Interpreting "dance"

So, watching flames dance on a pre-dawn, 14F morning,

I realized I had my photo(s) of the day (yesterday).

While not technically lovely, you get the idea.

And as an alternate, after the sun rose,

I saw the sunlight refracting in the grass ice.

So, that's Day 8 of the 30 Day Photo Challenge (fm @just_go_do_it).

Today's theme, day 9, is Shadows.

xoxobb

AMAZING time-lapse compilation video of Rim Fire at Yosemite...

by the brilliant Jonathan Byers,

including shots from the Crane Flat helibase and a view of Yosemite Valley.

With SOUNDTRACK!

'Cause this is STILL practically ALL I can think about.

I must have a pea brain.

That is filled with ecological obsession.

xoxobb

I am SO not qualified for this challenge...

For the short of attention, span-wise:
Thinking about landscaping around our home,
which is on a 5 acre rural lot,
but now that our house came w/in
1 mi of burning down via Carstens Fire,
my husband's repeated desire to adhere to
Cal Fire's 100-foot-clearance-around-your-house thing
is no longer met with my bored sighs and rolling eyes.

Our backyard not long before we were evacuated.

Air quality in our yard:

(w/apologies to those who already saw this in the fire posts)

So:

How do I landscape in a water-stingy
eco-friendly (conservation biologist, after all),
gets-mega-hot & is ALWAYS DRY all summer,
deer-and-rabid-gopher-proof kinda way,
when I canna plant anything w/in 100 ft of the house?

And I want intense colors, some wacky, variable forms,
and to attract all kindsa pollinators and birds and other creatures.
Except gophers and starving deer.


Background

Been more into gardening, lately,

thanks in part to husband's successful elimination

of a Super Hero Garden Foe

(who last year ate my entire garden

so I stalked off and pouted until this spring).

Also, 'cause my life soundtrack lately is

the Good Enough Gardening (TM) podcast,

with the fabulous duo, Jean Ann Van Krevelen and Amanda Thomsen.

They're just the entertaining, conversational, opinionated and funny,

smarty-pants, NON-PERFECTIONIST gurus I needed.

Helps me think things are possible.

Annnnnyhow,

I bought Amanda's CHARMING how-to book on

landscaping for beginners, Kiss My Aster (not a paid endorsement).

It's basically all cartoons, choose your own adventure,

WAY up my prone-to-get-overly-analytical-and-frozen-in-perfectionist-panic alley.

Tons of useful information,

but I've got a variable that is not addressed.

And I wouldn't expect it to be addressed.

Probably don't get to do much w/in 100 feet.
Might be able to sneak herbaceous and non-super-woody shrubs
after the first 30 feet, but even that isn't certain.

Don't think a distant skirt of vegetation
that I can barely see is the answer.

So, WHAT the heck to I DO?!?

You know you're in the sticks when...
One of Amanda's cool shortcuts is to go to Google Earth
and find and print your house/yard,
then trace that so you have a scale model of your space.
So, I thought, I can do that!
I use Google Earth all the time.

No.

Apparently, we live so far out in the boonies,
they don't have decent resolution images of our house/yard/land.
House is just a vague, beige smear
in a vague, beige landscape,
dotted fuzzy green & blue-grey tree-blobs.

Adventures of Invisigirl!
Years ago I called a cable company
to see if it was possible to get cable here,
and he said, "You're not there."

Pause. Waiting for an explanation. None happening.

"Uh... what do you mean, we're not there?"
"You don't show up on our map."
Me: "I can SEE your company's cable 'cause it's strung through our yard,
to get to the next neighborhood."

"Oh. Well, sorry, you're just not on the map."

Makes a girl feel special.
Cable and cell-phone companies are blind to us,
Google Earth has a pretty serious astigmatism.


However, bonus to living in the boonies:
You can garden outside in your coolest summer pants,
even if those pants are technically pajamas.

Who are the jackrabbits gonna' tell?

xoxobb


p.s. If ANY of you have dealt with this 100 foot clear space issue
when thinking about landscaping, please let me know what you did/concluded.

okay, looks like we may be getting evacuated: Carstens Fire chez-bb

So, time for ONE photo. 

There's more on twitter, a smidge more on tumblr.

