Hello Everybody,                             3 January 2007

This is written at one of my favorite birding and camping places, the
Bosque del Apache NWR in western New Mexico. This is probably
the seventh or eighth time I've been here in the past three years,
always with great chances for good bird photography. I left my
'homebase' at my brother Lee's in western Colorado around 3
weeks ago, first heading east to visit old sailing friends in Eagle CO,
then to spend a few days with my birding mentors Linda & Will Piper
northeast of Denver. On their glassed-in sun porch they have a huge
jade plant which was in bloom, and I couldn't resist photographing
the tiny blossoms. I left there just in time, as the next day they got hit
with the monster snowstorm which paralyzed the Denver airport just
at the Christmas rush. I camped at the John Martin reservoir state
park in southeast Colorado, not too happy to find that their
'primitive' camping area was closed and the 'improved' campsites
were $21 per night. I evened it out a little by staying a second night
on my first night's permit. The overcast weather was rather gloomy,
but there were some nice birds to photograph in the trees around
my campsite. 

The next day I headed for the Painted Canyon in Comanche
National Grasslands, right on the Oklahoma border, and by the time
I arrived at the end of the 15 miles of gravel road off the highway,
everything was covered with a good layer of ice from freezing rain.
This was apparently the edge of the big Denver storm, and by the
next morning there were ten inches of heavy new snow. I spent the
day waiting for the snow to stop and the sky to brighten, having fun
hiking around in all the deep stuff. With my new traction tires I had
no trouble getting back out to the highway, there to discover that all
the roads to the north were closed by the storm, with many dozens
of big trucks waiting in long lines along the road shoulder.
Fortunately I wanted to head south into Texas to try to get to warmer
and drier weather, and before very many miles the roads were dry
and the sun was shining. Over an area of several hundred miles
everything was covered with ice, each blade of grass and leaf and
weed covered in a thin sparkling sheath, really pretty. 

Lake Meredith, a dammed lake in the north Texas panhandle, is
surrounded by federal recreational land, which usually means free
and unrestricted primitive camping, just my style. The lake itself did
not interest me very much, it's mostly for boating and fishing in the
warmer months, but the dozen or so canyons surrounding and
running into the lake were just what I was looking far. Many of them
had access by dirt roads, and a couple were designated 'Off Road
Vehicle' (ORV) use areas, with lots of sandy tracks and shallow
streams for driving through. And this time of the year, nearly
deserted. Being farther from the storm center, and farther south and
at lower elevation, the weather picked up from the twenties into the
fifties. Of course this also produced snowmelt, which with the sandy
soil in some places produced gooey sticky mud - - but not so greasy
slippery as Utah and Colorado 'gumbo' clay mud which will stop a
4X4 cold. In one of the ORV areas, I was eating supper after dark,
when a teenaged boy knocked on my back door and asked if I had
a rope - - his truck was stuck in the mud. I slogged through the mud
for a few hundred yards to where he and two buddies had a Nissan
4X4 pickup high-centered in some ditches. I told them I would pull
them out in the morning, but not that night in the dark. They wanted
to give it a try that evening, so I loaned them my cable 'come-
along' which supposedly will pull 4000 pounds, and with that hooked
to a tree and some hard levering, they managed to get the truck
out of the ditch. Were they ever happy! So all I had to do was clean
all the mud off my chain and come-along the next morning.

One of the most common birds in the west, and one of the prettiest,
is the Northern Flicker (woodpecker), and all of the dozens I've seen
have been the red-shafted variety; in the east and north, the yellow-
shafted variety is most common, but north Texas is at the edge of its
winter range, and I was very happy to see one. 

Part of the Lake Meredith complex is an archeological flint quarry,
with flints from there traded over a large area during the past
centuries. In the winter it was not open, but while hiking in a canyon
on the other side of the lake, I came across a large boulder
composed of flints, and the ground in that whole area was covered
with scattered raw flint rocks and shards. Many of the naturally
fractured edges were razor sharp - - easy to imagine very effective
arrow and spear points, and knives and scrapers.

My last stop in Texas was Palo Duro Canyon State Park, claimed to
be the second largest canyon in the US, quite impressive and pretty
(although I would rate Hells Canyon much more so!), but again
expensive at $25 per night, ugh. One stroke of luck: while cooking
breakfast I looked out the camper window to see a 'new' and very
pretty bird sitting in a bush less than ten feet away, and I was able to
get a decent picture shooting through the window with my 'little'
camera. It was a Golden-fronted woodpecker, a specialty seen only
in Texas and the southwest corner of Oklahoma. 

I spent another day sitting out nasty weather in eastern New Mexico,
and this was apparently the edge of the storm that was so bad
around southeastern Colorado, with drifts 15 feet deep, and hay
being helicopter dropped to cattle by the military. Seems like I have
been running just ahead of disaster! 

Here are the same old instructions for the slideshow:

http://www.firestardesign.com/johna 

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

The new slideshow is < 07 Jan CO TX NM.exe > 

Most of you will be using Internet Explorer: you can either choose
OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK 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, and in this case
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 seems stuck

If you don't have a broadband Internet connection it's not realistic
to download these large files   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
firestardesign.com, 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 2004-2006 along with
their accompanying eMails, on CD. 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