The Field

A solar power idea

Have you ever stepped out onto the street barefoot in summer and had your feet scalded?  The road is hot!  Roads aren't very wide, but they are very long, and the fact that the sun's beating down on all that developed surface area every day gave me an idea -- why not build a very tall canopy over the road, open on the sides and supported at intervals by posts that would double as street lamps, and cover the top with solar panels?  The canopy could be shaped to maximize efficiency for the panels on it, depending on the direction of the road.  Since roads are land that's already been developed, there's no extra environmental impact of building a new power plant on agricultural or wild land.  The access provided by the roads would make it relatively easy to install and maintain it, and it would provide another benefit -- shading the road during the hottest part of the day.  Maybe it would be cool enough to occasionally turn off your air conditioner while driving, saving gas, money, and further preventing pollution, and the extra shade might make the city itself a little cooler and more livable at ground level.  It probably wouldn't work on all roads, but with the huge amount of road surface area in any city surely there would be enough eligible road to power the city.  Additionally, such structures could be installed over parking lots or other public spaces.

 

Is that a ridiculous idea?

How we can beat weeds

A method occured to me the other day about how we could actually win the battle against weeds (and other invasive species) if we really wanted to.  All we have to do is restructure our economy, so that instead of being built to serve humans, the economy is focused on serving nature.  Then IPM would be a major industry, employing tens of thousands of people in the Denver area alone, and instead of a few small weed crews watching in frustration as weeds take over even as they battle valiantly to stem the tide, we'd see weeds steadily cut back, until, a few generations from now, they wouldn't be a problem at all.

Last week in IPM: Wednesday and Thursday

Wednesday: Muckraking. We raked muck muck out of a tepid tributary to Boulder Creek. We we there to pull Eurasian watermill foil from the little creek, but we couldn't see the bottom for all the algae floating on top. So, we raked it out. It was a pretty swampy creek, but the dragonflies were cool. There were electric blue dragonflies, many of them mating and laying their eggs. One pair, firmly attached to each other, flew down and landed on a floating blade of grass, and, for a moment, they became a sail boat. With a grass blade hull and dragonfly wing sails, their eight resting wings caught a wisp of air and propelled them a few inches before they decided this was not a good place to deposit the eggs and flew off. There were also dragonflies with striped wings and some with white bodies and black wings, which were my favorite. I saw a garter snake that had wrapped itself around the upper branches of a rose bush. I got through the day without getting hit in the face with a flying glob of algae, so it can't have been a very bad day.

Thursday: We hiked the Cowdrey Draw trail to treat scotch thistle near Marshal lake. I thought I would be miserable today, because it was a tiring week, but the morning was so beautiful and I was in my element. Khaki hills with a mountain backdrop. This setting says to me "Home!" Far from tired, I felt great all morning. Upon clipping certain scotch thistle plants at their base, we were surprised to find a sudden profusion of half-inch long, black beetles go scurrying and burrowing for cover.  A few plants had 50-100 of these beetles congregated underneath them, apparently for shade... or something.

For lunch we went to the intersection of Highway 93 and Eldorado Springs Dr., where there's a gas station/cafe and an office building. Not open space, but very near open space, and we don't want those scotch thistle seeds blowing onto our open spaces, so we offered to do some weeding for them. Lunch was nice, with an iced soy chai latte from the cafe, but then it was 2:00 and 95 degrees F, and we were working on a steep hill between the highway and the parking lot, where it was more like 105. It was so, so hot, like a constant blast of heat. It hurt my eyes. It was like working in a sauna. After a few hours of that, we went back to the annex for ice cream. That was a nice way to end the week.

This week in IPM -- Monday and Tuesday

Monday and Tuesday presented various opportunities for gruesome death, and those days are always interesting. We finally got to tackle some Russian olive trees, a weed for which I have an almost unusual level of personal distaste (and so do the chainsaw wielding members of the forest crew, who actually had to wrestle the beasts to the ground.) Opportunity for gruesome death number one was the multiple chainsaws. Number two was the chipper, a lovely machine with a diagram on the side of a stick man getting his hand caught in the cutting wheel and being pulled in to his death. The nature of this work necessitated constantly wearing a helmet and ear plugs. I like ear plugs because they keep me from going deaf, but I find that they become uncomfortable after 30 minutes, and painful after an hour. We were working in a large field that looked like a normal grassland, but it was actually irrigated (for the benefit of cattle, I suppose) so there were a lot of mushy spots, and we spent most of Monday morning in several inches of water that instantly soaked my feet and kept them soggy for the rest of the day.

