Restoration at Coolbroth (Hell's Gate) Fire

From Forest Fire at Hell's Gate,

"The chainsaw work that took place recently on the Coolbroth site was in
response to the erosion issue and debris slide that closed the Coolbroth
road, following the storms in August. Trees were fallen, in contour with
the slope, in an effort to stabilize the hillside and avoid any further
slides that would impact the road. While the road will require some
further maintenance, it's been determined that the hillside has been
stabilized and should withstand any further storms. The treatment was
targeted in just those areas that were thought to be a threat to the road.
The remaining area will remain untreated, in order for the natural
ecological post fire processes to take place."

Kent W. Smith
Acting District Fire Management Officer

Upper Rio Grande Watershed: Rio de los Pinos to Conejos River

Flanked by the Conejos River and Rio de los Pinos, this watershed includes Pinorealosa and Osier Mountain, along with many excellent creeks (named and unnamed), alpine meadows, and river bottoms. Controlled burns and selective logging seem to be keeping the woodland open and healthy, while fire or beetles have left enough dead and downed timber to create unnavigateable thickets, quite conducive (necessary and sufficient) for unfragmented, Wilderness landscape.

Thin, filamentous, and/or deeply pinnatifid leaves, everything with prickles, spines, or a dense covering of hair (tomentous) -- but not many poisonous. Hairs serve to insulate as well as defend. ... In the wetlands, poisonous and fleshy plants dominate. Elk and bear, fire and grazing, Rorippa, Mimulus, Penstemon, Geum, myriad rodents scurrying away in all directions, fawns hiding breathless in the grass, hellebores and corn lilies, the 'Umbel of God', ululation, mountain thunderstorms...

The coastal fog of California, gentled by a 1,000 miles travel. I heed the thunder, and elevate the advent of rain above dull annoyance. This morning, I climbed the cliffs above our campsite. When I reached the top I felt like crying. Don't know why. Looking out over the watershed I understand the pattern. All water runs downhill. There is a band of trees from a lower line where it is wet enough to grow to an upper line where it is too cold to grow. There is a line in-between those two, above which precipitation exceeds evaporation. All rivers originate above this line, in their Headwaters.

I was always thinking of new, clever, ways of getting ahead of Nature, ahead of myself, beyond lightspeed and Saturation, entropy, Capacity. Rainbows multiplying from the first: Asgaard, Bridge to Heaven. But why does it curve back to Earth? Everyone sees a different shape and distance, depending on their perspective. The kind of rain mosquitoes can still swim through to sting. Lightening and that particular sound of the thunder rolling off of the peculiar and idiosyncratic topography up-valley.

But what if the world refuses to be ordered by the human mind? We know honeybees can be trained to show preference between human faces, but will they ever understand them? Then how too will we ever understand our world? Words are useless if we rely on them to a fault, if natural variation is continuous and nonlinear, yet we expect it to conform by our contingent, evolutionarily-derived logical architectures and cognitive biases.

On the backbone of the continent, the Genesis of the Southwest; a looking-glass world, mountains in every direction, but the brooding presence of the Great Plains felt in the passes opening between. At times we thought we were in Kansas, or safe away in our beds dreaming, but we were in the San Luis Valley, ripening in the sun.

You have driven up and down the mountain valleys, the flanks that lead up from below or down from above, the highways and streams of rivers and clouds. You have stood, still, in the center of the valley, under Blanca, for days. Transfixed interest, blossoms like dollar bills in the breeze. You have climbed high up where there is more air than land, yet still cannot seem to breathe enough and the mountain says enough and the Thunderstorm says Enough and you flee their mutterings and grumblings

Storms billow on surrounding mountains, then range over the landscape. Powerful rain, thunder and lightening on into the night...sigh... San Juan rainstorms. The next day the storms grow but, despite our hurry to avoid them, only blow for early Evening Entertainment, and on into the night. Next day, storms brush by, delivering a soaking with bits of hail mixed in. These storms build on the San Juans, blow low over the valley --but nothing can slow them until the Sangres, where they slide silently up the crest, lick their salty skins, run a tongue along sharpened teeth, and watch the wounds of mankind's world.

