Suburban Apex Predator, and the F-117 Barn Owl

Note: I had a hard-drive scare yesterday* and, for a couple hours, thought I’d lost the >90% complete draft of this post. I was totally, totally bummed. So I went over to Co-worker Matt’s office to commiserate, and ended up “telling” him the post. After I told him, Matt- who knew pretty much nothing about Owls beforehand- seemed genuinely into my “story-post” and impressed and interested by owls**. And then I realized that I didn’t feel so bad anymore, because at least 1 person had “read” and enjoyed the post. Just then the IT guy came over to Matt’s office looking for me; they’d recovered my drive.

*Yeah, that’s right- I blog on my work laptop. Oh, don’t get all sanctimonious on me; you’re probably reading this post on yours.

**Or maybe he was just yanking my chain to try and make me feel better. Whatever.

The Post

We moved into our current home in the Spring of 2002. When you move into a new neighborhood, you tend to notice all the little things- people out walking, how people maintain their yards, which houses have dogs that bark at you when you walk/run past, etc. One of the first things I noticed in our neighborhood that Spring was all the rabbits.

Our old neighborhood didn’t have rabbits, or if it did, I never noticed them. But here they seemed to be everywhere, and out not just in the early morning, but oftentimes right in the middle of the day. Awesome Wife and I joked that it was because now that we’d moved “uptown”, the neighbors didn’t let their dogs run free., and that if just one dog got out of its yard and roamed free for a weekend, the rabbits would probably disappear.

A few years passed. In early summer of 2005 a neighbor’s kid caught sight of a large owl perched on high up in a tall Blue Spruce next door. We spotted it almost every day for a couple of weeks. Sometimes it would hoot, and once or twice it spread its massive wings and flew off while we watched, probably annoyed by the neighborhood kids hanging out and chattering under its perch. After a couple of weeks it disappeared altogether, and we didn’t see it again. I wondered if all of our attention scared it away.

A few months later, in early Fall 2005, I was pedaling my bike home from a ride. I rolled down the little hill where I regularly used to spot rabbits out on a lawn and realized I hadn’t spotted a single rabbit in the neighborhood in, well, months. In fact I hadn’t seen one, since… that owl showed up.

I didn’t see rabbits again in our neighborhood until this past Spring. Over the Summer I’d see them out now and again, initially just around dawn, but later in the Summer out in the daytime as well. Rabbits aren’t particularly remarkable in a suburban neighborhood, but the kids like wildlife and would point them out to me, each other and their friends. Then last week, a neighbor’s kid* spotted this guy in the Elm** out front, the first one we’d seen in the ‘hood in over 5 years.

*Different kid, different neighbor, but same house. We’ve seen four families in that house- loved the first, didn’t care for second or third, love the fourth. Sort of a cool full circle thing. AW and I are getting all kind of serene and Zen-like with respect to problematic neighbors. We don’t get upset; we just out-wait ‘em. Eventually they all move away or die.

**Which I blogged about in this post. I don’t mean just the species; I mean specifically this tree.

The Great-Horned Owl, Bubo virginianus, is super-easy to ID. If you’re in the Western hemisphere and you see a big owl with ear-tufts, it’s a Great-Horned (GH Owl). And chances are, if you live in a suburban or rural setting anywhere in North America, you’ve already seen one. Its range is huge, from Alaska to Argentina. In fact, everywhere I’ve blogged about in the Western hemisphere- Maine, California, Mexico, Costa Rica, even Brazil- I’ve been within its range. Like many animals with huge ranges, the GH Owl is a generalist, in this case a generalist hunter. GH Owls of course hunt rabbits and mice, but you might be surprised how many other things they eat. Snakes, lizards, squirrels, rats, shrews, bats, moles and other birds. OK, so they eat a lot of different things, so what? Tell me something I don’t know.

OK, here’s something you might-not-maybe didn’t know: If you live anywhere in suburban or rural North America, there’s a good chance that the GH Owl is the single most bad-ass, toughest, fearsome predator that routinely passes through your yard. Don’t believe me? Here we go.

Know what else they eat? Raccoons. That’s a pretty big meal for a predator that only weighs 3-4 lbs, but GH Owls routinely kill prey 2-3 times their mass. What’s that? You’re still not impressed? Get this: GH Owls are more or less the only predator that routinely hunts skunks. That’s not all- they regularly hunt armadillos and even porcupines!* Wait- there’s more! GH Owls regularly hunt other birds, and not just cute little songbirds, but big birds- like ducks, swans and seagulls. That’s not all- GH Owls regularly hunt other birds of prey, including Red-Tailed Hawks and Peregrine Falcons**.

*Sometimes they do so by grabbing the porcupine out of a tree and dropping it to its death. I know that bobcats kill porcupines (on the ground) by going for the face, but don’t know if owls do this as well. I should mention though that in researching this post I learned that hunting/devouring porcupines does not always end well for the GH Owl. I covered porcupines BTW in this post, and bobcats in this one, with (admittedly lame) additional video footage in this post.

**I haven’t done a proper post about Falcons, but covered their hunting prowess and tactics last year during Pigeon Week. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.

In fact, GH Owls regularly hunt other owls, including every other owl species in North America except the (larger) Snowy Owl. GH Owls typically hunt by perching still from a high vantage point, then swooping down onto their prey. Since their eyes don’t move within their sockets, having a neck that can rotate around up to 270 degrees serves them well. But GH Owls can also hunt in other ways, including standing in shallow water to hunt small fish. And GH Owls have a bad rap with chicken farmers, as they’ve been known to actually walk inside coops to kill chickens. Before leaving their roster of prey, it’s worth mentioning that GH Owls also successfully hunt domestic cats and even on occasion small dogs.

Tangent: You can’t help reading about B. virginianus’ range of prey without wondering what it would be like to be attacked by them. Do GH- or any owls- ever attack humans? The answer is yes, though I’m unaware of any doing so fatally*. GH- and other owls- will defend nests vigorously, and may attack visitors, researchers or others who molest them. Then there are the cases where the owls apparently attack people well away from their nests. On Vancouver Island there have been a number of attacks on runners and hikers by Barred Owls, Stix varia**. And a rogue GH Owl attacked several cross-country skiers last year in Bangor, Maine. It’s thought that these owls might be mistaking human head-hair for small mammal prey.

*I came across this claim, which sounds like a stretch.

**The Barred Owl BTW, seems to be a significant threat to the endangered Spotted Owl, whom it typically out-competes for habitat/nesting sites. Interestingly, it also hybridizes with the Spotted.

But would a GH- or any other owl- deliberately hunt a small child? There’s no record of it, and human toddlers exceed the 2-3x body-mass metric. But what about outside of North America?

