Spring Creek Basin Mustangs

After a day that ended like this …

Dusty rose

… I awoke to a morning like this …

White as snow

That’s what we get in March in Colorado! Both are views of Disappointment Creek, outside the herd area.

It snowed on and off all morning, which left me wondering if we would even be able to get into the basin for the scheduled work day. The sky started clearing to the west, and sunlight hit the far hills, then the sun finally broke free of the clouds and lit the area, revealing dust-free air.

Snowy sentinels

Gotta love that light! That promontory on the left is the big prominent peak you can see from almost anywhere in the basin down to the southeast. (Photo taken from outside the basin.)

Again with the spots

On the way up the county road toward the basin entrance, I spied the pinto band again! The sunshine hadn’t quite reached their hill (actually their “pinto hill” is across this little valley to the southeast), but you can see it on the hills to the east across the basin.

By now you may be wondering why I was still in the basin at the beginning of the work week. If the wind and dust didn’t run me off, the threat of snow should have (though, as you could see from the photos, it wasn’t heavy, it melted quickly, and it didn’t impede vehicle traffic at all). Sunday’s visit was for pleasure; Monday’s visit was “work.”

Every year for nine years now, Kathe Hayes with the San Juan Mountains Association (nonprofit partner with our local Forest Service and BLM) has led the “alternative spring break” program, which, in our case, brings University of Missouri students to San Juan public lands in Southwest Colorado to do work projects earmarked for them in cooperation with FS and BLM employees. Those folks tell Kathe what projects need done, and she makes it happen with student labor – and hopefully the students get something out of it, too.

Spring Creek Basin Herd Management Area falls within San Juan public lands, and students spend a day or two of their weeklong visit in the basin working on various projects, which have included old-fence removal, fence repair, illegal-road reclamation, sign installation and tamarisk destruction. For those of you not familiar with tamarisk, it’s also known as “salt cedar,” and it is a non-native, invasive species, originally introduced to the Colorado Plateau around the turn of the last century for erosion control in riparian areas and as an ornamental plant (like a lot of terribly dangerous beasties, when it flowers, it’s guiltily pretty to look at) – so said BLM weed specialist Mike Jensen (and former herd area manager) when he talked to the students at the work area that morning. It sucks up gallons and gallons of ground water, and that’s not good for the native plant species in the vicinity, not to mention the wildlife trying to find water to drink in this arid country. Tamarisk, of course, likes wet areas like ponds and stream and river banks. It’s a scourge of the West, and a lot of work has been put into getting rid of it. (One of those biological control methods gone awry, eh?)

Our Colorado chapter of the National Mustang Association provides the herbicide used each year to spray the stumps of the tamarisk the students cut. It has the deliciously sci-fi-cool name Garlon 4. It works pretty well, but tamarisk is stubborn (Texans might be able to equate it somewhat with mesquite), and it can send up tenacious stems/branches/sprouts/whatever. So the students have been working in the Wildcat Spring drainage area (at least) for a few years, and that’s where they concentrated Monday.

With the help of Mike and three Forest Service folks (acting as sawyers for bigger-than-lop-size tamarisk and Garlon sprayers and reclamation workers), nine Mizzou students and one local high school freshman whose dad is a fifth-generation local rancher (Kathe said “she’s been coming out here since she was this high”), a lot of tamarisk got cut and sprayed, and part of the illegal road to Wildcat Spring was sent artistically back to nature (take that, you nasty littering people whose trash everybody BUT you has carried out!). WOW!

I covered their story last spring, and I was back to do the same this spring. Gotta tell ya, those kids are my heroes. And check this out: Two were back for their second year, and one was back for his third! Did you all read the posts and see the pix of younger-than-now Raven and Kootenai sent by Amanda Conner, Mizzou graduate? Mr. Third Trip is Miss Conner’s hard-working fiancee. 🙂 I’ve already used her name in conjunction with those pix, but to protect the innocent in case they want to be, I won’t use the students’ names here, but if ya’ll read this, know I’m grateful for the work you did!

I took some pix, too, where the students are not identifyable, but they show a little bit of what they accomplished – and with great attitudes despite the cold temperatures and intermittent waves of snow that came with welcome sunshine!

Below the spring

Here, a couple of Mizzou students are working as a team to cut and spray tamarisk just below the old dam site below Wildcat Spring. You can see the stumps of alternative spring breaks past! Most of the sprouts the students were cutting in this drainage were no bigger than a fat finger. The water collects naturally above the students and toward the center of the photo. Above that, it runs into a tight canyon upstream. This is in the east side of the herd area.

Road work

Here’s the “road” at the start of the reclamation work. Students also cleaned up the campsite at the end of the “road” toward the spring by scattering rocks that had been arranged into a fire ring and collecting wood and old tree stumps to use in the reclamation process. Students in the photo are digging a shallow hole so they can “plant” a stump like the one in the foreground of the picture.

The picture I most loved to take all day is one I can’t (won’t) use because it shows faces, but it’s of one of the Forest Service guys hauling out a “toilet box.” Seriously! Can people be any more disgusting?! When I cleaned up the site last fall after the hunters spent their time there, two rolls of toilet paper that had been left on branches right beside that horrible box were among the items that went into the five bags of trash I carried out. Believe me when I tell you it made my YEAR to see that box being carried away, and the FS guy who carried it out is my new favorite FS guy. 🙂 (In case you wondered, they have trucks; as much as I hated that box, no way it was going in my Jeep!) New favorite FS guy also buried the, ahem, “leftovers” from that box AND a handicap toilet chair that had been left standing above a bucket-without-a-bottom over another hole filled with “stuff.” They hauled those items (chair and bucket) away, too.

Thank you for letting me rant. (YAYAYAY – good riddance yucky box!)

On the road to reclamation

Huh!? Whaddya think now? Road no more. Thanks – you know who you are – for the “artistry”!

Doaneventhinkaboutit

New sign to reinforce the message. And later this summer, one of our National Mustang Association guys and our herd area manager will place a line of boulders across the “road” in front of this area, and then the stretch between the sign and boulders and the real road will be reclaimed. Good stuff!

The good trail

Job well done, guys and gals! Thank you so much for choosing Colorado for your spring break. I hope you all had a great time here; I sure enjoyed having you here.