She's Positively Glowing

If you can say a face covered mostly by feathers can glow. Maybe I should say puffy.

My little black araucana hen has been trying to raise a family for a while now. First, she started sitting last spring when we still had a rooster to knock her up. Unfortunately, even though I had mapped out the date the chicks would arrive and went out that day to collect her and her chicks to move to somewhere safer, the nest had been raided and nothing but scattered eggshells remained. Her brood had been eaten by something, likely rats considering the fact that whatever it was had to be small.

In the fall, she tried again, but this time the rooster had died and there was nothing there to fertilize the eggs. I couldn't keep her off the nest, so I let her sit there vainly for just over three weeks before she gave up and returned to normal life. It's a shame that rooster died. He was a purebred araucana and would have produce purebred chicks.

While we were on vacation, my dad called to let us know that the black hen had gone broody again and was sitting on a bunch of eggs and asked what to do about it. She's been tucked under the bottom of E's slide in the backyard ever since.

Until today that is. We were sitting on the couch eating breakfast this morning getting ready to leave for north Georgia when K asks if I hear any cheeping. Investigating the sound, I see a little black chick with a yellow cap standing in the middle of the yard cheeping his heart out. We race out with E in tow to see how many hatched. Out of nine eggs, the hen managed five chicks. Not a bad hatch rate. I was actually a little surprised. The rooster is less than a year old and they tend not to be that fertile the first year.

Anyway, no photos today. I caught the hen and chicks and put them in a pen to keep the chicks out of the paws of Chairman Meow, who the hen had to beat on a couple of times to protect her brood. K's getting irritated that I'm taking the time to write this as it is. When we get back on Monday, I'll take some photos of the feathered family and post them for all of you to ooh and ah at.

Unless they all die, which is always a possibility.

This Is Awesome

Found a link to this hilarious photo story on Ask and Ye Shall Receive. Don't click the link if you're easily offended. There are some rather graphic images of candy having sex.

I'm a Horrible Person

Just a bit of advice. If, for some reason, you are ever in need of my services as a caretaker, go ahead and let yourself die. I really suck at it. I helped my mom take my grandfather for some dental surgery today and when he came out, I couldn't even look him in the face. It didn't help that when he drooled his milkshake because he couldn't feel his face after the surgery that the vanilla milkshake came out strawberry. The idea of having to stay and take care of an elderly or sick person by myself is fodder for a horror movie script for me. It's a really good thing that I didn't try to go into medicine.

And yet, I somehow manage to cup my hands under my son's mouth when I hear him gagging and know he's going to throw up. This and changing his crappy diapers don't even disgust me and my own grandfather gave me the creeps.

What the hell is wrong with me?

A Pronunciation Tip for the Cooks

I'm watching a cooking show on Food Network right now and I've just heard one of my pet peeves being tossed around. People, please stop pronouncing the "Vidalia" in the name of the sweet onions with a short "a" in the middle. I grew up in that area; in fact my childhood home is on the border of the multi-county region where Vidalia onions can be grown and labeled as Vidalias. Locals pronounce the town as either "vie-DALE-yuh" or "vie-DAY-yuh." Actually, if you're familiar with the regional dialect, we tend to put an extra stress on the first syllable. For this word, it's a secondary stress on the first syllable and the true stress is on the second, but please do not refer to these as "vih-DALL-yuh" onions. It sounds silly. Plus, it doesn't even make phonetic sense. If you're going to pronounce them that way, you'd have to spell it "Vidallia". I'm okay with people who aren't going to go the full distance and try to get in the extra stress on the first syllable, but please use the long "a" sound in the second syllable. South Georgia is most definitely not some hoity-toity European Protected Designation of Origin zone and its eponymous agricultural products shouldn't sound that way. This is a completely American and completely unpretentious area. Please allow these onions to retain some ring of their homeland's speech when they're being consumed far from home.

