Theresa · Mather

The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is much closer to us than the more frequently visited South Rim, so it's where we go most often. It's higher than the South Rim, and heavily forested. The lodge closes for the year on October 16 although the park stays open until the snow seals it in for the winter, or November 30, whichever comes first. We decided to get a final visit in before the lodge closes.
At this time of year, we were expecting autumn color. We never expected to see the elusive park buffalo, which used to keep to the back country, yet there some were right past the park gates. Judging by the number of "chips", they come to this field frequently.

We saw lots of animals, including about 40 wild turkeys, grouse, deer and a rare kaibab squirrel, which is a large charcoal grey squirrel with a black belly and white tail.The regional deer population is teeming- we saw tons of them all the way back from the park.
( More pictures, clicky here )

We took a drive this afternoon up the mountain. Although the autumn color hasn't reached down to 6000 feet altitude in our town, there's plenty of it higher up. The highest peaks in the area hit around 11,000 feet.
This is the road up the mountain you can see from my front window.

Another view from the road up Cedar Mountain, looking toward the top where the altitude is 8700 feet.

This type of lovely plant is my nemesis each autumn. It's called rabbit brush, it's everywhere, and it makes clouds of pretty yellow pollen that make my eyes water continuously when it blooms in fall. Sure is pretty though.

Here I am walking at the top of a lava cliff up on the plateau at the top of the mountains. The peaks are all very high in altitude, but the effect at the top is rolling hills punctuated by evidence of volcanic eruptions. In the summer, ranchers graze sheep and cattle in the rolling hills er...mountaintops, taking them down the mountain later in fall to winter at lower altitudes. We saw several stags and lots of mountain bluebirds today up here.

The prevailing regional color once autumn sets in is golden yellow because of the aspens and cottonwoods and rabbit brush.

These pictures show the early colors. The gambel oaks and many of the aspens haven't even started to change yet. Barring a storm blowing in at the wrong time and taking down the leaves, I hope to make several more trips to this and other local areas to see lots of autumn color before everything turns grey for the winter, which I'm totally not ready for. It's not going to be long now till my own deciduous trees start to turn.

No fall colors yet, but I can see them higher up on the mountainside. It may be time for a fall color viewing drive. Summer is exiting like it entered- cool, and with frequent clouds and rain. We didn't really have much of a summer- I didn't take the lighter winter blankets off the bed until June and I'm thinking about putting them back on already.

I baked a loaf of brown potato bread, it just came out of the oven, so the house smells like baking bread. I had to call Barry to corral dumb kitty who seemed intent on jumping into the hot lower oven when I tried to take it out. Silly cat! Since she has had cancer and needs to eat, I've been sharing people food with her and now she knows it tastes better than cat food. So she's way too interested in anything connected to people food. I thought when she had the tumors removed in January, she wouldn't live very long after that. But it's getting to be fall and she's still here, now with a huge appetite for lunch meat, steak, pork chops, pudding, cheese, mayo, roast beef, salad dressing, cake and chicken. And she's pushy and whiny about it too! The interest in bread seems to come from the newly acquired knowledge that lunch meat and bread are often connected, so if you're handling bread kitty starts to get in front of your feet to force you to pay attention while she says MAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUU over and over.

Cat wrangling isn't all there is on my to-do list today. I'm reframing some pieces for a friend, finishing the small originals for October and getting a commission ready to send today.

Yesterday I got a large frame order in, so sorting and putting away things was the order of the day. I selected a few to reframe some paintings I think would look better framed differently. So I intend to clean up loose ends today and tomorrow so I can forge ahead finishing the year's work. I think dinner at Ninja Japanese Steakhouse would be a good way to celebrate finishing 2009! Of course it's just a symbolic goal, because I'll begin work for 2010 the very next day.

Fall comes early at 10,000 feet, but as of yesterday it's still hanging somewhere between summer and autumn a 15 minute drive from my house.
This is a view overlooking Zion National Park (in the distance) through ancient bristlecone pines that cling to the more inhospitable heights:

Here's a view of Cedar Breaks National Monument:

These berries were quite striking in appearance, but anything that draws that much attention to itself yet isn't eaten by animals is probably poisonous. Deer will eat anything that isn't toxic, including all my daylilies and chives. So if they didn't eat these, they must be pretty awful.

I have carpenter ants in my yard, some of them 3/4 inch long. The nest is way in the back of the yard, but I find them on the walkway near the studio. They were among the things I expected to leave behind as I set out on this year's road trip. But here in my motel room in Dillon, Colorado, I am currently being watched by several large carpenter ants as they stand guard on the window ledge, about a foot and a half from my head. The motel is sold out so there's no room to move to, and besides, if the ants are in the walls they're probably in the other rooms as well. I'm wearing heavy socks to prevent bites if I step on any in the middle of the night.

