Hodge-podge

I have a number of shots in the camera that were picked up here and there as we went about our business over the past week.  Some of them would have been nice to go along with the previous couple of posts but rather than go back and edit those posts I think it would be better to just put them here since it is unlikely that anyone would go back and read posts they have already looked at.

Our grocery run to St. George took us past some nice vistas and I mentioned the buffalo a couple of times.  On the 12 mile drive to the park entrance station from the campground the road slices through a meadow.  It is a big meadow, long and narrow and runs the length of a shallow valley for about 10 miles.  This is where the North Rim buffalo roam.

The herd tends to gather near the park entrance station in the early mornings and that is exactly where we found them just as the sun was getting above the tops of the trees.  They had parsed themselves into two groups about 100 yards apart but all on the same side of the highway.  This was very different when returned that night.  They had moved a couple miles and were strung out along and on the road near some blind corners.  It was slow as we picked our way through them.


One thing I found curious was that there were so many almost newborn calves.  It seemed pretty late in the season for an animal that has to endure extreme winter conditions to give birth only a few weeks before temperatures plummet and food gets scarce.

Here on the Kaibab Plateau we have a couple of rodents that are not seen anywhere else.  One is the golden mantle ground squirrel and the other is the Kaibab squirrel.  The golden mantles are pretty numerous in the campground and I have already posted a shot or two of them.  The Kaibab squirrel on the other hand has been eluding me for weeks.  They are out only in a narrow band of time in the early mornings and these guys never stop moving.  Getting close enough to get a sharp-focused shot and in a posture other than running away has been tough.

I finally caught up with one the other day that ten other photographers were not chasing after.  I put the big flash on the hot shoe in hopes of "freezing" the action.  I was still pretty far away and it was all the flash could do to reach my target but these are the best images I have captured.  Check out the bright, white tail.  The rangers told me that if I was stalking a Kaibab squirrel to just look for the "dinner napkin porpoising through the woods".

Not evident in these photos are large tufts of hair on the tops of their ears.  That is something else I have been trying to get close enough to get a clear shot of.  But after a couple weeks of frustration in stalking one I learned that the tufts are most prominent in winter.  I'm not sticking around for the twelve feet of snow they get up here to get a picture of tufts of hair on a squirrel's ears.

The longer we are around the north rim the more we get to look under the hood.  While doing a little exploring the other day near the mounted law enforcement barn I came across a building with a small sign above the door that said "Sign Shop".  But it was not the sign shop that got my attention, it was the concrete slab with a large floor drain and a coiled up water hose with spray nozzle adjacent to the sign shop that caught my eye.  It looked like a place where they wash their vehicles and equipment.  Oh boy, Big Gulp has not had a wash since the week of July 4th.  He had never gone this long without a bath, we just might be in business.

I made contact with the ranger in charge of the North Rim and asked if volunteers could wash their private vehicles, she said; "Absolutely, wash your truck every day if you want".  Cyndee was standing there and responded with; "Oh lord, don't give him any ideas".

Too late, the die had been cast.  I got my truck washing gear dug out of the basement and got it all ready so that I could go over and do a wash the next day while we were on our seven-hour break. 

Cyndee was across the street at the "community room" when she snapped a shot of the sign shop with Big Gulp in the wash bay.  The community room is where we get our mail and where UPS drops off and picks up.

There was over a thousand miles of cross-country driving grime that had to be scrubbed off.  It took a good part of the afternoon with most of that time trying to get all the bugs off the grill.

Of late the "monsoon" had abated and it had been pretty dry.  I joked with Cyndee that I was doing my best rain dance by washing the truck.  But I guess the joke was on me.  It has been raining like a son-of-a-gun almost since the moment I got Big Gulp chamoised off.  My plans to clay bar and wax are on indefinite hold.

Forecasts for the weekend are for another two to three inches of rain.  Campers are canceling reservations and people that are already here are packing up and leaving early.  We had 51 sites clear out on Friday morning.  Normally, people would be waiting at the gates to move on to a site as soon as it cleared, but not this time.  This time we have more than a handful of empty sights and the "Sights Available" sign came out at the check-in kiosk.  A rare thing.

Running the traps.

