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Giving aspens a fighting chance in Northern Arizona

Ever since I read those articles on Sudden Aspen Decline (SAD) and spent some quality time hiking in the spectacular but doomed aspen groves on the south and west slopes of the San Francisco Peaks I've been feeling depressed and helpless to do anything about the dim future of these trees. It's a shame that a species of tree that's been growing here since the last Ice Age (and probably even before that) could be all but gone in fifty years. And we caused it. I don't think that's too strongly worded or can be repeated too many times: Because of what humans have done it's entirely possible that in a few generations the only aspen trees left in this part of Arizona could be landscape trees bought at nurseries. The magnificent groves of wild quaking aspens that Arizona Highways gushes about every Fall could be extinct with little left to show that they were here but fading memories and JPEG files on computer hard drives. The thought of that happening makes me sad and, to be honest, more than a little pissed off.

Yesterday I spent the day working with the Friends of Northern Arizona Forests volunteer group to repair and upgrade an aspen exclosure off of highway 180. The work was back-breaking and by the end of the day my arms were limp from carrying heavy 10-foot fence posts a half mile through the woods and my hands cramped from twisting thick wire fencing clips into place. The group of 30+ volunteers were a mix of young people and older folks, all of whom were highly motivated and willing to work hard for a good cause. That so many young people showed up made me feel a little less cynical about the younger generation and the future of the environment. But only a little.

One of the benefits of going out there was having access to Patty Ringle, the silvaculturalist in charge of aspen with the Forest Service. She was full of interesting and enlightening facts about aspen trees, human-caused changes to the forests in Northern Arizona, and strong opinions about how to solve aspen decline. I'll post some more on what I learned later. But for now, let me just say that at least in Northern Arizona tree fungus and drying forests isn't the biggest threat to aspens. Not by far.

I can't express how good it felt to go out into the forest and physically do something to help aspen trees. It was so much better than sitting at home reading ever-more-dire blog posts and articles on climate change and feeling the creeping despair take root. Together we gave those trees a fighting chance to survive. But don't get me wrong, even if what we did yesterday saves that particular 30 acre grove of baby aspens it was only a rearguard victory in the larger war against anthropogenic climate change. To even make a dent in this problem we'd need hundreds - if not thousands - of volunteers and vastly more funds than the Forest Service has so far deemed fit to give to the aspen exclosure projects.

Still, it felt awfully good to get out there and put some sweat and muscle towards saving trees. I'll definitely be doing it again.

Determine your location using multiple compass bearings

In my last post on orienteering I explained how to use a single compass bearing to find your location on a trail or road. With this post I'll show how to use multiple bearings to triangulate your location anywhere, whether you're on a trail or not. This is a useful technique if you're hiking off-trail or have become lost.

Here is a panoramic photo I took from somewhere up on the San Francisco Peaks with three compass bearings in red:

From left to right the bearings are to Freemont Peak, Humphreys Peak, and Aubineau Peak. To determine your location using the compass bearings you first have to convert them to back-bearings and then adjust for magnetic declination. Remember, to convert to a back-bearing you add/subtract 180° to obtain the bearing as it would be for someone standing on Freemont/Humphreys/Aubineau back to your current location. Finally, you add the magnetic declination as determined from your map's legend. This gives you the True North back-bearing which can be used on a topographic map:

Freemont Peak = 223-180+13 = 56°TN
Humphreys Peak = 298-180+13 = 131°TN
Aubineau Peak = 334-180+13 = 167°TN

With the True North back-bearings you can then plot course lines on the map as I've done in the Topo! screenshot below (click for full size version):

The intersection of the three back-bearings points to my location, which turns out to be the Doyle Saddle (no surprise there). The topographic maps all have Doyle Saddle and Freemont Saddle swapped so ignore the label next to the location. When I made the panoramic photo I walked downslope a little to avoid getting too much of the ground in the shot so that's why my location is not precisely in the center of the saddle.

I made the above plot using my copy of National Geographic Topo!, which is very nice software if you're an outdoorsy sort of geek, but not exactly practical in the field. Instead, you'd use a protractor or else orient the map to magnetic north and then use your compass to plot the course lines as I discussed in my previous post. With some practice you can get very close to what Topo! will give you.

