of the West. But she is much more. She is a teller of wonderful stories, a crafter of the written and spoken word.

Those of you who elect to traverse the borders and tell those stories here are contributing to a new cut of history. One way to think about the narratives you construct from your experience is comparing them to journals kept by early pioneers and colonizers. Stories, narratives, video and photography that you post here contribute a unique and needed perspective on history. A history being made and shaped in large degree today by this method of participating in recording it.

Home on the Rang....er, Border

Cowboys aren't supposed to own up to this but I have spent time with sheep. Not in the prurient sense of the character in Dirck Van Sickle's Montana Gothic, and not even in Montana. This was in the borderlands country south of American Falls, Idaho.

I worked for a fellow named Barkdahl, and he ran sheep on government grazing in the higher lands above Rockland Valley where Highway 37 goes south. He had some of the best Basque sheepherder-dogs-horse teams that I ever ran into. Those sheepherders all lived out with the sheep in Sheep Camps like the one pictured here. These Conestoga Wagon-looking "camps" were probably among the first travel trailers. They were well equipped and could be pulled from graze to graze over some pretty serious terrain.

When I came up with the idea of walking the western borders I tried to find one to use as a portable base camp but these babies are not cheap these days. You can grab the one in this picture for a mere $35,000. Etsy, the web site with all the info, has some great pictures of the inside of this custom-built sheepwagon. The guy who built this camp, Jimmy Howard, lives in Seattle and displays his rustic art in all the posh western ski towns. I'll have to look him up.

Check out the Walk the Lines, Tell the Stories site too. I plan to put up another Tall Tale there soon. And hopefully some diagrams of sheep camps. In the meantime if you want to get some idea of what it is like to live in a sheep camp check out this true account.

I ended up with a little 16' RoadRunner trailer that isn't nearly as salty as a sheep camp but I got a deal on a new one for about 1/3 the price of Etzy's camp. Maybe I'll through up some diagrams of that, too, and we can compare them to the tried and true Basque floorplan.

Walk the Lines, Tell the Stories

One of my classmates at Mizzou said she wanted to read the Stretch story that used to be posted here but the type was just too small. Part of the reason for that is I had html problems posting it. But she was right.

Then my instructor and online mentor suggested I post a recent class essay, but backpedaled a bit saying the content didn't quite match the focus of the blog.

When Blogspot finally released its long-promised knol I immediately got fired up and published one because I thought it might solve the problem. But almost as immediately I unpublished it after realizing my content and intent didn't quite fit what a knol was about.

I mulled all of this over and came up with a radical new solution - not!

I'm starting another blog related to this Borderlands Traverse blog that will be a repository for the Tall Tales and Damn Lies fictional approaches like Stretch, and other tangential material that doesn't quite fit here. And I'll keep it on the Blog List here at Borderlands. I'm calling it Walk the Lines, Tell the Stories and you can click that link to get to it or go to the Blog List in the lefthand column.

Don't expect daily updates though because it is meant to serve the purposes outlined above.

Sense or Nonsense?

Albert L. Fisher, Geography Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah, penned some strong opinions about Utah's straight borders. In his 1980 article, written for the Journal of the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences, Encyclia, Fisher made the argument that borders should define logical functional and service boundaries rather than be arbitrary political lines.

"It is said that geometric boundaries are used when there is ignorance of the land or people or both," Fisher wrote, not saying who he might be referring to as the quote originator, but you get the idea that it might well have been him. His article is not available online but it goes on to make some well-reasoned arguments in detail for redrawing the internal county boundaries for that state, also mostly "geometric." He ends with the revolutionary thought that those boundaries should not be fixed and rigid at all but "bend or be removed according to need." He sounds like a man worth a visit.

The full title of Fisher's article is "Boundaries and Utah: Sense or Nonsense?," and appears on pages 127-133 of the 1980 Encyclia. It is definitely worth a read if you have a research library within reach.

Border by Brigham

Most folks know that Mormons settled Utah. They arrived in 1847 led by Brigham Young. Young and his religious followers were and are many things to many people but this leader's role as a colonizer finds few peers.