Where have all the willows gone? The heart of the landscape dug out, munched, passed, trampled dirt. The magic and will to live that flowed wild, healthy, worshipful. Destruction AND Growth. Unsimplified. Wet, unique.

All land in the West is "wetland"; fear not. Although nothing fits into categories anyway, each consciousness, attuned to an unique understanding, attempting an unbiased account of who-knows-what for someone else. Under the roof of the world, wet with the aspen, the carex, and the rivers; mountain ridges diverge until they peter out, rivers seek their breathren and converge until they become one with the ocean. Flowing water flows together - it lubricates itself; whereas water soaking into sponge, expands -- it flees the mutual weight of multitude.

Oh now gentle rain, Conejos River hopping along...who understands?

Workshops with Bill Zeedyk

The problem contains the solution:
an old fence line
combined with cattle walking it
started erosion: headcuts usually go in 2's or 3's with soil horizons
you can see the O, A, and B horizons
the old fenceposts make an excellent sponge/step down
allow the water to trickle down
Starve the headcut with a "worm ditch"
set at 1/2 the slope of the hill
with a rope twice as long

Comanche Creek, Zapata Ranch, and San Luis Lakes

Southwest Exploration: A Timeline and Bibliography

The more I study ecology, the more I need to study history. Everything from the extinction of the paleolithic megafauna through the grenshorizont of peatland bog studies (shift in peat formation two to three thousand years ago as the midwest became wetter and cooler) to the presence or absence of bufalo (Bison bison bison) in the Arid West....Ecology is paleoecology, which is forensic and contingent on largely unknowable past events. But without that past the changing movie of life is only a single strobe, an event, a stained glass window that we can look at but now through. This perspective is important for science, but equally important for public policy. We can't protect what we've already forgotten.

Below is a partial list of early explorers and colonists of the American Southwest, especially New Mexico, which has a 500+ year written history. We desperately need an ecological historian to compile these original observations, translate and condense, collate, draw conclusions, and eventually inbed it all in a google earth kml layer, like the Mannahata project.

This is a New Mexico centric list, prepared with much help from to William Goetzmann http://www.nps.gov/history/history/categrs/explr/biblio-g2.htm and Ruth Marie Colville, "La Vereda: A Trail through Time."

1537 Cabeza de Baca seven year trek from Texas to Sea of Cortez, fording the Rio Grande "breast high".
Journal: unreliable "recounting"
Book: Cyclone Covey, ed. And trans., Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, Univ. of NM Press, Albuquerque, NM, 1993.

1540 Francisco Coronado two years exploring Rio Grande Valley as far north as Taos, east to Kansas, west [in]to the Grand Canyon.
Journal: ?
Book: Coronado, Knight of Pueblo and Plains, Univ. NM Press, by Herbert E. Bolton, Albuquerque, NM, 1964
Book:[?]Pedro de Castañeda, The Journey of Coronado, repr., Dover, San Francisco, 1990,

1580 Rodrigues expedition: Fray Augustin Rodrigues and Captain Francisco Chamuscada. Rio Grande valley east to Pecos River
Journal: "Relaciones"

1582 Espejo party rescue mission: Antonio Espejo went east beyond the Manzano Mountains, west to ZUni and Hopi, as far as Flagstaff, then back home along the Pecos.
Journal: Diego Perez de Lujan

1590 Gaspar Castano de Sosa illegal colonization: went up the Pecos river to Pecos Pueblo
Journal: Castano de Sosa.
Book: "A Colony on the Move" by Albert Schroeder and Dan Matson.

1598 Don Juan de Onate colonization, settled at head of Espanola Valley.


1776 Escalante Expedition from Santa Fe, through SW Colorado, SE Utah, and NE Arizona.
Book: Bolton, Pageant in the Wilderness: The Story of Escalante's Expedition to the Interior Basin, 1776, Univ. of Utah,Salt Lake City, Utah, 1950,


1806 Pike Expedition: Zebulon Pike
Journal: "The expeditions of Zebulon Montgomery Pike to headwaters of the Mississippi River, through Louisiana Territory, and in New Spain, during the years 1805-6-7
Book: Donald Jackson, ed., The Journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike With Letters and Related Documents, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1966.
Book:Elliott Coues, The Expeditions of Zebulon Montygomery Pike, 2 vols., Dover, NY, 1987.

