Lex Anteinternet: Jury finds you can cross corners in Carbon County.

Lex Anteinternet: Jury finds you can cross corners in Carbon County.: 

Jury finds you can cross corners in Carbon County.

Elk Mountain as viewed from Shirley Basin.

Big news on the public access to lands front:

Jury finds four corner-crossing hunters not guilty of trespass

Now, what this isn't.

It isn't a court declaration that's binding precedent on the whole state.  It's one jury, in a circuit court case. That's it.

It does mean that these four guys are not going to be convicted.

And beyond that, it shows that juries, quite frankly, are unlikely to convict anyone for corner crossing.  Not only in Carbon County, but anywhere in the state.

And it doesn't end the issue, actually.  A civil suit remains, and it's far more likely to have a bigger impact, as it will likely be the one that ultimately goes to the Supreme Court and the Wyoming Supreme Court will then determine the issue.

It does send a signal, however, both to courts (of course) but to the legislature on how average Wyomingites view these issues, and that likely is summed up by a comment made in court by the defendants' lawyer:

He believed the whole mountain was his and that no one but [he] was allowed to be there … like a king.”

DEFENSE ATTORNEY RYAN SEMERAD ON RANCH OWNER FRED ESHELMAN

Eschelman is an entrepreneur who is noted for his charitable donations. . . and his donations to right wing politicians as well.  He's apparently humble and generous. Not so generous, however, that the South Carolinian saw fit to just turn a blind eye to this matter or to generally allowing some of the less well funded access to public land, not his land, on his Wyoming ranch.

The original encounter, moreover, was caught on audio and video, with Eschelman's employee stating to law enforcement;“Do they realize how much money my boss has? …and property?”

And indeed, his having a Wyoming ranch brings to mind Thomas Wolfe's comment on that in his book A Man In Full.

On the topic of decisions, this also points out the dangers of pursuing something best left untouched, something that was pointed out a couple of years ago in the Wyoming ve. Herrera case.  Sometimes, there are issues that you'd rather leave undecided.

Indeed here, the County Attorney, an elected official, made the decision to prosecute, no doubt based on prior interpretations of the law, which would have favored the same.  But in doing so, she's accidentally taken the side of a wealthy out of stater against the interest of common Wyomingites.  This probably never crossed her mind, but it likely has crossed the mind of a lot of locals by this point, and the effective statements of the defense now doubt have taken root.  Eschelman, in the words of the defense, is a would be king and oppressor.  I've now seen public comments that the County Attorney prosecuted as she was influenced by his wealth.  That's extremely unlikely, she was probably influenced by the law, and may very well not be in the class to whom this issue is dear to the heart, but she's no doubt aware that it is to many now.  How this also plays out is yet to be seen.

And indeed, this takes us back to the topic of allmannsretten, which we've addressed elsewhere.

As noted, this story is still playing out.  It'll be very interesting to see where it goes ultimately.

Lex Anteinternet: Earth Day, 2022

Lex Anteinternet: Earth Day, 2022: 

Earth Day, 2022

Human beings are the only species in the world that is not happy being themselves.

Fr. John Nepil (What Say You Nature/Grace, 25:30).

That's certainly the case for modern Western man, to be sure.

Today is Earth Day for 2022.

Take a closer look at that pile of ashes.  All those silver things are nails.

Given the recently and ongoing news, my prediction is that this will be a gloomy Earth Day.  War rages in Eastern Europe, with Vlad Putin working on going down as one of history's worst people.  In the future, Vlad the Impaler will have to take second fiddle to Vlad the Would Be Czar for Bad Vlads, reputation wise.  Now, war is a pretty obvious glum thing to start with in this thread, and I don't want to get into the sappy type poster crap, but war is a pretty big environmental insult in certain ways.*  We're not going all maudlin and frankly goofy superficial with a Mothers Against War type of theme here, and we're sure not going to put up a "War is not healthy for children and other living things" poster, the same being one of the stupidest sentiments ever put up on a serious topic, emphasized by constructed juvenility on a topic that's not very juvenile.

But that's part of the problem here.  More on that as we carry on.

Earth Day is something that gets politicized, for obvious reasons, pretty quickly.  The irony is however, in its heart of hearts, it's a deeply conservative, and conservationist, thing, and not really much in sync with the liberal ethos.  Because of the ultimate problem, however, that being narrow self-interest, we tend never to realize that, and for that reason, we don't make the progress in this area that we really ought to.

What we ought to be thinking of is 1) things are defined by our narrow self interests; and 2) ultimately in order to protect nature, we have to realize our own actual natures, and that isn't defined by us.

And hence the photo above.