The closely-related Eurasian Eagle-Owl, Bubo bubo looks a lot like a GH Owl, with ear-tufts and everything. But it’s bigger- up to 9 ½ pounds- and has been known to take deer fawns as big as 22 lbs*. Now we’re approaching toddler territory, though I’m unaware of any such hunting attacks.

*Wikipedia says up to 37 lbs(!), but every other source said up to 22…

But there used to be even bigger owls. Until around 10,000- and maybe as recently as 8,000- years ago, the Cuban Giant Owl, Ornimegalonyx sp., inhabited that island. Ornimegalonyx stood over 3 ½ feet tall and weighed over 20 pounds. Its wings were small, as was the keel of its sternum, suggesting it either flew only for short distances or not at all, and its legs were longer than a typical owl’s. Ornimegalonyx may have run after prey on the ground, or leapt from treetops. In any case, it was big enough to take a kid. Even though humans were in the New World 8,000 – 10,000 years ago, they don’t appear to have made it to Cuba until more like 5,000 – 6,000 years ago, meaning giant running owls likely never chased Taíno children through tropical jungles. But then again, the mandible of what was apparently a similarly gigantic late Pleistocene owl turned up some years ago in Georgia, so maybe…

The GH Owl’s primary weapon is its talons, which are kind of interesting in that they are semi-zygodactylous. Zygodactylous feet have 2 toes facing forward and 2 backward, in contrast to the standard passerine (perching bird) architecture of 3 forward, 1 backward*. (pic below, not mine)In GH Owls, the fourth toe is reversible, allowing it to shift between a 3 forward- 1 backward, or anisodactylous, to a 2 forward- 2 backward zygodactylous configuration (pic below, not mine**). The 3-1 config is used for perching, but the 2-2, which provides a greater coverage area, for hunting.

*We covered zygodactylous feet last year when we looked at Roadrunners. Seriously, everything.

**Captain Obvious, here…

For most prey, the moment of contact is the moment of death- they never know what hit them. The talons of B. virginianus are incredibly powerful, able to crush bones with a gripping force of up to 500 pound per square inch. For comparison, a human grip generates a maximum force of some 80 psi, the bite of a German Shepherd roughly 250 psi, that of a Rottweiler 325 psi, and a human bite around 150 psi.*

*This is why you can open twist bottle caps with your teeth more easily than you can with your hand. Not that you should ever do so.

Side Note: These figures were surprisingly difficult to obtain* and make sense of, so take them with a grain of salt. Psi is not the same as bite-force; a Rottweiler’s bite has more force than a GH Owl’s grip, but the surface area of the latter’s talons is tiny in comparison. The important point is that, for something that looks rather thin and inconsequential, the talons of a GH Owl are incredibly powerful.

*Which is fair enough, when you think about it. Wouldn’t you hate to be the grad student tasked with getting the wolf or pit bull riled up enough to bite whatever measuring instrument they use with maximum force?

Back to bite-force, wolves and coyotes have much stronger bites than comparatively-sized domestic dogs*, with the exception of special breeds such as a Pit Bull, whose bite is phenomenally powerful. The bites of hyenas, lions and tigers are stronger still, in another category of force altogether.

*So I’m really glad that coyote in Emigration did not manage to connect with my right cheek.

Owls also have exceptional vision. Their eyes (pic left, not mine) are as big as ours*, but many times more powerful- even in full daylight. Most owls can sight a mouse in the grass about 5 times further away than we could make out any object of that size, and in darker conditions the difference is even more dramatic. The eyes of owls are ringed by specialized feathers that reflect/direct light into the pupil, and their retinas are packed with light-sensitive rod cells, enabling them to fly and hunt in what looks to us like near-total darkness.

*Which is proportionally like our having baseball-sized eyes.

But perhaps even more impressive than an owl’s sight is its hearing, which is highly sensitive, particularly in frequencies around that of rustling grass. An owl’s ears are asymmetric; the GH Owl’s right ear is set slightly higher up on its head, and positioned at a slightly different angle. This makes an owl’s hearing more sensitive to position and direction of sounds than ours. Barn Owls in fact can hunt effectively in absolute darkness by sound alone, flying around and landing on prey with accuracies of a fraction of an inch. (I don’t believe GH Owls can quite do this.)

Side Note: BTW, the GH Owls “ear tufts” are nothing of the sort. Though they look like the part of the outer ear that is technically the pinna (the outer, visible part) on a person, dog or cat, birds have no pinnas* (pic right = actual GH Owl ear, not mine). The avian ear does have specialized feathers, called auricular feathers, that serve to direct sound into the ear canal, but GH ear tufts aren’t those either. They’re display feathers, and have nothing at all to do with hearing. We’ll get more into avian ears in the next post.

*Pinnae? Pinnum? I’m never really sure.

Tangent: Let’s pause here for a second. Hopefully by now you’re convinced that the GH Owl- along with many other owls- is a totally Way Badass Predator. It’s for sure more bad-ass than hawks, and maybe even eagles. I didn’t appreciate how bad-ass until researching this post. Oh, I knew they were effective hunters and such, but…porcupines? Armadillos? Cats? And I guess I was surprised because they just don’t look that mean, but rather kind of wise and serene, and well “nice.”* Like, say you were an animal and you lived in a Watership Down**-type universe, where all the animals could talk to each other and you were lost and had to ask another animal for directions. Wouldn’t you be inclined to ask the wise old owl? But no- don’t do it! Because even though he looks so benevolent, he’s really like this hyper-effective, terminator-esque Silent Killing Machine!

*And then there’s “Owl” of the Winnie the Pooh*** gang, and the USFS’s “Woodsy (“Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”) Owl, and even the wise old cheater-Owl (“How many licks does it take…?”) on the old Tootsie-Pop commercials. All of these guys come off as slightly-addled, geriatric, harmless softies. Couldn’t we have just one seriously bad-ass owl in popular culture?

**I love that book.

***Still think that bear should have pants.

I’m not the only guy suckered by the owl’s serene face: think about birds of prey in our culture. The Bald Eagle is our national symbol; it’s on the presidential seal and the quarter, and eagles grace the seals and flags of numerous other countries. We have sports teams named after eagles and hawks. Our military flies the F-15 Eagle and the Blackhawk Helicopter. Know what the much-vaunted F-117 “Stealth Fighter” is officially named? The “Nighthawk”. A Nighthawk- which I’ll mention just below in a moment, and is not at all closely-related to actual hawks- is a cool little bird, but it’s not even really a nocturnal hunter, so much as it is crepuscular, meaning active around dusk/dawn. And you know what it hunts? Bugs. And it’s a little, inconsequential thing; hell, I’ve nearly run over them multiple times night-riding. Our nation’s baddest-ass techno-night-fighter-jet shouldn’t be named after a little birdie that flits around eating bugs. No, it should be the F-117 “Barn Owl”, because the Barn Owl is truly a bad-ass nocturnal predator.

