Posts tagged mountains
Boulderwind cowx 54mph 92mph gusts: trees, lines, transformers, accidents, signs, debris blown
Jan 18th
Wednesday Jan 18 8:15pm Boulder police and fire report numerous traffic lights out over the city. Serveral transformers are being reported blown and on fire.
A tree fell on power line near 11 and Walnut starting a fire.
Nearby homes were evacuated.
In east boulder cattle fences blew down and cattle were on highway.
RTD is reporting some large signs down in city.
City 911 very busy. Dispatch reports
Power outages all over city.
Wind related roll over accidents 2 in last hour.
Some officers have been seen wearing helmets and googles. Good advice to anyone walking around. See weather report below. This does not account for the foothills of Boulder where winds are high
A tree fell on power line near 11 and Walnut starting a fire.
Nearby homes were evacuated.
In east boulder cattle fences blew down and cattle were on highway.
RTD is reporting some large signs down in city.
City 911 very busy. Dispatch reports
Power outages all over city.
Wind related roll over accidents 2 in last hour.
Some officers have been seen wearing helmets and googles. Good advice to anyone walking around. See weather report below. This does not account for the foothills of Boulder where winds are high
8:20 pm Power lines down on Pennsylvania on hill
8:25pm Tree down at 9th and college impeding traffic
Tiles flying off down town church at Broadway and Spruce
8:45pm Boulder County reports power line down in field at redwood court, sparking with fire and embers.
all fires out at this point, but police report signs, debris flying through air. Power lines are down and there are still power outages.
9:00pm Boulder Airport reports constant wind speed of 54mph Various sources in city report gusts of 71mph to 92mph
Diagonal and Look out road RR crossing sign blew into car causing tow car accident.
9:27pm Boulder Weather Station live reposts Power lines and trees continue to fall at this hour.
High Wind Warning
.HIGH WINDS IN THE MOUNTAINS AND FOOTHILLS THROUGH THURSDAY MORNING…
.VERY STRONG WEST WINDS WILL CONTINUE OVER THE NORTHERN COLORADO
MOUNTAINS…FOOTHILLS AND ADJACENT PLAINS THROUGH THURSDAY
MORNING. THE HIGH WIND WARNING IN THE MOUNTAINS HAS BEEN UPGRADED TO A
BLIZZARD WARNING FOR THE REST OF TONIGHT AS SNOW WILL DEVELOP ALONG
WITH THE CONTINUED WIND.
WIND GUSTS FROM 70 TO 90 MPH WILL BE COMMON IN WIND PRONE
MOUNTAIN AND FOOTHILL AREAS…AND ALSO IN FAVORED AREAS JUST EAST
OF THE MOUNTAINS SUCH AS ROCKY FLATS…BOULDER…AND CARTER LAKE.
THE STRONG WINDS WILL LIKELY CAUSE DOWNED TREES…POWER OUTAGES…
AND MAY BLOW OVER HIGH PROFILE AND LIGHT WEIGHT VEHICLES.
MONITOR THE LATEST WEATHER CONDITIONS AND AVOID TRAVEL IN AREAS
EXPERIENCING VIOLENT WINDS. MAIN AREAS LIKELY TO BE AFFECTED ARE
INTERSTATE 70 IN JEFFERSON AND CLEAR CREEK COUNTIES…THE PEAK TO
PEAK HIGHWAY BETWEEN BLACK HAWK AND ESTES PARK…AND HIGHWAYS AT
THE BASE OF THE FOOTHILLS.
My landlord, the rabbit and the rattler By Ron Baird
Aug 1st
My landlord, Jack, comes by from time to time and more often than not we sit and talk. He’s in his early 80s and looks like the farm kid he once was, with thick arms, big hands and a chest that hasn’t fallen much to the ravages of time.
His shock of gray hair has usually been wet-combed across his head, kind of like Opie of Mayberry at 75 if he hadn’t gone bald. He favors flannel shirts, jeans and workboots and often has a pipe clamped in his teeth, puffing away without inhaling.
He talks about climbing Colorado’s mountains back in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, when trips were made in old jalopies, the roads were narrow and winding and gear was primitive and heavy. He was at the University of Colorado then and he and a bunch of his climbing buddies scaled most of the 14ers in the state.
He graduated with a degree in some kind of engineering and has gone on to a full life of work and family here in Boulder. His wife is healthy, his kids are healthy and happy and have families of their own.
He’s building a steel-hulled boat in his back yard, has been for years, and fully expects to launch it into the ocean at some point in the future.
Jack is also a native of Boulder, grew up on a farm/ranch a ways north of town. He calls it a farm but I know that ground and there isn’t much that can be grown on it except cactus and wild grass and as it turns out subdivisions and mountain mansions. He was relating how lonely it was living out there as a kid.
I don’t know how we got around to it, but we were discussing rattlers, which were common back then. And he told me a story.