This might seem to be on the superficial Earth Day level.  I.e., don't pollute.  And indeed, that point certain needs to be made. The photo depicts ashes and nails. But more than that, the ashes are dead center on a very heavily travelled county road that's closed for the winter.

More precisely, it's right where the road is closed.  And I'm certain that I know what happened here.  A group of somebodies traveled down to the end of the road and had a huge bonfire, with the firewood being made up of pallets.

Now, who did that?  I don't know.  If I had to guess, I'd guess that there are two logical groups of suspects.  One are young adults.  Young adults do stuff like this all the time.  A group may have gone out for the night, camped, probably, built an enormous bonfire on a space where it was safe to do it, and stood around and drank beer.  A probable guess.

The second guess would be similar. This area is heavily frequented by snowmobilers. So much so that when I saw something at the end of the road, I immediately associated it with them.  Maybe a group of them decided to have a late winter gathering, along the same lines.

My guess is that it's more likely group number one. Snowmobilers are already carting in a lot of stuff just to do that, and probably don't want to cart in pallets. Besides that, they're already pretty sensitive, in this area, to being dissed by people who just don't like snowmobiles.  Chances are pretty good, therefore, it was group number one.

Now, there's no reason to believe that they intended to hurt a soul. Rather, the evidence is actually the opposite. The road is wide here, and by building a fire there, they built it on a surface that wouldn't burn.  Moreover, it was shielded on the windward side by a high wall of snow.  All in all, that was pretty good thinking, fire risk wise.

Not lingering nail wise.

Probably just an overthought.

And hence the problem.

Our actions have consequences, even if we intend to them to be harmless.  Some thinking and consideration is in order.

Here, now, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of nails on one of the most heavily travelled rural roads in the county.  

On the way out, I saw two highway patrolmen and reported the situation. They said they would head up as "we have shovels". Well, no matter how diligent their efforts, they won't be able to shovel up all those nails.  People will be getting flat tires all summer long.  Mountain bikes go by this area all the time, they'll get flats too.  Hikers go by, and hikers with dogs go by. And it's still in an area where mounted horsemen occasionally go by.  Nails pose a threat to them all.

Indeed, dating back to Roman times a device made of nails, the caltrop, was used to disable horses.  They're still made today to disable car tires.  

They didn't stop to think of that.  Or, if they did, they brushed it off.

And we all do both of those.

And here's the first thing to consider.  Just because it's in our own interest, whether for enjoyment, or for wages, doesn't mean it's good, long term, for everybody and everything.

That doesn't always mean we can avoid it.  Indeed, in someways, our daily actions are inevitably a secular example of what Catholic theology defines as "cooperation with evil".  Save for those who live cloistered lives, that will be hard to avoid.

Which gets to the topic of acting individually and collectively.

Now, individually, that's basically a don't build bonfires in the road sort of thing to some degree.  But in others, it's a be honest sort of thing.

And that means being honest with yourself, including where you are in cooperation with things. Beyond that, however, it's being honest that just because it profits you in some fashion, doesn't mean it's great for everyone in all senses.

To give an example of sorts, just because Colorado can tax weed doesn't mean getting a bunch of people stoned out of their heads and destroying their lives is really a good thing.

There are lots of other examples, to be sure.

But beyond individual, there's collective, and that has to do with community, and at the end of the day, that ultimately had to do with nature in a real, and existential, way.

We may all be individuals, and indeed we are, with each being unique, but beyond that we are all individuals within a single species, and therefore much more alike than different.  Our individualism takes us only so far.  It's easy to get diverted into "community" at this point, but the fact of the matter that our members of a species in fact defines our nature, and much of our modern, or as some would have it, "post-modern" individualism is a perversion of that.

It was in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia that the central character grabbed his own flesh and stated that a man could "be what he wants, but not want what he wants".  This is true of the entire species.  As a species, we're little removed from nature, and when we act, on Earth Day, or any ohter day, as if we are not, even if we are the most rabid of environmentalist, we act in a fashion that's an insult to nature and does it harm. We must be of nature, in nature, part of nature, and consistent with our natures, to act on any fashion that's really beneficial to nature, including our own natures.

And that's a deeply conservative thing, as well as a conservationist thing.

And it's something that modern Western society doesn't want to be about.

Footnotes:

*". . .sappy type poster crap".  This and the following line referred to the famous poster depicting a highly juvenile drawing of flowers and the lines that "War is not healthy for children and other living things". 

Well, d'uh.

Related threads:

Be who you are.

Mehr Mensch Sein

The Agrarian Lament: A lamentation. The modern world

Knowing where you are.

Young Diognetus in the modern world.

Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

Today is Earth Day for 2021. . .

Earth Day, 2020

Earth Day, 2019

We like everything to be all natural. . . . except for us.

It's All Natural! Except for us.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for t...: 

Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

Last year's entry on this topic was particularly good, so I'm repeating it:

Lex Anteinternet: Some odd things you can do for the environment on ...: 

Some odd things you can do for the environment on Earth Day that may or may not have occurred to you.

All of which are in the "little things mean a lot" category.

Quit buying bottled water.  It's almost always packaged in plastic and varies hardly at all from tap water.  Just get tap water.  If water in your area really sucks, okay you can do something, but bottled water isn't it.

I'll note, I don't include carbonated water, which is its own drink, in this. But buy it in the glass bottles or the aluminum cans.

By the way, if you live in the US, you don't need to pack around water constantly.  Americans carry more water on an individual daily basis than the British 8th Army used in the desert in all of World War Two.  You are hydrated just fine.

If you must pack water around with you like a desert explorer on an extended expedition, get a good metal container. We used to call these "canteens", but now water bottles are called something else.  Anyhow, get one of those.

Plant a garden.

Go hunting.

Go fishing.

Grow it, harvest it and process it yourself.

Switch to fountain pens, if you use pens.  Disposable ballpoint pens have gotten to the point where they write really nicely, but they're an entire industry based on disposal.  It's wasteful.

Don't buy it just because its new and you have an old one.  I don't know what it would be, but the buy it as its new ethos is wasteful also.

Walk there if you can.

Ride a bike there if you can.

If you are an outdoorsman and use an ATV to get to the sticks, get rid of it.  There are legitimate uses for them to be sure, and of all sorts, but hunting and fishing aren't two of them.  If you need a mule, get a mule.

Skip the sanctimony.  Almost all environmental sanctimony is handed out by people who have bought into theories of environmentalism that suffer in the face of reality, and tend to be, beyond that, virtue signaling.  Some people living really simple quite lives are much more green than people who make a big deal of claiming to be green.

If your clothes are synthetic, switch, when they wear out, to ones that aren't.  And buy durable ones.  That means buying plain or classic ones.  A good pair of Levi's lasts for eons, a Sheepskin coat is going to outlast a synthetic one by decades, a beaver felt broadbrimmed hat will last for 20 or more years when your high tech synthetic one has had to be replaced two or three times.

And your Levi's (and that's not the only thing) don't need to be washed nearly as often as you think they do, unless you work an occupation that makes them routinely dirty.

To add to that, quit buying the laundry soap that's perfumed.  It's just some weird chemicals and it just makes stuff smell weird, not clean.

Same thing with "laundry sheets".  You don't need them.

On perfumed stuff, I wish I could say the same thing about deodorant, a useless product that made its real appearance in the late 60s, but its now so ingrained in society there's no avoiding it.  At least it means that we have to put up with perfume, and even more useless product, less than we used to have to.

Make it yourself, if you can, whatever it is, from dinner to durables.

Go to church on Sunday and, if you are open to it, go to one that's an Apostolic Church.  An institution that has its eyes on the really long future and the really long past, and regards them all as pretty much the present, has a lot more going on for it than whatever organization you might be pondering joining.

Lex Anteinternet: Dog Fight

Lex Anteinternet: Dog Fight: 

Dog Fight

I haven't seen Power of the Dog.

I started to watch 1883, but I quit watching it as I couldn't get over the historic improbabilities.  That's why there's no review of it here.

As to 1883, my interest in it started to wane when it showed one of the protagonist engaged in a relatively short range gun fight, after being ambushed, using a scoped rifle.  Yes, there were scope rifles at the time, but they were exceedingly rare, quite delicate, and not really suitable for snap shooting.

But what really did it is when the Sam Elliot character is being recruited to lead a part of overland immigrants north from Texas.

In 1883, you could take the train. And why would you start from Texas in any event?  You would not.

Indeed, railroads leased out freight cars to immigrants, so they could dump whatever implements they had in them, and ride with them.

Yes, cattle were being driven overland, and some immigrants still took the Oregon Trail that late, but trailing up from Texas?

Anyhow, 1883 was a big deal with some viewers as Yellowstone, which I also have not seen, is a big deal with some viewers.  Sam Elliot reprised a role he's now typecast in as aged cowboy, with cowboy loosely defined.

Following that, Elliot was interviewed about the movie Power of the Dog, which I haven't seen and which I'm unlikely to.

More specifically, Elliot called the movie "a piece of shit".  He further noted, "They’re running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions of homosexuality throughout the movie.”