We are settled into a pretty steady routine of late.  Our co-host couple, Don and Anne had to leave for a few days.  Don needed emergency dental work to replace a cap that popped off a molar and then they are scheduled for a six-day rafting trip down the Colorado.  That has left us with a continuous duty schedule from Sunday to Sunday.  For now we are trying to keep up the pace and not let things get too shabby for when they return and pick up their half of the week.

We will get one day of rest and then we'll head for Bryce Canyon.  We were able to find a combination of hotel room availability and positions open on a half-day trail ride in Bryce.  We wanted to do this for a couple reasons; Bryce Canyon is on our must-see list while volunteering here at the North Rim and the trail ride into Bryce is less steep and wider than the Grand Canyon trail rides (they can use horses instead of mules) and have more opportunities to take pictures because of broad, flat places in the trail.  We are signed up for the early morning departure, hopefully getting back to the barn before the thermometer hits the century mark.

Our medics and EMT's have been busy, as well as law enforcement.  Everybody thinks it must be the full moon because everything is happening at night when the moon is high overhead.  There have been drunks at the lodge that have simply passed out and split their head open on the rock floor, anxiety attacks, a couple of  respiratory calls (asthma attacks) and a life-flight cardiac (this one was the only one during the day).

The first night of the full moon we had a camper in the tent-only section come out of his tent at about one in the morning and start howling at the moon at the top of his lungs.  The camper in the next sight over asked him to knock it off, the moon-howler tried to oblige him by knocking his head off.  Law enforcement was called; it was a scene ready made for an episode of COPS.  A guy stinking drunk, no shirt, scuffling with officers, handcuffed and spread-eagle over the hood of a patrol car.  One guy (an employee of the resort and living in one of the cabins a stones throw away) even brought his Doberman, although the only thing it knew how to do was bark.  All the LE's were shaking their heads and saying; "This never happens here".

When they finally got Moon-Howler to take a breathalyzer he blew a 0.24!!!  Most people would be comatose with an alcohol content that high, but somehow this guy could assault his girlfriend (turns out they were celebrating her birthday), howl at the moon, assault the camper next door and scuffle with the cops.  But they got him loaded up and he spent the night and the next day in our two-cell pokey at the fire station.  At 10:30 the next morning he still blew a 0.14 (legal limit around here is 0.07), they would not release him until it was 0.0 and that took well into the late afternoon.

Tonight, after the rangers had gone home for the evening we had a woman wave Cyndee and I over as we were doing our 7pm posting of the reserved signs for the folks that had not made it in yet.  We pulled over and she asked if we had a first aid station.  We do, at the fire station, but no one is there at this time of day.  She did not seem to be in need of first aid so we asked what the situation was and she said; "a cut, probably needs stitches".  About that time a man comes around from behind a car with a little, white bandage on his thumb and said he had sliced it but it had stopped bleeding.  He was going to call it good but the wife wanted it to be treated.  I looked, and directly above the tree tops, almost straight overhead was the full moon.  No sense fighting it, I got on the radio and called dispatch (they are housed on the South Rim) and relayed the situation.  They started down their call list and found somebody over on our side of the canyon to come out.

Cyndee and I went around to the entrance of the campground and waited to see who got the call.  The staff on the North Rim is very limited so everybody wears lots of hats.  On this night the guy that was the first responder LEO for the moon howler is the same one that got tagged to be the EMT for tonight.  The LEO's carry large duffle bags in their cruisers for doing emergency medical response so Cyndee and I were quite surprised to see a great big diesel powered ambulance lumbering down the entrance road to the campground.  We greeted him and gave him the low-down on the situation and since it was dark he asked us to lead the way to the camp site.  It was quite the spectacle with the Polaris and its ultra-bright headlights closely followed by the big-box ambulance with clearance lights stuck on just about every surface it had.  It looked like a Disney Electric Main Street Parade.

A saline wash, some antibiotic ointment, bandage and recommendation to see a doctor when they got home, and it was all over.  Fifteen minutes max.  The wife was satisfied and the husband was glad it was over.  So were we.  That's a wrap for today.

North Rim Grocery Run

We made it twenty days on the groceries we came in to the North Rim with.  We still have quite a bit of frozen meat and vegetables but we have run out of all fresh food like the 25 pounds of apples and 40 pounds of oranges that are a steady part of our diet. And then there were odds and ends like sweetener and light mayo.  This little list may sound kind of short to make it worth six hours of driving and almost a 100 bucks of fuel but when we were all said and done, we tallied up around $700 on our little shopping trip.  Yikes!

