Tag: American West

Big Sky Country, with Canal

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

This little (8×6) landscape acrylic painting is one of my favorites that I’ve done recently.

The water portrayed is actually a stream leading to the Snake River Reservoir, because the canals are not running at this time of year. However, I thought I’d give you some history about our local irrigation canals, because they are really remarkable.

The scheme diverts water from the [Snake] river about ten miles above Blackfoot. The main canal was planned to be 60-85 feet wide, carrying a depth of six feet of water about sixty miles, with many more miles of laterals and smaller ditches. … The canal is 60 feet wide and 8 feet deep, beginning near Firth and ending near the Lamb Weston Potato Plant at American Falls where a small amount of water then empties into the Snake.

Aberdeen, Idaho: Our Small Town Story, by Celia Klassen, p. 14

The canal system was constructed, essentially by hand, using horses, scrapers, and large baskets, and dynamite for rocky areas, between 1894 and approximately 1910. There were a series of investors, some working groups that fell apart, and two different canal companies that were formed to head up the project. The system includes many “fills” … areas where the canal was built up above the surrounding land, as to pass through a low spot.

During the construction, “Tent camps … were set up at various points, and everything the laborers needed had to be brought through the sagebrush by wagon … Families of canal workers lived along the canal while it was being built in what were called ‘ditch camps’.” (ibid, p. 15)

The canal system allows us to farm the Idaho soil, which is volcanic and very fertile, but doesn’t get enough rain for dryland farming. The Aberdeen-Springfield canal company still maintains the 190 miles of main and lateral canals, with sluice gates and the like. A canal runs right past my backyard, built up above the surrounding fields. The canals are drained in the winter months, and last year, an excavator worked its way slowly by our property, deepening the canal and creating large piles of soil on its banks. In the summer, “canal riders” patrol the system, checking for leaks. This is a wonderful system, and it takes a lot of effort to keep it working properly.

Despite being man-made, the canals also beautify the countryside. The presence of water attracts Russian olive trees, cattails, showy milkweed, and birds. Many farm kids grew up inner-tubing in the canals in the summertime, and their raised banks make a natural hiking route for people who want to walk in nature.

The source for this post was the book Aberdeen, Idaho: Our small town story, published by Celia Klassen in 2019. Celia did not grow up in Aberdeen, but married in. As so often happens, it took someone from the outside to appreciate that our local history was worth researching and recording.

Small-Town America, Described by Truman Capote

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

[T]he newcomer to Garden City, once he has adjusted to the nightly after-eight silence of Main Street, discovers much to support the defensive boastings of the citizenry: a well-run public library, a competent daily newspaper, green-lawned and shady squares here and there, placid residential streets where animals and children are safe to run free, a big, rambling park complete with a small menagerie (“See the Polar Bears!” “See Penny the Elephant!”), and a swimming pool that consumes several acres (“World’s Largest FREE Swim-pool!”). Such accessories, and the dust and the winds and the ever-calling train whistles, add up to a “home town” that is probably remembered with nostalgia by those who have left it, and that, for those who have remained, provides a sense of roots and contentment.

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, pp. 33 – 34

The Wind Farm

On By Jennifer Mugrage9 Comments

I live in the West, where you can see long distances. About twenty-five miles south of our house is wind farm perched on the foothills. At night, you can clearly see the windmills’ lights twinkling. This painting portrays a more close-up view, glimpsed as I started the drive home on a winter evening.

I never minded seeing wind farms, even in the daytime. I had a positive association with them, almost entirely because of the cover of a Petra album I had as a teenager:

I also believed what I was told, that these windmills would provide cleaner power than oil, coal, and natural gas.

Then, I started hearing about the downsides of wind farms. I heard that people who live near them develop health problems. I heard that, shockingly, it is not unusual for birds to get chopped up by them. The windmills have to be built in naturally windy areas, which are also migration routes for birds, which are apparently hard-wired in to the birds and can’t be changed.

Then, I found out that these turbines are expensive to build, last only about twenty years, and are difficult to dispose of:

https://www.prageru.com/video/whats-wrong-with-wind-and-solar

And that they are extremely inefficient, and the energy they do produce has to be stored in costly batteries:

https://www.prageru.com/video/can-we-rely-on-wind-and-solar-energy

Which can only be made with rare-earth minerals that are obtained using child labor:

https://www.prageru.com/video/green-energy-fueled-by-child-labor

Yikes!