I've read the synopsis of the movie, which is billed as a "psychological Western", and it frankly reminds me a bit of Legends Of The Fall, which was an awful movie.  Maybe Elliot is right, and it is a "piece of sh**".  I have no idea, but I'm not going to bother with it.

But what I will note is that Elliot is right about shirtless riders. Wouldn't happen.  Then, as now, cowboys cover up, even in hot months.  You very rarely, at least up here, see a working cowhand wearing a short sleeve shirt.  Television cowboys might work in t-shirts, but real ones don't.

Going further, in one of the photos from the film, the protagonist is wearing overalls.  You won't see cowhands wearing those, either. That's strictly a farmer thing. They're not appropriate for riding, frankly.

As for his other comments, I'll leave them there, as I haven't seen the film.

The director, New Zealander Jane Campion, did react to Elliot, noting that he's not a real cowboy (true) and defended her work by stating:

The west is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist… I consider myself a creator and I think he sees me as a woman or something lesser first. And I don’t appreciate that.

As a Westerner (and a stockman) that's part of the problem  The West is no more a "mythic space" than New Zealand is and ought not to be treated that way.  Yes, it's been mythologized, and often badly, but that process is part of an instinctive way of preserving history.  It happens, we'd note, in all cultures, on some topic.

Power of the Dog, I'd note, was written by one Thomas Savage, whom I'd describe as a minor novelist.  But for this film, I've never heard of him, and I've never heard of any of his works.  To some degree, it seems like his career was sort revived by Anne Proulx, which is interesting.  Proulx gained  a following as a regional novelist from the Northeast, but then briefly lived in Wyoming, during which time she produced Brokeback Mountain, which I also have not seen. Even when she lived in Wyoming, apparently Saratoga, she spent part of the year in Newfoundland.  From here she went on to New Mexico, always a favorite haunt of artists, and is now in Washington state.

I note all of this because Proulx is prominent, or at least her one work is, in what might be regarded as an "anti-Western", which Power Of The Dog seems to be as well, perhaps.  That is, the authors of these works, in some ways, take Western themes and seek to turn them on their head.  In Savage's case, it seems he had an early exposure to ranching as a youth and young man, but never took to it, and then as a writer used it as a setting of criticism, with the dysfunctional family being the primary topic.

This stands out, I think, from works by authors like Larry McMurtry.  McMurtry wrote some very gritty novels, but they're quite true to life.  McMurtry also grew up on a ranch, in Texas, and while, like most novelist, his themes exaggerate, they're also fairly accurate as a rule.  His book Horseman, Pass By, is probably the best book written set in a modern setting, with its descriptions being incredibly true to life.

Less so, but still notable, are those of Cormac McCarthy, who tends to write things set in Texas, and has spent much of his life there, but who is from Rhode Island originally, showing that a person doesn't have to be from a place from infancy in order to pick up the feel of a place.

I guess what this gets to is three things, one is historical accuracy, a second is love of place, and the  third is love of subject.  In order to produce a really outstanding work, written or filmed, all three have to be there.

Now, I may be going further than I should on some of these works, as I haven't seen them all, but that's lacking, it seems to me, on some of these, and perhaps on the two ones that started this dog fight.  I know that people have been fawning over 1883, but frankly it just fails in the first category at least.  I think people love it as they love sappy dramas and from what I can pick up about it, without watching it, that's what Yellowstone is. People love Yellowstone, so they love 1883. Beyond that, some people love Sam Elliot and will watch anything he's in, and others love Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, and finally some viewers, while they won't put it this way, find Isabel May hopelessly hot.  None of that makes the film great, or even good.  Nor does just simply taking Western stereotypes, which at least to some degree are stereotypes as they're based on reality, and turning them on their head. That can be done, to be sure, but just to do it, just does that, and not much else.

Lex Anteinternet: Nebraska Ranchers to go into Meat Processing

Lex Anteinternet: Nebraska Ranchers to go into Meat Processing: 

Nebraska Ranchers to go into Meat Processing

Abandoned Swift Packing Plant, Ft. Worth Texas.

 I've written about how the State should sponsor something like this here:

Nebraska ranchers have a plan to contend with Big Beef and restore local economy

And they just hit the Wall Street Journal:

Cattle Ranchers Take Aim at Meatpackers’ Dominance

Nebraska cattlemen plan to build their own butchering plant to bypass America’s meat-processing giants, which they say underpay for livestock

I'd note that this might help Wyoming ranchers too.