Our backyard at 4 p.m.

Gotta go retrofit a staples box for a chicken.

xoxobb

wheee! great Motor Fire footage of lotsa helis, + planes & flames

 
As @YosemiteSteve said, great fire helicopter porn. =)

Motor Fire Air Show Copyright 2011 from Tim Walton on Vimeo.

This guy, Tim Walton, is the bomb! =) Sweet stuff.

There are some moments where you see THREE helicopters in the air at once. And several times he's showing you flames up on the slopes and one of the darn helis gets in the way. =)

Apparently Highway 140 will be open tomorrow at 6 a.m. (per Yosemite Wildland Fire facebook posting), and evacuees can return at 9 p.m. tonight. Sounds like things are wrapping up.

Nice WORK everyone!

bb

Mumday from best poppy bloom EVER: 2009

 

The craziest poppy year EVER, according to numerous local people, including a smarty pants Fire Ecologist who's lived in El Portal for 30 years. This was all along the Merced River canyon, just west of Yosemite NP, and one year after a huge fire in the area. My favorite theory was that allll the ash that showered the hillsides for days and days was a natural fertilizer and the poppies went NUTS.

And this isn't my favorite shot from that day.

The cones and rods in my eyes were pretty much burned out after 2 hours.

An incredible experience.

=)

And taken March 20th, so spring is on its way!

xoxobiobabbler

Mumday interpreted: smoky SEKI!

  

This is one of the first places we stopped to gaze across the landscape and into the soup that was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks last weekend. The Sheep fire has been burning there for weeks and putting up a respectable amount of smoke.

Check this link out to see the fire via satellite. It's the puff of smoke east of Monterey Bay and south of Mono Lake. There's just about no other fires visible, so you can't miss it.

MODIS, by the way, is an AMAzing source of daily views of the planet. Truly stunning images, and free. I highly recommend bookmarking that pup.

Bear loves fire, and I suspect this is what prompted this, our FIRST trip here. Little did I know it's spec-TAC-ular. Wow. A lot of the views normally available were completely obscured, but we will definitely be back: now that I viscerally "get" the "Kings Canyon" title. Very apt.

This is about where we first saw the actual sources of the smoke, and loved what it did to the sun--some freaky lighting that day, all glowing orange and diffuse. I happened to be wearing orange pants that day, and they looked like they were plugged into an electric socket--too cool.

Here you can actually see places on fire--didn't usually see flame, but saw the smoke climbing up out of the trees.

If you didn't know, going to see a fire at night is the best time to see actual flame--looks totally different. This I learned when we had a fire about 3 miles from our house.

The base of this tree was on fire. Bear noted it was probably frustrated, 'cause this tree's toes are IN the river (see extreme foreground of picture), and it's surrounded by rock, but nevertheless, it still caught on fire

Ah, well. It'll be a lovely snag for some very happy bugs and birds (and mammals, etc.), once its temperature lowers to something hospitable. Snags (dead trees) really do seem to bring out biological joy; so many species benefit by them, it's a biological party that continues for years.

I figured I'd end the post with some huge sequoias that had obviously been burned in the past. Fire scars can be seen pretty commonly on these behemoths.

If you've not heard the story re: sequoias and fire, years ago parks with sequoias suppressed fire around the trees to keep them from burning up. Wouldn't want a Sequoia National Park where all the sequoias were just huge piles of ash, would you?

Well, then someone (super smart) looked around the sequoia forest floor and noticed something. No baby sequoias. NONE. That is not good.

Turns out sequoias MUST have fire to regenerate--to get new sequoia trees. So, everyone revisited their fire management plans and now they do allow fires to occur in the groves. They may be carefully managed fires, but fire has returned to these groves to do what it needs to do.

It's amazing how many times we tinker with nature and later figure out that it really wasn't such a good idea, and, in fact, is hurting the very thing we were trying to protect.

Lesson? Unless you have a mountain of evidence, when in doubt, ask yourself what had happened there for millenia before we ever arrived. That's probably a very good place to start.

biobabbler

P.S. SEKI is the NPS 4 letter code for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. If you want to learn more about these parks, go to www.nps.gov/seki. =)

Mumday

 

 

 

bb