This day marks

THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SEVEN DAYS of hearty, and joyful howling on Sherwood brought to you by the Sherwood Howlers.

THREE HUNDRED AND THIRRTY-SEVEN DAYS.

ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY JUST AROUND THE CORNER. BIG CELEBRATION COMING. TWENTY-EIGHT DAYS AND COUNTING.

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Tonight I am howling for the

BEARS EARS NATIONAL MOMUMENT

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located in hot dry, high desert canyon country, broad vistas, mesas, towers, high cliffs, red rock sandstone, San Juan County in southeastern Utah. By presidential proclamation President Barack Obama established this sprawling 1,351,849 acre preserve on December 28, 2016.

My lovely daughter Sarah’s birthday.

President Donald (Bone Spurs) Trump, illegally some say, reduced its size by 85% on December 4, 2017, an unprecedented and dramatic reduction. Trump eliminated a vast number of cultural and natural resources without consulting tribal elders and set the stage for a slew of anti-environmental actions put into place by executive order by him during the course of his presidency.

Prior to Trump’s action, in July 2016, Utah Congressman Robert Bishop introduced a bill that attempted to transfer 100,000 acres of the Ute Indian Tribe’s Uncompaghre reservation to the state of Utah for fossil fuel development. Fortunately, his effort failed to gain support. On December 6th, 2017, the five Tribes of the Bears Ears Coalition and their allies sued President Trump for unlawfully shrinking Bears Ears National Monument by 85%. These suits are ongoing.

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Bears Ears National Monument is named for the “Bears Ears”, a pair of prominent buttes. The Native American names listed in Obama’s proclamation are “Hoon’Naqvut, Shash Jáa [sic] Kwiyagatu Nukavachi, Ansh An Lashokdiwe”—all four tribal languages mean “Bears Ears”.

Bear Ears Buttes

The area within the monument is largely undeveloped and contains a wide array of historic, cultural, and natural resources. Hundreds of petroglyphs, rock paintings and other evidence of indigenous people’s presence. The monument is co-managed by the Bureau of Land Management and United States Forest Service along with a coalition of five local Native American tribes; the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni, all of which have ancestral ties to the region.

Fremont Culture Petroglyphs

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Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings dated to more than 3,500 years ago have been discovered in the region, just some of the estimated 100,000 archaeological sites protected within the monument.

Taken together with Canyon Lands National Park to the north, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument to the east, the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Bryce Canyon National Park, Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, and the Capital Reef National Park to the west, and you have yourself a damn fine high desert biome.

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Tonight I am howling for the Bear’s Ears National Monument.

Join me. HOWL TILL YOUR BEAR’S EARS WIGGLE.

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COMMUNITY NEWS

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Paul Fairbank’s yeoman’s work to secure Sherwood Howler tee shirts was wildly successful. He was able to get 60 shirts in the hands of excited howlers.

People are clamoring for more.

He has requested that if you want a shirt email him by Thursday, March 18.

pefnam@gmail.com

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It was February 25, 2006 when Ryan finally got enough courage up to ask Kristin for a date, their first.  Not to be their last. And where was that first date? Mammoth Lakes of course.

You can’t stop what’s coming.

What better way to teach your kids to value the truly important things in life than to take them back to the very place, the very trail, the very spot where their parents had their first date. To tell them their parent’s story of love, adventure and happiness. What better way to secure the bonds of lives well lived. To reminisce about their first fifteen years together with their rapt kids listening in, snowshoeing along on the very same trail – the Minaret Vista Trail – that Ryan and Kristin showshoed on that first date.

It makes my heart soar like a hawk!

A Life Journey The Gundling Mom and Pop February 25, 2006

And now, March 10, 2021

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Aiden

Yesterday, while walking Mr. Thaddeus T Drinkwater, Skunk Rabbit (aka Tom Sawyer) down East Beverly Street I encountered a brilliant and inspiring young person where Sherwood Lane spills out onto East Beverly.

Aiden, thirteenish, tall, slim, and attractive.

Moments with young people inspire me and solidify the notion that there is hope for humanity.

Aiden was engaged in an activity you don’t see very often. He was wielding a particular kind of sling shot. It was a short piece of braded line, maybe three feet long, with a cup-like structure on the business end.