Russian olives are hard to kill. They grow in a highly branched, bushy pattern that never presents a single, easy cut (unlike, say, most pine trees) and their hard wood stubbornly resists the bite of the chainsaw, much to the chagrin of the FEMP crew, who are all pretty awesome and hardcore guys to spend all day working in the sun with a tool that is heavy, hot, loud, sometimes breaks down, and works at a painfully slow rate against these damnable tree-weeds. I don't think I would have held up so well. Our job was comparatively easy, hauling trees and loading the chipper, and applying chemical to the stumps as soon as the trees were cut. The herbicide we used is called Garlon 4, which we usually use in dilution, but in this case it was 100 percent, the better, hopefully, to keep the Russian olives from resprouting, which they are very good at doing. We have to wear long pants and long sleeves and big rubber gloves when using chemicals, which intensifies the July heat. Also, Russian olive trees have thorns, but another tree we were also cutting, honey locust, is covered, trunk and limbs, in profusions of four inch long thorns that branch like antlers to many sharp, sharp points. You can bet between the heat, unwieldy power tools, and wooden spikes stinging through leather work gloves as easily as our own skin that there was a lot of cursing Monday and Tuesday. I did a lot of chemical, so I came out relatively unscathed -- minus an ugly scratch from a barbed wire fence -- but most of my coworkers look like they've been mauled.

Was it worth it? Well, I find that jobs requiring vigilance for safety make the day go faster, and we got to do something different, and most of all we got to kill Russian olives. On Tuesday afternoon we hauled out two tons of wood chips in our trailer, along with two other similarly sized and similarly filled trailers. Times two days, that's about 12 tons of weeds removed from the landscape, and the cool thing about killing big weeds is that you can really see the change you're making in the landscape -- in this case, opening it up and restoring it to plains grassland.

We also took down a few cottonwood trees, two of them twenty feet tall, healthy and beautiful. Why? We've decided this area is supposed to be a grassland, which means no trees, even if they are natives. I disagree. Cottonwoods mainly grow along riparian areas, yes, but they certainly can grow out on the plains away from obvious sources of water. Cottonwoods are beautiful natives. They're the good guys. Anyway, they were growing along a stream, albeit a manmade one. If we really wanted it to be a natural grassland, we'd eliminate the irrigation and the cows and let nature take its course with the cottonwoods while still working to remove the Russian olives and locust trees. Of course I think we did a lot more good than harm -- about twenty four thousand pounds of good, actually -- but I wish we'd have left the cottonwoods.

Skulls

Combing open spaces for weeds, it happens that we also see a lot of bones. Our open spaces are littered with the bones of animals past. I almost never see animal remains on a trail, but since this job started, we've found skulls (and in one case a disturbingly fresh head) representing six families of mammals from four orders. If you want specifics -- and I know you do -- here they are:

1. Order Rodentia (rodents)
Family: Sciuridae (squirrels)
Genus/species: Cynomys ludovicianus (black-tailed prairie dog -- these skulls are everywhere)

2. Order Lagomorpha (rabbits and hares)
Family: Leporidae (rabbits and hares)
Genus/species: Sylvilagus audubonii (desert cottontail (this is an educated guess based on the local abundance of this species.)

3. Order Carnivora (carnivores)
Family: Canidae (canids)
Genus/species: Vulpes vulpes (red fox)
Family: Mephitidae (skunks)
Genus/species: Mephitis mephitis (striped skunk -- this is an educated guess -- there are four species of skunk that live in Colorado, but this should be the only one in this region.)
Family: Procyonidae (raccoon family)
Genus/species: Procyon lotor (raccoon)

4. Order Artiodactyla (even toed ungulates)
Family: Cervidae (deer, elk and moose)
Genus/species: Odocoileus hemionus (mule deer -- there's a lot of these too.)