The Essence of Things

This afternoon K was off scrapbooking with a friend, so when E woke up from his nap, we went outside to play in the kiddie pool. Taking a break from pretending to be turtles and pouring buckets of water on each other, I lay back in the water and looked out across the field. The thick, soggy heat of earlier in the day had dissipated just enough that it wasn't miserable out and E was fully rested and happy. A flock of glossy ibises ambled through the short green sprouts of whatever was planted in the fields around our house this year. Off in the distance, miles beyond the ibises, a thunderstorm slowly rumbled across the eastern horizon, and, as I watched the giant irrigation system draining our water table to keep the corn field on the other side of our property line from twisting, I thought about how sitting in two feet of water really helps you know whether or not you're farting.

Without the bubbles, sometimes I just don't know.

The Animals of Northwestern Wyoming

I fully acknowledge that I am a geek. Alas, I should have listened to my Kindergarten through eighth-grade versions of myself and gone into some branch of zoology. Instead, I let my irritation with math send me into journalism, and look where that got me. Anyway, following are photos of some of the animals I'd not seen before in person before this month's road trip, or animals that are interesting enough to re-post even though I saw them in Alaska on my two trips to that state.

The elk are ridiculous in the two national parks in the top west corner of Wyoming. You turn a corner on a road in Grand Teton or Yellowstone and the scattering elk are reminiscent of the scurrying roaches fleeing the flick of a light switch in an infested tenement building. These two, a cow and a very young bull, were waiting for a break in traffic to cross the main road in Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone.

From what Mickey said, K and I may have been the only visitors to the parks not on the lookout for moose. Having spent a week for our honeymoon and two weeks a few years later in Alaska, we've both been accustomed to moose. Heck, in Anchorage, a reasonably sized city, you'll see moose wandering through residential neighborhoods. Still, moose are an interesting animal, and not one most of us get to experience in person. There was also a third deer species we saw on a regular basis, only I can't seem to find a decent picture of a mule deer. I think this trip marked the point where I saw all four of the deer species in the US and Canada. I still think whitetails are the prettiest, although they are the least impressive. Whitetails are smaller than even the mule deer, but the mule deer have slightly bulging eyes, are a little gangly, and have those goofy ears that earned their name. The elk are even worse with the bulging eyes and gangly build, but they are quite large. In the fall, the giant racks of the bulls distracts from the fact the animal is pretty goofy without its pointy bits. The moose doesn't even bother trying to look pretty. It just impresses you with its sheer size, of body and antler.

A pair of older male elk. The antlers are rounded and velvety now, but by fall they will be even larger, pointed, and ready for the rut.

These aren't a variety of deer. Instead they're North America's only antelope. This herd of pronghorn was grazing near the Interstate on our way out west. We saw our first pair while still inside the Cheyenne, WY, city limits and we didn't stop seeing them until we left the state. Really cool animals.

We didn't see any grizzlies on this trip, but we saw them on our Alaska trips, so no biggy. This black bear crossed the road behind us in Grand Teton. K actually got a really good view as it was sitting on the side of the road waiting to cross when on her side as we passed it. We saw a sow with cubs in Yellowstone, but it was too distant to get a decent photo. I actually mistook this bear for a young grizzly initially, but as I zoomed in to show Mickey a good shot of the bear on my camera, I realized it was just another black bear. No hump at the shoulders, no griz.

This was my most surprising find, although this is a horrible photo. I took a short hike after lunch down the Hidden Lake Trail in Yellowstone one day. I first came across a few bones that had to come from something no smaller than an elk and from the stockiness of the leg bones, I'm assuming it was a bison. Regardless of species, whatever it was had bones bigger than anything in my body. Maybe a quarter of a mile later, I see a gray shape loping off in the distance, heading away from me to the cover of trees on the other side of a narrow valley. I think it may be a wolf, but it's fleeing me, so I keep on down the trail. Still, those bones are weighing a little on my mind. Large predators don't like being separated from their kill. I turn a slight bend in the trail and a young-looking face pops up out of the grass. Shit. It looks like an older pup. Previous meal in the area, and pups? I turn around and head back. I take a peek over my shoulder and see this guy running through the grass away from me and I take a photo when he stops to watch me again. Honestly, given that I didn't have a truly up-close look other than than one little face, these could have been coyotes. Still, I've seen coyotes around my own house and these looked bigger and didn't look yellow enough or have a bushy enough tail for the smaller canines. Later, I found out from Mickey that this was near the site where the original pack was reintroduced into Yellowstone. I'm going to stick with the wolf story. It's got a good chance of even being accurate.

