Category: Photos

How the Heat Wave Ended

~ fern-seed ~ Leave a comment

The heat was oppressive for at least two weeks, and by the time we got to September, we’d grown almost used to the constant smoky tang in the air, the haze of numerous wildfires burning throughout Colorado wafting into our area. And then we started seeing this sort of thing on our weather apps:

File this under: WTF?

That’s a pretty radical temperature change, even for our area. So, we spent the holiday weekend winterizing our campers and covering the garden beds, taking several breaks to escape the heat as best we could. By Monday afternoon, I felt too hot and tired to do much else. By late afternoon, the wind started to pick up and the air to cool ever so slightly, so I went out to my little unfinished garden and covered the plants as best I could. The sky was so hazy that the sun going down looked a little ominous.

Hang in there…

By morning, it was snowing steadily, but the ground was so warm from the weeks of heat that it didn’t stick to the roads until late in the evening, and the house was still so warm that the heat never kicked on until midday yesterday. We ended up with five or six inches of snow covering the ground and weighing down tree branches. I’m not sure what my garden beds will look like when I finally go out to check. My broccoli had just started to sprout:

Tiny head of broccoli. Fingers crossed that it’s survived.

I’m hoping to salvage at least one head after all this. But if not, I’ll just chalk it up to life at 7,400 feet, and start earlier next year. I’m also going to do some indoor gardening in my little sunroom this winter. Maybe I can get some broccoli that way.

This morning, there’s still snow on the ground, and a dense fog has rolled in.

But it’s warming up. By the weekend, daytime temps will be back in the 70s, and we’ll have a few weeks of autumn. Fall in Colorado can be fleeting, but it sure is fine.

Hopefully, this odd early storm will help get all those fires under control. And hopefully, my garden has survived.

High altitude garden: a work in progress.

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I used to have a large garden when we lived in Pennsylvania. My husband, Mr. FS let’s call him, built me eight large, raised beds with a wooden slat fence all around it, and I had a few years of gardening bliss until we had to move back to Colorado, where I figured I’d never have much success. It’s a shorter growing season, and the weather is just generally harsher. Also, my neighbors all seemed to have either gardens they’d abandoned or gardens that the local wildlife ate more out of than they did.

But then COVID happened, and we found ourselves at home a lot more, and we also began to wonder how scarce some things could potentially become after watching the nation in general DISSOLVE INTO UTTER CHAOS over the slightest possibility that they might run out of toilet paper. And then there was that month when all the chicken got hoarded. I’m not quite sure I ever saw the produce department emptied out, but I did notice that things started to rise in price. During World War II, everyone planted Victory gardens. Today, everyone’s planting COVID gardens. If ever there was a time to give high altitude gardening a try, it was now.

So Mr. FS said: if I built you some raised beds, would you consider a garden this year? And I said: sure, but I’m going to want you to build me some beds that are well protected from the deer. And the rabbits. And the moles. Basically, I didn’t want to put in the effort and then watch all the woodland animals eat everything before we could. So we drew up some rough plans on the whiteboard in what used to be our homeschool room but has evolved into Mr. FS’s home office. We came up with what I like to call raised bed fortresses. They’re 4 by 4 foot squares, with 5 foot fencing all around and two doors on each side. I also asked Mr. FS to line each bed with gopher wire underneath the dirt so that rabbit and moles (which we have plenty of around here) couldn’t dig underneath the wood to get in that way, and we added two layers of chickenwire on the tops to hopefully deflect any overly large hailstones. We had one hail storm in June that ripped a lot of the young plants to shreds, but since then, they’ve recovered nicely.

Mr. FS and our two Saplings, constructing a Raised Bed Fortress.

So, I’ve spent the summer learning how to garden at 7,400 feet. It snowed on June 9, and we had that hail storm, but other than that, it’s been okay. We’ve enjoyed the project, and now have plans to expand quite a bit next year. I forgot how much I loved gardening. I can spend hours out there just puttering around, whether I’m planting or weeding or harvesting something. Or maybe I didn’t forget. Maybe I just didn’t let myself think about it too much — how much I missed my Pennsylvania garden. Mr. FS is happy for me, and also happy to eat fresh homegrown vegetables once again.

Not sure what’s up with the shapes of these bell peppers. We’ll wait and see.