1821 Fowler Adventure to eh Sources of the Rio Grande
Jounral: Cous, E. (editor) 1965 The Journal of Jacob Fowler: Narrating an Adventure From Arkansas Through the Indian Territory, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico, to the Sources of the Rio Grande Del Norte, 1821-1822. Ross & Haines, Inc., Minneapolis, MN.

1846 Kearny-Emory expedition. US Mexico Boundary Survey. Lieutenant W.H. Emory. Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila rivers
Book: Ross Calvin, ed., Lieutenant Emory Reports: A Reprint of Lieutenant W.H. Emory's Notes of a Military Reconnaissance, U. of NM Press, Albuquerque, NM, 1951.
Book: William H. Emory, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 3 vols., 34th Cong. 1st Sess. H. Exec. Doc. 135, Serial 861-63, Washington, D.C., 1857-59, and repr. William H. Goetzmann, ed, 3 vols., TSHA, Austin, TX, 1997.
Book: John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora and Chihuahua, Connected With the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission During the Years 1850, '51, '52 and '53,, 2 vols., Appleton, NY, 1854, repr., 2 vols., Rio Grande Press, Chicago, IL, 1965.
Book: Dawn Hall, ed., Drawing the Borderline: Artist-Explorers and the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, The Albuerque Museum, Albuquerque, NM, 1996, P.B.

1849 Washington Expedition to make peace or prosecute a war with the Navajo
Book: Navajo Expedition: Journal of a Military Reconnaissance from Santa Fe, New Mexico to the Navvaho Country Made in 1849 by James H. Simpson, Durwood Ball, Frank McNitt

1851 Sitgreaves
1853 Whipple
1854 Parke
1854 Pope
[misc ]
see Herbert E. Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706, Scribner, NY, 1916, repr. Barnes & Noble, 1995, ...

David Weber, The Taos Trappers, the Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846, U. of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1982.

Ralph P. Bieber, ed., Exploring Southwestern Trails, 1846-1854, Clark, Glendale, CA, 1938, William H. Emory,

Exploring the Rio Grande Headwaters: San Luis Valley

The Rio Grande drains the Southern Rocky Mountains and meanders more than 2,000 miles through the desert Southwest before reaching the Caribbean. Spanish explorers followed this river to its headwaters more than 400 years ago.
However, the Spanish were notoriously poor scientists, more interested in searching for the Seven Lost Cities of Gold than understanding native ecosystems. Even after the U.S. purchased this area in 1848, and despite more than a hundred years of U.S. exploration and documentation, much of this vast area remains unknown and (relatively) undisturbed by Homo industrialis.

I've set out this summer with Colorado's Natural Heritage Program to explore the Headwaters of the Rio Grande with a top-notch, interdisciplinary team of scientists from across the country.

The Rio Grand's headwaters drain from the San Juan Mountains and the Sangre de Christo Mountains into the vast alluvium of the San Luis Valley. This valley, the center of our research, can be thought of as either the southernmost Rocky Mountain park or the northernmost New Mexican valley.
At 7,500 feet this floodplain is a mix of alpine, wetlands, desert, and farmland. Coming from sea level it is continually astonishing to pause and gasp for breath in the center of an agricultural valley where the nearest mountains are 30 miles away. These high plains support a diverse and unique assemblage of plants and animals, with pronghorn antelope feeding in the alfalfa fields, buffalo competing with cows in the sagebrush rangeland, and elk and bear foraging along the periphery.
Our HQ is marked on these maps, a swanky cabin safely nestled in an out of the way canyon on the western rim of the valley. To get to this alpine oasis you first drive past the endless center-pivot irrigation systems of San Luis Valley, than upwards past La Garita through Sheep pass, where the rounded granite boulders shelter pinon and juniper. You are now entering Carnero Canyon, whose narrowings and widenings sequentially reveal a lush cottonwood bosque, then Ponderosa woodland and finally Aspen groves and mountain meadows.

The "Back 40" (square miles):

*Since the cabin is off the grid this post was beamed up via satellite.