On the Road

What do you do when you return from Antarctica and find that someone has built a road across your property? 

Take a look here–the left arm of the yellow symbol is our property corner and the right one is where the road footing starts–a full 10 feet!  Plus the road was built 3 feet higher which necessitated a 60′ fill into my drive and the steepness increased from 10% grade to 20%.   We were denied access all winter which is bull***t!  And it gets better–my uphill neighbor with the steep poorly designed driveway (a park ranger buddy whom I introduced to Saddle Butte) engineered this by putting their electrical service box 7 feet into the easement forcing the road into my property.  The road engineer bought this tripe and built the road over my property instead.    And my neighbors being on the uphill side got the better deal and driveway–they signed no easement–why should they?  It’s easier to steal!  Who paid for this?  I did through my landowners dues of which THEY ARE THE PRESIDENT!!!  Well, here’s how Doug handles these situations:

I hire a couple of good old local boys who instantly understand the problem (there was no shortage of backhoe drivers willing to do this chore).  At 3am I had these two expert excavators ripping this road up so I could gain access to my property.  This was after seven months of letters and stonewalling from their lawyers.  Who are these people?  Big Texas Oil money?  No, it’s Ware and Worrell developers who are ridge-lining the summit of Saddle Butte in the south-center of Jackson Hole.  This is like fighting Haliburton (maybe it is??).  The county attorney, who visited the site last year just shook his head and repeated “unbelievable” over and over when his road specialist informed us that it is easier and therefore cheaper to dump the spoils downhill on road construction–that is…..my property. 

Well, I look at this as an opportunity.  This has been more fun than when my brothers and I blew the pitchers mound off the little league field with some purloined dynamite in the early 1960s.  (It was attributed in the newspapers to flying saucers).  Take a look at what two backhoes can do in just three hours–here it is 6am:

This is beautiful!  And since there is all this easement space on the other side of the road, well it’s a natural place to stuff all this dirt.  Can you imagine what idiots would design and dare to build a road like this? Answer:  Rendezvous Engineering and Seaton Construction of Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  A one lane road to a multi million dollar development—truely unbelievable!  

We removed approximately 200 cubic yards of earth that was illegially dumped on our property.  And after asking them to remove it last October, they dumped four additional large boulders up against some aspen trees as a retaining wall.  All in all, they killed or buried 39 trees–we discovered today three more buried stumps!  This is a treble damage state, I believe and at $2000 per tree X 3 X 39, this is amounting into a battleground for us.  But this is Jackson Hole, which has the highest per capita income in the United States, where billionaires are running out the millionaires and you can find a house with 27 fireplaces or a $10M spec house above my house.  Opps, without a road, it won’t be worth $10 million.  Now would you piss off the person who lived in front of your view?? 

I launch the helium blimp on Monday….stay tuned….. 

Our mission is to proceed to Mesa Verde National Park, whose Centennial is next year, to design a poster for the event. We are granted permission to visit Square Tower, shown above from the road, which has been closed to the public since 1940. Our descent from the plateau rim begins down an aluminum ladder where we can see steps that the Ancestral Puebloans carved into the rock–no sissy ladders for them! They would farm beans, corn and squash above and live below in these alcoves. These “cliff dwellings” were built and occupied only for about 150 years from 1150 to about 1300 AD and marked the culmination of this society here in the high plateaus of Colorado. Today they live on as Zunis, Hopis and many other Indian tribes further south.

After the treacherous ladder business, we then had to squeeze through a very narrow slot which reminded me how long it has been since I was a svelt and trim ranger.

Here we are at the ruins, opps, not supposed to use that word–it might upset the Anasazis, er, I mean Ancestral Puebloans…..cliff dwellings would be more descriptive. In just 20 years since I visited this Park, many of the terms and theories have changed radically to describe these peoples and their lives. It’s hard to keep up with the new PC terms. Here the square tower is obvious but look at the tiny “crows next” at the upper right above Martina’s head–this is a full 50 feet above the floor below–what craftsmen and what a view!

Here’s a look up inside the Square Tower at the many levels. In the lower left corner (inset) is a cob of corn left over 700 years ago!

Here is a Kiva, a ceremonial place where they built fires. They are very cleverly built with draft flues to feed the fires, baffles to direct the flow and very clever roof designs. This is the only complete Kiva in the Park and was used to reconstruct many others. We can only peer inside as they are very fragile structures today.

Well, it’s been an exhausting day and we’ve taken many photos that we will use for the project. We squeeze back through the rocks and reclimb the ladders to our car. It isn’t easy being a Ranger of the Lost Art! Stay tuned….

It’s off to Mesa Verde via Salt Lake City to pick up our Bambi Airstream trailer where we encounter a Wyoming Road Hazard–ranchers driving their cattle down from the high mountain valleys. Five hours later we arrive in Salt Lake City and stay with my old Jenny Lake Rescue Ranger friend Ted Wilson and his wife Holly. We are joined by Rangers Rick Reese, honorary 3rd mate on my tug Katahdin, and Bob Irvine who was my former boss and now a retired math professor. We camp six miles west of Lake Powell NRA boundary and enjoy burritos and a “propane” campfire.

And in the morning, we warm up with cafe latte and the New York Times as I explain the subtle nuances of the advantages of mechanized camping:

Martina and I hike the bottom of the canyon while the fearless Rangers climb above us, risking their lives at every moment. They will eventually rappel down these watercourses to the canyon floor where we now stand. After waiting at the bottom for them, we grow tired and retreat back to our Bambi trailer then proceed down the road towards Mesa Verde

We eventually reach Mesa Verde National Park–our goal is to produce a centennial poster (2006) of Square Tower–the tallest structure built by the Anasazi’s. We are camped in our aluminum bubble (with heaters running) under steel gray clouds that reach thousands of feet above us with sun lighting the green mountains directly south of us…Mesa Verde or green mesa. Stay tuned for our tour of this park…..