Hello Everybody,                           8 August 2007 from Idaho

The past few months I've been very far in the boondocks, and I've
been falling behind in e-mailing and posting slideshows.  So you are
getting a 'two-fer', this email and two new slideshows, split into two
parts to reduce the length of each. 

After my super birding trip in SE Arizona with EV in April, I next had a
short but great trip showing Amy the Canyonlands area of Utah.
Then several weeks of truck fixing at my brother's in Colorado, some
professional and some DIY.  I ordered a bunch of books from
half.com and amazon.com to make sure I wouldn't run out this
summer, a mix of 'serious' books and fantasy/scifi series. 

I'd read that "to see lots of birds, go to the grasslands, not the
forests", so I decided to try this out by heading east of the Rockies
and north up through Nebraska and the Dakotas - - and it's true!
That area is not especially good for the National Forests and BLM
land which is necessary for my style of 'primitive dispersed camping'
(stop where you like), but the National Grasslands are a good
substitute.  And I was delighted to find that in areas far from any
federal land, many tiny villages have a little town park where
campers are welcome, often free. I decided to slow down my style
of travel, to be more relaxed and perhaps have even more fun, and
burn a bit less diesel fuel. In the past I've seldom camped in one
spot more than one night, this summer two and even three nights
have been more common; also, I'll often drive only an hour or two
between camping stops - - earlier this would have seemed
shockingly short! And it is more relaxed and more fun. I'm still slowing
down, after 18 years of retirement.

Linda and Will Piper, my birding mentors, suggested meeting in the
hilly Nebraska National Forest for some camping and birding
together, and this turned out really great. I arrived in the area a few
days earlier and found a nice shady (important at 98F !) isolated
spot to camp in a canyon valley with lots of trees and bushes, great
for birding. We made a short day trip out into the dry part of the
nearby grassland to Toadstool Canyon, a nice contrast. 

I then skirted the edge of the Black Hills area of South Dakota, into
Badlands National Park, which surprised me by being so green
between the patches of adobe and rocky 'badland'. It's a weird
and beautiful area. I made a longer drive on secondary highways to
the northern part of the state for more grassland camping, then on
into North Dakota. There, I was able to traverse most of the state
northward all in National Grassland, with lots of little dirt roads
straggling all over the place and more or less making a route
through. As I went north, the terrain went from nearly flat to quite
rough, with lots of up and down and a large area of mild badland
which was quite pretty.  

At one point I noticed a couple of deer browsing quite some
distance up the hill behind my camper, so I photographed them
with my 'little camera' at wide-angle and telephoto setting, then
with the 'big camera', all from the back door of the camper, and
the pictures really show how well the big lens reaches out.

Much of NW North Dakota is covered with hundreds of little lakes
('prairie potholes') left by the last ice age, and these are very
attractive to both breeding and migrating birds, so you find
unexpectedly great birding in what would seem like a rather sterile
area. 

As I crossed into Montana, the birding generally decreased but
butterflies and wildflowers made up for it. Western Montana has a
huge amount of National Forest land, so you can travel along easily
avoiding built-up areas, with lots of great scenery and camping. This
year has been exceptionally hot and dry early in the summer, with
wildfires starting 3-4 weeks earlier than usual, so much of western
part of the state is hazy with smoke. 

Between White Sulphur Springs and Bozeman, in the Bridger
Mountains, lies the Sixteen Creek country where Ivan Doig lived as a
little boy, so beautifully described in his autobiographical book This
House of Sky. I managed to figure out from his descriptions the
location of the old homesteader sheepherder's cabin where his
mother died when Ivan was around seven years old, and decided
to make a 'pilgrimage' there. After considerable visits to Ranger
Stations and knocking on ranchers' doors, I finally found the rancher
who owns the land now, and although he was away his wife was
home. She knew exactly the cabin and said it was still standing and
a very rough road went there, but given the extreme fire danger she
was not certain her husband would permit me to drive back in there.
She was right: when I talked to her husband the next morning he said
that if I'd return after the fire season it would probably be OK, but
that right now even they themselves didn't like to drive in there to
move the cows around. So maybe in September/October I'll be
able to make it, or next year perhaps. Another little bit to make
traveling more interesting.

I ended the Montana leg of my trip at my friend Warren Guffin's
beautiful cabin (really more a lodge than a cabin) on the East Fork
of the Bitterroot River, with a big streamer of smoke overhead from a
new fire on the West Fork not too many miles west of his cabin. It's
now five days since I left there, and I'm worried because a Forest
Ranger up here in the Idaho mountains told me that the town of
Darby had to be evacuated, and Darby is the closest town to
Warren's cabin. He narrowly escaped the 2000 fire, I hope this one
hasn't gotten him. Tomorrow I'm going out to civilization to shop for
food and hopefully to email this and upload the slideshows, and I'll
find out what the situation is.

Here are the same old instructions for the slideshows, but with the
recently changed server address (firestardesign.com is changed to
gj.net):

http://www.gj.net/johna 

(Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my email address change to
be just 'john')

The new slideshows are 

07 05 May June UT CO NE SD
07 07 July ND MT

Each browser is a little different, but generally you can either choose
OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK and then
OPEN if you want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I
have used my updated PC-cillin to be sure the .exe file is virus free,
so you can safely ignore Windows's warning about 'dangerous
<.exe> files'. 

Right-Arrow or Right-Click will advance to the next picture.
Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture.
Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show ever seems
stuck.

If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection it's not realistic
to download these large files on a phone line   please let me know,
as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you
would like any of the individual images, just let me know. I have
limited space on the server, so must sometimes remove older
slideshows to put up new ones; let me know if you want me to send
you a CD of any of the 'back issues', or of all of them from 2004-2007
along with their accompanying eMails, on CDs. And if you don't
want to get any more eMails like this one in the future, just let me
know. If you have friends who might be interested, I'll be happy to
add them to my eMail list.      

Regards, John Armitage