Heard lots of hermit thrush song yesterday, Monday, on aspen dendroglyph expedition with Dorothy. Dribbles of rain and sounds of distant thunder occurred occasionally but mostly sunny.
We looked for aspen dendroglyphs in a drainage of Frijoles Canyon that's south of NM4 and Cerro Grande . Bandelier National Monument has drawn pictures of the dendroglyphs there but did not have UTM information for them.
Dorothy is doing this work for the Valles Caldera National Preserve because the drainage was once part of the historic Baca Location No. 1. The VCNP would like to survey and record the aspen art before the old trees deteriorate or are burned in prescribed fires.
We found the 1925 Ottie tree inscription. Dorothy says this was done by O. O. Grant who settled on the Pajarito Plateau in the 1920's where the present-day Guaje Pines cemetery is.
I scoured the woods for dendroglyphs while Dorothy did the gut work of actually photographing them and filling out the paperwork. I left home at 9am and returned at 5 pm. I don't know how many miles I walked searching for dendroglyphs (I'm sure not much although it did include some back and forth to Dorothy to hold up the whiteboard for each aspen's identifying photo) because my gps ran out of batteries.
I forgot to give her back the flagging tape. I'll return it later this week. She temporarily flagged them, with permission from Bandelier, until she completes her project. Dorothy will go back there to draw any dendroglyphs not drawn by Bandelier's team.
We parked east of the first parking area for Cerro Grande. It was hard hiking down to the drainage because of all the dreadfall (deadfall) even though the area we were working in, the upper Frijoles Canyon area south of NM4, was burned in a prescribed fire within the last couple of years. There are some parts of the forest that have opened up as a result of the prescribed fire and aspen saplings have taken hold. On the steepest slope, though, there is still quite a dog-hair forest.
Walking in the meadow was also a challenge because the grass (including Timothy and Parry's oatgrass) is quite tall and effectively hides rocks and sticks that present constant tripping hazards. The meadow has lots of white clover. Dorothy wondered if it was purposely planted.
On Sunday, I exchanged my Keen mid-cut Voyageurs at REI because the sole was separating. I wore the new ones yesterday and even though nominally they are the exact same size, in reality, they are a size too small. This was not comfortable. I will be returning them. You won't believe what a confusion it was and how long it took to return/exchange the shoes. They ended up charging me twice for the shoes and I had to go right back when I realized that. Now the irony is that I have to return the new ones because the size runs small!
Sunday was very busy with the Santa Fe shopping trip, lots of food prep in the evening and my evening walk. Sometimes there are just not enough hours in the day.
I need to one day take my car into the dealership to get some work done in preparation for a possible CO trip in August. One day I need to call a plumber to check out the hot water heater which sometimes lets small amounts of water out of the overflow pipe. I need to call a roofer to check the roof after the recent hellacious hailstorm in Los Alamos. Today, though, none of that will occur. I will drive to Santa Fe for routine medical tests. Sometimes I wish that there was an alternative to all these routine medical tests that doctor's push!!
Tomorrow I play hooky and go on a hike with a local group!