Young and the Mormons had been driven out of Illinois, Missouri and other areas of the Eastern States after their original prophet-leader, Joseph Smith, was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Young was determined to create a sanctuary where he and his followers could worship and live as they believed.

When they arrived in the West most of it below the 42nd Parallel belonged to Mexico. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican War ceded what is now Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and California to the United States. Young wasted no time and proposed the Provisional State of Deseret in 1849.

As seen from the map here (taken from a version developed by Dale Morgan (1947) and published in Rocks, Rails and Trails by Paul K. Link and E. Chilton Phoenix) the boundaries of the proposed state covered most of the Great Basin and Colorado River Drainage. Young used these natural watershed borders as logical boundaries and extended the eastern borders to the Continental Divide south to the Gila River and to the western coast south of present day San Diego. This southern border paralleled the northern Mexican border of that era.

Young was also economically astute and included and ocean port within the boundary before it moved west along the eastern drainages of the Sierras and the northern Great Basin watersheds including that of the Bear River. This marks the first and only time this kind of boundary-making was officially registered for statehood in the U.S. But it was not to be.

With the Compromise of 1850 California was admitted to the Union (although technically created in 1849) and the Territories of New Mexico and Utah were created. Oregon Territory was created in 1848 and the proposed Deseret would have encroached on some of its southern border.

As an official territory, Utah was unlike its neighbors in that it kept a separate, church-sponsored active legislature and government as Deseret with its official one until 1880. It tried three more times to gain official state recognition failing each time in the face of national distrust of Mormon Church wielded government power and the now in-the-open church practice of Polygamy.

By gaining statehood first, Colorado and Nevada started nibbling away at Utah Territory in 1861. Nevada would take two more bites and Colorado and Wyoming got their chunks before Utah renounced the practice of polygamy and was able to reassure congress that the Mormon Church would be kept at a respectable distance from direct involvement with state government. In 1896 Utah finally achieved statehood with the borders as we see them today.

Straight Lines and Square States

One of the challenges of traversing our state borders is their unnatural straightness in so many places. Those straight lines are the result of many influences but probably first among them is that mariners and mapmakers were able to fix latitude before longitude. Most charters in colonial times fixed northern and southern borders of the first colonies by declaring a line of latitude. Since no one at the time had a clear idea of what the land was like to the west, that border was often vaguely defined or extended "to the western oceans," as in the case of Virginia and Connecticut. In later years after independence, congress made boundary decisions based on many factors including slavery and polygamy. The Missouri Compromise brought Missouri and Maine into the Union at the same time, the former as a slave state, the latter as a free state. It split the Louisiana Purchase into a northern and southern division at 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude with any future state except Missouri to be a free state and any future state south of that line to be slave. I tagged that latitude on the map above. It tracks from Virginia (just south of Virginia Beach) and was used as the border between Virginia/North Carolina, Virginia/Tennessee until the Cumberland Gap, Kentucky/Tennessee, Missouri/Arkansas, Kansas/Oklahoma, Colorado/New Mexico, and Utah/Arizona. All of these borders, it's true, don't track exactly at that latitude, but it was the guide and it is a strikingly continuous dividing line across the U.S. to Nevada. That latitude reaches the west coast near Monterey, California.

When California petitioned Congress for statehood toward the end of 1849 it was an 'island' in the West with no neighboring states. But the Gold Rush had made some folks there wealthy and with the wealth came power. Henry Clay, the U.S. Senator from Kentucky who crafted the Missouri Compromise, together with Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, senators from Massachusetts, South Carolina and Illinois respectively, led debates that resulted in a series of bills called the Compromise of 1850. This gave Californians the right to choose free or slave status and did not apply the Missouri Compromise to the territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona or Utah. It also was, with the Dred Scott case, a festering issue that contributed to the Civil War.

Utah, after some royal yet visionary ideas about its own borders, was gradually chewed down to its current boundaries by the penchant of post Civil War Congresses for admitting states around it that did not subscribe to the practice of polygamy. More on this aspect of the Borderlands in the next post.

