Snow Quiet

One of my favorite parts of winter, at least the cold snowy kind, is the snow-quiet. That damp silence that takes over when the snow is thick and cold. It's so loud it even drowns out the sounds of the city, the sounds of the wind. People are suddenly avoiding the outside, and those that must venture outside bundle themselves up and refuse to speak to each other until safely warm by the fire, rubbing hands and drying socks. Car engines and rusty mufflers are even dampened in the snow, rumbles and chugs only an echo of their normal torqued vrooooom.

The snow quiet was even more dramatic in Rocky Mountain National Park, where tourists avoided all but the most well-worn and populated ski trails. We had been waiting for snow to go snowshoeing for weeks, but the December weather in the Rockies as proving fickle. The lack of snow was distressing even the Visitor Center volunteers, who lamented that more trails weren't open for winter use. "The waterfalls are real pretty," drawled an older gentlemen about one particular flat hike, "but you'd be better off hiking with the smidge of snow we got up there." He directed us toward Bear Lake, and area which we had already explored, but one that looked the most promising without venturing into the backcountry. So we headed out to what looked like Emerald Lake, which we had missed by about half a mile on our fall excursions. We tromp our way past skiiers and overdressed snowshoers in their REI catalag wear, past tours of tired and grinning Japanese men on cheap, rented snowshoes and their bored-looking guide. We make some awkward twists and turns up the side of a mountain that takes us about 500 feet OVER our desired location, looking down on windblown snow and pine trees disappearing the the mist and rock outcroppings obscuring our view of the frozen lake below. Turns out, we inadvnertantly following the trail of a lone skiier who, very ambitiously, skied up a mountain. We stopped for bananas, and within seconds the brutal wind had numbed out fingers and made our decision to turn back that much easier. But it was a swift clumb back down to the car, our trail already work in and the snow broken.

A job well done deserved a good beer, so we hit up Estes Park for a pit stop on our way out of town. A disappointing selection of local beer joints, Estes was deserted. We tumbled into a local joint, with at first little charm. But it turns out it was their Christmas party, and we got to celebrate the season with locals, who exchanged gifts and cheer and a free buffet table of snacks.

A view of Dream Lake through the trees

Snow blowing off the hillside

Jonmikel walking across a frozen Nymph Lake

Jonmikel looking through the ice on Nymph Lake

Showing off his snowshoes...

Braving the cold and wind on Dream Lake

Climbing up above Emerald Lake

I have to admit, the new decision, allowing concealed weapons in national parks in accordance to state concealed weapons laws, is disappointing but not surprising. The current administration has been licking the boots of the NRA for quite some time now, so why should the protection of national parks be looked at from a different point of view?

The NRA sees national parks as places with dangerous wild animals that need to be controlled and dangerous criminals that need to be shot. Which is funny considering that, despite the immense stupidity of people who try really really hard to piss off the wildlife, national parks have remained the safest places in the entire United States. Without guns.

So far, journalistic comment has been negative, and public comment has been, in accordance with the American Cowboy mentality, joyous. Now we can all protect ourselves in places where we were all safe to begin with! Yay!

The problems with allowing such carry laws are numerous. Firstly, almost 100% of the people I have talked to about this law don’t understand that it applies SOLELY to handguns. They’re thinking rifles, hunting weapons, weapons that can actually kill a bear. When they talk of protection, they say, oh well now I can protect myself against bears. This is an entirely ignorant statement, as 1) you still CANNOT bring loaded shotguns and rifles into parks and 2) shooting a bear with a handgun will only piss it off and cause it to eat you. So immediately, we see an increase in animal attacks by people shooting at animals who would have left them alone otherwise. Because people panic.

Second, guns are still illegal in federal buildings, and people don’t know that. A Visitor Center may be in a park, but it is still a federal building, and people will be bringing guns into such buildings without realizing that they could get thrown in jail for it, permit or no. Confusion abound.

