Training Log Archive: Swampfox

Efter en längre tur ifrån Sverige, nu är jag tillbacka hemma hos Ingrid och Göran här.

If you can spot the nighthawk eggs in this picture, you are better than me!



Well, you are probably better than me anyway, but still...

C • Sweden 8

O' vid Diamond Flats, 9.4 kms, 28 kontroller. Solig och varm (90F redan, rekord varm for daget.)

Saw another young moose--same size as the one I saw a few days ago--standing in the middle of a dirt road, so I got a good, up close look at it, and now I'm sure both of these moose are yearlings, and not the "this year" crop. Biked during the middle of the day for 2 1/2 hours, and was somewhat toasted by the end. Ran at the end of the day down in the Crow Creek drainage with no plans but to saunter along and enjoy the smells and sights, which was good, because my legs didn't have much in the them anyway.

Anecdotally, drivers are not getting better--at least not around here. A few days ago, a driver was making a left hand on a busy road with oncoming traffic, with the problem being that I was part of that oncoming traffic, with the right of way, and right where he was turning into. A desperate swerve by me. was *just* enough to buy time for him to hit his brakes.

Then yesterday, trucking down a street in the bike lane, I saw signs of a driver maybe about to back out of a driveway. I assumed he wasn't looking or would miss seeing me even if he did look (for cars), and, sure enough, he backed right into where I was headed, never saw me, and once again it was only a swerve by me to get out of the way which kept me from being hit. There was a bit more time to work with in this case, but not enough to be sure there was nobody right behind me.

And then, also yesterday, now headed for home, I was riding towards a stop light a few blocks away with a steep downhill just past the light, and heard a siren down the hill. Followed by the appearance of an ambulance with flashing lights, which slowed at the light and then drove through the light (which was red). I pulled over for the ambulance. The hospital was a few blocks behind me and I assumed that was where it was headed. But no, a block or so away, it pulled over, stopped, turned off the siren, and the driver got out. Then I could see a few people looking like grounds keepers standing in the grass by the road there, and wondered if maybe someone had had a heat stroke or something like that. But as I got going again and drew even with the ambulance, I saw a rather astonishing sight: a car had crashed into a tree and the engine compartment was halfway folded around the tree. What made it astonishing was that the speed limit on the street is 30 mph, and generally traffic is pretty adherent and moving at a commensurate speed. And yet, somehow this driver had departed from the right lane, gone across the lane for opposing traffic, gone over a curb, mowed down one smaller tree, and then had hit a larger tree which stopped the car. I have no idea what happened, but fortunately from the looks of the scene and the behavior of the people there, it didn't seem anyone had been seriously injured.

It does make you wonder how dangerous biking around town might be getting to be.

O' pass, Granite Planite, warm with lots of sweat and a few clouds. Ran the Red Middle from last year.

As I was pulling in and just starting to loosen up, several cowboys and one cowgirl were packing their horses into a trailer and preparing to move out. As I ran by, one of the cowboys said to watch out for the wild cows. I told him the wild cows were the only ones I wanted to run with anymore. Their cattle dog barked, and I reckon he saw things the same way. Smart dog.

Enough of the cheat grass has ripened so that it can be considered cheat grass season is underway. No surprise--my socks proved to be most adroit collectors of the highly desired cheat seeds.

While I was de-seeding my socks post-run, I wondered why cheat grass isn't found back east. You'd think it would thrive there. Maybe it just hasn't arrived yet, though that seems unlikely, given how long it has been passed around in the West.

I am not a super big cheat grass fan like so many others are(?), and for this year I have devised a plan which I am on the verge of implementing.

Sometimes people accuse me of embellishing the truth or even just flat out making stuff up. Like I would need to do that! Life is already so weird, and why waste energy on making stuff up when you can just point to the president to point out the existence of various absurdities?

Anyway, some time ago I mentioned finding some nighthawk eggs out in the forest and sure enough someone wrote me to say: "You did not, you're just making that up!"

And so the other day when I was out mapping and noticed a nighthawk flying up off the ground, I thought to myself that I'll show them this time.

Usually the eggs are really, really hard to spot, and if you aren't quick enough to note *exactly* where the adult bird got up from, finding the eggs can be almost hopeless. There's no nest and they're just on the bare ground, and their camouflage is immaculate.

But this one time (it's never happened before), even though I didn't see where the bird got up from and didn't notice it until it was 10' or so off the ground, I saw the eggs almost immediately--I didn't even have to move any closer. Can you see them?



If you're thinking the eggs are that square whitish thing in the upper left quadrant, you're wrong. Eggs aren't square, and that's my mapping board, so give yourself a low zero for that guess, and look harder.

See them now? No?

Okay, take a look here:



And they say I make stuff up. Pffft!

For the record, the eggs are dead center in the upper photo, just to the right of the stick-stone arrangement that also shows in the lower photo.

After mapping, I headed over to run the WMP course at Remarkable Flats, and on my way out on the jeep trail I had parked on, I saw two people standing on the prairie by the road. It's very rare to see people on foot out there, except when there are orienteers around. It looked like they might be looking at insects or flowers or something. As I got close to them, they looked over, and as I pulled up to them it looked like they might want to say something, so I rolled down my window and stopped. It was a guy and a woman. They wanted to know where the bunker was. They had parked near the bunker and had gone for a walk. It developed that they were completely lost and had no idea which way to head to get back. They didn't even know which direction they were headed, even though the skies were blue and the sun well up and plainly visible. And since they looked like they just wanted it to be all done with, I told them to hop in and I would take them to their car.

It turned out they were from Cheyenne, the woman a high school teacher and the guy a UP train conductor (I didn't even know there were still such things as train conductors.) They were very grateful and tried to pay me when I dropped them off at their car.

When I first saw them and as they were getting in my truck, I subconsciously made the assumption they were a married couple and didn't think about it at all until I was driving away after dropping them off. Then for some reason I did think about it, and concluded my assumption had been wrong, and that they had seemed familiar enough with each other that it couldn't have been a first date, it might well have been the first time they had gone off together for a hike in the woods--which obviously had not gone exactly as might have been planned. Well, there are things from an experience like that that you can learn in no other way, so maybe it was a good outing in a silver lining type of way, and at least while we were together I couldn't sense any sign that either of them was put out with the other.

From there, I made my way over to Remarkable Flats and carried out the workout I had planned, running the WMP course--11.7 kms, 19 controls, 3 fence crossings on my route, lots of cows, and pleasant temps despite the sun itself feeling quite warm.

Marking down another moose sighting, this one a young fellow/fellowess in some aspens right by the dirt road I was on to get to mapping. It looked too large to have just been born a month or so ago and yet too small to have been part of last year's crop, thus revealing my limitations as a moose appraiser.