This example used three compass bearings but it's perfectly acceptable to use only two bearings. Your accuracy won't be quite as precise but you should be close enough. The third bearing acts as a check on the other two: if instead of converging to a tight point on the map you get a big triangle then you know that one (or more) of the bearings is off.

Some thoughts upon returning from Las Vegas Connections conference

I'm back from the Las Vegas Dev/Win/Exchange/Sharepoint Connections conference at Mandalay Bay. Over the week I was there:

1. I gained five pounds due to overeating and interruption of my normal exercise regimen. I knew I'd gain some weight but I wasn't expecting to pack on five freakin' pounds. My plan, lame as it was, was to climb the forty-some-odd flights of stairs in the hotel a couple of times over the week but for various reasons it didn't happen. The one time that I tried I discovered that people had been using the stairwell for cigarette breaks and the air inside was all but unbreathable. Oh, well. Next time I'll bring Mount Elden along with me or else visit the hotel fitness center.
2. I learned more about Microsoft's Exchange 2010 mail/calendaring server than I thought I would. The last couple of these Microzombie conference thingies I've been to boiled down to big multi-day marketing sessions. Exchange Connections surprised me with the depth of some of the presentations. Exchange 2007 was already a pretty damned spiffy mail server but Exchange 2010 just makes it better. The Firefox/Safari-enabled Outlook Web App (OWA) is going to be a very welcome change for non-Windows users.
3. I saw only two birds the entire time I was on the Las Vegas strip, both of which were male grackles. They looked kind of stressed out and eager to go elsewhere. By the fourth day I was feeling the same way.
4. I was astounded at how low the water level was in Lake Mead versus the last time I drove over the Hoover Dam seven or eight years ago. Without even leaving the car it was readily apparent how far down the lake was just by looking at the large white "bathtub ring" along the shoreline. There is very serious trouble brewing for anyone dependent on Lake Mead (and probably the Colorado River as a whole) for water. The Lake Mead Water Levels chart I found is downright scary. I don't think most people living in the southwest appreciate just how dire the situation really is.
5. I wondered how blackjack dealers, roulette croupiers, and other casino gaming workers can go home at the end of the day and feel good about a job well done. I mean, how can they feel job satisfaction about helping to funnel money from people who clearly don't understand basic probability and into the coffers of huge corporate entities with no-one's best interest at heart? I can't think of a single good social quality of these jobs beyond providing basic sustenance for the workers.
   
   Judging from the high percentage of minivans and older cars in the employee parking level of the hotel I suspect that gaming jobs don't pay well at all. The idea that those waitresses walking around the casino floor wearing hot dresses and offering cocktails to the players could be single mothers living lives of quiet desperation kind of took some of the fun out of the experience. I suspect that the casinos really don't want their guests thinking too deeply about this.

I guess that's about it. Anyone else been to Vegas lately?

Vegas Baby!

Posting on this blog will be even lighter than usual this week as I'm headed off to fabulous Las Vegas for the huge DevConnections conference. If you're attending the conference maybe we'll see each other there. I'll be that lone guy carrying an Apple MacBook in a sea of Windows 7 Microzombies. Hopefully Steve Ballmer won't be there.

The above pic is from Resident Evil: Extinction, which was a really bad movie but did have a couple of redeeming scenes where mutant zombie ravens tried to kill everyone. Of course I was rooting for the ravens.

Determine your location using a compass bearing

Here's a picture of the compass I sometimes use on hikes:

It's a model-27 military-grade lensatic compass that I bought before I got out of the Army about <mumble mumble> years ago. The Army had two kinds of lensatic compasses when I was in: one with radioactive tritium paint on the dial that would permanently glow for use at night and another with phosphorescent paint on the dial. The tritium dial compass was not available at the PX so I ended up with the one with phosphorescent paint. It's a rugged design and makes for a very cool (if a little heavy) piece of kit.

Unlike the clear plastic Silva navigation compasses you normally see people using, the lensatic compass is designed for taking bearings quickly and easily. The folding rear site allows you to look down through the lens and see the dial without needing to move the compass away from your face. This increases accuracy, which is a good thing if you're going to be calling in an air strike based off your reading.

If you're like me and mostly stay on established trails then a compass is most useful for estimating your current location using a single bearing measurement. Off-trail bushwhackers can also use a compass to follow a bearing toward some destination. Both skills are pretty easy to master but for this post I'm just going to show how to find your location on a trail or road using a compass bearing.