A step down in excitement was this chipmunk. Still, compared to the chipmunks we see back East, it's a little interesting. First, the tail is surprisingly long for a chipmunk. Second, it's significantly smaller than the normal chipmunk I'm used to. From what I can tell, this is a Least Chipmunk. This one's eating a carrot some stupid tourist kid probably dropped.

If the elk are the cockroaches of the valleys, these are the cockroaches of the mountainsides. Marmots were larger than I expected. I'd always imagined them to be the size of rats. Instead, they're the size of groundhogs. Every boulder field had a few and a couple of them were rather bold, probably fed by previous hikers and climbers. This one even posed for photos. I also got to catch a brief, but close, view of a pika. While we ate lunch on our 14-mile near-death march, one scurried up the cliff onto the path, paused to look at us, and then fled into the boulders before I could get my camera. The pika is the size I imagined it, a very large mouse, only it's not a rodent at all. Instead, it's in the same group as rabbits and hares.

After leaving Wyoming, we headed into South Dakota and I got my first glimpse of prairie dogs. The sound of hundreds barking through the colony as I walked through the middle was pretty cool. This prairie dog had a couple of young peaking out of the hole with her.

After leaving the prairie dog town, we saw this badger crossing the road. I'd actually never seen one of these, so it was kind of exciting for me. Those of you from Wisconsin are probably a little less impressed.

This isn't really exciting to most of you, but I'm fascinated by birds. This guy flew around in our campsite while we packed up to leave in Yellowstone. It looked very much like a giant, overly-fed mockingbird. After a little research when I got home, I found out that it's a Clark's nutcracker, a bird in the crow and jay family. I saw a couple of other species in this family as well. I have a photo of the common raven, but it really doesn't look like much out of context. Imagine a crow, then imagine a crow that just ate another crow. That's a raven. They're huge. We also saw a few black-billed magpies, and Mickey and I managed to piss off a pair of Steller's Jays on our hike.

The western grebes were pretty amazing. It's a shame I didn't get to see them put on their bizarre mating displays or at least carrying chicks on their backs.

Finally, we saw a ton of ducks in ever body of water. Some were just everyday mallards. I saw a pair of buffleheads once, but these are a pair of Barrow's Goldeneyes we saw on Lake Yellowstone.

A Tale of Danger and Supernatural Endurance

View of the Tetons.

E and I take in the view at the Hidden Lake trail head in Yellowstone.

The Lower Falls at the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.

Bison and fly fishermen mingle in Yellowstone.

I nearly died in the Tetons, but we'll get to that later.

I can't remember how much I've already shared with my blog readers who haven't sold out their souls to Facebook, and I'm too lazy to check, so here's the short version:

It rained almost every day we were in Wyoming. It was ridiculous. This is a semi-arid environment and we spent the week dampened by regular showers. Plus, it was cold. It supposedly dropped into barely sub-freezing temperatures one night, although cold isn't really an annoyance to me. Perhaps I should say that it wouldn't have been a problem if K hadn't forgotten to pack part of the clothes I had chosen for the trip. Because we weren't packing our normal luggage, K put herself in charge of packing our bags. She's quite possibly a genius at getting the most stuff into the smallest amount of space, so I just made a pile of what I needed to take and let her put it into the bags. The only problem is that the fleece jackets and thermal base layer pants I laid out didn't make it into any of our bags. That was fine during the day when my soft shell jacket and jeans kept me plenty warm in the 50-60 degree weather, but at night I got pretty chilly. We eventually caved and bought Yellowstone hoodies to wear to bed at night. After that point, we slept much better.

The trip was full of great scenery, we had fun with Mickey and Courtney, although I always felt a little guilty making them put up with a two-year-old, and we saw tons of animals I'd not seen in the wild before. I even got to teach E to make snowballs because of all the remaining snow drifts.

