|
|
I had a road trip scheduled across Wyoming last Tuesday (April 20) and I had a little extra time in the schedule so I decided to make a pass around as many lakes and reservoirs as I could fit in, just to see how well Spring has taken hold of the area. Along the way, I passed Jordanelle Reservoir, Strawberry Reservoir, Starvation Reservoir, Steinaker Reservoir and Flaming Gorge. The only body of water with ice left on it is Strawberry. The ice is looking pretty mushy, I wouldn’t go out on it myself, but I did see a couple of brave souls out there ice fishing. I keep my own boat at Flaming Gorge most of the season, so I was glad to see it totally open and a few boats already moored at the Cedar Springs Marina.
Looks like for the most part we’re well into Spring now, despite a few last storms that are still dusting the Wasatch Mountains with snow.
I use a Garmin Colorado 400i handheld GPS. This is the model that includes the Inland Waterways map. Recently, I decided to go ahead and buy the streets map so that I could use the GPS in the truck from time to time. I ordered the map on an SD card, and for the first day or two, all was well. Then, on a recent trip across Wyoming, I wound up getting stuck in some Mid-March Winter weather. Green River, Wyoming was having a full blizzard when I pulled the FJ Cruiser off I-80 for the night. Next morning, while sitting in the truck waiting for it to warm up a bit before I got back on the highway, I decided to fire up the GPS and let it plot the route home just for fun. When I did, I got the old message I used to get before I put the SD Card in, there were no roads close to my starting point. When I tried to make sure both maps were enabled, the handheld reported that the only map installed was the initial Inland Waterways map. I shut it down, popped the SD card in and out a couple of times, but still wasn’t able to make the GPS recognize the Streets map.
An hour or so later, I checked again after things had warmed up, and the handheld now reported that both maps were installed and it was able to plot the driving route for me. I haven’t had a chance to recreate this yet, but it does seem like this was a temperature related thing. I would really be interested in hearing from other folks with these who have had similar incidents in cold weather.
I wanted to take a minute to pass this one along. Just the other day, I was invited to watch a documentary called Sharkwater. I didn’t really know what to expect, the person who sent the movie along basically just said “You have GOT to watch this…” Well, I did, and by the time the movie was over, my blood was boiling and I decided I would make it a point to do everything I could to spread the word.
The movie is a Documentary, basically covering the practice of longline fishing for sharks so that their fins can be removed for the “shark fin soup” that the Japanese culture considers to be an “ultimate delicacy.” Here’s the basics of the practice, longlines are trailed through the water, miles and miles long, and the sharks that are caught are pulled in, their fins are quickly hacked off, and the shark is then dumped back into the ocean. I’ll warn you right now, this practice is brutal to watch.
You can buy the movie off iTunes, or order a DVD or Blu-Ray disk from the main site. Here’s the link:
http://www.sharkwater.com/
The movie makes a compelling case regarding the dangers or this wholesale slaughter of the apex predator of our oceans, and the scale of this problem is something that we need to be extremely worried about. The guys taking the shark fins are operating seemingly at will in places such as off the coast of Costa Rica and even around the Gallapagos Islands. The fins are big business, and are going to Japan by the hundreds of thousands. Most people seem to think that there isn’t any reason not to kill sharks, after all, they’re scary and have big teeth. It absolutely amazes me how short-sighted we are about such things.
I truly believe that we need to be stewards of this planet, and that we need to respect the role of every creature in every ecosystem. I am deeply worried that we’re going to look around in a decade and go “Man, we sure screwed things up by killing sharks by the millions…”
Please watch this movie, watch it with a friend, with your kids, tell your friends about it. This isn’t the only serious issue we need to be actively engaged with, but I think it’s a very important one. We need to build a groundswell of support for the people who are working to end this practice. We need to build enough public awareness so that even in Japan, people will get the message that this stupid delicacy has got to be taken off the menu.
Now, to start this post off right, I should offer up a simple fact. I love living in Utah! That said, I hate living in the Salt Lake Valley during the Winter when a high pressure weather system camps out over the top of us and basically screws a lid down tight on the valley, trapping us in a stew of rank air that leaves eyes and noses burning. We’re in the midst of a heavy inversion as I write this, it’s been going on for a while now and it makes me want to basically chuck it all and move out of here.