But there’s no fighter-jet, no attack helicopter, no presidential seal, no flag, no heat-seeking missile either named after or with an owl on it. That’s BS. A few years from now, when I found the state of Wasatch*, the GH Owl will be our state symbol.

*I’ll have to cover this one in another tangent in another post, but briefly, it’s for Salt Lake and Summit counties to secede from Utah (West Virginia-style) and form a new state. Economically it’s a total winner for the new state, and would improve everything from class sizes to social justice to open space protection. The constitutional issues involved are thorny, but not insurmountable. I tell you what, I am always cooking up something…

The “faces” of owls are vaguely disk-like in profile, making them almost instantly distinguishable from nearly all other birds. The disk-profile is also thought to direct and optimize sound reception. Speaking of other birds, what are owls related to?

Owls have been around for something like 60 million years, and became widespread during the Eocene. Today, the owls, order Stirigiformes, include 2 families: the True Owls, Stirigidae, which includes the GH Owl and oodles other interesting species, and the Barn Owls, Tytonidae. For a long time it was unclear where exactly owls fit in the family tree of birds*, but they appear to be most closely-related to the order Caprimulgiformes- the Nightjars, Nighthawks, Frogmouths and Oilbirds.

*One theory was that they were more closely-related to hawks. The owl-like face of the Northern Harrier, Circus cyaneus, seems now to be an example of convergent evolution- not close kinship.

Side Note: Nighthawks, specifically the Common Nighthawk, Chordeiles minor, is on my slightly-embarrassing list of things-I-researched-and-meant-to-blog-about-but-never-got-around-to-doing-so. (Pic right, not mine*). They’re cool little birds which fly around close to the ground at dawn and dusk hunting insects, and are common in the foothills and high rangelands bordering the Wasatch. On several night-rides this Fall I came upon them suddenly, just sitting in the middle of the trail shortly after dark. As I rolled toward them they’d alight, and then fly in my bar-light-beam, staying just 10 or so feet ahead of me for a few seconds as I followed them down the trail. My plan was to get this on helmet-cam for a post, but I was never able to work out a light/cam configuration that captured the action.

*BTW, this is exactly how they look when you come across them in the evening just sitting in the middle of the trail- squat and squint-eyed, almost kind of smug-looking…

I’ve never been able to get decent night-time helmet-cam video. I’ve tried all different light/cam bar/helmet combinations, but the results are always the same- a small circle of white light in a field of blackness:

Believe it or not, that clip was made with both bar and helmet lights going full-blast- I could see fine. Around the same time I experimented with a bar-mount for the cam. Noise was always a problem, as you can hear in this clip:

I was able to partially damp the rattle with multiple rubber-bands, but it was still there. The lower-level video looked faster and better captured the lean-angle of the bike, which was cool, but I found the video quality sort of frenetic and annoying, and switched back to helmet-mount.

Their next closest relatives are the Turacos, order Musophagiae, a funky-looking group of semi-zygodactylous-footed, fruit and bug-eating African birds, and after them, our old friends, Swifts and Hummingbirds.

I mention this not only because I’m always interested in what’s related to what, but also because this roster of the owl’s closest cousins rings a couple of bells from previous posts. Oilbirds and Swifts (specifically some Asian swiftlets) are the only 2 birds known to have accomplished another awesome hearing-feat: echolocation*. Isn’t that interesting.

*Which we looked at last summer in bats. It’s like… Oh yeah, I said that already.

We’ve looked at lots of differences between birds and mammals in how they’ve tackled the same problems, including vision, song, respiration, sex determination, “nursing” and thermoregulation. It’s time to check out their ears.

Next Up: The awesome saga of the middle ear.

Note About Sources: My standard sources for every bird-related post include Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America and the Cornell University lab of Ornithology All About Birds website. Additional info came from Phylogeny and Classification of Birds: a Study in Molecular Evolution, Charles G. Sibley & Jon E. Ahlquist, The Origin and Evolution of Birds, Alan Feduccia, Tracking & the Art of Seeing: How to Read Animal Tracks and Sign, Paul Rezendes, the Owl Pages website, the Exploring Nature Educational Resource website, the Colorado Division of Wildlife website, ChaCha (don’t ask), negah28.info, BirdsnWays.com, CubaHeritage.org and Wikipedia. Several of the photos in this post were provided courtesy of Hunky Neighbor.

2010 Helmet-Cam Retrospective

Let me start by saying that, in general, I think it’s kind of pretentious to do a retrospective-year-in-review-type post, because doing so implies that a) the blog is more important/has a bigger audience than it actually does, b) the year was somehow exceptional or notable, which it really wasn’t (with the obvious though admittedly not-world-shattering exception that it was the first year I had a helmet-cam), c) even if it was an exceptional year, that I would somehow be in any way more qualified than any other Average Joe to, er, retrospect it, d) that the visual content of this blog somehow merits review/re-posting, and e) I think they always come off as a wee pit pretentious.

But, I’m doing it anyway, because a) I’ve been looking at a bunch of old helmet-cam clips this past week, which have really highlighted the remarkable changes in the living world over the course of the year, b) it allows me to get a post up during this quasi-nether-week without doing any real* research, and c) I guess, if we’re completely honest, I am just a wee bit pretentious.

*Just to be clear- the issue here is that I am lazy- not that I am unimaginative, or in any way out of cool post ideas. In fact I have a great two-fer brewing for next week, about a cool predator and hearing.

I get this weird thing about seasons every year. In the Summer I’ll be walking around in shorts and a T-shirt, maybe hiking or biking past some spot in the woods up in the mountains, and I’ll think that in just a few months, the forest all around me will be leafless, freezing cold, and under several feet of snow. And while I know it consciously, I just can’t really believe it. It just doesn’t seem intuitively possible that the same place could be so different in such a short time. Then 6 months later, skiing or what-not in the backcountry, I’ll have the exact opposite experience, looking around at the frozen silent forest, trying to imagine it green and leafy and warm and full of flowers and hummingbirds and dragonflies, and I just can’t really believe that it’ll be that different so soon. That all this snow will somehow melt away and the dead forest will just come back to life.

Tangent: I’ve been fascinated by the place-change effect of seasons for a long time, since long before starting this project, or even knew anything about forests. In the summer of 2001 I decided to photograph the same spot on the same trail weekly throughout the Summer/Fall. I didn’t see it through, but still have some of the old photos, reposted below.