Planning Another Chunk of Border Traverse - By Horse

Plans are shaping up for what will be the first piece of border traverse by horseback. I'll be riding with a local man through the Naomi Wilderness and Wasatch-Cache National Forest in mid-August. This chunk of the Idaho-Utah border runs about 10 miles between Franklin, Idaho and Bear Lake, which straddles the border.

Planning a traverse by horseback is taking some thinking and planning. When I originally conceived the idea of the Borderlands Project I briefly entertained the idea of doing it all on horseback or with a mule or even llama. Then I read Tim Moore's hilarious Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago, about his traverse of the Pyrenees pilgrim route. Even though Tim ended up loving the donkey in the end, so to speak, it was the proverbial pain most of the way.

I have heard that llamas make great pack animals but I couldn't figure out how to do the endless transport necessary for my approach to hopscotching the borders. Someone doing them will hopefully use them and tell us all how it works out.

Stories, Tall Tales and Damn Lies

Traversing the borderlands, talking with the people who live there, you hear a lot of good stories. Some of those stories are for reporting and some are for telling. We collect both kinds here but so we don't confuse folks, we will put them in different places and clearly label them. I've attached a sample in the lower left hand column of the blog.

BTW, when you are talking about western things it is always good to know something about western gear, like saddles for instance. This Parts of a Saddle shows the saddle tree before the leather is fitted and attached. This Western Saddle shows a finished western saddle with its clothes on.

The Border By Horse

Some time ago I told my dentist about my idea for the Borderlands Project. His family is from a borderlands area in southeastern Idaho near Montpelier, where I used to own a small community weekly newspaper.

My dad would love to do this, he told me. So I got his dad's email address and eventually sent him an invitation. I heard back from him last Thursday.

"Yes," he answered. "I'd be interested in participating. I've never been out in the area near the UT/ID/WY border, so that would be interesting."

Then he added, "Any chance that I could ride a horse? I have a knee that has been acting up which may limit the distance that I could walk." So, we are now in the process of working out how to do some border stretches on horseback. This will add a different set of challenges than walking or boating the borderline but horses are about as eco-friendly a means of transport as you can get.

It also turns out that my riding companion is an electrical engineer with a Ph.D. who has years of experience in academia, nuclear power, and the space industry. He even knows who the Cassinis were! And better still, he is currently designing landing systems for aircraft that make use of GPS satellites so I'm hoping he can help me more accurately orient my handheld GPS unit more accurately to the border line.

This is shaping up to be a good traverse. I have a little experience aboard a horse, which you can read about in Summer Stretch, at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. It is a little story I did about the cowboy days of my youth.

Making Some Adjustments

Yesterday I spent some time with Cynthia Mitchell, a good friend, ex-Wall Street Journal reporter and current Assistant Professor of Journalism at Central Washington University talking about the Borderlands Project. She had a number of good suggestions that I hope to implement over time and one explained below that I have already taken some steps on.

She asked me several times about the name I chose for the company I have created to eventually handle the technological and project management aspects of the Borderlands Project. Since I have taken a lot of pride in assembling the name, I explained, at length I'm afraid, about the famous French Cassini family of astronomers and scientists who, among many other projects, spent several generations mapping France. NASA chose the family name for the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, which is currently sending back data and pictures for the Saturn and Titan Mission. I spent more time explaining that my last name originally had no "e," that "Passy" was the original French spelling, and that Frederic Passy was a French economist and peace activist who won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with Jean-Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross, and blathered on some more.

Turns out that wasn't her interest.

It doesn't smell right, was basically what she told me.

Huh? was pretty much my response.

It sounds like a consulting firm and there is no one named Cassini who is involved. Some people might think you're trying to pull one over on them, was the gist of her feeling.