Aiden wondered around looking for the perfect sling shot rock, which he loaded in. He began to twirl the sling, building velocity, and looked to a particular tree in the VSBD woods. He stooped over, leaning in for extra power and effort. Building, building, building.

Suddenly, with a sharp, snappy flick of the wrist, and a wide angle aspect, he let her rip. The rock catapulted out of the sling at warp speed, on a straight and true trajectory, and nailed the poor unsuspecting tree right on the noggin.

“Hey, that is some damn fine shooting”, I exclaimed.

“Thank you”, he smiled back.

“Let’s see you do that again”, I asked.

Without hesitation Aiden loaded up and hit his mark two more times.

Then came the good part. This young man clearly is not just a kid playing with a toy. He related to me that indigenous people in Africa use this kind of sling to hunt rabbits and squirrels and they rarely miss.

I asked, “are you going to hunt with your sling?”

“Probably not, I don’t need to kill rabbits to survive.”

Nearby Tom Sawyer waited nearby patiently, holding out for a treat and a chance to lick Aiden’s face.

As I walked away, I decided for myself that if I was ever in a slingshot fight I wanted Aiden on my side.

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AMERICAN TRAVELS

August 27, 2017. Dinosaur National Monument

We started this day in Dutch John, Utah (population 145) then crossed over the five-hundred-foot-high, Flaming Gorge Dam, that creates the ninety-one-mile-long Flaming Gorge Reservoir. The dam is 1,285 feet (392 m) long, and its reservoir has a capacity about twice the annual flow of the upper Green River. The reservoir provides storage for downstream water-rights commitments, the dam is also a major hydroelectric power source and is the main flood-control facility for the Green River system. Without this damn and reservoir no one could live in this hot, arid country, except for bands of indigenous peoples of the Fremont culture, who were displaced around A.D. 1000 by the Shoshone and Ute tribes. The first white men in the area, probably fur trappers beginning in the early 1800s, included William Ashley and his party who explored the Green by boat and trapped beaver there for several seasons in the 1820s. In 1869, explorer John Wesley Powell took his first boat trip down the Green and Colorado rivers. Powell described the canyon as “a flaring, brilliant, red gorge that may be seen from the north a score of miles away,” and named it Flaming Gorge.

We cross the dam and head south into the Ashley National Forest and the Uinta Mountains, America’s only east – west trending mountain range with peaks ranging from 11,000 to 13,528 feet. Thousands of acres of juniper, pinyon pine forest. Passed a big mining operation north of Vernal, Utah (population 11,000).

We are in dinosaur country. Vernal’s economy is largely based on oil, natural gas, phosphate and uintaite or Gilsonite, a form of asphalt. However, these days, there are plenty of thirty-foot-tall, plastic dinosaurs deployed throughout the town to encourage tourism. I wish I could bring one home.

On to Jensen (population 412 humans, a few feral dogs and 50 plastic dinosaurs. Then north into the Dinosaur National Monument, a dazzling landscape, a place where there is ample fossil evidence that dinosaurs roamed one hundred million years ago. We were greeted by the usual troop of friendly Park Service rangers at the entrance station then drove ten miles to our fabulous camp site right on the banks of the Green River or as I prefer to call it, the Sisk-a-dee-agie, the native Ute name.

After setting up camp we sat by the river waiting and watching. In short order thirteen wild turkeys, looking rather dinosaur like, walked out of a willow thicket on the opposite side, took a long drink of cool Green River water and began foraging the banks for insects. A stately great blue heron joins his turkey cousins for a while. Soon they walked back into the willow grove as we sat in stunned silence. Time for a swim. In I went. Burr cold!

Wild Turkeys Foraging on the Seeds-kee-dee-Agie (Green) River

We took a sunset car tour through more breath-taking country, highlighted by Split Mountain. We drove deeper into Monument Land and followed the map, passed a few other travelers, and came to the still standing, homestead cabin of one Josie Bennet Morris, a remarkable woman who was married five times and divorced four times in an era when divorce was unheard of. The kiosk didn’t say what happened to the last guy.

With no money to buy property, Josie decided in 1913 to homestead in Cub Creek. Here she built her own cabin and lived there alone for over fifty years. She shared her home with her son Crawford and his wife for a time; grandchildren spent summers working and playing alongside Josie.