But boy, what a drive.  One hundred fifty miles to the west and nearly a five thousand foot drop in elevation.  We oohed and aahed our way down off the plateau and across the southern entrance of Zion National Park.  Even from twenty miles away it looked amazing.  St. George was only a little further.  As we left the North Rim around sunrise the temperature was a chilly 51 degrees.  Pulling into St. George, Utah at mid-morning it was 90 degrees and before the day was done it hit 107 degrees.  Sorry Ashley, I had to talk about miserable hot day again.

We made the most of being in a community large enough, about 75,000 people, to have a little bit of everything.  A sit-down restaurant for lunch, The Home Depot, Camping World, the biggest Ace Hardware I have ever seen, the mall, the Verizon store, a Walmart Supercenter and Costco.  Whew!  No wonder my wallet was moaning in agony.

The drive home started a little later than we planned.  It was 9:00 pm and completely dark.  That scenic ride on a narrow two-lane, shoulder less road was not going to be the same leisurely drive out as it was in.  But it turned out to be not so bad and we made good time, arriving home about 10:30pm.  Now, for those of you doing the math on the time, remember that we changed time zones going back and forth between AZ and UT.  While the road itself was not a difficult drive in the dark, there was a huge jump in the number of animals on the road between Jacob Lake and the North Rim.  In that short, 45 mile stretch we dodged 11 mule deer, a really large owl and a herd of buffalo strung out on the road for several hundred yards.  Since the rule of thumb is that for every one deer you see, there are ten that you didn't, we figure there were a lot of deer lurking just outside the throw of our headlights.

To further illustrate the hazards of night driving on the stretch from the park entrance to the campground, we hear on the radio volunteers that do traffic control and search and rescue get called out at night for deer/car collisions.  Last night they were called out for a buffalo/car collision.  The driver managed to almost get stopped.  The front end damage did not get into their radiator so they were able to drive away.  And after more than an hour of walking through a buffalo herd at midnight (with shotgun loaded with slugs) looking for an injured one, they decided that the buffalo must have made out better than the car and everybody went home.

As we pulled into our campsite our co-host, Don was just finishing a walk-around and he came over to help carry the groceries in.  We take a load from the truck and set it inside the door where Cyndee then takes it and starts putting it away.  I filled his arms full with one load and then another.  As he and I had finished our third trip and were beginning the fourth, he leaned in the door and told Cyndee that she was going to need a bigger camper.  After I finished my last load and stepped inside to find the counter tops and most of the floor covered with piles food I was beginning to wonder about what we had done.

It took us another day and a half but we finally found a nook and cranny for everything.  I'm pretty sure it is going to be like when I was a kid and we would find Easter eggs that we had hidden a little too well some months later.

It is time for me to do the 10:00 pm "quiet check" walk around.  We'll just be running the traps for the next few days.

Band of Brothers and Camp Host Life

We are more or less getting settled into a routine in our current camp hosting job.  We have met a good number of rangers and people that work for the interpretive services group.  They call the interpretive people volunteers, they have the same volunteer patches on their uniforms as we do, yet they get paid.  We'll have to find out more about how you draw a paycheck for volunteering.

But now that we know so many and they know I am scouting wildlife to photograph, we are getting some good intel on sightings.  Such was the case in the last couple of days.  An off-duty ranger biked over to our rig and wanted to let me know he had spotted a grouse and some deer.

We were between our split-shift so I grabbed up the camera and headed out.  The grouse turned out to be a hen that had decided to roost on a pile of lumber outside one of the park service employee cabins.

After the grouse I headed out to find the deer.  On the Kaibab Plateau there are only mule deer.  No white tails and no elk.  It is hard to miss-identify deer with there only being the one kind, as if a mule deer would be mistaken for something else with those big, honkin' ears.

There are four bachelors that hang together and seem to work their way around the perimeter of the developed areas of the North Rim.  We hear people saying that they had spotted them in one point of the compass or the other from day to day.  On this day they were on the southeast edge of the campground in a ravine, foraging.

This six-point was the biggest of the band of brothers.  He always stood off a little from the other three.

This guy is the larger of the two, smaller four-points.

These three hang pretty close together while the big six-point stands off, but always within site.