Coming from any other friend I probably would have blown this off. After all, I had envisioned more employees than myself in the future, or subcontracting certain aspects of the work -- the associates -- and wasn't sure that using the name of a famous dead guy (Cassini) would be a problem. I can name one or two other companies that use the name of dead guys who don't actually work their. I don't think Cassini's descendants have been out trying to pull their name off the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft and I never heard of anyone walking around NASA asking for the Cassini guy to interview but I haven't verified that with the folks at NASA. I also don't remember reading about Ben Franklin's descendants asking for their name to be pulled off company nameplates across the country. I could be wrong on that.

But this was, after all, a former Wall Street Journal reporter so I told her I would test her reaction, which is what I am doing here and inviting comments. I also took the company name out of prominent display in the blog name and added more disclosure in the introduction. My altruistic purpose for including it there in the first place was an attempt to distinguish it from the hundreds of other borderland projects that have to do with immigration issues.

Incidentally, the way I found out about the Cassini family's involvement in the mapping of France was reading Graham Robb's fascinating book, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. The map-making of the Cassinis is also discussed in an older map classic by Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps. And finally, an English language account cited by Robb is worth checking out if you are interested, Cartography in France, 1660--1848, by Josef W. Konvitz.

Seeing With New Eyes

The Borderlands Project is one way of looking at the world around us through different eyes. The idea is that by actually traversing the borders themselves we'll have viewpoints that are different from just imagining the borders. The project also encourages the gathering of data of all kinds, waypoints and routes, reporting on issues connected to the borderlands, stories about the people who live there, the animals, plants, even the rocks and soil. As the project progresses all of this data together will produce a map, what author William least Heat-Moon called deep mapping. It is possible to visualize this in many ways: with words, drawings, photographs, even sculpture, and plays, academic research.

I just ran across one of the most amazing examples of the power of seeing things differently at a website called Visual Complexity . There are some 600 "maps" there that use data in a very graphic approach. Click through the different examples and I think you'll see what I mean.

Visualizing An Acre-Foot of Water

Aaron Million, the man talking about piping water from the borderlands around Flaming Gorge in Utah, or alternatively the Brown's Hole area of Colorado, to the Front Range cities like Ft. Collins, Denver and Pueblo, says the pipeline will move between 165,000 and 250,000 acre-feet of water. How much is that exactly?

An acre foot is one acre covered by one foot of water. An acre is 660 feet by 66 feet or 43,560 square feet. A football field is 300 feet by 160 feet, not including the end zones, or 48,000 square feet so it can give a good visual approximation.

This isn't nearly as spectacular as the stuff on Visual Complexity, but it does give a simple visualization of how much water Million is talking about. The Colorado River Compact divides 15 million acre feet of water per year to various western states. The graphic was prepared by Passy Cassini & Associates.

Water - Even When It doesn't Rain - Reigns

A random sample of acquaintances (they are used to being subjected to my quirky polls) shows only the vaguest notion of where their tap water comes from. In my years publishing community newspapers I have found this to be the norm. Water is something most of us take for granted.

But water doesn't get to your tap without a mind-boggling amount of planning. In the arid western U.S., that is multiplied exponentially. Unfortunately most regular folks, if they have any notion about how cities get their water, base it on Roman Polanski's 1974 movie Chinatown. They know there is subterfuge and money involved and big spans of time - which in todays world means anything over four years.

Actually, water systems are developed over decades, quarter- and half-centuries. Years have been added to the total since the 70s addition of environmental regulations. Building a major new dam or reservoir is a 50-year project with many hurdles to clear along the way.

In the meantime people keep coming to places in the western U.S. that had precious little water in the first place. And they expect water to come out of the tap when they turn it on. (A side note: water experts, but not usually the general population, understand the water 80/20 rule of thumb: Agriculture uses, on average, 80 percent of any water supply.)

The big river systems have traditionally been original water sources. These rivers and their feeding watersheds also don't fit neatly within state borders. Even when a river itself is the borderline, feeder streams enter from both sides.

The instrument of choice to deal with this has been the "compact," a multi-state or multi jurisdictional instrument used to share the water. The compact that holds sway in the proposal to pipe water from Flaming Gorge to the Front Range cities of Colorado is the Colorado River Compact. Within that are two major subdivisions, the Upper Basin, dealing with Colorado, Utah, wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona; and Lower Basin, dealing with California, Arizona and Nevada. The Wikipedia article linked above contains reliable information in its general overview of the compact. The Bureau of Reclamation lists the various laws relating to the system's rivers.