I was busy matting and framing artwork until about a half hour before we left this morning. Usually I'm farther ahead, but my cold and bruised ribs from an inglorious fall that I'd rather not describe in its humiliating detail slowed me down. We bid kitty and those staying behind adieu and hit the road. There wasn't much time for stopping since we got a late start, but I think I did manage to see half the Utah prairie dogs (UPDs) in existence. They are supposedly threatened, so there are strict rules governing their removal- only 300 of them can be moved per year in the entire county. Needless to say, the Cedar City golf course and large sections of our town are now UPD habitat. There are colonies all up the I-15 if you know where to look, and in one town I saw probably 30 dogs standing alert on top of mounds as we drove by today. One environmentalist claimed in an editorial that UPDs are "as rare as whooping cranes", but I can show anyone who really wants to see them several hundred in about 15 minutes, so unless all of them now live in Cedar City and along the I-15, there are more of them than people think.

Other highlights of the day include a stop in Green River, driving through the beaten up town and past its classic vintage signs and (unfortunately) right past the local watermelons the area is known for piled high at roadside stands. We did manage to get some local cherries and peaches farther up the road in Colorado. We didn't snap pictures today, and the scenery along the I-70 from its start in Cove Fort, Utah to the start of the Rockies in Colorado really needs to be seen in 3 dimensions to be appreciated. With a few sparse clouds, the play of light and shadow gives depth to the vast empty sweeps of landscape. Past Glenwood Springs and Vail and other towns, we really had little time to stop. The fun part this trip comes farther up the road, far away from the unwelcome observation of carpenter ants.

Well, the town fireworks were interesting. They were set off to a soundtrack on one of the few local radio stations, "Kickin' Country". Selections included Neil Diamond's "They Come To America" to Nathan Hale's Gallows speech, selections from the Declaration of Independance read to the music of Jurassic Park, but the Grand Finale left no doubt that some in this area still aspire to theocratic dominion- the Grand finale was to "In God We Still Trust" performed by whiny voiced "Diamond Rio", a paean against separation of church and state. It kind of puzzled me how there was all the stuff about the sacrifices and ideals of the founders and then a whiny badly written badly executed song decrying what the founders fought for as the big grand finale, saying there is no separation between church and state and we owe all our money and "freedoms" to God and not anything else.

I guess they lost the right to force all bars to be private clubs you had to pay and fill out a form to enter so they have to tell us they're still in control somehow. :P

I hadn't ever shown my work in Southern Utah before, but the show of regional artists at the Braithwaite Gallery at Southern Utah University has changed that. The reception was Friday, and it was fun to finally meet other artists from the community. I think one really striking thing about the show is the wide variety of subjects and media represented- from Emily Bradley's delightful fiber sculptures to Russ Fawson's photo realistic wildlife paintings and fabulous leatherwork and saddles to J. Brad Holt's evocative paintings of regional scenes, and too many more to mention, the variety and quality of work is really amazing, especially considering that this is such a small town! I have 6 pieces in the show, which runs through September 5.
The show includes artists from both Artisans- Cedar City to which I belong and the Cedar City Arts Council.
I'll also be setting up a tent at the Utah Midsummer Renaissance Festival this year. It's a small faire, but admission is free and it's probably one of a very few Ren Faires where you can get a Navajo Taco. :P

So they removed a huge killer bee colony from a home a block and a half away. There were 150 pounds of honeycombs in the eves of the house and the hive apparently had been there for at least four years. So all the bees in my yard for the last four years have been killer bees. They didn't act any more aggressive than regular bees, they just buzzed around and did usual bee things. I guess we should have been tipped off by the fact that honeybees can't survive the winters here... now we know. But a small twisted part of me is also kind of disappointed that after all the hype of the 70's and panic in the media and movies, I lived near killer bees for 4 years and they seemed just like regular bees, happily pollinating my apple tree and rolling in yellow pollen in the wildflowers. Somehow, in my mind, they should have looked more sinister...with some kind of special stripes, larger size or little villain's capes or something.
Even so, I'm very glad no one got hurt.

EDIT: Link to news coverage including video and pictures. I should note though that contrary to the caption, Cedar City is not in Utah county. :P
Click here

I'm irked for two reasons.

1. Pine pollen and privet hedge pollen are making my eyes water and my nose stuffy.
I've taken an antihistamine but it still looks like I've been crying. There is so much tree pollen that there was yellow powder all over my driveway until the rain washed it away, but the rain caused more trees to start blooming.