Busted!  One of the little four-points made me as I leaned out from behind a tree to get the shot.  But it did not seem to bother him too much, he soon went back to grazing.

In the foreground is the smallest of the four-points.  He has a couple of pretty tall stalks with just barely the points beginning to show.  The larger one to the left has an atypical rack, five points on one side and two on the other.

Big brother found himself a comfortable spot and decided to bag it for awhile.

He knew I was there, but I was far enough away that he felt comfortable enough to look away.

The big four-pointer took the lead from big brother and bedded down to watch the sun set.

 But living full time in the RV and campground hosting is not all game stalking and vista photographing.  You still have to fix three squares a day, do laundry, pay bills and all that junk.  Cyndee also has a sewing project that she is continuing that was started more than ten years ago.  Her sewing machine is probably the single largest thing we brought with us from the house.  And that is even after she had significantly down-sized machines a couple of years ago.

We have a great picnic table just outside our door so I got her machine out of its storage and got it all set up.  Out came our travel blanket.  We have collected sew-on patches from everywhere we have gone since the kids were in middle-school.  And these patches eventually end up attached to the blue fleece blanket we got just for that purpose.

There were times when Cyndee drew an audience as campers would walk by and want to see what she was doing.

We had quite a few patches on the blanket already but we had acquired so many in the last 10 weeks that Cyndee spent almost all day getting caught up.  It won't be long before we will have to start using the other side of the blanket.

We also got a wild hair one afternoon and made the 45 mile drive to Jacob Lake.  That takes us about 30 miles outside the entrance to the park and past some of the prettiest meadows you have ever seen.  We have been told that is where we should see large herds of buffalo, but so far all we have seen is one mule deer from a long way off.

We have been in the North Rim for approximately 15 days now.  Our stock of groceries are dwindling in certain categories.  We still have plenty of frozen meat and vegetables in the big chest freezer the park supplied but all our fresh food is gone and, worst of all, we are out of Coke Zero!  We are both jones'n bad for that tasty, bubbly concoction and at half way between the park entrance and Jacob Lake there is The Country Store.  We saw it come up in the distance and Big Gulp mysteriously started picking up speed.  By the time we got to the driveway we had enough speed to make the turn on two wheels.  We screeched to a stop with tourists hanging around outside the store looking at us like we had two heads.  But we did not care, we were on a mission and inside on the back wall were the coolers that held the prize.  We each got a twenty ounce bottle and started drinking before getting to the cash register.

The plan was to just get the one bottle and get to Jacob Lake where we thought we could buy six-packs or cases of bottles.  But noooo, there was not a Coke Zero to be found in Jacob Lake.  Oh well, we dinked around and looked at all the wares there were in the store/restaurant/lodge/diner/bakery/gift shop (Jacob Lake is just two buildings, the aforementioned and a gas station) and then headed back to camp.  This time we made a more leisurely approach to the Country Store and I eased up to a diesel pump.  Fuel is danged expensive up here on the Kaibab Plateau but so far, the Country Store has been the lowest of the high prices.  While filling up I went inside and got an armful Cokes to take home with us.  We're set for a few days but we are going to have to make a grocery run pretty soon.

An unfortunate day.

The Grand Canyon is an outdoors-person paradise.  Hard-core back country backpackers come from, literally, all over the world to hike the seemingly limitless trails.  But all this beauty and grandeur attract more than the well trained and physically fit.  You are just as likely to encounter someone pushing a walker in front of them as you are someone with a 50 lb pack on their back.

In the past few days a family from France were visiting the North Rim.  A mother, father, two adult daughters and a son-in-law.  They were enjoying a hike on the North Kaibab Trail.  This is the trail on the north side that goes all the way to the bottom of the canyon and connects to the Bright Angel Trail to the South Rim.

But you do not have to take the trail its full distance, and most don't.  There are a number of overlooks and points of interest that are a relatively short walk in distance.  However, they all involve elevation changes worth making note of.  What is an easy walk out, and down, can and usually is an arduous climb back.

Such was the case this day.  The family from France enjoyed a leisurely stroll down to a place called Redwall Bridge.  It is roughly 2.5 miles in distance and 2,000 feet in elevation drop.  They had turned to come back up the trail and had made their way back to a point called Coconino Overlook, less than a mile from the trailhead and only 800 more feet of climb.  One of our Volunteer Interpreters, George, a 74 year old that has been doing trail assistance and rescue on the North Kaibab for ten years or more had just spoken with the family.  George left the family enjoying a rest stop and view and hiked on up the trail.  He had not gone a hundred yards when a panicked man run up from below and started calling out in German and broken English something about someone falling down.