When you walk the borderlands rest assured that anytime water crosses your path, there are a depth of stories and some very interesting people to meet.

GPS Glitches - Anyone Know What Gives?

I'm hoping someone out there will at some point be able to explain the apparent GPS glitches regarding where state borders show up on Garmin's MapSource software. My on-the-ground Map Points do not agree with the location for those borders in MapSource. For instance, MapSource shows the Wyoming/Utah border point where US Highway 191 crosses just east of Flaming Gorge at N41 00.718 W109 25.397. My on-the-ground map point, reading the border from my Garmin Colorado 400t at 80 ft. showed it at N41 00.718 W109 25.534, a difference of about .1 mile. That's a lot.

When I marked the border near the "notch" of Wyoming and Utah my on-ground reading was N41 00.519 W111 02.814 and MapSource shows the point at N41 00.553 W111 02.726, a difference of 206 feet north/south error and again, about .1 mile error east/west. So, any geocachers out there know what's going on here? I'll see if I can track this down myself but I would appreciate any help.

Water, Water Everywhere? Not in the West

Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area straddles the Wyoming/Utah border. Its reservoir runs some 91 miles and holds almost 4 million acre feet of water behind the dam on the Green River. The Green, with headwaters in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, flows east from the Flaming Gorge Dam and crosses into Colorado, turns south and re-enters Utah via the spectacular Canyon of Lodore. Butch Cassidy frequently camped in this area, known as Brown’s Hole or Brown’s Park, as did other rustlers and outlaws of lesser renown. Aaron Million, though, wasn’t interested in rustlers.

Million is behind a $4 billion plan to pipe water from the Green River to the Front Range population centers of Colorado. The best in-depth balanced article on Million and his plan that I’ve run across was written by Allen Best in October 2006 for ColoradoBiz Magazine. I will do my best to outline pertinent pieces of it here as we go along.

Million has a big dream for solving one of the longest standing problems in the arid West, where water has and still can cause wars. He has been campaigning and presenting for almost five years now and has – as is usual with water issues – many supporters and many foes. This is one of those major issues that needs deliberation, careful thought and exploration. Just the kind of thing for borderland walkers to bring out in posts about their experiences.

What Am I Seeing?

It’s just a guess but I’m betting most people who track this site or decide to participate by walking and reporting on some borderlands areas are map freaks. What can be better than a good map? So any info on various map types would be a welcome addition.

You don’t have to be a veteran map freak to know that there are maps that can give you all kinds of information, show not just where you are but what you’re seeing. Of course, the right map for the right job is a good idea. I only mention this because my geologist father-in-law often tries to navigate with his geology maps when we are on road trips. We have had near-death experiences looking for "the road that goes through this Ordivician outcrop."

I mentioned “Ecoregions” in an earlier post. At first glance Ecoregions appear to have similar boundaries with topographic groupings – where the boundary line is drawn to group similar topographic features.

Ecoregions, as the name obviously suggests, group by ecosystem similarities and include things like plant and animal life, soils and also topological features that together have connected impacts on a localized area’s unique existence. The Environmental Protection Agency uses these spatial boundaries to direct and monitor research and actions that affect the environment.

There is an obvious and stark contrast to anyone who walks the state borders between those often straight-line borders and the borders of ecoregions.

Here is the main link to Ecoregion Maps in pdf format. Note that print versions are available.

State Ecoregion Maps
Colorado
Idaho
Nevada
Utah
Wyoming

Did Miss Kitty Sleep Here?

Dinosaur, Colorado is one of those border towns most folks drive through without realizing it has come and gone. Even with its one-of-a-kind name, Dinosaur is not a destination resort stop. When I was a kid riding in a 1948 Chevrolet we always stopped here for radiator water. No need for that these days.

But on this day I noticed a fancy new state tourist office just back from Highway 40 and I wondered if they sold fishing licenses, so I went in. Well, plus I had to see a man about a horse, you know.