The weather eventually did clear up, however. Our last two days in the Tetons were actually quite nice. Last Monday, I took a hike into Death Canyon with Mickey. Despite the name, Death Canyon is quite pleasant in appearance, although there is that one part of the trail where an avalanche uprooted large trees and scattered them across our path. Avalanches smell like Christmas. After a couple of miles of navigating switchbacks to get up about a 1,000 feet in elevation to actually get into the canyon, the hike was pretty easy. It's nearly level, the trail is pretty clear and the view was incredible. Going in I had no problems. The switchbacks made the climb into the canyon easier than most of the trails I've hiked in the East Coast mountains. In the Appalachians, trail makers tend to just plow their way straight up the hills. The mountains in the east are pretty gentle, but that bullheaded attitude can make for some strenuous hikes. In the Rockies, they seem to rely a lot more on switchbacks, probably because they have to. Rock climbers could handle the incline of the younger Rockies without switchbacks, but hikers aren't mountain climbers.

We crossed snow slopes pretty early on in the hike and it wasn't until we'd gotten back into the canyon that I started having problems with snow. Mickey is nearly 100 pounds lighter than I am and bounds gracefully like a gazelle over the snow, that is if gazelles weren't a warm-climate animal. I learned pretty early on to follow his footprints to avoid the hollow spots in the drifts near rocks and logs, but even then, I'd frequently fall through to my knee or hips into the drifts. I even warped the lower section of one of my trekking poles in one fall, but was able to bend it back into shape. Speaking of the trekking poles, they're perhaps the best buy I've made for hiking gear. I got a good deal on them, but usually I finish a 10-to-14-mile hike over two days and come out with legs that set into rigid posts every time I sit still for a few minutes. With my poles, I hiked almost 14 miles in one day, and I didn't experience any muscle soreness or knee pain, something that plagued me on my last mountain hike.

On the hike back out of the canyon, things turned for the worse. I hadn't felt hungry when we stopped to turn around, so I didn't refuel while Mickey snacked. I was getting a little too hungry by the time we stopped again for a snack break. I had started to feel a little nauseous, but I assumed it was just from letting myself get too hungry. I ate a good snack, drank a little water and he headed on. My nausea dissipated and I didn't feel hungry anymore and I was good for a while until we crossed those snow slopes again. The funny thing is that I don't remember the first crossing of these to be all that difficult. I don't remember any issues with crossing the snow until we'd gotten into the trees the first time. Unfortunately, this time I had some serious problems. See, the slope was a steady downhill to the edge of the cliff where it met a drop of a few stories. Maybe I just realized this on the way back and the thought made me a little less nimble. I made it about 3/4 of the way across before I managed to slip and fall.

The snow slope that nearly took my life.

This is when that thought about the drop entered into my head again. Time seemed to slow as I felt my hip hit the packed snow and begin to slide. I rolled onto my stomach as I continued to slide and frantically grasped at the snow to slow my descent, but the snow always seemed to crumble in my fingers. The vision of my body crashing through the two-foot-high firs at the base of the snow slope and out into the empty space beyond replayed in a loop in my inner vision. Finally, I managed to halt my slide, my heart pounding and my hands shaking with nerves. I turned to the side to see Mickey snapping photos of me lying in the snow. What an ass.

Then I looked at the track my body left in the snow as it slid. Turns out the whole trip was two, maybe three, feet downhill. I was still a good 15 feet from the edge and it wasn't even really that steep. Mickey didn't seem to be the slightest bit concerned, so I tried to act like it was nothing and then pulled myself to my feet to continue the hike back to Mickey's car.

I give you permission to laugh.

The rest of the hike was fairly uneventful, although I kept getting more and more tired and a little sick feeling. I did manage to finish the hike, my longest single-day hike ever, including the short bushwhack to avoid the moose Mickey almost pissed off. It wasn't until we finally made it back to the truck and I'd buckled myself in for the trip back to his cabin that the nausea finally caught up with me. I felt the sudden wave that broke my self-control coming and fumbled with the seat belt buckle as I twisted out the door to avoid puking in the vehicle. I didn't have much in my stomach so it was an uneventful puke, but I have to tell you that puking while twisting to the side really hurts. I don't advise it. Hips should always be in line with your shoulders while vomiting.

I was a little surprised when I had another bout with the toilet about an hour later before finally perking up. It had to be altitude sickness. I can't explain it any other way. I never felt physically tired at any point in the hike and I never had any muscle soreness afterward.

At least I didn't die.