Still in the blast furnace stage of heat — 105* yesterday.
By 8 in the morning we were roasting, but I didn’t turn on the swamp cooler until 9:00 a.m. I was trying to keep as much natural air in the house as possible. After that we just couldn’t do it.
There are lots of fires around us, one is up by the Silver Jack Reservoir near Cimaron. I would say, maybe 30 miles from Montrose. If memory serves me right it was lighting started.
You are looking at all the smoke around us.
I wish the forestry service (or whoever makes the decisions) would cut down all the dead and dying trees. They really need to get rid off all the fuel for those fires.
When we went to Yellowstone last fall the forests there were clean…nothing dead or in a dying stage. I saw new trees growing in lighting started fire burns, which was really nice to see.
It isn’t just humans that loose their homes or perish in these nasty fires animals do also and then many times they lose their lives.
When I was a child the lumber jacks would find a disease tree — go get the forest service ranger, show him the tree…it was marked…then the loggers could come back in and remove the tree, put it in a separate pile, tests were run on the tree to see why it was sick and what to do about it, then the tree was headed to the mill.
That doesn’t seem to be the case now. It looks like the trees are allowed to die so the bug or disease finishes off the tree — jumps to another tree and proceeded to decimate all of the lovely old trees setting up perfect fuel for a fire.
In talking to a ranger a while back and relating what I just said, he told me that the idea (I may get this a little off) is to let the forest take care of itself —so to speak. If one species dies then the fire will clean the land so new can grow. That maybe so, but watching these lovely old trees (here in Colorado it takes a long, long, long time for a tree to grow) die is really sad to me. (If any ranger or forest manager is reading this maybe you could leave us a comment so we can understand—understanding often helps.)
Anyway, the following is an older photo of where the Silver Jack Reservoir resides…beautiful country up there and extremely rugged.
We had a slight rainfall last night. Really nothing to speak of lots of wind and a few splatters then it blew on leaving us behind.
But it left us a touch of a rainbow! My first of the summer!
Well the day is waiting and I must get out there and get my watering done before the horrendous heat saps me and everything else.
Hugs,
Linda