TexasAg1969

You just jinxed hell out of him Tour-turned into a pumpkin at midnight.

Wonderful Wino!

Got me a mix it yourself Chicken Caesar Salad and a couple shots of fine Venezuelan sipping rum unencumbered by ice or coke. Yum!

Bears will eat any damn thing they find. I was at an outdoor lecture on black bears in RMNP outside Estes Park with my grandkids. The speaker said when they are even 20 miles downwind they can pick up on a carcass and backtrack the smell to the source like buzzards do. This article says their sense of smell is something like 7 times better than a bloodhound. That is just unreal and explains why you never keep or cook food near your sleeping area in bear country. Biggest black bear I ever saw was crossing the road to the far west side of Estes Park on his way to the city dump. https://sectionhiker.com/bears_sense_of_smell/ Yeah during the film I was thinking of converting to Canadian so I could go hoist the flag. At this age it's just a rich fantasy life.

Cal-In the first video I laughed when the first thing she did was walk away from her backpack full of food sitting on the ground. Rule #1 is carry a rope to hoist it into a tree if you're leaving it while scouting. She already screwed up but I'll finish watching anyway because it looks interesting. And if she's going to use a knife as her only defense along with bear spray then she better rig it up on a sturdy limb of some kind like spear to at least have a shot at poking an eye or two out from at least a short distance if the bear spray does nothing. LOL! Edit #1: 20 min. in and this girl is a novice. Leaves her food out again while she uses the bear bag to get river sand. And then she hangs it in an unsound tree that she could have checked out before hanging it up. But at least she likes to bathe in the river a lot for entertainment value. Too bad they cover her with the Canadian flag icon though. Edit #2: Not a Cajun dat fo sur. Suck dem heads o da crawfishes girl! Edit#3: Nice little speckled trout she got. Best eating ones I ever caught were Native Cutthroat trout up the Poudre River in Redfeather Lakes area WNW of Ft. Collins. Nothing like fresh trout cooked on a spit over an open fire. I caught 'em in early spring just after the ice broke and had my limit in about 15 min. Ate a bunch and took a bunch home at the end of my trip. Those were the days! PS-if you take a stringer with you you can keep them alive for quite a while in the water and eat them fresh whenever you get hungry. Or clean them and put them on ice in your beer cooler. LOL! Edit#4-thanks for the video cal. Overall she did fine with a few novice mistakes early in. I'll watch the others as I have time. PS-I laughed at myself as I watched her use rocks to bake her bread close to the fire. I got in a heap of trouble with the old man as a kid when I swore up and down that Indians ate rocks because I read it in Boys Life magazine. When we got home from the 15 minute argument he made me find the article and there was the picture of the Indians with rocks in their pot boiling away. What I had failed to do was read that they had heated the rocks in the fire and then thrown them in the pot of water so it reaches a quick boil. That earned me a knot on my head for not reading it. So the lesson never forgotten is that if you have a fire going keep a stack of some clean rocks in it and throw them in a container of water whenever you need it if you want hot water really fast. And read instructions carefully or you may get a knot on the head.!

One of those great moments. Thanks Tom! The Great Ones always leave too soon. RIP!

Adios

Apropos of nothing except the upcoming season. Sent by a friend: "Fact: If someone is playing Christmas music in October you have the right to kill them and use their corpse for a Halloween decoration."

This ^ And use the deep penetration rounds such as my favorite: The copper jacket takes it in further than most, but is built to peel back and mushroom in critical areas. And a .357 makes a hell of a lot more noise going off than any dinky .40 or .45.

If I ever hike in grizzly country I would take nothing less than my .357 Ruger with penetrating rounds that mushroom deeper than the normal HPs. Plus it makes a hellofa noise if all else fails. Bear spray would be nothing but backup.

I have a T-shirt I bought in Colorado this summer that says, "Never hike alone in bear country! Always hike with someone you can trip and outrun."

My daughter always told friends in California that when the Apocalypse came, she knew I'd find a way to save her and if they were smart they'd stick with her. Her standard answer was, "He survived Vietnam so the Apocalypse would be a piece of cake for him. He knows stuff no one else knows." LOL!

LOL! I'm living in the age of Trump/Jong Un, so I think worst case scenario with these two in charge. Get with the new age cal.

If I have to filter out radiation too then fuck it. I'll sip on my .357. I hate cold and if we are filtering radiation then nuclear winter is here to stay.

