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.