September 12 -- "Heritage Days" at Rodeo and the Chiricahuas

"Heritage Days" has taken place at the Chiricahua Event Center for the past 7 years. It's 3 days of farmer's markets, crafts, music and talks ranging from water issues to Apaches and their horses. And it's a great time to see friends, and meet new ones. But before we go there, here's the ubiquitous sunrise, this time reflecting off Cave Creek Canyon --

And the cloud formations about False Portal Peak -- 

After breakfast, I wanted to try out a new weed-pulling device I'd just received from Amazon. It's a 3-pronged device that has a long lever at the bottom where you push down, the prongs dig into the ground around the weed, and then you pry it up -- and the weed and root are in the prongs. It's quite a clever device, it works -- and it saves your back from bending over. I was getting into pulling up Russian thistle (read tumbleweed) and lost track of the time, when I receive a message from Helen reminding me of Heritage Days. After pulling up a few more weeds ("just one more"...) I head down to the Chiricahua Event Center, where all the big gatherings around Portal and Rodeo are held. It was a packed parking lot, with lots of trucks and guys in cowboy hats (I was wearing my usual baseball cap, and had sunscreen on -- I never step outside without putting some on), and as the parking lots were full I pulled off to the side of a road, with weeds and bushes under my 4-wheel-drive truck, and hoped the hot catalytic converter wouldn't start a fire underneath Toyota Dos. (That would be rather embarrassing to happen to the new guy -- not to mention raise my insurance rates.) I got to the hall in time to hear part of "Bats in the Bootheel", where the speaker was talking about bats in, among other places, Cave Creek Canyon, and assuring folks that local bats don't have wingspans of 3 feet as bats in other countries do -- or drink your blood. They DO drink the nectar from hummingbird feeders that are left out overnight, and sometimes leave a slimy mess on the cover. The next presentation was about the water aquifer beneath the San Simon Valley, and the state it's in (pretty good compared to most other aquifers; it's where I get the water from my water well). Then after a snack break there was a fascinating talk on the "Crystal Cave Mapping Project", A veteran "caver" from back east has a team going into the labyrinth of chutes, wormholes, and rooms twice the size of the presentation hall and mapping the routes. The cave system was discovered by an eccentric who left detailed descriptions of the cave, and at the time people thought he was nuts -- "all that can't be in a cave under our feet!" But the current mapping folks found out he was right on most counts, though he used primitive caving instruments all of his descriptions in a journal. The entrance to the cave has since had a gate put over it, though I hear the key to the gate is available somewhere in Tucson, but that's probably changed now there's mapping going on. After the cave presentation there was "Living With Coyotes". I'd heard coyotes early in the morning when I stayed at the Cowboy Room at Rodeo's Mountain Lodge and RV Park prior to buying Faranuf, and it was one of the weirdest sounds I've ever heard; it was like an alien chorus. Like in most places, coyotes are considered to be a nuisance and shot when seen, but concrete evidence shows that the more coyotes are shot, the more the females have kits; there seems to be a direct correlation. Which means that the best policy to keep the population down would be simply to leave them alone; they eat mostly berries, rodents, and lizards and very rarely go after livestock. And as there are Mexican wolf programs both to the north and south (in Mexico) re-introducing wolves to the area, people get wolves and coyotes mixed-up , and end up killing the wolves, which are protected species. Apparently there's a legal clause that protects people who say "Well, I didn't know it was a wolf!" but it sounds like ANYbody could say that and get away with it. But the bottom line is that the more coyotes killed, the larger the population grows. Then as I didn't have a ticket for the buffet lunch, my friend (and former resident of Orange County) Maya Decker and I went to the Rodeo Tavern for lunch, then got back in time for "Archeological Findings at Cave Creek Midden Site", which occurred on Kim Murphy's property just outside of Portal . Kim was the local game warden, and when he passed away about a year ago I got a few of his things -- a bed he made, an old dresser, a signed Rex Allen movie poster (Rex Allen was born in Willcox, on the northwest edge of the Chiricahuas, and was a famous movie cowboy from the 40's) -- and an old lamp where Kim had hung arrowheads tied on to strings. After listening to the presentation, I began to wonder if they were old...Then we went on the "Mountain Lions in the Chiricahuas/Peloncillos", which is of special concern locally as there have been mountain lion sightings right in "downtown" Portal. Even my friend John had encountered a mountain lion in his back yard; he used the recommended technique of looking right at the mountain lion, acting larger than he was, making noises and slowly moving towards the lion -- but the lion merely looking at him as if to say "what are you doing that for?" and, when he got bored, just turned around and walked back into the underbrush. It was obvious the mountain lion had been "habituated", i.e. was used to humans, which is not a good thing for the lion to be. In Arizona, you must have a license to kill a mountain lion; in New Mexico, ANYone can kill a mountain lion -- and you need nothing, not even a license. Just your gun. And now there is a new proposal in New Mexico to allow snare and traps to aid in killing mountain lions. It's all controversial, and as you can imagine there is much debate on both sides of the argument. After the talk on mountain lions there was a presentation on Apaches and their horses, detailing how the Native Americans initially got their horses from Spanish incursions across the border from Mexico -- and eventually became a horse culture. The Chiricahua Apaches, with such legendary figures like Cochise and Geronimo, still have history here. The last presentation was by Bruce Thompson, the caretaker at the Painted Pony Resort, talking about restoring private rangelands, rehabilitating them to a least a semblance of their original state, as now the majority has been taken over by invasive grasses and weeds -- when it hasn't been turned into a dust bowl due to no vegetative ground cover. The Heritage Days presentations ended on that note. I went back to Faranuf, had dinner, then sat out on the back porch watching the birds come in for the last time that day -- and saw 3 Green-tailed Towhees in the outer periphery of the back yard, the first ones I've seen since I've been at Faranuf. They're mostly considered to be wintering birds here, so I was surprised -- and pleased. They made it 30 birds species (that I could recognize)  for my Yard List. Tomorrow it will be more weed whacking, removal and yard maintenance...