Yes! That’s rain! That’s a kestrel in the rain! And if you look closely, you can see some raindrops bouncing off his shoulder.
What a gorgeous little splash of feathery autumn orange on a dreary – and utterly, gloriously WET – day!
Thank you, Hurricane Polo!
… fresh greasewood! Temple takes advantage of the rain-plumped treat after the rain when the horses moved away from their tree to start browsing.
We got some rain. 🙂 (Zoom in to see actual drops of actual, falling rain!)
A proper toad-gagger across Disappointment Valley and across Spring Creek Basin. Zoom in above to see rain drops. … This, pictured, was NOT the toad-gagger; that happened much earlier (before daylight). This was the third or fourth wave. A non-stop symphony of thunder banging the drums across the sky, and it was … *magnificent*.
THE best thing to do after getting rained on? Roll! Almost all the horses rolled when the rain stopped and they wandered out to resume browsing.
Ahhhh. Fresh.
Spring Creek was still running, though low, at the first crossing, but clearly it had run high! By the time I got there, the water definitely was slowing. I’d gone first to where Spring Creek runs under Road 19Q (Disappointment Road), before I went to Spring Creek Basin, and it was rolling along then and there like a proper creek).
Toad’s-eye view of Spring Creek looking upstream. That sky brought the next wave of rain – and thunder rolls.
Absolutely, absolutely fabulous. 🙂 And the forecast is looking extra promising this week (as long as said forecast proves accurate and doesn’t just bomb, as it has so often this year). Dance, pray and cross everything for us. 🙂
**********
In other news, some of you may remember that I was a member of the Colorado Wild Horse Working Group a couple of years ago. That group was created by Senate Bill 23-275 (2023) as part of the Wild Horse Project to enable the state to provide support to BLM’s management of wild horses in Colorado. A second bill, House Bill 25-1283 (2025), created a program for wild horses within the Colorado Department of Agriculture, along with an advisory committee for that program. I’m now a member of this new committee.
The first bill came with $1.5 million, much of which was granted to Colorado’s boots-on-the-ground advocacy groups for range-improvement projects and fertility-control support. The second bill comes with no funding. Earlier this year, the Colorado Legislature approved a new license plate design, to join the 270 (!) current designs, to funnel funding to the state’s new wild horse program for further on-range fertility-control support as well as off-range (post-roundup) support of Colorado mustangs and adopters.
CDA has just released a survey with several license plate designs, and you, the public, are encouraged to vote for your favorite. As stated, if you participate in the survey, think about this: “Which design will help sell the most plates” … to offer the most financial support. Colorado’s campaign for wolf-related license plates – “Born to be Wild” – apparently generated around $1 million in its first year.
If you’re so inclined, please follow this link to get to the survey to vote for plates and describe what you like and don’t about each plate. Keep in mind that visibility and identifying *wild* horses as the subject are the main goals in order to encourage people to buy these plates for their vehicles to help support Colorado’s wild horses.
And if you’re a vehicle-driving Coloradan, the plates likely will be available next year.
Thank you!
Temple on a dramatic evening a couple of nights ago. A curtain of rain was passing to the northwest over or in front of (our Colorado side of) Utah’s La Sal Mountains.
Shafts of sunlight were finding the mountains as the rain edged past to the north.
Whatever land was getting that glorious rainfall under the path of the curtain is fortunate, indeed. For our part of Disappointment Valley, after a crazy “front” of wind, rain finally came briefly after dark. Still not much, but it was wonderful while it lasted.
I even managed to capture a tiny bolt of lightning in the clouds. The ponies were not at all concerned, but shortly after, I hit the road!
This happened late Tuesday evening in Spring Creek Basin. Wowza. Not the boldest rainbow ever, and the pic doesn’t do justice to the view, but it was pure magic. … Yes, it “sprinkled” over that part of the basin; I think I got hit by four, maybe five drops. Sure was pretty. 🙂
Apologies for the late post this morning; last night’s storms took out my electricity! Very glad of the rain … shown above making its way into Disappointment Valley southeast of southeastern Spring Creek Basin. Seneca really didn’t think she wanted to help show off the view and the rain, but she did an amazing job of it, of course. 🙂
The great thing about the rain is that it wasn’t even in the forecast, so it was a *very* pleasant (understatement) surprise!
Between one thing and another (including some more sprinkles and thunder/lightning risks after the big rain Tuesday night), it took me three days to get out to Spring Creek Basin to check on the state of things. Only parts of the arroyos – Spring Creek above – were still damp, and this isn’t even close to as rearranged as I’ve seen Spring Creek and this crossing after a big rain over Spring Creek Basin. I’ve been turning the valve to one trough on and off manually because part of the float is broken, and I hope to report soon that we’ve fixed that. Fortunately, there’s plenty of water in the tanks to fill the trough pretty quickly (good pressure).
And kicking right on the heels of that encouraging news, some really awful news again: One of the two firefighters injured when Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson and Sydney Watson were killed fighting the Knowles Fire, which merged into the Snyder Fire, has died. Nathan Matthews, 43, from Nebraska, died Friday. No details are being released about the second injured firefighter to protect the privacy of that person and their family. Prayers are with them all, along with the family of Nicholas Dale, the Canadian pilot killed while fighting the Gold Mountain Fire near Ouray.