Meat processing has become, over the years, one of the most concentrated industries in the U.S.  I.e., the Sherman Anti Trust Act has apparently taken a vacation in regard to them, as there are hardly any owners.  This actually became the topic of a Presidential statement relatively recently, albeit before the news became dominated by Vladimir Putin's desire to become the Czar.  The President's statement was summarized on the Presidential blog:

Recent Data Show Dominant Meat Processing Companies Are Taking Advantage of Market Power to Raise Prices and Grow Profit Margins

DECEMBER 10, 2021•BLOG

By: Brian Deese, Sameera Fazili, and Bharat Ramamurti

---

The Biden Administration has been working at every level to address supply chain issues that are affecting prices. Many such issues are related to the pandemic—like changes in demand patterns, bottlenecks, or shutdowns. But for some price increases affecting Americans, there’s another culprit: dominant corporations in uncompetitive markets taking advantage of their market power to raise prices while increasing their own profit margins. Meat prices are a good example. 

In September, we explained that meat prices are the biggest contributor to the rising cost of groceries, in part because just a few large corporations dominate meat processing. The November Consumer Price Index data released this morning demonstrates that meat prices are still the single largest contributor to the rising cost of food people consume at home. Beef, pork, and poultry price increases make up a quarter of the overall increase in food-at-home prices last month.

As we noted in September, just four large conglomerates control approximately 55-85% of the market for pork, beef, and poultry, and these middlemen were using their market power to increase prices and underpay farmers, while taking more and more for themselves. New data released in the last several weeks by four of the biggest meat-processing companies—Tyson, JBS, Marfrig, and Seaboard—show that this trend continues. (Other top processors are private companies that don’t report publicly on their profits, margins, or income.) According to these companies’ latest quarterly earnings statements, their gross profits have collectively increased by more than 120% since before the pandemic, and their net income has surged by 500%. They have also recently announced over a billion dollars in new dividends and stock buybacks, on top of the more than $3 billion they paid out to shareholders since the pandemic began.

Some claim that meat processors are forced to raise prices to the level they are now because of increasing input costs (e.g., things like the cost of labor or transportation), but their own earnings data and statements contradict that claim. Their profit margins—the amount of money they are making over and above their costs—have skyrocketed since the pandemic. Gross margins are up 50% and net margins are up over 300%. If rising input costs were driving rising meat prices, those profit margins would be roughly flat, because higher prices would be offset by the higher costs. Instead, we’re seeing the dominant meat processors use their market power to extract bigger and bigger profit margins for themselves. Businesses that face meaningful competition can’t do that, because they would lose business to a competitor that did not hike its margins.

As one large meat-processing firm noted to investors during its earnings call, their pricing actions “more than offset the higher COGS [cost of goods sold].” Comparing the fourth quarter of 2021 to the same quarter in 2020, that same firm increased the price of beef so much—by more than 35%—that they made record profits while actually selling less beef than before.

Here is the bottom line: the meat price increases we are seeing are not just the natural consequences of supply and demand in a free market—they are also the result of corporate decisions to take advantage of their market power in an uncompetitive market, to the detriment of consumers, farmers and ranchers, and our economy. They underscore why promoting competition is a core part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s economic agenda.

The Administration has already announced strong actions to crack down on illegal price fixing and enforce the antitrust laws robustly, investments of hundreds of millions of dollars to create more competition in meat-processing, over a billion dollars in relief to small businesses and agricultural workers hurt by COVID, and many other steps to ensure American families, farmers, and ranchers get a fairer shake. These are just a few of the actions we’re taking under our existing authorities.

Just yesterday, the Department of Agriculture announced that its loan guarantee program to invest in small meat processors and distributors is now open for business. The program will use $100 million in American Rescue Plan funding to leverage approximately $1 billion in lending capital through community and private sector lenders to expand meat and poultry processing capacity and finance other food supply chain infrastructure. This important investment in new private sector capacity will give producers more options, help bring competition to the meat-processing industry, and close vulnerabilities in the food supply chain revealed and exacerbated by the pandemic. It is in addition to the previously announced $500 million investment for expanded meat and poultry processing capacity.

In September, we also called for Congress to work together to enact greater transparency in cattle markets. We are encouraged to see that Senators have since announced new, additional efforts to work together to advance bipartisan legislation. 

Together, these actions will support families, farmers, ranchers, and workers, and address the concentration in meat processing that makes it easier for dominant corporations to hike prices.

I have to say, if former President Trump had stated this, there'd be all sorts of rural cheers everywhere.  In our current era of hyper partisanship, however, not much occurred.

Indeed, in an election year like this one, in which oil is up and down, and people were worried about the economy and the long term prospects for the state, surely this would be a heated issue that every candidate, particularly those running for the House of Representatives, would be focused on, right?  We'd expect the candidate with rural roots to be discussing this, for one thing.

No, nobody is saying much.