There are eight orders of mammals to be found in Colorado, with 22 families (nine and 23, if you count horses). I wonder how many more we might find?  I find this interesting because it's evidence of biodiversity that you don't usually get to see when you're hiking on the trail, and the abundance of bones off the trails reminds you that you are in a dynamic environment, where a multitude of life and death dramas happen all the time, and where nutrients (like the calcium in animal bones) cycle from the ground, to living things, and back to the earth again.  As we respectfully buried the raccoon skull the other day, I imagined it saying, "Hello IPM crew, I'm dead!  One day you will be like me.  You too must go into the earth."  Well, that's just not true.  We can be cremated and have our remains shot into space if we want, and if we have the money.  Then again, maybe giving back our nutrients and giving rise to future life isn't such a bad fate, even if it is a little creepy coming from the surprisingly toothy grin of a long dead raccoon.

Fishing for cell phones

It feels a little post-apocalyptic, being surrounded by heavily altered nature, fishing a piece of broken and toxic technology out of a small body of polluted water. On my walk today, breaking in my new Garmont Kiowa Vegan hiking shoes, I weeded the sprouting Russian olives some and then noticed pieces of a cell phone in the pool under the little old bridge. As more important people have noted, computers, cell phones, tv's, and other modern conveniences contain an array of heavy metals and chemicals that are fine while contained in their technological form, but horrendous if released into the environment (to say nothing of the fact that they also contain small amounts of gold and other things worth recovering.) That's why responsible recycling of old technology is so important. It's unfortunate, then, that it's so darn fun to break stuff and throw it in bodies of water. I managed to fish out the face plate, and the circuit board with antenna attached, but unfortunately I didn't find the battery, whose acids are probably still leaking into the water. There was a medium sized crawdad dead in the middle of the pool. Not an encouraging sign. Other than that, it was a very nice day.

The Myrtle Spurge Scourge

It was still winter today near the Shanahan trail just above Boulder. The snow was light and powdery, unlike the wet, spring snow farther down. We opted to try myrtle spurge on Shanahan again today, hoping there would be less snow under the trees and it would be more visible than the med sage down on the plains. It wasn't, really. There was 1-2 inches on the ground, and only the larger plants were visible unless they happened to be uncovered by our probing feet. So we followed the GPS around to our points, stopping and carefully searched likely spots, looking for the long shape of its stems buried under the snow, or a few pointed leaves sticking out. Myrtle spurge, with its distinctive leaves that spiral around the stem and strange yellow flower heads is, like so many invasive weeds, is an escaped ornamental from people's gardens that's now mucking up natural areas, crowding out native vegetation. Plus, it has a wicked anti-herbivory defense -- the milky latex that pours from any wound is poisonous to animals that might eat it and causes severe irritation if it gets on your skin. And it must be hand pulled, because it will regrow from any root left in the ground, hence our rubber gloves. Later in the year we'll also have to wear safety glasses to counter its explosive seeds. Yes, the weeds can shoot at us now. All hail the frightening power of evolution.

It's hard enough to find every weed when you can see them; this was kind of ridiculous. But how often do you get to walk though a forest covered in fresh fallen snow? It was worth it. For a little while, the sun came out and shone on the frosted Flatirons. Walking into a densely wooded location, I noticed a bunch of deer tracks, and thought about mentioning them, but didn't. Then one of my coworkers said, "There's a lot of deer." Sure enough, the herd was just ahead. They turned their giant ears toward us and mosied along quietly as we did our work. Later, I found a number of the large, ovoid body prints in the snow where they had slept.

Our feet were getting wet and cold and conditions were not improving, so we called it off after only a couple hours and went home, which was nice because the snow had kind of made me hope that I wouldn't have to do very much work today hehe.

I'm getting paid for this?

That thought occurred to me more than once as I hiked up the snowy Chautauqua Park trail with the rest of the IPM crew, the trees wreathed with snow, the Flatirons frosted and topped with misty clouds, and as I sat down alone in the middle of a small stand of trees to complete my assignment -- 20 minutes of silent contemplation of my surroundings, open space, nature, etc. The snow on the bare branches surrounded me with a fractal maze of black and white lines. It was still but for the tiny sound of little, hard specks of snow hitting my jacket and birds occasionally calling in the distance, and the wash of traffic far down in Boulder. I'm getting paid for this!