In less than a minute George was to the scene (George is not like any other 74 year old you know, he can move!).  It was the 64 year-old father of the French family.  In the words that George described it to me; "The man had suddenly clenched his chest and fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes."  George put out a may-day on the radio and started giving CPR immediately.  Just by pure luck there was a high-level medic and EMT training session going on at our admin building.  Twenty guys burst out of the room and were at the trailhead in less than three minutes.  With several of them carrying 75 lbs of emergency gear on their backs, they sprinted down the canyon trail.  The guys carrying the portable de-fib machine were first to arrive and they had administered three shocks by the time the guys with oxygen bottles arrived.

CPR, adrenaline and oxygen were administered for a solid hour, right there on the trail.  At that time one of the senior medics on the scene called it and the rescue became a recovery.  With the new widow and children looking on he was most respectfully put in a body bag, strapped to a one-wheeled gurney and hand carried the last half-mile out of the canyon.

All of the responders were visibly shaken.  They were the best at what they do and there were so many of them and so quick on the scene.  It should have been a different outcome.  Only the autopsy will tell for sure, but everyone suspects that it was a heart attack so bad that medical technology did not exist that would have brought him back.

The family had set up camp in the campground before their hike but were now in shock and disoriented from the ordeal.  Their patriarch was gone, his body being transported to Flagstaff four-and-a-half hours away to the coroners office, they were at a loss for what to do.  In the campground we keep two sites reserved all the time for the soul purpose of having a place to "house" emergency response teams.  The lodge must do similarly as they made rooms available for the family until they could get themselves collected and make arrangements to get to Flagstaff in a day or two.

This is such a happy place with families and people of all ages having the time of their life.  There is the occasional twisted ankle and separated parties but soon all is fixed and forgotten.  Not today, today the harsher side of life has made its presence known.

Hot Spot.

It has only been a couple of weeks since leaving the sweltering heat of the South and the scorching temperatures of the high plains of Texas and desert of Arizona but they have already faded into distant memory after being where the daytime temps only briefly exceed the mid-70's and mornings are just one side or the other of the 50 degree mark.  My five-cup mug of hot tea is thoroughly enjoyed each morning and not one watt of electricity has been spent on running air conditioners.  All we do is adjust how many windows we want open, usually not more than one or two.

Since the last post Cyndee and I have celebrated our anniversary.  Thanks, Mom for the text message.  You did better than me on remembering how many years it was. 

The day of our anniversary we were on duty, which meant we would be working from six to ten pm.  So we were going to celebrate later on one of our days off.  But our co-camp host got all wound up about it being our anniversary and since it was such a big one, 35 years, that we should celebrate it on that day.  He disappeared for a couple of hours that morning and when we were in camp for lunch he informed us that he had been to the lodge and had made dinner arrangements for us at the lodge dining room, with a table next to the window looking out over the canyon.  He was going to take our evening shift and we were to have a good time.  Thanks, Don.

But there were daytime duties to get done first.  In the last post I put up photos of Cyndee and I cleaning fire pits.  Every campsite that is vacated on that day gets a fire pit check.  We look to see if there are any ashes that need to be removed and especially check to see if anything has been left burning or hot.  Occasionally we have run across some hot embers but we carry water with us and simply put the hot ashes in a bucket and drown them.

But the five or six little metal pails that we carry around in the back of the Polaris fill up pretty quickly when you are cleaning an average of 40 pits a day.  When they do fill we take them over to the little blue Chevy truck with full-size metal garbage cans and transfer them over.  But these too fill within a couple of days and when they do, road trip!

This is how you haul ashes on the North Rim

There is a designated place where we take all the biodegradable things like the ashes, fallen tree trunks and mulch, it is called Lindberg Hill and it is down a road that is marked for service vehicles only.  For me, this is a cool part of the job.  I get access to parts of the park that would not be an option for me if I were here as a camper.  It is a nine mile drive to get to Lindberg Hill and Cyndee and I loaded ourselves into the little blue truck and headed out.