Okay, so let's say you've been hiking up the Weatherford Trail on the San Francisco Peaks for a couple of hours and while you know you're still in Weatherford Canyon you want to know exactly where you are. To do this you look across the canyon and take a compass bearing to a prominent location, which in this case would be Schultz Peak:

The compass tells you that Schultz Peak is at bearing 95° from your current location on the trail. If someone standing atop Schultz Peak were to shoot a compass bearing back to you the angle would be 275°(95°+ 180°). This is called the "back-bearing". With the back-bearing and a map you can determine the location on the Weatherford Trail that intersects with that angle, i.e. your current location!

Now, there's a slight complication with that 275° angle. Because you used a magnetic compass to obtain it the angle is in relation to magnetic north, which is not the same as the true north your map uses. Magnetic north drifts around slowly and depending where you are on the Earth the difference between magnetic and true north can be quite large. So you must correct for this difference, otherwise your calculations will be off. Fortunately, all good maps will tell you what the difference is, called magnetic declination, somewhere on them, usually in the map's legend. My map's legend tells me that magnetic declination for Flagstaff is 13° east, which we then add to the 275° magnetic back-bearing to get 288° true north bearing (275°MN + 13° = 288°TN).

So now that you've converted your magnetic back-bearing to map bearing it's time to find the location on the Weatherford Trail that intersects with that angle. To do this get out your map and orient it to magnetic north. This allows you to make angle measurements directly on the map with the compass, negating the need to carry a protractor along with you on the hike. Lay the map on the ground, align the compass with a north-south line on the map, and then turn the entire thing (both compass and map) until the compass needle reads zero degrees:

In the above example I aligned the compass to three UTM markers on the map but any north-south line will do, even the edge of the map.

Once you've oriented the map to magnetic north all that remains is to find Schultz Peak on the map and then shoot a 288° back-bearing from it to find your location on the Weatherford Trail. Because you know you're on the Weatherford Trail you know your location has to be where the bearing line intersects with the trail on the map:

 

In the above picture I placed the lower edge of the compass's straight edge on top of Schultz Peak and then rotated the compass until the dial read 288° below the hairline. This places the intersection of the green line (the 288°back-bearing) with the Weatherford Trail about here:

 

The black circle denotes my estimated location, which happened to be where I stopped for lunch on this particular hike. Checking with my GPS and Topo! show that the location determined via compass and back-bearing from Schultz Peak was about 200 feet off. My true location as given by the GPS was actually a little further down the trail near the southern edge of the black circle. Not perfect but also not too bad for someone without a lot of experience doing this sort of thing.

So what did we learn from this exercise?

1. How to use the lensatic compass to take a magnetic bearing reading to a distant location (Schultz Peak was 95°).
2. How to convert the bearing to a back-bearing (added 180° to bearing to get the back-bearing of 275°).
3. How to convert the back-bearing from magnetic north to true north as used on the topographic map. Flagstaff's magnetic declination is 13° so we added that to 275° and got 288°.
4. We then oriented the map to magnetic north so we could use the compass to measure angles instead of a protractor.
5. And finally, we placed the edge of the compass straight edge on Schultz Peak and rotated the compass to 288° to find our location on the Weatherford Trail.

As I said, this didn't give perfect results but it was close enough for me to know that I was only a half mile or so from the Doyle Saddle. I'm pretty sure the error was due to inexperience shooting bearings and not with the map or the compass.

RIP - Flagstaff, AZ Home Supply Chart

After some thinking I've decided that I'm not going to maintain the Flagstaff, AZ Home Supply Chart any longer. I've been diligently punching in numbers from the MLS and zillow for a long time now and I don't want to do it any more. My interest in housing bubbles and economics in general has waned and I'm not going to spend any more of my time watching home prices. Life is just too damned short to be worrying about some jackass asking too much for his crappy three-bedroom ranch house in ponderosa trails.

If you want to download the spreadsheet and keep it going yourself then you can download it here. It's in Excel 2007 format. I never had much luck converting it to Apple's Numbers, OpenOffice, or anything but Microsoft's Office formats.

To update the data all you have to do is head over to www.northernarizonamls.com every week or so and do three "Flagstaff" property searches: one for single family + townhouse + condo, one for mobile + manufactured, and one with everything selected. The zindex data for Flagstaff can be found here.