The gal behind the counter turned out to be chatty and seemed friendly. I asked her about the ranch house I’d seen that seemed parked just inside the Colorado border. I was angling to get the names of the owners so I could ask for permission to cross any of their land that might straddle the line.

Oh, she said, you mean the K Ranch?

I allowed that I probably did. I find it regrettably easy to drop into almost any local vernacular.

Why sure, she said. That’s Mike and Norma’s place. Well, it isn’t but they manage it, you know. Say, did you know that Amanda Blake, you know, Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke owns that place? Well, of course she’s dead now but I mean, so her estate must, or family, or the like, you know.

So I drove out to Mike-Norma-Miss Kitty-Miss Kitty’s family place. The driveway was long and dusty. Not a driveway really, more like a mile or so of dirt road.

A spry looking silver-blue haired woman opened the door when I finally got past the yard dogs. She looked up straight into my eyes.

No, she answered my question with a pleased laugh. Norma’s my daughter and Mike’s off into town doin’ whatever. I explained my mission. She looked down at my Croc®-clad feet and then back up into my eyes. You best ask Mike on that, she said, but she smiled.

So I got a phone number and an address and when it comes time to walk north from Highway 40 I’ll be calling Mike to see if he’ll join me. Or better yet, he and Norma and Norma's mother. My research so far on Miss Kitty has not turned up any ownership records for the K Ranch but some darned interesting stuff on Miss Kitty.

I’d like to see what Mike knows about what those town folks in Dinosaur are saying about his land.

K Ranch from the air

Snake John Reef can also be seen on this map. Go south from the ranch and check for the uplift feature running from the northwest to the southeast. The Colorado/Utah border runs north and south in a straight line just to the west of K Ranch.

Black Plague Update

The empty white-tailed prairie dog communities around Snake John Reef on the Colorado/Utah border may not be as empty as they appeared.

I contacted sensitive species biologist Brian Maxfield with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources today. He thought the communities were doing pretty well.

Maxfield speaks like a man dedicated to his profession and someone who knows what he is about. He added some new information to the more dated reports we recently commented on here.

Maxfield told me his team released 31 black-footed ferrets into the Snake John Reef area rather than the 10 noted in the Deseret News story, 10 of which had been inoculated with the sylvatic plague vaccine.

Badgers and coyotes, who also inhabit these borderlands, are more likely to decimate larger prairie dog communities than ferrets, he said. The black-foots will move to another colony long before their food supply diminishes to a critical point.

I was happy to learn that prairie dogs have not been neglected in the fight against sylvatic plague either. Maxfield said an oral vaccine has been developed that can be spread over feeding areas and ingested by the dogs. Tests for that vaccine are ongoing and as yet inconclusive.

I also learned from Maxfield that all these vaccine tests are actually under the direction of the U.S. Army, which he said handles all plague research. He also said it was the U.S.G.S. that got his research data first.

Maxfield said he was currently busy working on a study of flying squirrels in the Uinta borderlands area so he had been spending his days in higher country lately. The Northeast Regional Office of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources will conduct a “poll” of the black-foots at Snake John Reef in August and I wangled an invitation to tag along. The teams begin after nightfall looking for what Maxfield called eyeshine. When they catch a ferret they identify it by virtue of a subcutaneous tag implanted earlier and log its health data.

I hope Maxfield is right about those prairie dogs being okay at Snake John Reef. I will be able to make a personal report after my August ride-along. All I have now is the attached video (No Dogs) of the empty mounds. Compressing the file to fit here as video compromised its clarity, but you should be able to see what I mean.

I also admit I’m a little worried when I hear that yet again their distant cousins are getting more attention.

Black Plague and Snake John Reef

Nobody was home.

It was a huge community -- signs of construction everywhere. And yet no eyes looked out, no sounds of alarm, no watchers.

The east side of this part of Snake John Reef on the Colorado/Utah border showed not a living prairie dog watching from any of the hundreds of burrows scattered across the dry grasslands when I walked this area during the last of May this year. Finding out why is one of the rewards of walking these borderlands.