We enjoyed the nine miles of Ponderosa Pine and Aspen and wheeled around to back up to the ash pile.  In my forgetfulness I neglected to drop the tailgate of the truck before backing all the way up to the ash pile, so I was climbing over the side of the bed to walk out to the end and unlatch the tailgate from the inside, and Cyndee was getting out on her side when I hear; "Joohhnnn".  Now, you have to know that when my name is called in that manner and in the tone that goes with it, something is up.  Our son, who can sleep through a hurricane, marching band or rock concert will bolt straight out of bed if even hears the faintest hint of that call.  I'll bet that even with him 2,500 miles away his eyes popped open and he was asking himself; "what was that?"

What "that" was, was Cyndee discovering that she had stepped out into the ash pile on her side of the truck and that it was HOT!  I came around after dropping the tailgate and took a look to find that not only was it hot where Cyndee stepped out but it was hot twenty feet out in several directions in a pile three feet deep.  Uh-oh, not a good thing since this ash pile is on the edge of the hill and trails off into a heavily wooded ravine.  At the moment the heat was up on top of the edge of the hill but just in the time it took us to dump our cans it had moved out another foot or so.

We did not dilly-dally around getting back to the campground and got with the ranger on duty in the check-in kiosk.  The response to my concern about the burning ash pile, shall we say, left me a little wanting.  I was told that all fire crews and any vehicles they had that could carry water were 40 miles away at the Jacobs Lake fire.  I wrote about that fire a post or two ago.  And, since it was Sunday, none of the maintenance crew were on duty.  The only thing that could be done would be to leave them a voice mail that they might get to on Monday morning.

We got back to our campsite, a little perplexed, and relayed what had just transpired to our co-host.  Within a couple of minutes we had hatched a plan to get some water up to the ash pile.  Both Don and I have what are commonly referred to as 'blue totes'.  These are little wagons of sorts that campers use to haul gray water from their camper to a dump station when there are no sewer hook-ups.  They are plastic tanks with a couple of wheels on one end and a hook on the other.  You just throw the hook over the ball on your hitch and pull it (slowly) to the dump station.  These are great little accessories, allowing you to extend your stay without having to be super-frugal in the use of dishwashing water or bathing water.

So between the two of us we were able to take on about 60 gallons of water.  We unloaded the ash cans from the little blue truck and put our totes in their place, went to the dump station where there was access to non-potable water used for hosing down the dump station and filled the tanks to capacity.

When Don and I got back to Lindberg Hill the ash pile had gone from just being hot to giving off plumes of smoke in several spots.  It was a pitiful site, the two of us out there with just a gravity-fed trickle coming out of a garden hose.  As soon as the water hit the ashes it instantly converted to steam and blew volcanoes of ashes into the air.  Luckily there was no wind and they just settled back onto the ash pile.  We did manage to cool off a couple of spots but we really just barely scratched the surface of what needed to be done.  Making eighteen mile round trips for sixty gallons of water was not the answer.

It was mid-afternoon now, we had done what we could and had stopped by the fire station on the off-chance someone might be around.  They were not.  And every bay in the station was empty save one truck left here in the event of a need to fight a structure fire.

We went on about our daily routine, but could not stop worrying about what was going on up on Lindberg Hill.  As afternoon turned to evening we got ready for our special occasion (took a shower and everything).  We arrived at the lodge early so we could enjoy watching the sun set on buttes that rise up and block the view of the Colorado River from the North Rim.  It was stunning.

At one point I looked up from the viewfinder to take in all the people around us sharing this beautiful evening.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man sitting on a rock wall, it caught my attention because it is not a place that was meant for public access.  I took a closer look and what a stroke of luck, it was Grant, the manager of maintenance for the North Rim.  Grant is a formidable presence, not tall but built like a tank with large, thick hands of a man that knows his way around the business end of hand tools.  He has piercing blue eyes set in a sun-reddened face adorned with a large moustache that curls down around his mouth all the way to his jaw-line.  I made my way up to him and gave him the abbreviated version of the situation up on Lindberg Hill.  He squinted at me with those piercing eyes and asked me point-blank if we had been dumping hot ashes.  Whoa, no way!  Besides, the pile was three times the size of what we could do and it was comprised mostly of charcoal ash, not the chunks of unburned firewood that makes up 90% of what we collect.

