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View up Ice Canyon
Fifty years ago, the small community of ranchers and oil-field workers built this school for their children. The 1950's was not a particularly high point for American architecture so when the school district pulled out in the early 1980's, the building they left behind was a rambling shell, which soon was colonized by woodrats and red-shafted flickers. Fifteen years as an abandoned building, occasionally used by humans for shelter, a chicken house, or a spot for scavenging odd artifacts, left the school a candidate for bulldozing. We plucked it from the brink of ruin and have gradually made it re-inhabitable. It shows the scars of time. The Largo Canyon, formed from erosional processes is another testimony to the effects of time. Wilma Jean Kaime, my neighbor, remembers the night when the other side of the canyon collapsed, dropping about an acre of land, trees intact, from the mesa above into the canyon. It is not unusual anywhere in the canyon to find a freshly fallen boulder crushing a tree, or as happened recently, partially blocking the road until the county sends a bulldozer to move it. The rocks are soft rendering them unsuitable for climbing but making them ideal for sculpting by the winds, frosts, and rains that are intensified by our 6,400ft elevation here on the edge of the Colorado Plateau.
To non-desert dwellers the reality of water erosion might not seem significant, but when you live in a place where the vegetation holding the soil is sparse, maybe sparser from the grazing of cattle, and the rain falls in monsoon downpours, our annual 12 inches of precipitation becomes the dominant shaper of the landscape. Two or three times a year water pours off the mesas above the canyon in muddy waterfalls. The dry Largo wash runs bank to bank in a flashflood. The riparian vegetation is stripped away. The soft rocks are pulverized into sand and the sand and mud moves downstream, north, towards the San Juan River. In the windy dry months, that sand and mud moves back upstream carried by winds out of the north. First the white alkali dust is blown up the Largo, then, as things get more dessicated, the sand moves with the wind and creates sandunes along the Largo. The dusty winds create the dark patina along the canyon walls which provide the background for petroglyphs of the ancient peoples.Perhaps the most numerous creatures in this landscape are the ants, which thrive in the calcified sands of the canyon bottom. They gather leaves from the wormwood and saltbrush and create mounds of these leaves and rocky grains pulled out of their burrows. Our other herbivores are the deer, elk, rabbits, groundsquirrels, chipmunks, mice, etc. One step higher on the food chain we have swallows, eagles, hawks, bobcats, mountain lions, and the ubiquitous coyote. Animal trails are common and it doesn't take long to recognize the tracks of these various critters.Even in this lonely and remote landscape, the dominant mammals are the humans, especially those of the oil-field variety. Our landscape is not pristine, but rather has natural gas and oil wells interspersed amongst the rocks and junipers. We hear the hum of gas compressors miles away in the stillness of the night. Gas trucks and drill rigs rumble by, stirring up clouds of dust. In the winter the BLM lands along the Largo become home to herds of cattle and these stray on the open range into the school yard where we appreciate their bovine beauty, but then chase them out before they find the gardens. Human activities accelerate the natural processes of erosion.
Flash floods across the roads are extremely dangerous. People die.
Blowing dust and snow, it must be spring
The ants rule here.
Nature will stop you in your tracks.
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