“One day when I was about 10, we heard the damnedest ruckus coming from the field behind the house and we went out to see what the hell was going on. When we got out there, there was a mother rabbit standing between a rattler and her babies, which were in a nest in the grass. I guess the rattler wanted to make a meal out of them babies and the mother was having none of it. When the snake started forward, she’d move towards it. The snake would coil and she would lunge, drawing a strike. At the last second, she would spin away and kick the snake in the head with both hind feet, knocking it away. The snake would gather itself and start forward and she’d do the same thing again. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw.
“Now, you have to understand that we weren’t very sentimental about such things back in those days. So we just watched. And besides, we’d never seen anything like that. Who could have imagined a momma rabbit would, or could, do something like that to protect her babies? But this went on for, I would guess, 20 minutes. Every time that snake started forward, she would kick it again. You could tell they were both getting pretty tired but the snake wasn’t giving up and neither was she. But the snake was bleeding from the eyes and mouth, and the bleeding was getting worse and worse. And it seemed to be disoriented and would lay there longer and longer before trying again. The rabbit would lay down, and its sides were fluttering she was breathing so hard. But when the snake got up so would the rabbit.
“Finally, the snake didn’t move anymore. I don’t think it was dead exactly, but it was dying. It’s head looked like somebody had hit it with a baseball bat. I wasn’t sure the mother rabbit was going to make it, either, but I’ll be damned if she didn’t finally she get up and hop to the nest where she had her babies.
“As I said, we weren’t too sentimental back then. We knew nature was hard. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how brave that momma rabbit was, so I went back to the barn and got a shovel and went out and cut that rattler’s head off, just to be safe. I think she earned that⎯not having to worry about that snake any more.”
Jack, even 65 years later, still shakes his head in admiration, as he finishes the story. “I’ve never stopped thinking about it.”
And now that I’ve heard the story, I can’t get the death duel of the momma rabbit and the rattler out of my head, either.
His shock of gray hair has usually been wet-combed across his head, kind of like Opie of Mayberry at 75 if he hadn’t gone bald. He favors flannel shirts, jeans and workboots and often has a pipe clamped in his teeth, puffing away without inhaling.
He talks about climbing Colorado’s mountains back in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, when trips were made in old jalopies, the roads were narrow and winding and gear was primitive and heavy. He was at the University of Colorado then and he and a bunch of his climbing buddies scaled most of the 14ers in the state.
He graduated with a degree in some kind of engineering and has gone on to a full life of work and family here in Boulder. His wife is healthy, his kids are healthy and happy and have families of their own.
He’s building a steel-hulled boat in his back yard, has been for years, and fully expects to launch it into the ocean at some point in the future.
Jack is also a native of Boulder, grew up on a farm/ranch a ways north of town. He calls it a farm but I know that ground and there isn’t much that can be grown on it except cactus and wild grass and as it turns out subdivisions and mountain mansions. He was relating how lonely it was living out there as a kid.
I don’t know how we got around to it, but we were discussing rattlers, which were common back then. And he told me a story.
“One day when I was about 10, we heard the damnedest ruckus coming from the field behind the house and we went out to see what the hell was going on. When we got out there, there was a mother rabbit standing between a rattler and her babies, which were in a nest in the grass. I guess the rattler wanted to make a meal out of them babies and the mother was having none of it. When the snake started forward, she’d move towards it. The snake would coil and she would lunge, drawing a strike. At the last second, she would spin away and kick the snake in the head with both hind feet, knocking it away. The snake would gather itself and start forward and she’d do the same thing again. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw.
“Now, you have to understand that we weren’t very sentimental about such things back in those days. So we just watched. And besides, we’d never seen anything like that. Who could have imagined a momma rabbit would, or could, do something like that to protect her babies? But this went on for, I would guess, 20 minutes. Every time that snake started forward, she would kick it again. You could tell they were both getting pretty tired but the snake wasn’t giving up and neither was she. But the snake was bleeding from the eyes and mouth, and the bleeding was getting worse and worse. And it seemed to be disoriented and would lay there longer and longer before trying again. The rabbit would lay down, and its sides were fluttering she was breathing so hard. But when the snake got up so would the rabbit.
“Finally, the snake didn’t move anymore. I don’t think it was dead exactly, but it was dying. It’s head looked like somebody had hit it with a baseball bat. I wasn’t sure the mother rabbit was going to make it, either, but I’ll be damned if she didn’t finally she get up and hop to the nest where she had her babies.
“As I said, we weren’t too sentimental back then. We knew nature was hard. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how brave that momma rabbit was, so I went back to the barn and got a shovel and went out and cut that rattler’s head off, just to be safe. I think she earned that⎯not having to worry about that snake any more.”
Jack, even 65 years later, still shakes his head in admiration, as he finishes the story. “I’ve never stopped thinking about it.”
And now that I’ve heard the story, I can’t get the death duel of the momma rabbit and the rattler out of my head, either.