During past winters I’ve sometimes reality-checked myself by looking through photos from the preceding summer, which helps, but a still photo is just that- a still. But this year, looking at old video-clips, I’ve found a connection to the past cycle of seasons I never managed to experience before.

So anyway, I started to do a kind of a month-by-month helmet-cam retrospective, intending to document the change of seasons and be all kind of artsy and such, but by the time I got to May, I thought, “Man, this is a lot of singletrack through leafless scrub-oak footage…” So instead, I’m just going post a bunch of my favorite helmet-cam clips from 2010. Here we go:

The Clips, Already

Some of the best early season clips I got were down South. This is a portion of the descent of Upper JEM outside of Hurricane, UT, traversing the upper 3 members* of the Moenkopi formation. The trail is lined mainly with Blackbrush and the occasional Utah Juniper up top, with Rabbitbrush and Mormon Tea joining in lower on down. I love the flow of this clip, the way the land changes color as we tranisition between geologic members, the weird light and ominous clouds. Pine Valley Range in the distance.

*Upper Red, Shnabkaib, Middle Red

Tangent: Yes, that’s right. The helmet-cam was my Christmas present last year. What’s that? What did I get this year? Well, I received several nice gifts, but one of the most interesting was a pair of Eyeclops Nightvision Infrared Binoculars. They’re not real night vision binoculars, like the kind of light-amplifying devices used by the military and such, but rather an infrared flashlight attached to a camera-viewer. It’s a fun little toy and I hope to use it for things like night-time bug-hunting, maybe checking out scorpions and such down in the desert come spring.

But in playing around with it (pic below, left = living room chair viewed in darkness) , I discovered a curious and unexpected side effect, which is this: it appears that artificial hair coloring doesn’t show up in infrared light. [I actually have a great photo that displays the effect, but unfortunately I can’t post the photo here, for reasons I can’t really get into.*] Meaning that when you look at someone with colored hair through the infrared viewer, their hair looks gray or white. You can actually pick up the viewer, scan a room full of people, and instantly see who’s dying their hair- Isn’t that freaky??

*Because Awesome Wife would likely leave me if I posted it. If you’re a real-world friend and want to see it, email me- it is way, way freaky.

Back in March I was in the same area with the team, and filmed this clip of the road descent into La Verkin with Teammate-Perry. I like this one for the rush of speed, as well as the physio-geographic significance: We’re crossing the Hurricane Fault here, dropping off the very, very Western edge of the Colorado Plateau and into the Basin and Range country, which extends clear to the Sierra Nevada.

Further down in the Mojave, this clip is from outside Blue Diamond, just outside of Las Vegas. The riding is slow and light dim, but I love the otherworldly feel of this ridge, following the faint singletrack, as well as the sense of solitude and open space just ~20 miles from the spawl and noise of the city. The tall yuccas alongside the trail are Spanish Dagger. Spring Range in the distance.

OK, this one isn’t helmet-cam, but I’m including it anyway. It’s driving across a wash in the Mojave, specifically Beaver Dam Wash, the lowest point in Utah. I love the blast of sun and green and water all together way out in the middle of this dry, spiky expanse of desert.

Tangent: What’s that? You’re wondering what else I got for Christmas. Well I got whole bunch of great books on my latest obsession, er, I mean interest- history of the first peoples in the Americas, and in the Great Basin in particular. (My recent rock art encounters have piqued my curiosity.) And I got some CDs and some more of that quick-drying underwear, and oh, yeah, this:

OK, so I bought myself that one…

Back up in Utah, this is one of one of my favorite stretches of Gooseberry Mesa, the South rim. Following Hunky Neighbor here, we’re rolling across the Shinarump Conglomerate, which marks the transition from Moenkopi to Chinle formations. About a minute in we roll up onto the next Chinle member “up”- the Lower Sandstone Member. We’re passing by Blackbrush, Mormon Tea, Cliffrose, Turbinella Oak, Utah Juniper and Singleleaf Piñon. Little Creek Mesa in the distance.

Closer to home, a couple of May bird-sightings. Here’s a male Black-Headed Grosbeak singing alongside the Shoreline Trail up above the Capitol…

And here’s a soaring Red-Tailed Hawk from Jack’s Peak. Oquirrh Range, Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island and Salt Lake Salient* in the distance.

*No, I haven’t explained this yet- it’s the geologic formation that comprises what I generally refer to as the “foothills” at the North end of Salt lake Valley. We’ll get to it when I do my Geology of the Wasatch post. (And yes, I will do a Geology of the Wasatch post one day and it will be awesome- my veritable Wasatch Opus. You will not want to miss it.)

Around the 1^st week of June the forests around 7,000 – 8,000 feet practically explode in greenery. Here’s a clip from up in Pinebrook. The leaves (mainly Maple & Aspen) are only partway out, still that light, lime green color, and the underbrush (mainly Ninebark & Snowberry) though green, is still low, only recently freed from the weight of the snowpack.

Just 2 weeks later, on the eve of the solstice, I took this clip from the Northern (and best) stretch of the Mid-Mountain trail, passing through several Aspen groves. You can’t see it in the clip, but the trail is lined with blooming Sticky Geranium and Wild Rose.

I did some cool summer road trips this year. This clip is from along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, riding the Rainbow Rim Trail. The tall conifers are Ponderosa pines. In stretches we pass through stands of Gambel Oak and New Mexican Locust. Out at the point we roll by a couple of Colorado Piñons, and finish off with a corridor of blooming Cliffrose. This section smelled fantastic. (At 2:27 I glance into the inner gorge.)

This clip turned out cool. It’s the full moon rising over the Paunsaugunt as I pedaled the bike path back to camp. There are all kinds of cool conifers on the Paunsaugunt. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I’m pretty sure we’re passing through Douglas Fir and Ponderosa.

OK, another non helmet-cam clip, but a good view of Redfish Lake up in the Stanley Basin of Idaho.

Earlier that same day, here’s a clip from up on the ridge on the West side of the lake (so on the right side of the previous clip) with some nice views of the lake. The trees on this stretch are Douglas Fir, and geologically I suspect I’m rolling over a glacial moraine, not from the last glacial advance, but from the one before, likely ~100,000 years ago.

Later on that vacation, here’s a clip from our campsite on the Lochsa River up in Northern Idaho.

Tangent: I just realized that reading the 2 previous tangents, you probably think that the only thing I care about around Christmas is getting presents. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. For while I certainly enjoy receiving gifts, I certainly know what really makes Christmas a truly unique, special and magical time, which of course is Making Fun of People’s Holiday Cards. Oh come on, you know you do it too. Every family has a Crazy Aunt or some such who sends out a whacky form letter every year that you and your significant other just can’t wait to get.* Actually, in all seriousness, I like Christmas card-form-letters**. Yes, sometimes they have a lot of detail, but they’re a great way to get caught up on the lives of friends and family you don’t get to see very often.

