Occupation of Independence

Sagebrush-covered flats and hills were my first love as a dispersed-area-camper/mountain biker in the West. It's fun to be back in it. Greater Nevada and Utah are really the place to be if you like sagebrush, but Gunnison (CO) has a lot of it over 8000 feet. It would be more interesting if it was mixed with more grass. Would that be the case if controlled fires were used more? This hillside seemed odd when I first looked at it: You can't appreciate it as a postcard. What matters is what it represents. Presumably the dark (sagebrush) streaks are barely-visible troughs that collect rainwater and snow melt, allowing the sagebrush to survive -- barely. How much strife there is in Nature! Normally this brings up an image of scratching claws and bloody fangs, but that isn't the case here -- unless you see these streaks as the curved talons of a drought-beast, reaching down to rip at the soft flesh of the lower hill.  One way to insult a place is to say that it is

Gunnison CO. I've never been in town when the college students were back in session, so the town seems crowded. Colorado, with its exercise and non-obesity culture, makes for some enjoyable girl-watching. Now, I think we can all agree that the decline of girl-watching is one of the things that shows America's inexorable moral and cultural decline. But I had more fun watching some of the middle-aged women in town. I'm not being facetious. Colorado has developed a "Copenhagen chic" bicycle culture that has spread even to backwoodsy Gunnison. What an improvement it is to abandon the uni-sex athletic jock look, with a boy's bike, spandex, and a plastic/styrofoam brain bucket; and then to see real women -- in flouncy summer dresses no less! -- jump on ("into", actually) an old-fashioned girl's bike with chrome fenders and wicker baskets and streamers on the handlebars; and off she pedals to a store to do some errand. Girls will be girls after all

Once, a friend in a bicycle club told me a little about his job driving a mini-bus for the city -- one of those buses that responds to individual calls to pick up people with special needs. His supervisors were quite systematic in the training they gave him to visualize big clockwise loops, with no left hand turns, and with no back-and-forth wastefulness. An RVer would benefit from training like that, especially now that the era of cheap oil is over, and the cost of maintaining motor vehicles escalates at double digit rates. I have found this easy to do on a "strategic" level. Even as a newbie RVer I had no interest in the mainstream RV cliche of 'visiting every state and Canadian province' on some sort of bucket list, and then buying one of those silly maps that you put on the door, and coloring in each mighty conquest as it happens. The freshman year was the last year for RVing east of the Rockies, for all the obvious reasons. It was also the last year for

This morning I had the pleasure of reading the best financial post in a long time, on "Of Two Minds." Why doesn't the destruction of middle class wealth by the ratholes of health care, higher education, and housing get more attention than tanned female Olympic athletes frolicking in cheeky leotards or exultant NASA nerds imitating Olympic victory celebrations for their latest successful Giga-boondoggle?

Uncompahgre Plateau, west of Montrose, CO. I am pleased to stumble upon my second "forest miracle" in one summer. Up here at 9000 feet the locals are busy as beavers harvesting firewood in various areas where it is allowed. It's nice to see them actually get some use out of their oversized, overpowered, and overpriced pickup trucks, the official car of Colorado. Maybe one of them will tell me how much a full load of firewood is worth, compared to buying heat from the power company. Of course, I just love seeing downed timber get cleared away. It makes the forest a lot more attractive and removes "ladder fuel" from a potential forest fire. And Coffee Girl can chase squirrels up tree with fewer speed bumps on the forest floor. (Then again, she has amazing buoyancy in bounding over logs.) Progress is being made in this forest, and I don't want to sound greedy, but do you think that commercial companies can get permits to cut firewood and then sell it