Raised on the frontier, Josie lived into the modern era of electronics. For friends and acquaintances in the 1950s, Josie was a link to a world past. During Prohibition in the 1920s and into the 1930s, Josie brewed apricot brandy and chokecherry wine. After a lifetime of dressing in skirts, she switched to wearing pants in her later years. She was tried and acquitted twice for cattle rustling when she was in her 60s. At the age of 71, in an ambitious move to revive a profitable cattle business, she deeded her land away and lost all but the five acres where her cabin still stands. In December of 1963, the legendary Josie suffered a broken hip while in her cabin; she died of complications in May of 1964.”

Josie Bennet Morris Homestead

Back to our campsite for the night, but not before another sitting session at out private beach where we were delighted to watch two enormous beaver appearing to forage their way down through shallow water on the opposite side of the river. I thought beaver ate tree bark, but these guys were gathering something from rocks in the river. I speculated that it might have been mussels. Oh, wait a minute, those aren’t beaver. They are river otter! Big fat North American River Otter (Lontra canadensis), fattened I hope on the native mussels found in the waters of the Green River basin, not the quazza and zebra mussels infesting many waters in the east and being found more and more often in certain western waters. The Bureau of Reclamation and other state and federal agencies are serious about stopping the spread of these non-native species. Mandatory inspection points are set up throughout the west. Anyone towing any kind of aquatic vessel must stop and be examined. On the way into Josie’s homestead we encountered petroglyphs and pictographs of the Fremont people who lived in this area about a thousand years ago. Petroglyphs are carved or chipped into rock, a process which must have taken a very long time. These folks didn’t have power tools. We saw many examples. It’s quite something to reach out and touch these remarkable works of art and ponder the mystery of why they were created and to think about the daily lives of the Fremont people, living in a place with such extremes of seasonal weather.

After an evening cocktail and supper, its beddy-bye time for us. More Dinosaur Monument adventures tomorrow.

Sweet dreams.

August 28, 2017. Dinosaur National Monument

Up and away after coffee and watching foraging rabbits to visit the Dinosaur Quarry Exhibit. Many of the Monument’s dinosaur fossils came out of an area extensively studied by Earl Douglass, Carnegie Museum of Natural History. In 1908, Mr. Douglas started looking for dinosaur fossils in the Uinta Basin. After some disappointments, he found the quarry that became Dinosaur National Monument. He continued to excavate it for the Carnegie until he died in 1931, but his legacy lives on with the monument. The dinosaur quarry exhibit was one of the many innovative ideas he had about educating the public about the life and times of these creatures. A massive building constructed over a portion of the quarry wall, showing a conflagration of dinosaur bones washed up together and shown in the wall exactly as Douglas had found them. One can stroll along a cat walk, touch the fossils and wonder at the lives these phenomenal animals lived.

Wall of Bones – Dinosaur National Monument

Wall of Bones – Dinosaur National Monument

Dinosaur National Monument T-Rex

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COMPLAINT DEPARTMENT

I suppose I missed the memo that makes it clear that one has to be an electrical engineer to buy a damn light bulb.

Incandescent, energy saving incandescent, halogen, LED (light emitting diode), fluorescent, or compact fluorescent to begin with. Smart bulbs that can connect to Wi-Fi so you can control them from your computer or a smartphone app.

Lumens vs watts.

Color. For Pete’s sake. There is that guy Pete again.

White, soft white, warm white, daylight light, warm yellow light, slightly yellow warm light, neutral, bright white light, slightly bluish, bright white light.

Blue light has been shown to interfere with sleep, so get ready to read Mayo Clinic scholarly articles on sleep deprivation.

In order to make a color choice one must know the Kelvin temperature scale and probably own a spectrometer to measure light spectra, that is to say, wave length emission.

Dimmable vs not dimmable. Who knew?

Make sure you check the energy star rating and compare yearly cost. Don’t forget certification and energy efficiency standards.

And make sure you allocate 50 hours to compare costs across dozens of manufacturers.

I think I will buy a bunch of tiki torches and be done with it.

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COVID 19 IN VIRGINIA, STAUNTON, AND AUGUSTA COUNTY

NO COVID REPORT TODAY.  TRENDS ARE LOOKING GOOD.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Bears Ears is not just a place full of trees, plants and animals. It is life and we are woven into it to protect it for it is in our nature to be the lords and protector of these lands. When we lose that connection, our connection with our culture, Mother Nature and the cosmic energy of space will be lost.”

Shiprock, New Mexico, Ute Tribal Council