The Ferris Fire is thankfully 97 percent contained, and progress continues with suppression repair work, especially along roads affected by the fire.
These pix are a poor representation of the ASTOUNDING sunset Monday as rain moved across Disappointment Valley’s western/northwestern horizon at sunset. It was one of the most amazing sunsets I think I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been blessed to see a lot of those).
Rain = literally, the lifeblood of the desert.
The cottonwoods in the near(ish) foreground line (dry) Disappointment Creek. This is looking northwestish toward neighbor Utah’s La Sal Mountains. You can just barely see one of the shoulders of one of the mountains through the rain. Actual sunset is at far left.
Amazing view a little closer/zoomed. I HOPE that rain was actually finding soil.
Backed out again, and you can see a bit more of the mountains through the curtain of rain.
The LIGHT!!! Kept getting getting better as the sun neared the horizon and even disappeared (from my perspective).
Sheer luck: That downpour is lit up by a lightning strike!
Tuesday afternoon and evening, Disappointment Valley is getting multiple little waves of rain. Super grateful.
There have been multiple road closures because of mudslides in the region (pretty much all of western Colorado). Be careful out there!
We don’t do things by halves here in Colorado.
Smoke from wildfires? Unfortunately.
Spectacular sky from incoming storm days later? You betcha.
From Spring Creek Basin’s western rimrock boundary looking southeast at the very end of yesterday.
Looking east from the same place. The storm was to the north – our left as we’re looking out over the basin here.
One of the most spectacular jags of lightning I’ve ever seen lit up that northern sky (not close, not nearly far enough away), and I took that as my sign to hit the road, which was still a bit of a hike down to the right. As I headed down the hill, so did the ponies I’d been visiting with. No fools, they (or me!).
This pic, taken Sunday from between the main/original water catchment and Filly Peak in Spring Creek Basin, is looking southeast toward the Glade and Benchmark Lookout. A few days before, I’d seen the red swaths of retardant across the trees while looking at smoke up there, but I didn’t manage to get a decent pic that showed it. While fire continues to smoke in that area (that’s the Ferris Fire’s northeastern edge), clearly firefighters and aircraft pilots have been hard at work. So hugely grateful! Rick and Linda Freimuth, who staff the tower during the fire season (!!!) hope get the green light to return this week. The mustangs and I (you know they would if they could) will be cheering their return.
Now, some taken yesterday (Monday):
Storm brewing to the east. Spring Creek Basin’s western rimrocks and Filly Peak (lower left) are in sunshine, while Temple Butte, McKenna Peak, Brumley Point and the basin’s eastern ridges are shadowed by rain! Woo-the-heck-hoo!
Looking back to the west from the same spot as above. More rain! What looks like white smoke on the horizon at left IS smoke from the Ferris Fire … and I hope it got a good dose of the wet stuff. It wasn’t a high-rain-chance day, but toss the forecast and let ‘er rain!
Methinks the weather wizards were outsmarted by Ma Nature herself. 😉 RAIN, BABY, RAIN! This is from Chrome’s Point in western Spring Creek Basin, looking eastish at a curtain of rain that DID, as I was taking pix, make its way west. Unfortunately, I didn’t get tooooo wet. Ha – I would not have minded!
Ants congregating at the entrance to their mound. Apparently, “Ants congregate at their mound entrances after rain primarily to survive flooding. When underground tunnels fill with water, the colony is forced to evacuate. They move the queen, larvae, and food upward to escape the saturation, using the surface or mound entrance as a temporary, elevated sanctuary.” Interestingly, these ants and others I saw doing the same thing in the same relative area happened to be on some of the highest ground in the basin, near the western boundary. I guess that when you’re an ant, everything is at the elevation of ground level (ha ha!).
From the south wall of Spring Creek canyon looking eastish after the rain (it didn’t last very long, unfortunately).
Hope you don’t mind this view! It’s pretty spectacular. No, that’s not a road down there in the canyon; that’s Spring Creek arroyo, and just beyond (lower left), it leaves Spring Creek Basin to cross lower-ish Disappointment Valley on its way to join Disappointment Creek (neither of which are carrying water at the moment).
See the pinto pony? This is from the same point as the above two pix, looking generally northwestish across lower Disappointment Valley toward Utah’s La Sal Mountains. There’s a fence across this lower end of the canyon to keep the mustangs within Spring Creek Basin, and there’s a water gap (hanging PVC pipes to move when water DOES flow) across the Spring Creek arroyo. There are a couple of manmade structures down there, one behind McKenna and one kind of in front of him.
As it turned out, though he and his pal and a band were in the vicinity – and the reason I walked out – it was something else entirely that actually took me all the way to the canyon rim. … And that will wait for another post because I got some pix that knocked even my socks off.
To end this post, news that I never want to post because I want it to never have happened, some really tragic news from the Gold Mountain Fire near Ouray and Ridgway: A pilot was killed Sunday when his aircraft, used to aid firefighting efforts on that fire, crashed into Silver Jack Reservoir, in southwestern Gunnison County, on the northeast side of the fire. It’s the worst of all news to lose another firefighter. 😦