Last night I picked a bunch of green beans for dinner and they were just so much better than what’s available at the grocery store. (The beans are actually one of the items that prompted me to ask for the FORTRESSES. Back in Pennsylvania, it was a constant battle with the rabbits, trying to get a decent crop of them. The bush beans, and pole beans, all are housed in the protected beds.)

Bush beans, carrots, and one large broccoli plant.

It’s been a fairly large undertaking, and we’re actually still not finished. Three out of four beds are built, but only two have doors on them. The third is ready for doors but Mr. FS has been too busy with work to finish. So I planted things that deer generally don’t like in that bed: zucchini, bell pepper, and tomatoes.

I keep having to trim back the zucchini plants to give the bell peppers a chance.

The zucchini have taken over, and the tomato plants are actually getting nibbled down by some animal out there. But we’re still able to harvest plenty for ourselves. So I can’t complain. Actually, I’ve decided to NOT complain. We’ll get these things finished at some point. I find that I’m in no particular hurry. Gardening isn’t something that lends itself to HURRYING. Gardening is more about puttering. Thinking. Tasting.

The nasturtiums took forever to bloom, but they’re worth the wait.

Discovering.

An acrid bite to the air.

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There are fires burning in the mountains north and west of us this week, and air quality alerts have gone up all along the front range. All week long, we’ve awakened to an ever increasing acrid scent and smoky haze in the air. We don’t have central air at our house, so we usually sleep with the windows open at night. In the mornings, we’ve been closing the windows and blinds for the day, to keep the house as cool and as smoke-free as possible. But even so, I have a constant metallic taste in my mouth, and a slight ever-present headache.

Two of the fires are actually in locations we’ve visited recently, on social distanced camping trips, so it’s strange to think that places and roads we just drove through are now closed and under evacuations.

Just last weekend, we snuck off for a weekend camping trip, our last before we had to drive our oldest back to Denver for college, and since we were close by, we drove to the top of Independence Pass, just to show the girls. But we didn’t stay long up there because it’s 12,000 feet up, and that can make us feel a little… odd… being up at that altitude, but also because it was damned crowded up there, and we didn’t want to be around so many people, masks or no. So, we drove back down the narrow and winding roads, back to our quiet little campsite, and kept to ourselves.

And now, Independence Pass is closed, I think. Not because the fire is burning up there, but because truckers keep trying to use the road as an alternative to I-70, which is partially closed due to fire. The problem is: big trucks can’t make the narrow hairpin turns that Route 82 is full of. There are signs all over the place warning large trucks and RVs to NOT TRY TO DRIVE ON THIS ROAD. But still… people have tried. Image a tractor trailer or Class A RV navigating this turn:

Now imagine that going on for miles and miles, 12,000 feet up endless narrow roads, no guardrails, switchback after switchback after switchback. Now imagine it super crowded with truckers and several dozen cars of varying size, trying to find a way around the I-70 closure, with heavy smoke in the air.

Not the best of ideas.

But given different circumstances, Independence Pass is beautiful. Here’s a picture of the top of the pass, taken a year ago, when we passed through there briefly, before the pandemic, before the fires, before everyone under the sun decided to take up camping as a hobby.

It’s worth the high altitude drive up there, provided you’re in a car that can handle the road. Five stars. Highly recommend.

It looked similar when we were up there last week, except for the crowds of people wandering around.

Two days ago, we drove our oldest up to Denver, to move into her apartment before her semester starts at CU. She texted us this picture later that evening:

So, yeah. Fires are burning this week. And we’re all staying in as much as we can.

Still.

Scooby’s street?

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mysterylane

We find ourselves traveling through Gunnison more and more these days, and we’ve often passed by this funny little sign, and I finally managed to snap a picture of it. Maybe someday we’ll turn in and drive to the end. See who’s there.

A rare sighting

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payphone

We live in a forest in Colorado, on top of a smallish mountain divide, where mule deer are plentiful, along with a smattering of coyote, foxes, bears, even a bobcat. We do like to travel as much as we can, though, and we like to drag our teenage daughters along with us whenever possible. Sometimes, on our many road trips, we spot something that’s quite unusual for us to see, like this weird-looking thing, spotted somewhere on the outskirts of Gunnison.