That Lifestraw looks kind of neat. May have to add it to my backpack though I've never had any problems drinking water straight from Rocky Mountain streams that have a good cleansing run over the rocks. Best during the spring and early summer snowmelt. Aeration does wonders. But a little insurance can't hurt any and should not affect that great mountain water taste any. if it does I'll go back to drinking it straight again. I'm so toxic from running behind mosquito smogging machines as a kid that I think I kill of the bad stuff naturally.

On a bit more serious side. Found these on the web. The second one has related articles worth clicking on. http://survivenature.com/island.php http://traveltips.usatoday.com/survival-guide-deserted-island-62359.html

OK-their granddaughters.

I'd take MaryAnn AND Ginger.

One of the things I've always loved to do in Colorado is go "off trail" just using my compass and a very good contour map of the area. Sometimes makes for difficult going, but I always take a "survival" backpack prepared for all kinds of weather and duration "just in case" something goes wrong. If all else fails you just follow the streams downhill and eventually you'll get out. Fortunately sense of direction has been an innate ability all my life and it adapted well to Army map navigation training.

Sprague Lake which you pass on the road to Bear Lake is completely wheelchair accessible and has nice areas for picnics and great views. Had a big blowdown though a couple of years back and lost a lot of the big Ponderosa pines. I've been to Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Yosemite and others, but RMNP is still my favorite place. Recently I have even spotted moose on the eastern slope that were reintroduced to the western slope a few years ago. I thought it was a large black bear in a remote lake until I got closer since I had only seen them on the other side of the divide in the Park. https://cpw.state.co.us/Documents/WildlifeSpecies/Mammals/MooseReintroductionFactSheet.pdf

My parents bought a home in Estes Park outside of Rocky Mountain N.P. Colo. in 1976 and we lived near there for another 7 years before eventually coming back to Texas. We sold the place after they both had died, but my older brother and a sister bought homes there, so I have been walking those trails almost every year for over 40 years. There are two walks that are my favorites. One I take flatlanders on is to park at Bear Lake @ 9,450 feet and trek mostly downhill, after about a 2/3 mi. upward trail, down to Bierstadt Lake very early in the morning before the wind gets up. On the far side of that lake you can often catch a perfect reflection of the up close Rockies including Long's Peak. Absolutely stunning panorama of the whole range from there. Then it's an easy walk from there down to the main road to a shuttle bus pickup point where you can ride free back up to Bear Lake to get your car. Easy walk for the tourists with great views, especially in the fall when the aspen are turning and the elk are in rut. Bugling can be heard for miles during that time. The harder walk has to be in August and early Sept. depending upon how long it takes for the snowmelt to open the trail. The Glacier Falls Trail near Bear Lake goes past those falls, up past Mills Lake and on to Black Lake where you can look strait up a stone facing about as high as Stone Mountain Ga. and watch the snowmelt tumble down off that facing strait into the lake. It's a daylong round trip so take plenty of water, energy bars plus raingear because often you get thunderstorms that are coming over the Rockies there from about noon on that time of year. If you are on a hike with me in the Park and I tell you we need to turn and run back downhill to the car, then you just have to trust I know how to read those clouds after so many years learning the hard way what they mean when they first start to build before tumbling over the mountains with a lot of lightning and heavy rain. A friend I took had a hard time believing me and kept slowing us down to watch. So the last 400 yds we sprinted with lightning, small hail and rain. Sometimes you just have to trust someone else's experience.

Erin Burnett of CNN-did not know that before looking it up-knew there was a reason I like watching her show.

I totally agree on both Maui and St. John. Great view from up there and also some excellent snorkeling places, though a couple of people were killed by sharks on Maui just before we got there. St. John is just one of a kind. Bucket List stuff. Favorite hiking zone for me is trails throughout Rocky Mountain National Park just outside Estes Park. I'm getting a bit old now for the really long 12-15 milers I used to do in my 30s and 40s. I always spend the first week taking the relatively shorter and lower altitude ones before taking on a few 10 milers (round trip). For a fall trip I tell people drive to western Mass and drive up through Vermont (Woodstock is as you said) and on to the White Mountains of N.H. There is a very excellent art gallery in Williamstown, Mass. that is worth spending a few hours in before taking the drive further on. Unbelievable collection that most are unaware even exists there. Take a look at their permanent collection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_Art_Institute

Miles are only (no comma) a state of mind. (period) LOL! from #2.

Yeah but did you hide in the fog of the mosquito spraying machines as they drove down the street? One of our favorite games growing up.