*Sadly, my own Crazy Aunt stopped sending us her card/letter a few years ago. I can’t figure out if she stopped doing it altogether, or somehow got wind of me making fun of it and took me off the list. It’s a shame, I loved it. It was always written in this super-happy upbeat tone, but kept mentioning things that seemed borderline inappropriate for a Christmas card. Actual line from a past edition: “After breaking off his engagement, Tad*** bought a VW Rabbit and moved to California…”

**Except for the downer ones. You know, the ones that go, “It’s been a year of challenges for the Hetzweigs; Hal lost his job in May, Betty’s back in rehab, and we had to put down Rasputin this year, but we’re hopeful little Petey will learn to cope with his deep anger issues…” Gee, I’m sorry it’s been rough, but did you have to dump all this on us the week before Christmas? Couldn’t you have emailed me or something back in October?

***Not his real name.

The truth is, there’s only one type of holiday card that drives me batty, and that is the Card With New, Unidentified, Unannounced and Unexplained Family Members. I’m not talking babies or pets here- I’m talking adults. Several years ago one of my cousins sent us all a card with a picture of him, his wife, their 2 teenage sons, and… another teenaged boy. We don’t see this cousin but every few years, but so far as we knew, he’d always had 2 kids. Could we have somehow missed one over the years? We doubted it. The card had no explanation, and we chat so infrequently with him, his parents or his siblings that there wasn’t a smooth way to just call him up on some other pretext and say, “Oh, BTW, who’s the other teenager on your Christmas card?” And because we felt awkward asking, by the time the next year’s card came around (again, with mystery teen) it was too late to ask, and so… anyway it was like 2 or 3 years before we were clued in*.

*He was a teen from a troubled home who played basketball with their sons and whom they took in and became his legal guardians. A totally awesome, inspiring story. I just wish they’d noted it in the card so we weren’t scratching our heads (and then semi-faking like we already knew) for so long…

This year, we got a card from AW’s cousin, a single(?) man with a young son. The card said, “Happy Holidays from the Jones* Family” and had a photo of the cousin, his son, a middle-aged woman and 3 teenaged girls. Who are these people? No note, no names, no nothing**. None of these women were in his card last year. We hadn’t heard of a wedding or even a serious girlfriend and suddenly we get the Brady Bunch Christmas card… We are totally clueless…

*Not his real name.

**Which is ironic, because this is the kind of Christmas card that totally merits a lengthy detailed form-letter…

Closer to home, the Wasatch Crest always makes for good video. This clip is from SkiBikeJunkie, Coryalis and my 83-mile Fourth of July Super-Crest tour. You can tell by the low brush/grasses and the light Aspen leaves that it’s still early in the summer. In addition to the usual Wasatch characters, we pass a number of Limber Pines between around 1:00 and 1:20.

For comparison, here’s a piece of that same stretch, exactly 2 months later. Check out how much higher (and drier) the grasses are, and how the Aspen leaves are now a dark, mature green.

This next clip I like- even with the problematic lighting- because it’s one of my favorite stretches of Great Western Trail, and also because it’s my only helmet-cam clip of, er, me. SBJ was kind enough to film it later during the Super-Crest ride. The conifers in the shady sections here are mostly Engelmann Spruce, which do real well on these North-facing slopes*

*And have been doing even better following a century+ of fire suppression in the Wasatch.

Here’s part of that same stretch 3 months later, the trail now lined with fallen Aspen leaves. Passing through the darker Spruce stands, the golden underbrush seems almost to glow, lighting up the forest from below.

The colors peaked in mid-October. Here’s another stretch of Mid-Mountain, about 2 miles North, and 4 months after, the Solstice-Eve clip up above.

Later in the Fall we returned to Gooseberry, where I took this clip following Fast Jimmy through Piñon-Juniper along the rim, with glimpses of the banded Moenkopi formations below.

In mid-November I followed Cory on this high-speed descent down into City Creek. The oaks and maples are bare, the grasses wilted and brown, the sky gray. The landscape is practically begging for snow. We’re rolling over conglomerate soils here, eroded down from the tertiary conglomerate cliffs above. I’ve been trying to keep up with Cory on the downhills for 15 years now, and he just seems to be getting faster. We hit 29.9mph on this stretch.

I saved my favorite clip for last. It may seem like an odd pick, and my feelings aren’t hurt if you don’t like or get it. It’s slow and meandering, I’m alone, the scenery is unspectacular, and the trail rather undefined. It’s the descent of a side trail* off Mid-Mountain trail during the peak bloom of Serviceberry on the day before the summer solstice. The video’s slow and poky, but when I watch it I feel the sun on my neck and smell the brush all around. I feel the Serviceberry brushing my arms, the Sagebrush scratching my shins, my flexed stomach flat on the seat and the braking-burn in my forearms**. For me, this clip is Summer.

*Lower Finesse.

**Because yes, I am a Luddite and ride with v-brakes. Or rather rode. Did I mention my new bike?

It was a good year. The next one will be great.

Best Gift Ever

For weeks Awesome Wife has been bugging me to tell her what I want for Christmas. Clothes? Gear? Books? What do I want? She thought she’d come up with a great gift idea when I lost my camera, but her hopes were dashed when Fuzzy found it the next day.

The problem is that I’ve reached that age where, if there’s some thing I want, well I generally just go buy it. I really have pretty much everything I need. Of course AW and I still buy each other nice gifts, but generally, whatever major gift we give one another at holidays is something we’ve pretty clearly specified.

Thinking about this recently, I thought about how it’s one of the things I miss about being a kid. Remember how, some years, you’d get a Christmas gift, and it was something you completely didn’t expect, maybe hadn’t even thought of, and yet it was totally the Best Gift Ever? Remember how incredibly happy that made you? That’s what I miss about being a kid at Christmas.

The ideal Christmas gift would be something that made me feel that way, that didn’t cost a lot, and that I never had even thought of. Oh, and it would have some kind of connection to baby Jesus, too, since, well you know, it’s Christmas.

Yesterday when I got home from work, the package from Fuzzy had arrived. Just as he’d promised, it contained my camera which I’d lost on Luke’s Trail, now safe and sound.

Side Note: Probably the nicest thing* about recovering a lots camera is recovering the photos you hadn’t yet uploaded off it when you lost it. I’ll share just a couple here.