It turns out parts of Utah, Colorado and other western states have been experiencing an uptick in sylvatic plague, what a Utah State biologist called "the prairie dog version of the black plague" (Deseret News and Utah Wildlife Division).

Prairie dogs, though, are low on the social ladder for ranchers and others who scrape a living from these parts. The white-tailed dogs Cynomys leucurus that inhabit this section of borderlands apparently haven't risen much higher. The furry barkers are related to squirrels but are basement dwellers unlike their high rise cousins. Horses and cattle can break a leg crashing through the rooftops and worse, these dogs eat grass. There's not much of that to go around.

It's not all bad news out by Snake John Reef though, thanks to some other, more highly esteemed residents. Those would be the once "most endangered mammal on earth," the black-footed ferret, which, incidentally, has a singular appetite for prairie dog. That means the ferret also gets the plague.

The rarity of the ferret merited a special effort to develop a vaccine that would keep it from being wiped out. The 16 fortunate prairie dog colonies in the Snake John Reef area were blessed to have the company of 10 black-footed ferrets, half of which were vaccinated, half not. The idea was to see if the vaccinated ferrets beat the plague. The prairies dogs were apparently not consulted.

On both sides of the fenceline that tracks the state border are vacant mounds. Ferrets are nocturnal critters and a watcher wouldn't expect to see any in the daylight hours. But the neighborhood would have a guard dog yipping a warning in strategic locations, and a few gleaners scurrying through the grass and saltbush.

That day there were no yips, no watching eyes, no furtive dashes for cover. Just the wind at Snake John Reef.

To be continued...

Which GPS unit to use?

A good GPS handheld unit is critical to borderline traverses. The whole idea is to walk the border in a line that matches the border itself, recording way points as a verification. These borderline walks are far from easy, especially on straight line borders that make no leeway for the topography or plant life and rivers. Some variations are inevitable but the idea is to stay on the borderline itself as accurately as possible and record some of the difficultieis in doing so. Here is a link to one of the best sites I've run into for analyizing GPS units. GPS There are some others and hopefully readers will add their own comments on their own experiences with various models.

Map Mystery

The comedian Stephen Wright once told an audience he had the most accurate map in the world. "But it is a 1:1 scale so it takes a very long time to unfold."

Maps are a key component of the Borderlands Project. Together with a good GPS unit they are one of the necessities...right up there with a good snake-bite strategy. In the age of satellite photography and Google-Earth we have come to think of ourselves as the proud possessors of the most accurate maps in the world. But are we?

Check out the picture of the Marshall Islanders map on this page. It is reproduced from a 1938 edition of General Cartography by master topologist Erwin Raisz. It is constructed from shells and sticks that partly provide support and partly show the prevailing curvature of the wave fronts. These island voyagers used this sort of map to traverse the expanse of ocean that separated their island destination points.

Another insight into the diversity of map making and way finding can be found in the description by Eric Hansen of his experience in the rain forests of Borneo (Stranger in the Forest). Hansen had a map, the kind most of us are familiar with, but had extreme difficulty getting his guides to tell him exactly where they were or how long it would take to get to the next camp. His Penan guides (a forest tribe highly regarded for their abilities in the Borneo rain forests) navigated by the direction of streams or by where a certain vine grew on a tree, they told him. Hansen measured the journey in hours and minutes and the difficulty of the route. His guides measured the journey by how good the hunting was. For instance, if the hunting was good in an area it may take them five days to traverse it because they spent time tracking and hunting. If game was scarce they might traverse the same route in a day or less to get to where the hunting was better. The route also depended on mood or need so a reference to a destination "not too far away" may relate to it being a place where good tobacco could be secured from a friend. The fact that it took five walking days was not a factor.

Motorized or not?

We have had some input on whether motorized conveyances are acceptable for traverse teams. The guidelines currently ask for non-motorized transport. This is meant to encourage both a closer connection to the boundary country and more eco-friendly traversing. The guideline is also meant to make getting permission from property owners easier to secure.