Third, parks barely have enough money to police as it is; adding guns into the situation just makes people tenser. It will only be a matter of time until a LE ranger wanders into a campsite at night and gets shot from a trigger-happy, jumpy, and scared tourist. I’ve also heard people saying things like, “Well they need to be punishing the people who commit the crimes, not everybody.” Which is a fine statement to make, except the park service is already stretched too thin. They can’t afford to arrest and punish the people who commit crimes. Who is going to pay for this? Gun owners? Should there be a hefty gun-owners tax to make sure we have enough people out there to look for the bad guys? That may not be such a bad idea… In addition to that, park rangers are already some of the most harassed and attacked LEOs in the country; I’ve seen some arguments with rangers that I’m pretty sure would have ended in a shoot-out had the civilian had a gun. Good thing he can have one, now.

Speaking of money, where will our parks find the money to re-sign everything? They don’t have the money to maintain the signs they have, let alone create brand-news ones with PARAGRAPHS of political jargon about who can carry what where. Nobody will read them, leading to even more confusion than before.

To add to the confusion are these two fun caveats:

1) The concealed weapons ruling applies to national parks even in states that do not allow concealed weapons in state parks, which is more than a fair few. This could cause several problems in places where state parks abut national parks, generally allowing a free-flow of visitors from one to the other. Most visitors, though they may know they are traveling between a state and a national park, have no clue where the borders are. I know several rangers who may be scant as to that knowledge, as well.

2) Finally, what happens in parks that span state lines? And what happens when those states have differing concealed weapons policies? Who is going to pay for all that fencing and all that signage? Who is going to take the time to explain to visitors that now state lines matter?

This isn’t a case of “law-abiding” people being allowed to carry guns everywhere. There is a standard that has been adhered to that national parks are gun-free places where people can roam without fear of begin shot on purpose or by mistake. Plenty of “law-abiding” people break the law with their concealed guns. People are shot every day over trivial conflicts, and now we can add “who was at the campsite first” to the list. And now that people are allowed to carry guns in parks, what can they do with them? Can they target shoot, as they can in national forests, as long as no one is around? (I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that most people who are pro-gun toting in parks have no idea what the difference between a national park and a national forest is.) The actual legislation, in fact, doesn’t even address this question, which makes me aware of how haphazardly it was put together in the first place.

I agree with the statement by several people that concealed weapons are now meant to replace the use of common sense in national parks. Parks are safe. I’m not a big girl, and I’ve never felt threatened by ANYTHING inside a national park, well except that one time that elk during rut chased me to my car. I guess I could have shot it. That would teach it. And then it would gut me for trying.My point is not that people shouldn’t be allowed to carry guns. Just that with the lack of funding for pretty much anything useful in national parks and the mass confusion about what’s really going on coming from a generally confused American public, allowing people to carry guns in parks is a bad idea. I’m not worried about the crazy people who are out to break the law anyway. You’re right, they will bring guns into the park regardless. I’m more worried about the “law-abiding” citizens who, upon being faced with stressors and situations they have never been faced with before—such as coming face-to-face with a bears or watching wolves hunt down an elk right outside their car windows—panic. I’m worried about that one guy who hears something go bump in the night at his campsite and ends up shooting a ranger because he thought he was a bear. I’m worried about the family man who, upon seeing a wolf approach his car while covered in blood from a hunt, panics and shoots the wolf. I’m worried about the guy who, while out hiking, comes across a bear that under normal circumstances would wander off harmlessly, but because this hiker has a gun and shoots at it in panic, it attacks and kills the guy. It’s because I’ve seen people panic like this in places like Yellowstone and Grand Teton and Glacier and Denali when no guns are present, and that’s bad enough, though it usually ends peaceably. You put firearms into that situation, and suddenly people are in danger. Adding guns to national parks just puts more stress on people, and unfortunately very few Americans are aware of the actual difficulties and problems and situations facing the National Park Service and its already-exhausted staff.

Funny story. I know of these people. They claim to be eco-friendly and generally “green.” They grow their own food (which, in the West where there is so little water, I find much like having a lawn in Phoenix, but regardless), and work for “green” companies, and buy organic food and Seventh Generation products. They talk about green living and energy conservation and hybrid cars (though none of them have any). They are typical greenies, living in Ft. Collins and enjoying the culture.

These same, nameless people, went to lunch the other day. The lunch place was three blocks from their relative workplaces. It was a little chilly, at about 20 degrees. So what solution do these “green” people choose? They drove to lunch. They drove a GIANT SUV to lunch. They drove a giant, COLD SUV to lunch, three blocks away, because it was too cold to walk. They had to walk at least two blocks from the parking garage where they parked to lunch. In the cold. Because it was too cold to walk three blocks from the office.