*In fact, from a financial standpoint, losing the camera wouldn’t have been as big a deal as I’d feared. Over the last year or so prices on point & shoots have plummeted. If you’re looking for a last minute Christmas gift, you can pick up the updated version of my camera for about $110. I’ve had it for 18 months, abused it thoroughly, and it’s still working great.

A nice view of the Little Grand Canyon of the San Rafael River:

Here’s a cool zoom from along the rim of Good Water Canyon. The circled area shows an apparently recent cliff-break/slide KanyonKris spotted, which you can make out from the bare, vegetation-free slopes below.

Here’s a better shot of the “pavement-slab” formation in a broken-off chunk of Carmel rim rock:

From a bit later in the day, here’s a better close-up of the “angel” anthropomorphs down at Buckhorn Wash:

On the way out we had a nice Pronghorn* spotting:

*I blogged about Pronghorns in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.

This shot from Price (top of Luke’s Trail) isn’t great, but it clearly shows the relative rockiness of the pediment mantle which the trail lies atop of. We’re looking West, and in the background the line of the Book Cliffs is bending around to the South.

The Gift

But the package also contained something else- a bumper sticker. And not just any bumper sticker, but one that was the absolutely best, most spot-on, perfect-est Christmas gift for me ever*.

*And which will nicely compliment my existing stickers.

[SCROLL DOWN]

Thanks Fuzzy! And Merry Christmas, everybody. Remember, don’t make Baby Jesus cry; fix your bike already.

Filling In Blank Spots

Speaking of filling in blank spots, that’s what I did last Tuesday. KanyonKris and I played hooky from work, meeting up before dawn at the Orem Park & Ride and heading South, then Southeast, over to Price, then South to Castle Dale, where we turned off the highway and drove East toward the San Rafael Swell.

Geo-Side-Note: This was my first time heading South on Highway 10 from Price. The road follows a broad valley across the Mancos Shale which has a similarly drab appearance and ground-cover to the (unnamed) valley between Green River and Price. These 2 valleys make sort of a big crescent, in which Price sits at the junction. On the West side of the valley are high cliffs, and in fact these are the very same Book Cliffs we looked at in the last geo-post, which run up to the Northwest from Green River, then bend clear around Price and start heading South past Huntington and Cast Dale, where they form the Eastern edge of the Wasatch Plateau. So when you’re driving up out of Price toward Soldier Summit on your way back to the Wasatch Front, you’re driving up through the Book Cliffs.

According to “Fuzzy”, the owner/proprietor of Fuzzy’s BicycleWorks in Price, this bend in the Book Cliffs creates a sort of precipitation “hole” right around Price, such that they rarely get snow in and around town. But we’ll get to Price riding and Fuzzy in a little bit…

Like most Utahns, my usual exposure to the SR Swell is via the Eastern edge, which is specifically the San Rafael Reef. The SR Swell is a large (40 x 75 miles), 2,000 foot high, ovaloid uplift in Central Utah. On the Western edge, this uplift has tilted and cracked huge wedges of Navajo sandstone in a nearly 75 mile-long line of giant cliffs and “flatirons”. This wall/reef has been eroded by countless little stream/washes into dozens of fantastic, tight slot canyons*.

*I blogged about a hike with Bird Whisperer through 2 of these- Ding and Dang Canyons- a couple years back.

Extra Detail: The Swell was uplifted during a geologic episode known as the Laramide Orogeny, which was a 30 million year-long period of mountain-building in Western North America starting around 75 million years ago. The Laramide Orogeny produced the Rocky Mountains, as well as- closer to home- the Uinta Range.*

*Interesting geo-factoid: the Uintas are roughly 4 times as old as the modern Wasatch Range. But that’s a story for another post.

But when you approach the Swell from the Western side (Castle Dale), your introduction to it is very different. Instead of sighting this massive wall on the horizon, you just sort of roll along through open scrublands, first over Mancos Shale, then down onto the Cedar Mountain formation, working your way gradually lower, but mostly just rolling along over a not very interesting gray & brown landscape. Then you get a little lower still, the road gets a titch more squiggly*, and Junipers and a few Piñons appear, and then all of a sudden, the world… falls… away…

*But still graded and excellent. The roads in this area are the best-condition unpaved roads in the state.

No really, I mean it. The road ends at a spot called the Wedge Overlook, where what you are overlooking is the so-called Little Grand Canyon. No, it’s not as “grand” as the actual Grand Canyon, but it’s still absolutely, thoroughly and spectacularly awesome. Here it is:

OK, now at this point in the post, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: “Why does this photo suck so badly? If the view is that great, shouldn’t he have taken a decent photo instead of just cropping some still from his helmet-cam?” To which the answer is yes, I should have and indeed did so. In fact I took a dozen+ wonderful shots. But, later in the day, I lost- yes lost- my camera. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Tangent: Long-time readers will recall that I have a long, sad history of losing/ destroying cameras. In fact when I purchased this one, I broke my own rule and bought the super-duper extended warranty* that would cover any kind of impact/breakage.**

*Because warranties are a form of gambling, with the odds similarly stacked against you. So is insurance, I guess, but I do buy that because not doing so- ironically- turns out to be a bigger gamble. Still, I actually have a long, complicated and reasonably-well-thought-out (for me at least) Half-Baked Theory as to why we’d all be better off if automobile insurance were outlawed***, but I’ll save that for another footnote in another tangent in another post.

**Unfortunately you need the actual camera to collect on the warranty. KanyonKris helpfully pointed out that broken cameras are often offered for parts, etc. on eBay, and that I could possibly procure a “stand-in” on the cheap, but that would’ve broken my Rule of Crime****.

***In my younger days, I actually- and I am not making this up- had an extended version of this Half-Baked Theory that applied to banks, but it fell apart once I managed to accumulate $100 and needed to put it someplace.

****Which is not what you might assume. My Rule of Crime has absolutely nothing to do with ethics or morality (although I am personally ethically and morally opposed to crime- that’s beside the point) but rather the logic of crime. The Rule is that you should only commit crimes that you will only need to commit once. One time. So for instance, stealing $10 million out of a bank vault, or the Mona Lisa out of the Louvre***** is a sensible crime, because you do it and then presumably you’re set for life. On the other end of the spectrum, holding up a liquor store is right out, because you’d need to rob them practically weekly to maintain any sort of a reasonable income, and then the odds would doom you to death or incarceration in short order. Similarly, petty fraud sits down on this Low/No end of the Crime-Rule spectrum. I should point out BTW that KanyonKris strikes me as exactly the kind of logical, creative, smart and ultra-resourceful guy who would make a Fantastic Master Criminal if only he weren’t So Darn Nice.