Who owns the West?

Common wisdom has it that the West is owned mostly by the Federal Government in one or another of its forms. While this is true for the most part western land ownership teams who traverse the state borders will find that a surprising amount of that land is in private hands. Contacting owners for permission to cross private land is a tenet of the Borderlands Project. That means in many cases finding out what land specifically is public and what is private. It also means finding out who those owners are.

The United States Geological Survey publishes what are called Surface Management Status maps in 1:100,000-scale topographic versions that show land ownership (maps). This link is the best search-able site on their website. Click on the state then type in Surface management status.

When teams need to drill down further for specific owners and property divisions, they will need to contact the county assessor's office for the county along the border they are traversing.

Center of the American West

The Center is associated with the University of Colorado Boulder. One way to think about its work is to make a list of all the issues that affect living in the West that the perfect western Governor would really have to know about to do a great job. Many of these issues are unique to the West or unique in how they play out in this part of the country. The Center brings people together in a variety of ways for dialogue on those issues with the idea that it will lead to better policy and better living.

No Video...But Watch Out Up The Road!

I wanted to attach or at least link a video record of a sample traverse done on the Utah/Colorado border where U.S. Highway 40 crosses. But I haven't yet figured out the how-to so I'll just post some narrative about it. I did this traverse in May of 2008 traveling from north to south on the following waypoints moving from start to finish of the traverse:

N40 16.385 W109 03.052
N40 15.978 W109 03.056
N40 15.736 W109 03.059
N40 15.596 W109 03.056

I was able to set the second waypoint directly on a USGS Survey Cap.

The video I made was a pretty horrible first effort. It could have been tightened up with a voice-over narrative but I wanted to present a sample as close to the actual video filming as possible. I did do minor edits but it was still long and rambling. Probably better to chalk it up to a learning experience.

Post # 1 - What's going on here?

I have begun this blog under the auspices of my newly formed company, Passy Cassini & Associates, but it may not end up that way. I am a recovering journalist and newspaper owner (small weeklies and business journals in the western states). This blog is part of my desire to do what I love in a different way. The idea of Traversing Borderlands is to record the experiences of many people who will hopefully answer the challenge of traversing the actual borders of our country's states and will record their experiences here and on a companion website.

The idea grew out of an old notebook entry I found in my idea file during the gray period after selling my newspapers as I was wondering what would come next. The scribbled entry simply said, "walk the borders of a square state."

Of course there aren't really any square states. I must have been thinking about Wyoming or Colorado, the two that come the closest. But I started to dig into the idea and became more intrigued as I did.

Western states in particular, but not exclusively, stand out on a map for their straight lines. Who decided, and why, to drop these straight lines on the borders. What kind of consequences did and does that have for people, plants, animals, resources, businesses, watersheds -- the whole range of entities that populate and are affected by the borderlands? Was there any rhyme or reason to it at all?

I started to think also about other areas of the world -- the Mideast in particular -- where the relatively recent drawing of arbitrary borders has had far-ranging consequences. And that borders aren't just geographic but social, political, psychological, intellectual, linguistic -- it goes on and on.

As a 30-plus year journalist and struggling owner for the past ten years, I was also frankly burned out on the news business as it is. But I am still impassioned about what it could be. The traditional definition of news, how we track it, who gets to create and distribute it, how it gets subsidized (some might say bastardized) by total dependence on advertising -- this stuff kept kept knocking up against the interests of real people I talk with every day.

The old news paradigms also seemed contrary to how real people actually learn about the things that are important to them.

I have been intrigued by William Least Heat-Moon's description of his book, PrairyErth." He called it a "deep map" of Chase County, Kansas. That is how I envision Traversing Borderlands.

I'm new to blogging and the community out there, unmet as yet. But I think this first post is too long already so I'm going to close now and add more in following posts. I'll include the preliminary outline of how the project works, sponsors, all of that. But in the meantime I'll be interested to see what kind -- if any -- input comes this way. I believe Traversing Borderlands could be a mother lode for deep mapping.

bt+editor