Besides that, most of my first day was standard first day stuff -- orientation, introductions, and paperwork. Being around peers and watching a powerpoint on weed management made it feel strangely like an ecology class back at CU -- a class where the school was paying me instead of the other way around. The other three techs and the leader seem to share goals with me -- learning plant identification, GIS mapping software, and improving communication skills by speaking up more and asking questions when necessary -- so I think they'll be pretty easy to work with. There was only one guy who said he actually wanted to "tone down" his apparently overbearing extrovert personality. Hopefully there won't be any conflicts. Anyway, I'm really excited to get to work outside doing relevant ecology work, even if it does mean having to give up being a night owl so that I can wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, a time I'd usually just be heading to bed.

Wind on the Coalton and High Plains trails

This has been the windiest winter!  Whitney and I went for a walk on the 13th, and we couldn't have picked a clouder, windier day for it. Really, the conditions were pretty unpleasant. Luckily for us, hiking in bad weather builds character, or something. It was a trail I've never seen, despite its nearness -- the Coalton trail in Superior, off of McCaslin Blvd. It was a few miles east of the trailhead for the Greenbelt Plateau trail that we hiked on Valentine's. It was a strange trail -- really more of an unpaved road -- that was broad and rocky with a wire fence on either side, and arrow-straight. The first mile and a half led through a large prairie dog colony and past it, climbing a hill and revealing a great view of grassland and mountains as it made a 90 degree turn south. The prairie dogs, protected from interlopers by the fencing, were mostly unconcerned with us, which made for some good up-close viewing of the highly social little fuzzballs, who are a very important part of the ecosystem and couldn't be cuter if they tried.

Atop the hill there was a view of the mountains I've never quite seen before in all my years of looking at these mountains -- the long crest of the hill sloped down into a grassy valley with a tiny, unnamed pond. More khaki, grassy hills rolled toward the mountains. It was as we continued down the trail that we began to feel an incredible amount of solitude. It was only a few miles to the cookie-cutter subdivisions on the other side of McCaslin, but we hadn't seen another human since we parked, nor could we hear any traffic noise despite relatively near highways. What we could see of the city looked very far away, and the only immediate sign of civilization was the high-tension power lines (or whatever they were) running parallel to the trail. But they represented the same sort of absentee civilization as empty office buildings, and didn't count. We were on a dirt road out in the country somewhere, alone but for the howling wind and the occasional appearance of a bird of prey, in a hilly sea of short brown grass.

I wore two hoods, more to keep the wind off my ears than for the cold. Persistent wind hurts my ears and dries out my eyes, and I hate it, but I think I'm finally getting used to it. Maybe the clouds were a blessing, since there wasn't a tree within two miles. Obtaining such solitude, with such open views is a remarkable thing when you're just outside a big city. Most of the land we explored is protected as part of the city of Boulder's massive open space green belt, and it's impossible not to be grateful to the people who had the foresight to preserve it, and it's amazing, humbling and extremely gratifying to think that come Monday I'll be working in places like this. I finally managed to get a job, as a seasonal Integrated Pest Management (IPM) technician with the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks department. "Pests" in this case are invasive plant species -- weeds -- that I'll be helping to control on open space lands.

Eventually, Highway 128 came into view, and the Coalton trail merged into the High Plains Trail, where the dirt road and fencing gave way to a narrow footpath with no fences, which was a nice change of pace even if it did make walking side by side more challenging. We wound around a few hills, crossed a little wooden boardwalk over a drainage, where there was at last a few trees, and then came to another, slightly longer little bridge where we stopped to rest and eat snacks and enjoy each other's company. We had the grassy plains all to ourselves, and the sun was peeking out.

We were already pretty tired, so it was a long walk back in the wind. When we reached the Coalton trail again, we finally caught sight of some humans -- one man running, four women with a dog, and one man on a bike. As we started down the final hill on the home stretch the ungainly subdivisions and offices of Superior and Broomfield lay suddenly ahead. I figure it was about a seven mile walk, all together. After four hours in the wind, it was nice to get in the car, where it was warmer and not windy at all.

(Belated) Pre-Valentine's adventures

I had to work on Valentine's, so we had to have most of our festivities on the 13th. It was sunny, so we went for a walk. Since we had the opportunity, I wanted to go someplace outside the neighborhood, but it wouldn't do to go to the mountains because it'd be too snowy. So I thought of one of the only alternatives I know -- that one place off of highway 128, where it's out of town and near the mountains, but still down on the grassland. It turned out to be the Greenbelt Plateau trail; I remembered it from several expeditions there when I was a kid or young teen with my dad and brother, often on bikes. It's just north of Rocky Flats, the defunct-Cold-War-nuclear-weapons-plant/future-National-Wildlife-Refuge, and runs parallel, and a little too closely, to highway 93. But the road noise didn't bother us much; it was mostly drowned out by the howling wind. We'd been chased off the trail by cold, relentless winds on several recent walks, so we weren't about to let this one turn us back, but darn if it didn't try. It never completely went away, but the trail turned down slope, offering a grand view of Boulder, and descended to a more sheltered hillside with more trees, and the wind eventually let up a bit.