My advice for those trying to time the market using charts like this is: Don't Bother. If you need or want a home and you have the money then buy one. If you don't then rent. It's a pretty simple choice. If you can, skip the realtors and their high commissions, lies, and conflicts of interest. Instead, look at the FSBOs, talk with the owner, and work out a deal. You know, kind of like the old days before middlemen and hucksters convinced everyone that we couldn't do business without them.

And today's word is: nihilarian

I get the A.Word.A.Day daily e-mail and today's word seemed eerily fitting to my current mood:

nihilarian
noun: One who does useless work.

Perhaps the folks at wordsmith are trying to tell me I need a vacation?

My dad's mad orienteering skills

One day when I was a teenager my dad, who worked for the Forest Service and whose job it was to mark off timber sale boundaries, brought me to work with him. I don't remember why, but I guess it was one of those "take your kid to work" days or something. At the time I was more interested in reading Heinlein and thinking up new adventures for our role-playing game club at school than tromping around the forest with my father. So, needless to say, I was a less-than-enthusiastic ride-along partner.

After an hour of paperwork and office talk we loaded up a bunch of gear into a green Forest Service truck and drove out into the middle of the forest on a network of seemingly random logging roads. When we finally got to the proposed timber sale, which looked like any other patch of impenetrable eastern arizona forest, we set off into the tangle of trees on foot. Keep in mind that this was raw, virgin forest filled with huge old-growth douglas fir and spruce. The canopy overhead was so thick you couldn't see through it to the sky and the forest floor was such a tangle of brush and downed trees that it was impossible to walk ten feet in a straight line without having to veer around some obstacle. Think of the forest around the Humphreys Trail on the San Francisco Peaks and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about.

It was then that my dad showed me the most amazing feat of old-school orienteering that I've ever seen.  Even the land-nav instructors I met in the Army could never have matched it. We spent the rest of the day navigating through this impenetrable mess to precisely predefined locations specified by the timber sale prescription, measuring off various distances down to the foot, and marking trees with spray paint and ribbons. Not once did we get lost. And at the end of the day after hours of transecting the sale back and forth in big loops and figure-eights we not only found our way back to the truck but we did so from a different angle and were only off by a few feet or so.

All of this was done without the aide of a GPS receiver, which, if they existed at all at the time, would've been the size of a jeep and decidedly not portable. My dad's tools were a map, a compass, and sometimes a really long tape measure, although mostly he just counted paces. Hours later, when I saw that green Forest Service truck appear like magic out of the thick trees exactly where my dad said it would I was just floored. It was incredible and maybe a little uncanny, too. To modify Clarke's famous saying: Any sufficiently advanced skill is indistinguishable from magic.

So, Sunday when I noted that my Garmin eTrex GPS had lost its satellite lock yet again in the trees I decided that I wasn't going to carry the damned thing on my birding expeditions anymore. Not only is its battery seemingly always dead but in all the many hikes I've been on this year and last I can't think of a single instance when I really needed to know my location down to ten foot accuracy. Also, it's utility has diminished somewhat since I don't geocache any longer. Instead, in the future I'll do as my dad did: use my mind, a map, and a simple compass to find my route. Maybe I'll get lost, maybe I won't. But it'll be interesting and maybe we'll learn something.

Fast turkeys

Yesterday I saw my first wild turkey, i.e. "lifer" bird, up on the San Francisco Peaks. This being November and with Thanksgiving just around the corner I won't say exactly where. Let's just say that the hunter who bagged one of these birds would have to be an extremely motivated and fit outdoorsman.

Besides being the first truly wild turkeys I've seen, what impressed me the most about these birds was just how unlike the pitiful doomed birds you see at the county fair or coming out the business end of Safeway they were. These wild birds were slim, sleek, and freakin' fast. When they saw me coming down the trail they were gone in a flash, leaving me no time to even think about removing my camera's lens cap. By the time I reached the clearing they'd been crossing they were long gone.

I only saw them for a couple of seconds but my perception of turkeys has been forever changed.

The Lord Givith and The White Man Taketh Away

"The Lord Givith[sic] and The White Man Taketh Away"

[ Found on a bridge near NAU campus. It appeared sometime in the past week as I haven't been down that way for a few days. ]