Something definitely needs to be said.

And something needs to happen.

Prior related threads:

The Pandemic and Food, Part Three. A Good, Affordable, Steak

Ranchers Form Co-Op to Address Meat Processing Bottleneck

Lex Anteinternet: Issues In the Wyoming Election. A Series. Issue No. 1 (c). The Economy again. . . Agriculture

The Wyoming Economy. Looking at it in a different way.

Supply Chain Disruption and Other Economic Problems

Lex Anteinternet: The 2021 Season

Lex Anteinternet: The 2021 Season:  

The 2021 Season

 It wasn't a great one, for a variety of reasons.

The Dude after the last day of hunting.  We finished up with an attempt, unsuccessful, on Chukars.  He was tired.

As with most hunters, the season doesn't quite follow the calendar year.  For me, it starts sometime in spring when spring turkey season opens up.  When that closes down, its fishing season for me, even though my state doesn't really have a dedicated fishing season.  You can fish all year long.

Indeed, when my daughter was at home, fishing season started as soon as waterfowl ended in January, with that being ice fishing season.  She's away at university now, so there hasn't been any ice fishing recently.

Anyhow, there's turkey season, and then fishing season, followed by sage grouse and dove season, antelope season, deer season, and elk season.  This assuming I didn't draw any special tags, like moose, and that would be a safe assumption.

Big game season yields into waterfowl season.

Seasons dictated by nature, the weather, and I guess the game and fish department.  A better calendar, however, than one dictated by professional sports or by actuaries.

Indeed, if I had my druthers, which would mean having the extra time, I'd add gardening season and this would effectively be my life.  Just the other day a slightly younger colleague of mine spoke about his dreams for retirement (which with five kids, only one of whom is in college, I'll predict will remain a lifelong dream).  They involved "travel", and when I mean travel, I mean global travel.

I have utterly no such desires whatsoever.  I've crossed oceans by plane more than once and if I never do so again, that's okay by me.

I'm a simple man.

Anyhow, in terms of unrealized dreams, this has been a year of unrealized dreams for me in a lot of personal ways.  2021 won't go down as a happy year for a lot of people, spirit of the times and all, and it certainly won't for me.

I did start off the year with turkey season.

Me early in the turkey season, dog behind me.  Yes, the dog goes.  The rifle in this picture may have been near its last hunt, as it was stolen this past year.  The hat is a heavy duty Park Service dress campaign hat.  The year before last my old reproduction, heavy duty, beaver felt M1911 campaign hat, which had become my fishing hat, and then hunting hat, bit the dust and, worse yet, blew out of my Jeep on the same day that the Dude was bitten by a rattlesnake.  The jacket is a surplus Swiss Army smock.

For quite a few years, I had access to some farm ground with turkeys on it.  That ground sold in 2020 and my access went with that.  This meant, of course, that finding a turkey, in the general season, in my region, was made quite a bit more difficult, but that's the way such things go.

I stumbled on an area which in 2019 I was the only one who was hunting turkeys.  Even better, early in the turkey season, you have to really hike in.  Last time I really did this heavily, in 2019, I was about the only person I saw.

The season started off that way, and I did run into turkeys.

I’m probably the only guy who takes his hunting dog out for turkey hunting, although I'm not hunting turkeys with him.  He's hiking.  Things have gotten so that I can't go out the door on a weekend anymore without the dog.  He won't allow it to happen.  This is detrimental to turkey hunting, however.

I did find a turkey at one point, but I was armed with a .22 Mag rifle, and it was in a tree.  I frankly didn't have a good enough view of it, from a distance, to tell if it was a tom or not.  I passed on the shot, and eventually he flew off.

The next trip, my luck on isolation ran out.  When I was up on the mountain, I could hear the motorized ATV brigade down in the valley.  Trying to pursue a turkey down a heavily wooded slope, I could hear them coming up. They never saw me, but I sure could hear, and then see, them.  I'm sure every turkey in the county could as well.  On the way down they passed me, and then when I was loading the dog they went by me again.

Now, like a lot of folks who are gasoline jockeys, they weren't very attune to what they were doing and where they were going.  I've had this happen twice this past year (I'll get to the other in a moment), but I was worried for the dog.  Frankly, I was highly distracted.  I put the rifle on the hood of the Jeep to load him so he wouldn't get hit.  When they passed, with the dog in, I got in and started to drive off.  I realized, however, that the rifle wasn't in the truck, and I went back to get it.

It was gone.  I walked the entire area that day, more than once, and again the next day, and again one more day after that.

I was the only one there, other than them.  I'm certain they took it.

And by took it, I mean stole it.  It wasn't hard to figure out whose it was.