Unfortunately, my aesthetic response to these windmills has already been locked in by Petra. I don’t think it’s going to change. Now, though, I no longer think of them as a good thing, a step in the right direction. I think of them as evidence that we are living in a sci-fi dystopia. Maybe some day, the wind farm in my part of the state will come down. But this little painting will remain as evidence that I lived in the Age of Man when we feared the imminent end of the world and thought we could forestall it by building these things.

Beautiful Nature Quote

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze.

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, p. 10

Megalithic Ruins in Montana

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Deep in Montana’s remote wilderness lies the Sage Wall, a stunning megalithic structure composed of massive granite blocks intricately stacked in a straight line extending 275 feet (84 meters). Reaching up to 25 feet (8 meters) high, with some blocks weighing 91 tons, it is believed that the wall continues an additional 15 feet underground. This unique formation appears to have precise, interlocking stones resembling ancient masonry found worldwide.

Despite its remarkable features, the Sage Wall remained hidden for centuries, covered by dense foliage on private land owned by Christopher Borton and Linda Welsh. Its discovery occurred when the landowners cleared their heavily forested property, revealing the wall and sparking scientific interest.

These paragraphs are taken from the article linked below:

Massive Stone Wall, Believed By Some To Be An Ancient Megastructure, Discovered in Montana, USA

It turns out that I have been sitting practically on the doorstep of a potential bucket list item!

If I had money and could travel, my destinations would be all the remarkable archeological sites in the world, particularly the ones that seem to partake of what appears to have been a worldwide megalithic culture. As I have pointed out before on this very blog, new examples of these are discovered almost yearly. Anyway, this site in Montana is one that I could actually be in a position to check out.

There are other sites in Montana that some believe are intentionally erected dolmens, and others believe are natural rock formations. Sage Wall, if it really is as it appears in the picture above, looks suspiciously manmade and highly similar to sites such as Sacsayhuaman in Peru. However, I realize that anyone who takes it as a given that there was never an ancient megalithic culture in North America will argue that Sage Wall is just a natural formation, and that rock does sometimes tend to fracture this way, as demonstrated by formations like Sage Wall.

The best way to deal with this is to see it in person.

Here’s how you do that:

Sage Wall and Trails

Wooly Mullein at Lava Hot Springs

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

A few hours’ drive from my house, in the mountains of southern Idaho, we have a hot springs attraction. The pools are tucked into a niche between the town on one side and the highway on the other.

The photograph above was taken from the east end of the little canyon. Behind me, as I took this photograph, was something called “The Grotto.” It consists of paths and small garden areas winding along the lava-rock hillside. The rocks are basalt, but covered with mineral deposits from the days when the springs gushed out over here.

My husband and I went to the town of Lava, which is very touristy and has a lot of old-timey, cowboy-themed restos and hotels, back in September. I had never walked in The Grotto before. (Usually, I’m just either going in the hot springs or not going in the hot springs.)

But on this particular September, The Grotto was simply alive with the most Wooly Mullein I had ever seen in one place! Wooly Mullein are those plants you see with broad, pale-green, pillowy-looking basal leaves and (in some cases, not all) a tall spike of a flower.

I blogged about these plants a few years ago, when I had photographed one growing in a farmer’s field near my house. According to Central Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, “They are biennial plants, growing the first year as a round cluster of large radiating basal leaves covered with thick, woolly hair. The second year, they rapidly grow a 1 – 6′ tall stalk, crowded with yellow flowers in a spike arrangement. Then, with all its energy expended, the plant dies.” (p. 157)

“This introduced weed colonizes disturbed places from the valleys and plains to montane forests.” (ibid) Look at how many of them there are! They must love the dry climate.

But Wooly Mullein is not just a weed. “Dioscorides, the Greek physician to the Roman armies in the first century, used mullein to treat coughs, scorpion stings, eye problems, tonsillitis, and toothache. Today, herbalists value it as a medicinal herb for asthma, bronchitis, coughs, throat inflammation, earache, and various other respiratory complaints.” (ibid) My copy of Prepper’s Natural Medicine confirms this.

Hence, Lava is really the place to come if you’re ill in apocalypse situation! The Shoshoni Indians would bathe in and drink the hot-spring water to cure illnesses, plus there is all this mullein here. Still, it might be better to plan ahead.

I walked down this path and sat on a bench set into the rock wall. Lo and behold, up in a niche was Spiderman watching over me! Lava truly does have everything you might need!