Over this last weekend, I piled my daughters in the FJ and we headed up Parley’s Canyon to get out of the muck for the day. We started off by stopping by the Geocache we placed up on the Weber River, just to check on it. (Here’s a link to it: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=92b86957-bb64-4708-8059-371520f57584) It was fine, but getting a little thin on cool goodies, so we’ll have to plan another trip to load it back up. We decided to make our way around to Heber, so we had a chance to check on the Ice Fishing at Rockport. The Reservoir was well iced and there were plenty of folks out trying their luck. Through Kamas, we worked our way around the back side of Jordanelle Reservoir, which was mostly ice free. After lunch in Heber, we made our way up to Strawberry Reservoir, where, again the Ice Fishing crowd was out in force.
As it were, all it took was a day on the road, up out of the soup that passes for Winter Air in the Salt Lake Valley, and once again I was convinced that for an outdoorsman, this is a pretty good place to call home.
If you like to fly fish the Green River, we just got back from there and the time to be dropping a Caddis on the river is now! The Reservoir is just about as full as we’ve ever seen it, so we recommend you be very mindful of the river water levels just in case they turn out more water, but the weather has been favorable and the fishing is hot! Watch for those late afternoon thunderstorms, some have been a bit on the wild side as they roll off the Uintahs, with strong winds, lots of lighting and even some hail thrown in for good measure.
Here in the West, we’ve had an unusually wet Spring, especially in light of the fact that we’re coming off a sustained drought in this area. Around our home area here in Utah, the Lakes and Reservoirs are almost all full, with the exception of some of the larger ones such as Lake Powell, that will take several wet years in a row to bring back up. In fact, just last week over the 4th of July, we took a long road trip that had us passing lots of Western bodies of water, and we’re happy to report that many of them were still at full pool. The Great Salt Lake is one that we spend a lot of time on, and unfortunately it’s lost a lot of volume through the drought years, so we’re nowhere near where we should be there, but some of our spring months have been massive in terms of our annual rainfall, in fact, June came in at roughly 303% of normal!!
So, the drought appears to be over or at least significantly easing… Now if we can just get the economy back on track, we’ll have plenty to chear about.
I’m not sure if any legitimate visitor to this site knew we had a Forum area setup, but the Spammers got hold of it somehow and for the last couple of months, we’ve been waging a silent battle of attrition with those worthless Bastards! In case you’re wondering, it goes something like this. We setup the forum, get it all organized and structured and then turn it loose on the world. A while later, some web crawler identifies the site as a forum, and the next thing we know, the thing is full of ads for Viagra or some porn site. First round in the battle, we start to block IP Addresses from around the world. There are huge chunks of addresses that have been assigned to places like Russia, and so we block those at first. Not just Russia, but Ukraine, Bulgaria, all sorts of countries from across the pond. Things quiet down for a while, then the next thing we know, we’re getting tons of posts from South American addresses.
There are a few more things we could have done to fight the battle, we changed the board so you had to be validated before you could post, but then our mail server just got buried in mail from the system, telling us some guy with some name that was no more than just some random collection of letters at gmail wants to join. As it turns out, we do indeed have better things to do than deal with this kind of crap, and since legitimate users weren’t posting anything substantial, we’ve decided to give up on it.
We’re going to pull the plug on the forum completely. In its place, we’ll use this Blog area and while it won’t be quite as nice as a well mannered Forum is, we’ll just have to make do As we get rolling on this, we’re going to start out nice and open at first, until we find that this area is getting filled up with useless junk, and when that happens we’ll tighten down the screws until we get the spammers evicted. I hope you’ll stick with us through it all, and in fact I really hope you’ll feel compelled to add real comment or two from time to time. We really did intend for this site to be a legitimate resource, and we know we’re not the only folks around who know stuff, so sound off, jump in and let your own voice get added to the mix. Just don’t bother us with ads for stuff that supposed to make us get a “bigger Johnson”.
Since it’s summer now and we’re spending most of our time out in the wilods, we may not be updating the core sections of the site quite as often as we do during the winter. We are still busy though, and we’ll be using the blogs here to keep you posted on the stuff we’re doing, places we’ve recently visited and explored, and basically anything else that comes to mind.
|
|