2. The Cooper's Hawk that hangs out in one of my trees near the studio.
He ambushes robins and jays from the tree. I know he's just doing what hawks do and is just looking for dinner, but finding broken backed robins staggering around the yard and robin parts and piles of robin feathers where he plucked them before eating them on an almost daily basis is getting old really fast. Nothing like getting up in the morning and walking to the studio only to find some form of robin carnage along the path. The hawk watches me through the studio door and I just know if I was small enough he'd try to eat me too.

Stop reading now if you don't like bugs.

Calamitous Drama is going on in my yard. For some reason, I have lots of ant activity this spring. But it isn't ordinary black kitchen ant type activity.
The drama started this week with a huge (3/4 inch) ant with big jaws sitting wounded on the walk to my studio. I stopped to look at him because he was so unusually extra-large. One of his antennae was clipped and several of his legs were missing segments. He stayed put until he died and I assume a bird ate him. Later in the day, I found two similarly wounded big ants. I went about my business and came back only to find that they were missing more parts. Apparently they were trimming eachother's legs and antennae, and they kept fighting al la the Black Knight in Monty Python's Holy Grail. "It's only a flesh wound!". They both blew away or got eaten by a bird because they certainly could no longer walk away on their own.
Toward evening that same day, I noticed a dark spot on the ground about the size of a salad plate next to the bread crumb pile I leave out for the birds when I have old bread. Curious as to what had been dumped there, I examined the dark shape and found that it was a bivouac of tiny ants.... many thousands of them. They had set up camp while other ants were busy dismantling bread. I didn't know army type ants ate plant material or bread. A robin came and ate too, though I think he was eating ants rather than bread.
Today I found another wounded warrior ant on the walkway, waiting boldly for his fate. I went into the back part of the yard and there past the area that passing deer like to use as an outhouse was the beginnings of a colony of half inch ants. They were busy excavating on top of a mound. The huge ants may be warriors of this type of ant, but I can't be sure. I had left a hard boiled egg that had been forgotten in the fridge out there for the foxes or raccoons but instead, through a crack in the shell yet another kind of ant had removed about a quarter of the egg in a little over a day. These ants were being ignored by the half inch ants that were building the new tunnels.
I've been looking online to figure out what all these ants are, but there are just too many types to narrow it down. I do know that one of the regional businesses locally was once collecting ants for Ant Farms. Mail in your Ant Farm ant certificate and some Utahn went out and trapped them to fill your order.

I seriously hope none of these ants decide to move into the house.

"By the strength of my arm, by the sight of my eye,
By the skill of my fingers, I swear,
As long as life dwells in me, never will I
Follow any way but the sweeping way of the wind."

I first learned of Everett Ruess and his artwork shortly after moving to Southern Utah, and his story immediately captured my imagination.

Everett Ruess was a young poet and artist who vanished into the Utah wilderness in 1934 at the age of 20. He had spent several years wandering alone with his horses and burros before he disappeared, exploring remote canyons, mountains and deserts. He associated with the likes of Ansel Adams, Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange.. often boldly introducing himself to people whose works he admired. Although his life was short, he created wonderful artwork based upon the things he saw and his writings are still in publication. You can see samples of his work and read about his brief remarkable life on the website created with the permission of his family.

Part of the legend of Everett Ruess has been that the mystery of his disappearance was never solved. Some claimed he was murdered, others that he lived on in the wilds. But now part of the mystery is over and another part begins- his remains have at long last apparently been found and identified. But he was not found anywhere near where he said he was going in his last letter- how he got there and who or what killed him remains a mystery.

"Beauty isolated is terrible and unbearable,
and the unclouded sight other kills the beholder.
His only refuge is in insignificant things,
in labor that keeps the mind from thought, and in companionship
that gives back to the ego some of its former virility.
But he who has looked long on naked beauty may never return to the world,
and though he should try, he will find its occupation empty and vain,
and human intercourse purposeless and futile.
Alone and lost, he must die on the altar of beauty."

-Everett Ruess

A storm has moved in and it's so heavily clouded that this is the darkest day so far this year. I don't think I'll get a lot of painting done unless it clears some, since I work by natural light. that's alright though- I'm still stiff and sore from yesterday's hike at Taylor Creek in the Kolob section of Zion National Park, which takes about 15-20 minutes to get to from my home. The trail was only about 5 and a half miles, but there's a lot of up and down and I've been walking a lot less for most of the winter. My body is telling me I need to exercise more often.

The following is a series of photos, in order, from the trail. You travel from a lower pinion/juniper high desert area along a creek into the shadowed forest of a narrow canyon, terminating in a huge natural alcove that has dripping springs and is filled with maidenhair ferns and wildflowers in the summer. At this time of year, there were still a few icicles instead of foliage.

