From the web – Nov 2nd, 2021

Happy November! A time in which we overeat candy the previous week, again wonder about the sanity of changing the clocks, and celebrate the holidays with the most American of pastimes – Maxing out credit cards to purchase crap!

Same principles!

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• “A Colorado town nearly ran out of drinking water. Experts say it’s a window into the future”. Dove Creek is a small town just over the Colorado/Utah line that Joan and I frequently drive through on our way to other places. And in particular, the San Juans mountains.  And this agricultural town is experiencing many issues because of the increasingly small snowpack of those said mountains. The area has a long agricultural history. The well-known Lowry Pueblo from the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument‘s location among farms on land used hundreds of years ago by the Ancestral Pueblo. Then it went away due to drought and hotter weather.

McPhee Reservoir viewed from Road 25 in late March.

• “Colorado gets a 43rd state park under first-in-the-nation deal with the Forest Service” “What started as an effort to protect 488 acres surrounding Sweetwater Lake above the Colorado River from private development on Wednesday became the country’s first state park on Forest Service land. “

A family in Rowboat on Sweetwater Lake, Spring, Garfield County, Colorado (Todd Winslow Pierce)

• Please don’t change the voicemail on your phone if you are lost, your phone’s dying, and you manage to have service.  Here are some better tips I wrote earlier!  A battery charger and backcountry map atlas, at the very least, are items you should have in the vehicle.

• Hiker lost for 24 hours ignored rescuers’ calls because ‘they didn’t recognize the number.’
  “If you’re overdue according to your itinerary, and you start getting repeated calls from an unknown number, please answer the phone,” officials said.

• How to visit rock imagery sites like an archaeologist.  Elizabeth Hora, an archaeologist for Utah, shares some thoughts and ideas about visiting pre-Columbian sites respectfully. She gave some talks Joan and I attended as part of our volunteer training. With the reinstatement of Bears Ears National Monument, a timely piece.