I've never liked ATVs much as I think they're an insult to nature, frankly, and people abuse them.  I see people roaring over the sagebrush with them, and with their asses so welded to them that they just can't seem to get out on foot.  It's not all that uncommon for me to find somebody who will state that they didn't see anything. . . 

Yeah. . well if you are as noisy as the Afrika Korps, you aren't going to.

I did go back later, but, no turkeys.  I did run into them, but I could never get up on them.  I'm more than a bit unusual for a turkey hunter in that I stalk them, and I lack a call.  Very few people hunt them that way.  But when I first hunted them as a teenager, that's what we did, and I'm not patient enough to wait in one spot for a long time.

Then came fishing season.

Now, about that, I’m mostly a stream fisherman and always have been.  I will fish other bodies of water, and I certainly do, but that's my focus.

I can't really complain about fishing this year, other than that due to my work schedule I didn't get out nearly as much as I had hoped. And that's something to complain about.  Otherwise, my main complaint would be, I guess, that my son was off at school for most of the summer and my daughter had to have back surgery.  My daughter is a long time fisherman and my son has taken it up with more earnest recently.  

It's an odd deal to look back and realize that in some ways you're repeating your own father's history.  He taught me to fish, but at some point I became a fanatic outdoorsman and there were plenty of times that I went out on my own.  When I went to school, of course, he was left in that position, and he was a great and frequent fisherman.  So he was fishing quite often on his own.

Now I am.

One of the creeks I fished this year, and should have done a lot better in than I did.

Anyhow, before late summer yielded to other concerns, I did get out some, fishing the creeks in the mountains.  I reconfirmed a finding I'd make the prior year that a spot I found that looks good is, in fact, not.  It also looks like it ought to be populated by bears, and it probably is.

Getting into the spirit of things.

The first bird hunting season around here is blue grouse.

This has been frustrating due to interactions with novice game wardens the past few years who can't quite bring themselves to accept that a person of six decades residence knows more about how to get onto this spot and never touch foot on private ground than they do, having just arrived from California as they have, and seeing the world from a 3/4 ton pickup as they are.  When proven wrong, they varied from apologetic in the first instance, to blisteringly aggressive and rude in the second.^[1]  This year, however, the local chief warden took the matter in his hands and wrote me a note, for which I am greatly appreciative.  So I got up in to the high sticks without incident.

Didn't see a single bird, however.

That, I suspect, is because it had been so dry.  No water, no birds.

I also ended up doing this by myself.  This used to be an annual routine for me and my son, and one year for me my son and my daughter.  Indeed, since my son was hold enough to hunt birds, I've never had a bird season where I didn't have him accompany me at least once, but this year, due to university, that was the case.  And not only for blue grouse, but for everything, save for fishing and antelope hunting.

Blue grouse here is followed by the short sage chicken season.  I'd seen a lot of sage chickens in the summer, but ran into one during sage chicken season. Actually, the dog found it, not me, and I wasn't ready for it. 

No sage chickens.

After that, both kids came home, but on different weekends, for antelope.

I managed, for the third year in a row, not to draw an antelope tag, and I'm not happy about it.  I like antelope as food.  I don't like the fact that my state weights out of state tags more heavily than any neighboring state.  I am, after all, a killetarian and I figure that if you live in New Jersey there are deer in New Jersey.  Hunt them.

Lots of economic interests don't figure it that way, however.

Both kids got really nice antelope, I'll note.

Deer came after that.  I only got out once, although now I can't recall why.  I didn't see any deer, but I did get stuck pretty bad in the high country.

Well, that's not quite true.  I did get out a second time, but it was marked by the fact that I fractured a tooth, and hadn't realized it, about a day prior.  It impacted severely that morning and by the time I was where I was going, I was unbelievably sick.  I barely made the long drive home, and during that time frame a storm had come in, and the highway became a sheet of ice.  A tooth extraction followed.

And then came waterfowl.

It was a fantastic waterfowl year, the best in years and years.  I did do really well hunting ducks and geese, and got to spend some blind time with one of my oldest friends.  The only sad note is that due to various things by mid summer things were a bit sad on other score and that lingered as I recalled that my trips out to hunt ducks and geese, with more around than there have been for eons, were again alone.

It was in the late waterfowl season that I had my second vehicular run in of the year, and it was similar to the first.  I was duck and goose hunting on a stretch of the river.  Up until the last few years, this stretch, which is 7,000 feet high, closes to fishermen because of the weather.  Nobody wants to fly fish in 80 mph winds when it's 10F.

That's started to change, however.