*****Leaving aside the whole fencing issue, of course.

But here I am, losing yet another camera. So if you don’t know me in real life, you are probably thinking, “I am never loaning him anything…” but really, this only happens to me with cameras. And in my defense, I bring my camera absolutely everywhere and take tons of photos with it. So I think you should give me a little bit of slack, at least until you read how I lost it.

The Little Grand Canyon looks so different than the Eastern edge of the Swell- the Reef- because it’s not all crazy-tilted. It’s just been eroded down into countless little draws and canyons as the Swell has uplifted. It’s sort of a little Colorado-Plateau-within-a-Colorado-Plateau (which in this case happens to the actual Colorado Plateau.) The geology here includes a number of formations we’ve looked at previously; I’ve marked the main ones in this photo*.

*Courtesy of KanyonKris, who is exactly the kind of guy who doesn’t lose things like cameras.

Our reason for visiting the Wedge Overlook wasn’t just to see the view, but also check out a new mtn bike trail we’d heard about. The Good Water Rim trail departs from the overlook and follows the rim of Good Water Canyon- a network of small canyons feeding into a bigger tributary to the main San Rafael Little Grand Canyon- for 15 miles of singletrack. The ride was mostly level*, not at all difficult, and provided wonderful views. Sometimes the views would be of the deep canyon reaching out to the San Rafael River…

*Would be a great singlespeed ride.

…and other times it would just be of the shallow Navajo-lined side washes.

Side Note: Utahmountainbiking.com, whose reviews of trails are usually spot on, gives this trail borderline-ecstatic reviews. KanyonKris and I enjoyed it very much, but were not quite as enthusiastic. While interesting, the trail is almost completely non-technical. The views are great, but after 30 miles out & back, well, you’ve seen the same view quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong- it’s a very enjoyable trail. But if you’re a mtn biker planning a first trip to Utah, there are a few dozen trails I’d ride before of this one.

Regardless of aspect, the trail stuck to the same geologic layer: the Carmel Formation. The Carmel is a “mid-Jurassic” formation, separating the (early-Jurassic) Navajo from the (late-Jurassic) Entrada. It formed in a shallow marine and peritidal environments in seven distinct “depositional cycles”. The marine environment which led to its creation was a shallow inland sea extending from Southern Utah to Southern Alberta, called the Carmel Seaway. The formation consists of various layers of limestone, siltstone, sandstone and evaporates*.

*Mineral sediments concentrated by evaporation. Closer to home, the mud flats around Great Salt Lake are full of ‘em.

So wait a minute. If the Carmel separates the Navajo from the Entrada, why didn’t I mention it back over in Moab, when I was going on and on about those formations? Because it doesn’t occur over there; the Carmel Seaway didn’t reach that far East*. In any case, the trail rides over, and makes good use of, an abundance of remarkably flat gray slabs- limestone members of the formation. Some are small- like dinner plates, and clatter, jump and sometimes even flip under a bicycle tire. Others are massive, living-room-sized slabs. How are they all so flat, and on the same level?

*“East” is relative here, since what is now Utah was in a different spot on the globe in the Jurassic than it is today.

Extra Detail: I couldn’t figure out which limestone member; there are 3. A big one occurs near the tippy-top of the formation, an even bigger one in the middle, and a small/narrow one down at the bottom.

The answer becomes obvious when you look at the breaking-away chunks of the rim. Each massive car-sized boulder is comprised of a series of 2-3” thick horizontal plates. When one is eroded away, the next is right there to take its place.

The Carmel as a whole is relatively erosion-resistant layer when compared with the softer underlying Navajo. When the Carmel is finally removed, the Navajo quickly erodes into deep washes and canyons.

The Carmel and Ancient Marine Life

The Carmel appears to have played an interesting role in the evolutionary history of marine life. The limestone layers created what geologists carbonate hardground, which means a lithified (turned to rock) seafloor. These hard seafloors favored life forms that with hard, protective exteriors, and/or “encrusters” that formed hard, protective shelters or tubes, over critters that burrowed into softer/sandier soils for protection. The Carmel- and other Jurassic period hardgrounds- saw an explosion of various bivalves (oysters, clams, scallops, etc.) and other encrusters, such as serpulid worms, which construct and reside in hard little tubes.

The Carmel was one of a number of Jurassic carbonate hardgrounds that formed during the Jurassic, and later the Cretaceous. But for a long, long time before- throughout the Triassic and Permian, practically no such hardgrounds were formed. The next most recent hardground-forming era was back in the Silurian* and earlier Ordovician periods, and interestingly, this was the time-span that saw the rise of the echinoderms**, which include all sorts of spiny things, such as sea stars, sea urchins.

*We looked at the supernova hypothesis for the Silurian extinction back in this post.

**We looked at echinoderms- and specifically Brittle Stars- last spring down in Mexico in this post. Man, it is like I have a post for everything.

After the ride, while we were in the area, we drove down to the bottom of the Little Grand Canyon and the San Rafael River crossing, an easy drive which I strongly recommend. This whole area is both beautiful and remarkably accessible; come Spring I’ll be returning with the Watcher family for sure.

On the drive down we passed one of the best rock art sites in this part of the state- Buckhorn Wash. Buckhorn is a huge cliff-side panel, some 160 feet long, chock-full of large anthropomorphic figures dating back several thousand years. The style/period is Barrier Canyon, which we’ve looked at previously, so I won’t repeat the background here, but mention just a couple of cool/unusual things about this site.

Several of the figures are holding curious staves, snakes or other objects. Some of the anthropomorphs are winged, like weird, shamanistic archaic angels. 2 of the figures, oddly, seem to be over-painted with a yellow pigment; it’s not clear when or by whom, or even whether it was in historic or prehistoric times. (This site BTW is almost all pictographs, meaning painted figures, as opposed to petroglyphs, which are pecked/carved figures. The last rock art site we visited, Thompson Wash in the Book Cliffs, features a mix of both types, consistent with the multiple styles/periods found there.)

But the weirdest thing is that most of the anthropomorphs have later, deliberately-pecked holes in their chests. What does this mean? Were later visitors trying somehow to deface the site, or remove or later it’s significance or power?

Extra Detail: Buckhorn, like Thompson Wash, is another restoration success story. The site was similarly trashed until the mid-90’s. There also another, unmarked, Barrier Canyon site some 3 miles up-canyon of the main Buckhorn panel of which KanyonKris and I were unaware, and which I’ll be sure to visit on my next trip. Slifer’s book has detailed directions.

We headed back to the highway at Castle Dale, gassed up and did “lunch” at the Huntington Maverik, then raced North toward Price to catch a quick ride while we still had daylight.

