For the last year or so, Nancy and I been transporting cats and dogs down to HOPE's low cost spay/neuter clinic, to get them fixed via the Chowchilla Animal Rescue Alliance (CARA) monthly transport service, Pets Express. CARA's Pets Express runs in cooperation with FMAS's low cost voucher program to offer this free service to Chowchilla's residents. Every since we've had interactions with HOPE and its staff, I have been impressed with their compassion, care for the animals and professionalism. We're gone in the front doors as individuals, in the back doors as CARA, and they've never failed to treat the animals and us with great care. I watch how they treat everyone else also. I have to admit, despite what must be very difficult work, they execute it with excellence. I've run into a few people who complain a little about HOPE, but what I find out is that they don't understand the nature of HOPE's work. HOPE is not a vet hospital. It is a low cost spay/neuter clinic. To be able to provide such services, they have to do as expediently as possible. The HOPE experience is not at all like dealing with a vet. If we come in through the front door, as cat and dog owners do, we fill out paperwork and wait for our name to be called for admittance. As names are called, a HOPE associate takes their cat or dog and checks it out for any problems. Once the associate returns with a OK, we can take off and return for pickup the next day. Simple. But, usually, we arrive as CARA and use the back door, where rescues and shelters are admitted. Either way, I am grateful to HOPE and the HOPE employees for great community work. |
0 Comments
Here is my trip report from along the Ten Lakes Trail. I hiked the Yosemite's Ten Lakes Trail some time ago and I really can't wait to get out there again. It has been way too long!
I'm trying to catch up on trip reports. I like writing them, but they're so hard to start. Here is one of mine from Yosemite. Trip Report: North Rim of Yosemite Valley - Eagle Peak
My first post on Trailspace.com about the new sleeping bag test method that I hope will come to replace the EN 13537 test method: http://www.trailspace.com/forums/gear-selection/topics/115783.html
Link to the test protocol on Ardeth: ASSP and an article I found interesting on EasternSlopes.com: http://www.easternslopes.com/2010/03/08/the-new-sleeping-bag-paradigm-does-en13537-testing-really-work/ Do I want to revolutionize sleeping bag testing? Yes. I've had my aluminum Bugaboo mess kit for more than a decade. After I bought it, I used it for a bunch of years, and then it sat idle after I bought a titanium cookset. I set it aside in favor of a 5" SnowPeak 900 (30 fl. oz. at 6.2 oz.), which was perfectly suited for a lonely man of the mountains.
This cookset was also set aside in time because it was too small once I started backpacking frequently with a partner. Nancy and I initially carried the 5.75" SnowPeak 1400 cookset (47 fl. oz. at 7.4 oz.; MSRP $55.99), which is sized just right for two (don't forget the additional 14 fl. oz. in the lid/pan!), but we found it limiting—namely, it wasn't good for baking. And baking in the backcountry is something that we came to embrace with zeal. We've been dehydrating our backpacking food for years. We started because we found few vegan backpacking meal options. At first it took a little time to learn the temperatures and time needed to dehydrate various foods, how to prepare food for dehydrating, and what we could and couldn't dehydrate. But after a short time, dehydrating became second nature and we now happily and easily dehydrate most of our backpacking meals.
Overall, we want our meals to be as whole as possible, without preservatives and chemicals. We want food that is nutritious, devoid of animal products, ethically produced, inexpensive, and readily available. We also want our food to be tasty and meet our desire for variety. But as backpackers, we also seek meals that are lightweight, compact, durable, and unlikely to spoil. By dehydrating our own food, we can easily meet these criteria. We started gardening earlier this year. Nancy and I both enjoy working the soil and love watching things grow. We also wanted to eat better food that are free from pesticides and worker exploitation. Saving money would also be great. Here we have our seedling that we planted a couple of weeks ago. There are five trays poised, I hope, to capture the winter sun at Spock Laboratories. I sketched out what the book, "How To Grow More Vegetables", (here is a link to the February 2012 edition) stated would be good winter vegetable and were one that we wanted to eat. Then I made this little map. The graph paper was made from regular inkjet paper and a template from incompetech.com which has a bunch of cool stuff beside free graph paper templates. I made notes on our transplanting timelines, and what went where. I made little hash marks on the boxes every two inches to mark off where to place the seeds and numbered the boxes. The numbers correspond to the map. I guess these guys will be ready to transplant at the end of January and be ready some time between April and June. Meanwhile, we still have a lot of our fall plants doing well in the ground, as well as the seedlings that we started about two months ago. I am amazed at all this life around us! _We have a lot of leaves in our yard from all of our great trees. These leaves make great compost. Here we have two out of the three compost chambers filled with leaves. The compost chamber in the background is filled with household green waste. But, we cannot put the walnut tree's leaves in the compost due to some crazy enzyme. So, we have all these leaves all over and I really don't want to throw them into the green waste bucket if I can help it; I'd prefer to be able to use them somehow. _So, I thought maybe I can make leaf tamales as tinder for our fireplace. I asked the Google about this and it seems other people are doing it a little too. I started by just rolling leaves in newspaper. Then, I laid the newspaper on a large Tyvek bag and scrunched up the leaves before rolling them and the newspaper into a tamale. Have you ever done this? does it work for you? I'll let you know how it works! -Jason prototype performance blanket. _We've just launched our website, ArdethGear.com, and I know that there isn't much here. We launched the site to allow the people that have asked us about our gear to have a place to find us and learn about what we are working on. We actually have dozens of trip reports and blog posts, but we've been focusing of building gear and getting this little business up and running. We hope that in the next month or so we'll have that part of our sit up and running. Please take a look around and let us know what you think of our little site. thanx! -Jason Today Jason and I went on a short hike through Yosemite Valley. Spring is just arriving in the valley, and a rash of chilly days, additional snow, and cold nights have seemed to delay it a bit. But it's definitely on the way. As we wandered on the trails that connect the meadows, we could sense it. Songbirds are calling, mallards pairs are foraging in the river and in meadow ponds, and the frogs are tremendous! Dogwoods are blooming in sunny spots, and we saw a first snow plant emerging brightly from the earth. Trees are starting to leaf out, and food is becoming abundant again. As we were walking along the river, Jason spotted a bear browsing a little meadow off to our right. Now I'd seen a bear in Yosemite Valley before—there was one napping in a tree in Curry Village surrounded by onlookers. But this time it was different. This bear was just moseying about, looking for food, scratching his head, and sitting down to dine a bit. I think we were the only people who had spotted him. I was able to observe him under natural conditions. He looked at us a few times, but browsing the meadow for food was more interesting, I guess. That's always a good thing, honestly. I was really excited to see this bear under such circumstances. I really hope that this season will be the one that brings a bear sighting in the wilderness on one of our backpacking trips. Later on we found a nice spot and watched Yosemite Falls for a while. They're pretty full and will only get bigger from this point until they peter out a bit in the hotter months. It was a pleasant hike, and it reminds me that I don't always have to travel for miles into the backcountry to observe the life cycles and activities of nature's amazing flora and fauna as the seasons change from one to another. ~Nancy |
The Tardigrade Outdoors blogOur repository for whatever we are doing.
Archives
May 2021
Categories
All
|