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blizzard warnings - 13:52 , 03 October 2013

heelerless - 21:32 , 18 August 2013

Red Coat Inn in Fort McLeod - 11:38 , 23 June 2013

rushing into the waters - 09:53 , 21 June 2013

choosing a spot - 17:43 , 27 April 2013

06 July 2004 - 23:47

barrels and a 100th

Email came this late morning, advising us all about who my new boss will be. (Actually, that should read "is." They made the decision retroactive six days.) One of my neighbors, who already had the office right next to the retired boss, so he won't have to move far. Or at all. And it's a good choice. He would have been mine, if I was making the decision.

The interesting thing is, in this era of rapid communications and instant email...

The email notification came almost four hours after I got the news the usual, old fashioned way. By the verbal grapevine.

Now all the speculation is about who will want to transfer to his old district, which adjoins mine. Considered to be a primo posting. And no, I don't want it.

When we were searching the winter range for poisoned elk in February and March, I more than once had game wardens asking me about the 55-gallon steel barrels that were laying scattered out across the countryside, rusting away. A few suspended on steel fence posts.

When I was new to this job, a graduate student came out to study winter habitat use by the pronghorn. This was well before the days of GPS, even for the military, so the clever means he came up with to keep track of where the antelope were selecting to stay was to survey corners of his 40-acre study plots and mark them with these barrels. Even from a plane, in deep winter snow, he could tell exactly where the antelope were (and weren't).

But when his thesis was over, he just abandoned the dozens, or maybe hundreds, of barrels out there.

Yeah, technically that was littering, but back in those boom days, folks were leaving trailers, cars, washing machines, and everything imaginable out in the country. Nobody much worried about barrels, especially since they still did something useful, like marking land survey corners.

But this spring, as I encountered one barrel after another, laying abandoned in the sage, I considered the possibility of having someone write him a citation for littering on official-looking federal paper. Perhaps with some outlandish penalty charge for his payment being 20 years overdue. With a separate charge for each barrel.

Or better still, gathering a dozen or so of those barrels, and delivering them to his office door sometime at night. Stacking them up to greet (and block) him when he arrived in the morning.

'Course, now he's my boss, so maybe not.

Maybe for his retirement party...

So far, I have posted 99 "Grouse Pics" in this journal. Today's is number 100. Thought it ought to be something special (and no, it's not the double rainbow, although that was considered). But as I perused the many fingernail images, I came across this one, and knew this was it.

One of you knows why.

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