Grant was very appreciative of the information and he wasted no time in heading out to investigate even though it was his day off and it was getting dark.  We later found out that he did take a fire truck up and 2,000 gallons of water later had things cooled off. 

While Grant was being a one-man fire fighting crew, Cyndee and I were enjoying an evening of what is fine dining on the North Rim.  The prices are what you would expect for a luxury dining in the city (six bucks for two glasses of iced tea), but the food was about what you get at an entry-level sit-down restaurant.  The view was priceless.  Just as it got dark a thunderstorm ran the length of the canyon and it put on a awesome lightning display as it passed by.  From the gasps, oohhs and aahhs of the people in the dining room you would think you were watching a 4th of July fireworks display.  A good time was had by all.

This is a poor excuse of a photograph, but you get the idea.

Long shadows and sunlit points.

When the sun got low it just barely raked the bottoms of the approaching storm clouds.  Looked like it was raining fire.

But there was still the mystery of how the ash pile ended up hot and burning.  To our knowledge, only the campground was using Lindberg Hill.  The lodge has an enormous fireplace on the east veranda but it has not been used and besides, they burn whole trees in that thing, not charcoal.  Could it have come from the in-cabin fire places?  Unlikely since they do not use charcoal either and the amount was far in excess of what would come from the cabins.  Everybody in every cabin would have had to burned a 20 pound bag of charcoal on the same night to account for what was on the hill.

While contemplating the possibilities we could here the ring of the bell on a little 'train' that comes through the campground every afternoon.  It is both a shuttle and rolling billboard for the nightly live entertainment and bar-b-que.  DING!  The light came on, these guys were the only ones that had cooking pits large enough to hold more than a thousand pounds of charcoal at a time.  They must run for a week or two at a time before they need to shovel out the ashes to make room for a new fire.

At the time of this post it is not confirmed if the nightly cookout is the source, but I am pretty sure that if Grant tracks it down it won't be happening again.

Campground Hosting

The last couple of days have just been doing our campground host routine; running the traps.  Putting out the reserved signs at night for the people that did not make in by the time the ranger station closed, pulling the reserved signs in the morning and giving a list to the rangers of who showed during the night and who didn't.  Not rocket science but it does get you out of bed before six am and keeps you available to the campers until ten pm.

We also do what is called the 11:00 purge.  Everyone that is leaving should be out of their site by 11:00 and arriving campers can not check in until 12:00.  That gives us hosts a one hour window to clean fire pits and pick up the campsite, if necessary.  But at 11:00 we go around with a list provided by the rangers showing all that have not returned their little paper camping permit that hangs on the post at each site.

Most of the time the campers have just forgotten and left their permit on their post and are long gone, some take their permit off the post but forget to stop at the ranger station and turn it in.  But occasionally you have folks that are a little slow in getting it together and being on their way.  This is where diplomacy has to be engaged and you give them a little encouragement to pick up the pace because there is a good chance that the person with that campsite for tonight is already in the parking lot waiting for the sight to open up.  So far most folks have been pretty good about it.

Technically, we are off duty between 11:00 am and 6:00 pm but we have been doing the purge for the rangers since they are short-handed (there were a few in the last weeks that decided for one reason or another that they could not finish their assignment on the North Rim and left).  Even with picking up this extra little chore there is still plenty of time for fooling around on our own.

Around lunch time yesterday we went to the lodge to check out the Heritage Festival.  Local tribes were putting on arts and crafts displays of glass blowing, jewelry and pottery making.  Stuff right down Cyndee's alley.

We stepped out on the large veranda of the lodge and looked across the to the South Rim to see that what had been a small, prescribed burn that had been underway for several days had now gotten a little bigger than what they wanted.  We were told that they had gone from just observing to actively doing fire control.

 While a fire on the South Rim poses little or no danger to the North Rim, we do have our own to worry about.  There was a lightning strike a couple of nights ago at Jacobs Lake, just north of us by about 40 miles.  It too just started as "one to watch" but has now evolved into fire crews being brought in and they are actively engaging it, trying to keep the fire to the several hundred acres it is burning in from becoming several thousand acres.