Is this not making sense to anyone else?


On a positive note, I thought I would share a sunset photo with you:

So this is a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, and I promised I would have a post explaining this particular occurrence. I apologize for my slack...

Living in an old house, we are both pretty aware of how much things can go wrong. It’s old and drafty and cold and creaky. We seem to have an uber problem with the electrical wiring. Some outlets work fine and are wired correctly; others are wired to two different circuits; others are not wired at all, as far as we can tell, which is quite the quandary seeing as they work just fine. So when our refrigerator and stove went off, we really though nothing of it, went to bed, and figured we’d deal with it in the morning. We woke up to a fine layer of ice on the inside of our windows. Turns out, the furnace had stopped, too. We were freezing. So we clamber out of bed in a mad rush to figure out which switch would turn these things back on. Everything looked OK; it didn’t seem like we had blown a fuse. We turn them all off, wait for them to reset, then turn them back on. Nothing. To compact this story just a bit (for the sake of convenience, that fact that I’m behind in my entries, and the fact that I really don’t have the brain capacity at the moment to churn out something more eloquent), it turns out that the furnace, the fridge, and half the outlets in the house are attached to the same circuit as the washer and dryer, which is supposed to be reserved for just the washer and dryer. It also turns out that despite the fact that the microwave is not on the same circuit as the bathroom, that having both the bathroom lights and the microwave on at once can cause a surge in the bathroom. It ALSO turns out that we have an outlet in the bedroom that is not attached in any way to ANY of the switches we have found in the house. With everything off, that little lamp was still burning bright. So we’re missing a fuse somewhere, and we have no idea where. I mean, really.

OK I'm just going to post the rest of my shots from Thanksgiving in Vermont. I know, I've been totally lax about getting to those days, but... there has been so much policy stuff going on in NPS, that I've been so focused on how irate I am at the currently and thankfully outgoing administration for slowly trying to whittle away any honor left in the park system. I have those entries following this one, especially because really it's too chilly to frolic in the snow today, and a whopping 3 degrees!

But do know that TG was a total blast; I got to see family I haven't seen in years, notably my uncle Jeff from Seattle and my cousin Mark from New Jersey (and I hear his kids are getting huge!), and a bunch of my brother's friends that I have for years been trying to steal as my own. :-) We all hunkered down in a pretty sick condo in Downtown Burlington, right on the pedestrian street, and it was great being able to walk lots of places. Dinner was had at the house my parents rented out in Shelburn, right on the lake. Crappy views of the lake and mountains, you know.

That's a view across Lake Champlain and the mountain beyond, with JM in the bottom corner, playing photographer

Airplane!

The manor house at Shelburn Farm, in the summer it is used as a guest house, but apparently it has no heat

Seriously, this is the BARN at Shelburn Farm, or one of them. They also have another horse barn and a dairy barn, and several barn-like structures used to process maple syrup...

Frigidair

The high for today is 13. The low -6. This is more like it. Winter is supposed to be cold.
We had to close off one of our rooms the other day, to keep in more heat. We have one room, that Jonmikel was using as his office, that is mostly a sun room. It gets nice and toasty when its sunny, but as soon as that sun goes away is a heat vacuum. So we shut it down and are now running on only 3 cylinders, er... rooms. It's proving to be quite efficient, though.

It snowed a couple weeks ago, and then again last night. It hit up north before it go to us, and as we drove back from a hockey game in Loveland last night, road signs indicated that I-80 was shut down at Cheyenne, as was the road to Laramie. I was thinking, at the time, that we were going to be forgotten in the snowing once again, but this time we did get a couple of inches, and well-deserved frigid air.

Some snow shots for you all:

Yay! Our house in the snow!

OK, this one was actually taken by JM because his were so much better than any of mine, but this is to demonstrate the ice on the inside of the our windows in the sun room.

I have a fun fact for all of you:

Did you know that the Emancipation Proclamation only outlawed slavery in the southern states occupied by the north? That slavery was LEGAL in the Union until AFTER the Civil War ended?

Just some food for thought.