Putting Down Roots for the Winter

 

My writing about our adventures in fulltiming have gotten woefully behind.  I'm going to compress some time with this post.

May 2023

We had a very welcomed resident in the volunteer campground.  A Great Basin Gopher Snake.  This guy and a companion did a good job of keeping the rodents at bay.  I didn't have a single mouse get under the hood of the truck or in the camper all season.

Spring was long, cold and wet.  It made for some gorgeous flora.

Cyndee at the Swett Ranch taking in the perfume of a giant lilac bush.
Notice the long sleeves and vest.

We had been photographing so many small, delicate flowers in the 
desert that coming across all these large flowers really got our attention.

More yellow flowers amongst some very uncommon long, green grass in the high 
elevations of the Uinta mountains.

The first mowing of the yard of the Swett Ranch.
Growing conditions were so perfect that mowing was needed 
every week for the first six weeks.  It took two full days to mow and trim the yard
inside the fence that surrounded about two acres where the cabins and house sat.

Choke Cherry blooms.
These trees were planted near the house and cabins as a source of vitamin C.
Between these trees and the garden, Emma Swett, the matriarch, would put up
at least 500 jars of canning to carry them through the long, cold winter.

Of the many local octogenarians that visited the Swett Ranch they
all said that it was the wettest and greenest summer they had ever seen.  

June 2023

By the first of June our volunteer coordinator had laid out a number of projects for us to do.  Top of the list was to repair the irrigation system that had sustained quite a bit of damage from the heavy snowfall and flooding from the spring melt.

First up, the weir gate that feeds the canal to the garden.
With the ranch being on the National Registry of Historic Places we
were not allowed to install a commercially produced gate.  We had to do it in the style of a 
self-sufficient rancher circa 1935.
So, a piece of sheet metal, some light-weight U-channel, two pieces of cable and two turnbuckles and we had us a new weir gate.
All the sandbags were to divert the water away from the gate while we worked on it.

The Forest Service usually puts in about a third of the original garden.
This year all the flooding kept us from getting it planted in time.
However there was a scout troop of about 30 kids that helped us hand-till the
garden as a civic project.

There are some perennials in the garden.  This little patch of 
poppies are in with a long row of current bushes.

I had never seen poppies quite like these.
Ended up burning a lot of electrons photographing these beauties.

Amongst the wildflowers on the ranch are these geraniums.

With the cool temps and wet conditions wildflowers like these geraniums 
were coming out everywhere.

This is where the water from the weir gate flowed to.  The 
pipes that were here were old and brittle.  The flooding pretty 
much took out all the old pipe.  I put in a new stub, Tee and cleanout 
on the four inch pipe and completely replaced twenty-five feet of two inch (the white pipe) 
and cut in a Tee and valve for each row of the garden.

The volunteer coordinator also wanted the two inch pipe routed differently, hence the rubber boot that let me create a custom angle.

Prepping the rubber boot for the custom angle.

While the caretaker project list was pretty long, and getting longer, we still had our primary duties as docents to do too.

That's me in the hat, leading a group on a tour.  Here we are 
at the hog pen and implement shed.
You can't tell from the picture but I am pretty much soaking wet.  
It was like this almost every day for our first six weeks.

It wasn't all work and no play though.  We were fortunate enough to be given a private tour of the Flaming Gorge Dam, something not available to the public since 9/11.

Flaming Gorge Dam.  It's a doozy at about 490' tall.  It backs up 
the Green River in northern Utah and well into Wyoming.

The drive to the dam is a tour in itself.
The Cart Creek Bridge must be crossed to get to the 
Flaming Gorge Dam.

Road over the top of the dam.  The egress is cantilevered over a cliff 
and leads through a cut that eventually gets you to Dutch John, UT. 

Into the depths!
Somewhere deep in the core of the dam, millions of tons of concrete all around.

The business end of a power generation dam.

What a crew!
I think our tour guide was wore out with all the questions asked.

Meanwhile back at the Red Canyon Visitor Center a small herd of Big Horn Sheep ewes and lambs had climbed up from the cliffs of the gorge to do a little grazing.

This time of year the rams with the big, curled horns are solitary 
and stay out of sight.

 A little sparring action amongst three of the ewes.

A couple of days later on a trip down the mountain to Vernal, UT we spotted some elk grazing in Cart Creek Meadow.  This meadow is huge and had snow on it when we arrived.  Now it is lush, if not a bit boggy, from all the snow melt and rain.

Cart Creek Meadow is huge.  This shot was taken with a 300mm lens 
at full magnification.  There were more elk but they were scattered too wide to 
get them in the shot.

Same picture as above except heavily cropped and enlarged.
Despite the extraordinarily harsh winter these elk are looking good.  
Although their numbers are being reported as very low.

So that's May and June in a nutshell.  My previous post about Cyndee's ailment got us through the first of July.  Up next will be finishing up at the ranch and starting our new duties at the fire watch tower as well as a little touring.