We have a small, log building directly across from our campsite.  It started out as some kind of project for an interpretive use, something about a 1930's style park cabin.  But the project ran out of money and they just stuck particle board over the openings that were not finished.  One of those openings, a door, directly faces us.  After a couple days of sitting in our camp chairs and waving at incoming campers, reading and visiting, Cyndee decided that "door" was just too ugly to look at for the next three months.  We located one of the full-time maintenance guys, John, and asked him if he had some National Park Service brown paint and some brushes.  He got a curious look on his face and was unsure about a couple of total strangers wanting some of his paint.

But when we told him what we wanted to do he said that he thought that was a great idea and that he did not know why someone had not thought of that for all the years it had been that way.  He even got creative and offered us green paint too, so we could match the trim.  Well, Cyndee took off with this and immediately designed a fake door.  She went around and looked at the cabins that the park service people were living in around us.  They all had an old-fashioned screen door over a solid wood door.  Cyndee then drew out a screen door design that blended in, but not exactly the same as the doors in the area.  We taped it off and started painting using the government issued paint. 

 

As we painted in the fake door it became obvious that some of the logs of the cabin were in sore need of a coat of paint.  What the heck, we had plenty of paint, the brushes were already wet and we were there.  But when we were finished and the paint was dry, oops, the new brown paint was the color of milk chocolate and the old brown paint was mocha.  We're ambitious but painting the whole cabin is not an option.  I hope that we have not caused a problem for the maintenance guys.

A little something between downpours.

Internet connections have been dodgy the last couple of days.  I am trying to squeeze in this post while it lasts.

After monsoonal rains on Sunday we hit the same 15 mile road early on Monday.  The weather has tended to be better in the morning so we left early and drove all the way out to Angel's Window/Cape Royal.

With clearer skies today, the Colorado River can be seen near the bottom of the window.

I mentioned a post or two back that now was the peak of the wildflower bloom.  Not all sights are grand vistas.



What the plaque does not convey well is that 'tall' means around 10 feet high and maybe twice as wide.  That is a big plant to think of as a rose. 



While the Cliffrose may be a large tree-like shrub, it has tiny leaves and delicate, fuzzy stems that are at the base of a wilted bloom.

While the blooms of the Cliffrose may be tiny, they are profuse.

Don't know what these are but they were in patches just about anywhere the sun reached most of the day.

We had a dry day with just some fair weather clouds but the air was still hazy.  I guess we will have to wait until the fall to get the crisp air that will deliver sharp images.

Cyndee just keeps surprising me by walking up to these edges

Notice the green?  The rain of the last couple of days has vegetation popping up where there was none a short time ago.

Another nice thing about the rain is that it has deepened the reds.

Again with the walking up to the edge of a 3,000 ft cliff.  We saw people turn around and go back when they realized the path lead out to this rock ledge.  Our co-host said he saw a guy get down on his hands and knees and crawl out.  But he stayed in the middle and never stood up to look around.

I had mentioned a couple of days ago that when you are on the North Rim you never really see the part of the Grand Canyon that has the Colorado River.  I came across this interpretive sign that shows clearly why.

 More blooms.  Most of the below photos came from a hike we did on the Roosevelt Trail (named so after Teddy Roosevelt) and Imperial Point.

 

 

A place we did not get to the other day when it was raining was Imperial Point.  This is the highest point on the North Rim and it also has a hiking trail that wanders through the forest along the park boundary.  The hike is a good study in fire ecology as this area burned in what was called the Outlet Canyon fire, a prescribed burn that got away from them.

 

This was perhaps the greenest place we have seen in a couple of months, and it was only a couple of days old.

To the left and center is the South Rim, more than 2,000 feet below where I am standing at Imperial Point.

It is getting later in the day here, clouds are starting to build again.

We took a morning break at the Cape Royal picnic area.  The table was very close to the edge of the cliff and afforded us a view like no other we have had while eating our 10:00am fruit.

 Just a couple more from our day of hiking around.

I have not had much luck in getting critter shots.  Putting food out as a bait to bring them in is forbidden, but as I walked out to the truck to bring in the stuff we had taken with us today this little guy was sitting just under the driver's door.  I think the folks at the campsite behind me had been tossing him bread crumbs.  When we first saw one of these a few days ago we thought it was a large chipmunk but have no learned that it is a rather rare Golden Mantle Squirrel.  They are a ground squirrel, burrowing little holes under fire pits, building foundations, and elsewhere.

He's cute but wait until I get a clear picture of a Kaibab Squirrel.