First trip of the season in to the cabin…just starting to get things in order. (Putting up the drift fences is one of the first chores when opening up. Lest the horses decide to leave.)
26 Jun (Tue) ◦◦◦◦◦ After lunch and coffee I got the front drift fence into a standing position. It’s completely thrashed and not much of a barricade. (Still, it looks like a fence and that’s usually enough to keep horses in.) All that’s left now is the across-the-river section of the back fence which requires two people to drag across. Mosquitoes positively HORRIBLE. I was sucking them up my nose and down my throat; trying to breathe through clenched teeth and not through the nose. Which is tedious, in case you’ve never tried doing that. Life in ranger-world, oh, boy. ◦◦◦◦◦ And, speaking of insects, here’s another gritty tale of living in the backcountry: After lunch, I “had to go.” Stepping into the shitter, I was greeted by a diffuse cloud of teensy weensy bugs that drifted out the open door like smoke. I knew what they were: moth flies—minuscule critters not much more than 3mm long…actual flies shaped like moths, with broad, fuzz-covered wings. Totally harmless and for the most part inoffensive. They lay their eggs in mucky places like shower drains and…outhouses. (They’re also known as “drain flies.”) I see them in the outhouse all summer long and, most mornings, find a few that bivouacked in between sheets of the roll of TP. On this day, conditions must have been ideal. I was witnessing a fresh hatch.Several thousand in a grand exodus, heading for the promised land. Never seen this before—this swarm thing. Must be the warm, humid nights. But because I was, ahem, in something of a hurry I plopped down on the seat and did my business. As I sat their, scores of the little buggers flew out of the triangular gap between my thighs, making their escape. I could feel (barely) these insubstantial critters bouncing off my bum, heading for daylight. A somewhat disconcerting sensation. Kinda disgusting, to be honest, even by my fairly lax standards. ◦◦◦◦◦
28 Jun (Thu) ◦◦◦◦◦ Flies just awful. Saddling up, the greenheads were assaulting the horses. Tied to the rail, all three stood there totally helpless until I got their saddles on and was able to hose them down with bug juice. Piute, who seems to be particularly thin-skinned, had probably a hundred and fifty gnawing on his chest and legs and privates all at the same time. It was a ghastly sight. Imagine what that must feel like! These gargantuan horseflies with creepy-looking green eyes carve out little chunks of flesh—leaving holes big enough that blood oozes from them. They cluster like hogs at the trough around the small, open wounds they’ve created, sopping up the blood like alien vampires. Poor Piute was covered with hundreds of welts. The equines really suffer at this time of year. At least when they’re out in the meadow resting they can stand side-by-side and alternating head-to-rear, swishing their tails to keep the wing-ed devils off each other’s heads and chests. ◦◦◦◦◦ More bugs bugging: On the way over Kirkwood Pass we entered several “yes-fly-zones.” For long stretches, we’d be literally swarmed by face flies. Veritable clouds of ‘em surrounding the horses and my humble corpus, buzzing ears and eyes and bouncing off eyeballs. Harmless, non-biting dipterans apparently designed strictly to drive one mad. On both sides of the pass and all the way down to the Forks of Buckeye we’d enter and then leave these fly-controlled zones. They’d be horrible for a stretch and then, just like that, totally manageable. ◦◦◦◦◦
©2024 Tim Forsell 18 Dec 2024
A good reminder of what a Sierra summer can be like! Makes you wish for a windy day to keep the bugs away. Been too long since your last blog post, happy to see an update.
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