( more pictures, click here. )

My work for the day is done and I'm winding down with a Wyder's Dry Raspberry Cider. I didn't get as much done as I wanted to, but I did get the studio almost ready for transferring my supplies back out for the season. I even swept the deer crap from the walkway..it was very thoughtful of the deer to leave nice a nice big steaming pile behind so I would know that they had stopped by.
( Lots more, with pictures! (not of the deer crap) )

Infamous Utah state senator for the communities of West Jordan, South Jordan and Herriman Chris Buttars has a special gift for putting his foot in his mouth. He just can't let a session of the legislature pass by without making a huge spectacle of both himself and the people in this state who keep re-electing him. He recently took time out from pushing creationism in schools, attempting to mandate the saying of "Merry Christmas" at cash registers,coercing Utah judges to rule his way, and other projects to come out with the declaration that gays are the greatest threat America faces and are worse than Muslim extremists. There's more here. And there will be plenty more coming soon to media near you. This is rubbing salt on the wounds- the state just refused to pass legislation that would prevent the firing or eviction of people based on sexual orientation.
This state is poor, and has a hard time attracting business. As long as it allows its strident obnoxious poorly educated blathering idiot politicians to represent it and keeps putting socially unskilled openly corrupt jackasses in office, it will continue to remain a dirt poor enclave of the third world in the United States.

While I'm waiting for the sun to rise so I can start painting, I thought I'd post some thoughts on the housing market. I live in a part of the country where speculation and flipping homes was rampant, so I get to see the train wreck of the housing market front and center.
Part of the reason that I chose Cedar City instead of St. George to buy a house was that the bubble had expanded from Las Vegas already, and I didn't want to buy a house with a bubble inflated price that would lose half it's value or more once the inevitable pop came. The bubble soon followed me, and my house "doubled in price" (yeah, right) on paper in two years.
Now here's where I knew it was all bullshit. The wages here are stagnant- the average pay is something like $10 an hour, but the home prices skyrocketed and luxury mcmansions were built by the score. But the people buying most of the homes from here to Las Vegas didn't buy them to live in- they bought them to collect as investments. Often, they would leverage the bubble equity in one home to buy more. I know people in California who "invested" here. There were even investor bus tours in cities like Boise for California buyers to snap up "investments". There are probably AT LEAST 100,000 unwanted luxury investor homes between Las Vegas and Utah that local buyers could never afford. When the "investors" get foreclosed on, they lose multiple homes at once. From tens of thousands of luxury "cabins" in the mountains to rambling Tuscan Villas, there is no actual market for these homes. When people actually want to live in a luxury home, they have one custom built. When they decide they hate Utah and run back to civilization, no one will buy their custom home- the people who would be buyers want to build their own instead. Some beautiful lavish luxury mansions have been on the market here since I was house shopping nearly 6 years ago, failed to sell in the bubble and are still for sale, but new ones have been built...and have been left vacant... in the mean time. Meanwhile, the builders failed to build much that the local populace could actually afford. Southern Utah's only businesses of any size are tourism and construction, so you can image the devastation losing the market for investor homes has caused..construction jobs were the only ones that were paying well. So the state and government are trying to figure out how to make the housing market "bounce back" when we already have thousands of luxury homes no one wants or can afford on the market. I figure many of these behemoths will have to be carved up into multi-family units at some point, or else have to be torn down or modified. I hear people locally blaming the "liberals" for forcing the poor innocent banks to give loans to minorities who "don't qualify" for them for the whole economic mess, but the flippers and investors often are responsible for hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of losses each when they go down. The people who bought a McMansion they couldn't afford with an interest only adjustable to keep up with their neighbors are a huge part of it too. And the southwest is now literally awash in huge granite countertopped cathedral ceilinged homes there is very little market for.
So when I hear that "stabilizing the housing market" is the "key to recovery" I just hear so much "blah blah blah". There is no market for the sea of luxury homes all around, and there is no point in "jumpstarting" the construction of more of them. The whole economy was built on wealth on paper based on the artificial value of stucco boxes that were being bought and sold Ponzi style. I would guess from what I've read that nationally there are several million extra uneeded homes.
In light of this, in my opinion, what we're going through is at least in part a very sharp, very painful correction back down to where we would have been were it not for the artificial wealth created by the housing Ponzi scheme. At least that's what it looks like from here, looking up the street at the McMansions no one wants to buy.

We went back to the park and grabbed a shot of the snow centipede I posted about a couple of days ago. It has a few less segments than I remember (there are some behind it) but it's still damn funny. It has an ice shard nose and stick antennae, though you can barely see them in this shot. I just love the facial expression and all the stick arms.

But the fun and excitement doesn't end there....
We took a day off and went to Snow Canyon.
( More pictures and text, click here )