For one thing, in spite of the high altitude, it hasn't been as cold up that high recently.  It's still really windy, however.  On the day I was out there, it was probably around 35F with 80 mph winds.

I'm a fisherman too, but when hunting starts, for me fishing stops.  I'm more of a hunter than a fish hunter.  My father was the other way around.  Anyhow, I sort of figure that guys who have the run of the river from April until late August, can ease up a bit in September through December, and most in fact do.  If you see a fisherman on any other stretch of the river from August on, they tend to be friendly as a rule and share the river.  I try to avoid them.

On this stretch its different, however, and that's because most of the fishermen who tend to be in this stretch are from the big rectangular state to our south.

Now, I'm not the only waterfowler on this stretch of the river.  A few other dedicated guys are dedicated blind hunters on the same stretch.  It must be the case that they stake their claim and the fishermen avoid them.  I generally avoid the fishermen.

On this day, however, I drove down to a stretch of the river in this area that I knew was empty.  I got things, and the dog, out a couple of hundred yards away from the river and then, as the dog was milling about, a Rectangular State SUV came blasting down the two track and nearly hit my dog. Worse yet, they saw him.  

What that was about was them getting to the river before me. They probably thought I was a fisherman too, or they knew I was a hunter and they wanted their stretch of river. I hunted it anyway.  They knew they'd been assholes as they kept looking back as I walked the long stretch down and the long stretch back.  On top of it, they put in on what amounts to a wind tunnel (I knew that) and had no luck.  

There was no need for that.

Last year I took up chukar hunting in earnest.

Me chukar hunting.  Why am I dressed like I'm in the Swiss Army?  Well the reason is that I'm too cheap to buy the quuality hunting clothes that other people do, and I grew use to miltiary style clothing as a National Guardsmen and I like its features, particularly the zillions of pockets.  On  this day, the wind was bad, and hence hte hood up.  Also, I'm wearing GI field pants over Levis for the same reason.

The reason has to do with having run into chukars in a major way in 2020.  I knew all the spots they'd been in, and therefore I went back. I got. . . one.

Indeed, I saw them only once.

Another reason that I've taken chukars up is that in the last few years I haven't drawn an elk tag and chukars take me into rough country and I tend not to be very good at it.

I'm not one of those people who run around looking for challenges in life.  Indeed, quite frankly, my life had plenty of challenges early on, and I don't need anymore.  Frankly, for that matter, I tend to find people who claim to take up occupations because they're "challenging" to be full of  bull.

Having said that, I'm completely different with outdoor endeavors.  Maybe I do like a challenge, and perhaps that why I'm after chukars.

While not exactly on my seasons, my failures at chukars caused me to try to find out more about them and that lead me to this excellent blog:

The Reigning Chukar Champions

It's a great read.

Anyhow, different year, different hatch.

Last day of the season.  Yep, more unecessary camouflage for the same reason.  The jacket is an Australian wind proff SAS smock that an Australian friend gave me, the trousers are U.S. Army pants.  I'm wearing a Charhartt coat for wamrth.

Footnotes:

1. In the first instance the game warden followed me out, at my invitation, and in the end relented with "I didn't think that this could be done".  On the way, I somewhat worried about him rolling his pickup truck and warned him about a hill, turn and traverse across a dam that's no big deal for a Jeep, but is a big deal for a pickup, but he did it.  He probably didn't believe me that this was a way in and out.

Well, in the end, he did.

In the second instance, the warden started off as rude and argumentative. When I explained the road that I came on, he said "it isn't a road", claiming that 4x4s had just created it the past few years.

That claim was absolute bullshit.  I looked him up, and he was a relatively recent arrival from California.

I should note that several years prior a different game warden was hugely enthusiastic that anyone had gone to such an effort to get where I was went, which was just a jumping off point at that for a hike in the mountains in pursuit of grouse.

Anyhow, with the experience noted of the two difficult wardens, I actually called ahead for the second year in a row.  The first time I didn't get a call back, and then I got the rude warden.  I did it again this year and got the regional warden, who was apologetic about his green underlings, and wrote me a note so that they'd leave me alone.  I kept hoping to run into them, but didn't.  Indeed, coming out of the hills the only one I ran into was on the main dirt road, and he'd just stopped a party of University of Wyoming female ag students who were on some sort of expedition.  I stopped, but he just waved me on, which is what I would have done if I were him.

Lex Anteinternet: This is the Year of the Tiger. . .

Lex Anteinternet: This is the Year of the Tiger. . .:  

This is the Year of the Tiger. . .

 on the Chinese lunar calendar.

Yikes.

Let's hope its a good year for tigers ecologically, as that's good for everything.

But not one, metaphorically.