We found ourselves next on the Community Ditch trail, which followed what I can only assume was the Community Ditch. What the community does in this ditch remains unknown. It was obviously a popular place, and it was easy to imagine people tramping off the trails, squashing vegetation and creating dozens of new trails. In response, there seemed to be a little sign every fifty feet reminding you to please stay on the trail and not trample all the nature we've worked so hard to preserve here, thank you very much. I was hoping we'd make it to the big lake I'd seen on the trail maps, Marshall Lake, which I'd never been to before. I was hoping my love and I might have a romantic walk around it. As we drew near, the trail widened and was flanked by bright new wooden fence work (another measure to keep folks on the trail). The trail went up a small hill, and the lake began to come into view at last. Then the trail ended in a dead end. An old sign declared No Trespassing by order of the irrigation company that presumably created the lake. A newer looking sign declared No Trespassing by order of the Louisville Rod and Gun Club. A few trucks were parked down by the lake, where some men were no doubt having fun playing with their rods. Should you be able to own a lake like that? What harm would there be in just letting average people stroll around it? We were forced to turn back in defeat.

There was a mature cottonwood that seemed to be growing up straight from solid sandstone, and ponderosa pines that were growing in a cross-section created by the ditch, their roots stretching visibly down the layers of exposed rock. Whitney asked me if I had yet begun to think about my inevitable blog post about our walk. Of course I had. I thought about the debate over access versus preservation. There was an article in the paper a few days prior about how the majority of lands protected by conservation easements in Colorado don't allow any public access, and I thought, well, that's fine -- at least land is being protected, giving us the benefit of great views and less troublesome development. Besides, almost everywhere else is open to people, and the mere knowledge that some places will remain wild and free of development is itself comforting. Furthermore, not allowing humans into certain protected lands may very well be in accordance with conservation goals if they are meant to protect sensitive animals and plants from all of the molestation that recreating humans can bring. But being able to see Marshall Lake and yet not get close to it was annoying. And it can be argued that experiencing a place gives it more value in your mind than just seeing it or knowing that it's there, and that allowing people to recreate in a place makes them value open land more, and could likewise promote conservation efforts. I don't think people should be allowed everywhere... but a lot of places, certainly. Including Marshall Lake.

I lost my ear muffs. The grassland felt expansive, and you could almost believe you weren't surrounded by a major metropolitan area. To really appreciate a prairie, you need a lot of it -- its beauty comes through in its open, airy quality, when hills roll on and on and big blue sky meets grass all along the horizon. It makes you feel like you could run forever. A single misplaced structure on any of those horizons can really ruin that feeling and make shrinking prairies start to look like bare lots waiting to be built upon. Most of the world's prairies are long gone. I hope the little stretch that remains between the Front Range and Denver's suburbs survives.

That night, after an aborted attempt to eat at a Moroccan restaurant that had sadly apparently gone out of business, we at the Leaf, a boulder restaurant that might very well convert you to vegetarianism if you aren't already. It was beyond delicious. Flavors came in combinations that were new, unexpected, hearty and exciting. It was not a meal, it was an experience, like visiting a National Park, or a big museum, or a major theme park, but in my mouth. Somehow, they took blackened figs, and parmesan cheese, and bread, and true love's first kiss, and put it on a plate. Tempura plantains, sweet potatoes, and tofu. Jamaican jerk tempeh on forbidden black rice. Apple and cranberry pie with vanilla ice cream and creme brule (sp?). We wanted more and more, I ate myself painfully full, and then spent the next several days thinking about that meal, and how nothing else I've eaten compares to that. I'm pretty sure the ingredients also included children's laughter, unicorn tears, and hope for the future. It was that good. We fell asleep soon after returning home. She got me a 13 month Xbox Live subscription and I got her season 2 of Buffy, and we got each other the same card. That was a good Valentine's.