Saturday trip to Scott City area

I spent all day Saturday with my coworker Sue in the Scott City area, which is a half hour north of Garden City. First, we went to the annual Whimmydiddle (I kid you not) arts and craft show and I enjoyed that WAY too much. Then Sue and I drove around Scott Lake, which is about 10 miles north of Scott City. We saw a rafter (group) of about 20 turkeys cross the road. I also walked in the cool water along the designated beach area, but was chased out by the unwanted arrival of a van full of pre-teen, church camp boys. Annoying! So then I took Sue's suggestion and we drove further north to one of the many natural wonders of Kansas, called Monument Rocks. The "rock" formations are actually clay bluffs that spring out of the otherwise flat landscape. Pretty impressive. I enjoyed climbing all over the bluffs and I saw a toad along with several neat plants. I had lots of fun taking pictures of the sun shining over the bluffs and through holes in the bluffs. Yes, I may have too much time on my hands, but what a way to spend it!

**Click on the pictures for a larger view**

Work in southeastern Colorado

*Click on the pictures for a larger view*

My office's water engineer and I drove around southeastern Colorado for 3 days checking on problems we found during our spring "dryup acres" inspections. See my June blog entry below for that trip. Basically we're looking for illegal irrigation and over-use of water on Colorado fields where no river surface water is supposed to be applied in order for Colorado to honor its water agreements with Kansas. We had a run-in with an unhappy farmer who said "don't you have anything better to do", but if we turn a blind eye to his problem then the other 80 problem fields we identified would be treated the same way, much to the detriment of Kansas farmers and irrigators. We felt sorry for the guy because he didn't know there was a problem with his field due to a breakdown in communication within the Colorado agencies. On the other hand, our view is that we'd like to see the landowners be pro-active rather than re-active on these issues.

*Update* I just compiled the numbers and this year my coworker and I visited over 60,000 acres (over 2,200 individual fields) of cropland/farmland in southeastern Colorado. Just to give you some perspective, a football field is 1.3 acres in size. Still, 60,000 acres is only about 19% of the Ark River basin which has a total of 318,000 acres of farmland. It isn't hard to see why there are water shortages.

What I love the most about fieldwork is the wildlife and wildflowers. Over 3 days we saw at least a dozen deer and I took several pictures of wildflowers. My coworker tried to catch a wasp that was laying eggs on a live caterpiller (for his son's bug collection for school), but after several capture attempts he gave up. Having an angry wasp trapped in a Taco Bell cup inside the truck wasn't my idea of a good time anyway. I can handle nature-stuff as long as it isn't mad at me.

Another day out of the office...

I spent all day reading 20 center-pivot irrigation meters in southeastern Finney County. I was so excited when I drove up to this one center pivot and saw an ornate box turtle crossing the road. I caught up with (her) before she fled into the corn rows. I have seen turtles on the prairie but never in a cornfield!

My day was going well until I started back for Garden City and noticed the work truck wasn't driving quite right. When I stopped to fill up with E85 gas, I noticed that the back driver's side tire was pretty low. As I was getting the tire fixed I took a picture of a hawk that had been rescued from traffic on Kansas Avenue by the tire workers. I don't know what happened to it, but it didn't want to fly. Pretty cute though! Whenever a person would approach it, the hawk would extend its wings out to make itself look bigger and supposably scarier, but that backfired because it made me want to take more pictures and get closer!

A day out of the office...

I got to get out of the office today to read irrigation meters. I don't normally do fieldwork with irrigation wells, so I tend to forget things like "wear hearing protection around a running well motor" and "take the cell phone with you before you walk a 1/4 mile out to a pivot center and can't find the meter". At least I am getting exercise! I'm glad I threw my boots in the truck because I had to walk 1/4 mile to another pivot center and the road was really muddy because the pivot was running!

Before today whenever I went out to read well meters I would wonder around the countryside not really knowing where I was, trying to drive and read a paper map at the same time, and hoping I ended up at the right well. Today, I took my work laptop with a GPS hooked into it and knew right where I was and where I was headed because I could see myself on the computer map (as a little blinking dot) as I was driving. I'll never have to ask for directions again! Yaa for technology! Now I need to figure out how to keep the laptop from flying off the seat when I slam on the breaks...