NSF AWARDS CU-BOULDER $5.9 MILLION GRANT FOR ALPINE ECOSYSTEM RESEARCH
Jun 16th
The National Science Foundation has awarded the University of Colorado Boulder a six-year, $5.9 million grant to continue intensive studies of long-term ecological changes in Colorado’s high mountains, both natural and human-caused, over decades and centuries.
Awarded to CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, the renewal grant will allow faculty and students, including undergraduates, to continue key environmental studies at the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research, or LTER, site west of Boulder. The study site, considered extremely sensitive to climate change, is adjacent to CU-Boulder’s Mountain Research Station and encompasses several thousand acres of tundra, talus slopes, glacial lakes and wetlands stretching to the top of the Continental Divide.
The grant is the largest environmental sciences award in CU-Boulder history, said INSTAAR Fellow Mark Williams, principal investigator on the grant. In 2005, NSF awarded CU-Boulder a $4.9 million renewal grant for environmental studies at the Niwot Ridge site. As one of five initial LTER sites selected by NSF in 1980, Niwot Ridge is now one of 25 such sites in North America and the only one located in an alpine environment, said Williams.
“CU-Boulder has a worldwide reputation for monitoring global climate change from Greenland to Antarctica and its impacts on natural ecosystems and human populations,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “To direct such a key program in our own backyard for the National Science Foundation is crucial from an environmental science standpoint and unique in that it provides a spectacular training ground for our students to work side-by-side with some of the world’s best climate change scientists.”
Recent climate studies have predicted the mountainous areas of the American West will become both hotter and drier in the coming years, and long-term meteorological measurements on Niwot Ridge indicate the alpine climate there has warmed slightly in recent decades, said Williams, also a professor in the geography department. The temperatures are significant because even small changes in alpine ecosystems can cascade down and have negative effects on other ecosystems, he said.
CU-Boulder researchers also have charted a doubling in atmospheric nitrogen deposition on Niwot Ridge in the past several decades — primarily from automobile, agriculture, ranching and industrial activity — that is now adversely affecting some aquatic and terrestrial life on the ridge, said Williams.
In addition, researchers are keeping a close eye on existing populations of the American pika, a potato-sized animal related to rabbits and found in rocky talus slopes as high as 13,000 feet on Niwot Ridge. Of 25 populations of pikas in the Great Basin of Nevada documented between 1898 to 1990, nine had disappeared by 2008, apparently the result of warming temperatures. Pikas in Colorado require deep snowpack during winter that serves to insulate them from extremely cold air temperatures, Williams said.
“Many consider the American pika a ‘sentinel species’ in terms of measuring the effects of climate change,” said Williams. “Niwot Ridge has a cold, short growing season, and the biological activity that occurs there is on the razor’s edge of environmental tolerance.”
Despite a long-term warming and drying trend in mountainous areas of the West, 2011 was a striking anomaly, said Williams. “What we have seen around here is one of the largest and latest snowfall years on record in the high country and extreme dryness accompanied by an inordinate amount of winter wildfires around Boulder, which is only 15 miles as the crow flies from the Niwot Ridge study area. What has happened from Boulder west to the Continental Divide has been a total disconnect in terms of weather.”
“The primary climate driver of the Niwot Ridge site is snow, and the mountains are our water towers,” said Williams. “As the alpine climate changes, one of the biggest impacts on humans will be a change in water resources. Even if we end up with the same amount of precipitation, in the form of less snow and more rain, we are going to end up with less usable water for municipalities.”
There already are some indications that the snowline in the Rocky Mountains is moving upward, which will affect the abundance and distribution of plants and animals and likely shorten the annual ski seasons at resorts throughout the West in the future, he said.
The Niwot Ridge site is a huge benefit to CU-Boulder students, said Williams. “I have five undergraduates working in my chemistry lab this summer. Not only do they get paid, but they learn valuable research skills.” The LTER grant funds research for about 15 CU-Boulder graduate students and 25 to 30 undergraduates annually, Williams said, and there are more than a dozen CU-Boulder faculty members that are co-investigators on the new Niwot Ridge LTER program grant.
CU-Boulder ecology and environmental biology department Professor William Bowman, director of CU-Boulder’s Mountain Research Station for the past 20 years, said the Niwot Ridge site has been gaining momentum in stature from its beginnings by the consistent, high-quality research that has resulted in many publications in top-tier science journals.
More than half of the research on Niwot Ridge is by scientists and students from around the world that are not associated with the LTER program, said Bowman, also an INSTAAR fellow and who leads a team studying how air pollution, including nitrogen deposition, threatens biological and aquatic communities in U.S. national parks. There are currently 12 undergraduates conducting research at the Niwot Ridge site as part of the NSF’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program, said Bowman, who also is mentoring a student researcher at Niwot Ridge from Fairview High School in Boulder.