Ode to Maverik

Tangent: Lunch was Crunchy Cheetoes, a Rock Star and a Maverik chocolate chip cookie. It is time for a trailer-trash Confession: I love Maverik (pic right, not mine*). I love the cheap gas, I love that the sunglass tree is always well-stocked (for the countless times I have forgotten/lost/destroyed sunglasses in the backcountry) and I love their fresh-baked cookies**. There. I said it. I love Maverik and I don’t care who knows it. When I roll into the outskirts of a rural Utah hamlet after days camping, backpacking or biking in the backcountry, and I spot that cheesy red and white sign ahead in the distance, my little heart practically sings for joy; there it is, everything I need in the civilized world, a proud little bastion of organization, resources and logistics, the very essence and ultimate triumph of Western civilization, conveniently packed into one little store. I swear, if I’m ever camped out alone in the desert and a flying saucer lands and aliens get out and ask me to show them the crowing achievement of our civilization, I am taking them straight to the nearest Maverik. Ah, Maverik! (If only they stocked better beer…)

*I pulled it from the Convenience Store News website. Man, it is like there is a website for everything.

**99 cents, and totally, decadently and awesomely delicious.

Price has a nice singletrack network on the north side of town running over a series of low hills or mini-mesas that collectively form sort of a long “pre-bench” leading up to the Book Cliffs. Price sits, as I mentioned, atop the Mancos Shale, and the pre-bench just above is also of the Mancos, but of an upper member, the Blue Gate. Though silty and fast-eroding like the rest of the Mancos, the Blue Gate Member seems to have just a bit more “spine” than the lower members, and actually forms modest-tough-beautiful minor cliffs and hoodoos in the side canyons in the pre-bench (pic below= crappy helmet-cam still).

Most of the trails are accessed via a brutal jeep-road-climb or hike-a-bike up onto the pre-bench, but once on top, the trails are great, all twisty, windy* and fun. Lower down, close to the edge of the pre-bench, they’re mostly smooth and stone-less and open, but as you get higher and “Norther”, Juniper and Piñon appear, creating a non-Mancos-y woodland, and the trail starts to feature occasional boulders, intermittent rock gardens, and coarser, larger-grained, and distinctly un-Mancos-like soils. What’s going on?

*As in they wind around a lot, as opposed to there being lots of wind.

What is going on is that the Blue Gate pre-bench is overlain with a very different soil formation, called pediment mantle. A pediment in geology is a broad, gradually sloping area at the base of mountains or cliffs, covered with a relatively thin layer of fluvial gravel which is the product of erosional (not depositional) processes. Where does stuff come from? From the Book Cliffs, which as we saw in our last geo-post, are gradually eroding their way North across the land.

The pediment mantle here is of uncertain age, thought to be laid down mainly sometime over the last 10 million years, probably more recently near streambeds, and consists of a “poorly-bedded”* mix of silt, sand, pebbles, stones and boulders.

*Although this sounds like a term from the Urban Dictionary, it is in fact geo-speak for “all jumbled up”.

The pediment mantle atop the Blue Gate member forming the “pre-bench” North of Price is only between 10 and 150 feet thick, but it’s enough to dramatically change the character of the surface. The land is covered with Piñon, Juniper, and well-established Sagebrush, and the trails corner well, hold up under moisture and feature intermittent interesting little rock gardens.

What’s cool about the Price-pediment-mantle is that it’s a great example of geology in action. While all this rock and sediment stuff sounds geeky and esoteric, here’s a clear, real-world example of how geologic processes and history change the land you ride across and the experience of the ride. Mountain biking in Utah is always fun, but until you understand what you’re riding on, you’re really just pedaling in the dark.

Pressed for daylight, we climbed steadily to the top of Luke’s Trail, then turned around and zipped back down. The descent was a delight- a bit too twisty to rip it, but interesting enough to keep you on your toes, constantly weaving and ducking your way under and around Piñon/Juniper limbs, and S-curving your way across pretty sagebrush-filled meadows.

When we popped back out on the dirt road we re-grouped and bombed down the steep, rutted half-mile back to town and the car. Loading up the bikes in the dusk, we laughed about what a great descent it had been and how we couldn’t wait to return. Then I noticed- my camera was gone.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I keep my camera in a small pouch (a cell-phone case) with a clip that clamps onto my Camelbak strap. When I first rigged up the system ~18 months ago (following my last camera/biking mishap) I used a piece of electrical tape on the open end of the clip as a failsafe. But over time it became tedious to constantly apply and remove tape for practically every ride, and I started mounting the case without the tape. After a few cautious rides, it seemed to be holding onto the strap just fine, and I soon forgot about the tape. And so things were, just fine as can be, till last Tuesday, when I found myself camera-less.

Kris immediately encouraged me to drive back up onto the pre-bench, where we looked around by flashlight at a couple of points where the trail intersected the road. It was hopeless of course, but that’s the kind of guy Kris is: patient, upbeat, generous with his time, happy and eager to help a friend out. Finally we gave up and drove back down to town in the dark. Kris mentioned that he’d spoken to “Fuzzy”, the owner of the local bike shop, earlier in the week to ask about trails, and that he’d call him in the morning and ask him to let us know if the camera turned up. I said, “Sure, yeah…” I knew he was just trying to help, but really, you drop a little camera in a woodland while descending at speed- it’s gone, off in the brush, never to be seen again. I might as well have dropped it in a river of molten lava... So it turned out to be a great day, but kind of an expensive one. I did my best to shrug off the mood as we chit-chatted on our drive back to the Wasatch Front.

Back home, the next day was a busy one, with plenty of catch-up work, email and phone-calls from the day I’d missed. After work AW and I attended a music program at school that Bird Whisperer and Twin B were part of, returning home home late and tired. Getting ready for bed, I noticed my phone was blinking. It was a text from KanyonKris. He’d heard back from Fuzzy. My camera was at the shop.

Note About Sources: Geologic info for this post came from Sedimentation, Stratigraphy, and paleoenvironments of the lower members of the Carmel Formation (Middle Jurassic, Southwestern Utah), Kirsten M. Banner, A carbonate hardground in the Carmel Formation (Middle Jurassic, SW Utah, USA) and its associated encrusters, borers and nestlers, Mark A. Wilson et al, and Geologic Map of the Price 30’ x 60’ Quadrangle, Carbon, Duchesne, Uinta, Utah and Wasatch Counties, Malcolm P. Weiss et al. (Crops of this map were used in the Price Geo-Graphics.) Archeological info came from Dennis Slifer’s Rock Art of the Utah Region.

Special thanks to Fuzzy of Fuzzy’s BicycleWorks and local riders in Price, UT. Fuzzy put out the word on my camera on the shop web page, and it was recovered inside of 6 hours. What a cool shop and biking community.