Franktown Cafe

Well, at least here in Washoe Valley, it wasn’t all that. In the last couple of years we’ve had deeper snowfalls and higher winds. Even the rain just reminded me of a rainstorm last year. I don’t think we got the predicted 10′ of snow and 200 mph winds on the ridgetops either.

But we don’t get many “natural disasters” or even severe winter weather anymore so I can’t blame the news and weather community for getting all excited once in awhile. We all get tired of endless network coverage of storms back east and in a sick way feel kinda left out. It even seems to be standard operating procedure for weathermen, when standing before the national map, to stand to the left, obscuring our region.

Our thoughts go out to the folks in Fernley today though who are suffering a flood from a canal breach. Initial blame is being placed on an anonymous gopher although no gopher terrorist group has claimed responsibility. I’m sure this will cause months of recriminations for all concerned as apparently many in the area don’t have flood insurance and even if they do it is still a big mess. Was it classified as a flood plain? Is it a coincidence that a gopher hole caused the breach during the big storm? Was there a lack of human concern for the danger of gopher holes?

Already looking forward to the next “storm of the century”.

Last Tuesday we made the journey over to Verdi to check out the new Cabela’s store. If you are not familiar, Cabela’s is a midwest mailorder sporting goods company (www.cabelas.com) that as been opening sporting goods “super” stores. I’m a real fan of their merchandise and have placed several orders, mostly for clothing. It seems that in stores, if you have a 38″ waist, you are supposed to be short. It is rare to find a 38 waist pant with a 34″ inseam. Cabela’s will tailor the inseam for free. For that and other reasons, I am a fan.

Back to our trip. The Cabela’s stores, as I have seen them in the catalogs, are over the top with aquariums, shooting ranges, stuffed animals and all manner of cool outdoor gear. So I was excited to go. Especially since it is hard to find something new in a store these days. For the most part, now that all the local stores are dead, a “new” store in town is just a copy of one already here. So we went.

You get off I-80 at Boomtown and maneuver through a new road system complete with a roundabout. Even for Tuesday morning the store was busy. It really is cool if you are at all interested in the outdoors. There’s a holiday gift for everyone there.

Now to the nitpicking. The catalog and website are heavily weighted towards hunting and that is true with the store. Not being a hunter, I don’t really consider the Reno area a big hunting area, but maybe that’s just me. So there is a big area in the middle you can ignore if you are like me. You will recognize it as everything imaginable is camo.

I wandered over to the boating area and drooled over all the electronics and gadgets. A display of nautical maps had about 6 hooks of maps of Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho. Did someone at corporate think Reno is in Idaho? No maps of Tahoe, Pyramid or even Lake Mead or the Delta.

The gun section is a gunners dream. All kinds of stuff. Even short barrel 50 caliber carbines. I don’t know what for, ask a hunter, I guess. I did fondle the “home protection” short barreled shotgun, though. Off to the side, next to the snack bar and computer hunting games (just buy tokens) are the BB machine guns. Wow. We kids used to dream of BB machine guns back in the 60’s and here they are. Both electric and gas powered.

The wife was getting impatient so I grabbed a crock of hot cheese with caribou sausage and a small package of gourmet beef jerky (the buffalo jerky was $30 for a pound) and headed for the exit. We got in line and waited, and waited, and waited. I understand that the clerks are new and still trying to learn all the coupons, special offers, buyers club ins-and-outs but it was just silly after a while. Finally I put the stuff down and walked out. Just wasn’t worth it. During the holiday-grand opening period, they should have every register manned. Maybe its just me and a thing about lines.

So check it out for yourself sometime. The aquarium with the giant trout, bass and catfish is definitely cool, the clothes are nice, and there’s even an old fashioned, coin-op shooting gallery for the kids. Look at cabelas.com to see what kind of stuff they have.

Took the big drive into town today. It seems a memo must have gone out to NDOT employees as lately they have been drivig about 50 through Pleasant Valley. Previously they have been zooming through like everyone else, oblivious to the 50 mph signs. I talked to an NHP officer awhile back who seemed surprised that my anecdotal observation was that most extreme violators were from out-of-state. It seems only natural- 395 looks like a freeway. But wouldn’t you get a clue if you were doing 65 and all the locals were doing 60 or less and the signs have flags that say 50?
Then in Reno I had to wait while a couple of teenagers crossed a street. They never broke their gait as they crossed or looked for cars. Trusting souls, those kids. That is opposed to the other guy, older, who saw me approaching out of the corner of his eye but chose to jay walk anyway, being too cool to look at me, daring me to run him over. Of course it *would* be my fault but, hey, he’d be dead- and cool at the same time.
Doesn’t surprise me anymore when someone gets run over. I believe the pedestrian has the right of way but I still look to make sure I’m not going to get run over.

I wonder how many people, like me, set up a blog to share all these clever, witty and brilliant thoughts that go through our heads every day, and then never do it. Either you realize you just aren’t really at the keyboard enough or when you are, the thoughts that were so memorable before are gone. Your mind’s eye just sees a cluttered closet of junk in there.

As always, I’m going to try harder. And to all of you that have expressed an interest in writing for washoevalley.org, I understand. Keep up the good intentions though and when it all comes together for you, send it in!

Tahoe Black Bear 3

Originally uploaded by RickC.

We went up to Tahoe this week and took one of our favorite hikes. We walked five miles up above Carnelian Bay on the North Shore on a loop hike we know that includes a section of the rim trail. With two dogs we didn’t see so much as a blue jay. On our way back to the car we saw this young bear at the corner of Carnelian Woods Drive and Carnelian Way, just a couple hundred feet from the highway, North Lake Blvd. He was looking for goodies and that is found where people are, I guess. Quite a thrill and I hope he doesn’t get into trouble.

Will progress and development ruin shooting in the hills? Washoe County commissioners banned shooting in 37 square miles of the north valleys area at the request of some homeowners. As Washoe county oozes from rural to suburban, more people means we are geting a little too close to each other to continue some of the old ways. One is the hobby of going out in the sagebrush and shooting anything and everything with whatever gun you have. One at a time, houses are creeping up the hills all around Washoe Valley and what looks like public land may not be. There are large parcels all around that are undeveloped and private but the public has had access as it looks like and is right next to BLM land.
Not only is land disapearing but the ever increasing population is going out in the hills to hike, hunt, shoot, ride, drive and who knows what else.

With a lot of activites, including shooting, it is the shooters themselves that tend to ruin for themselves. We’ve run across kids shooting from hilltops and another neighbor says he ran across a guy pretending to be ? James Bond? jumping around with a pistol firing in all directions. It is common to hear accounts of windows, barns, powerlines and livestock hit with gunfire.

Rather than attacking people who fear guns and the people that love them, the gun hobby establishment should be going after its own members and insisting on education, training and limiting gun use to responsible citizens- which is what I think the founding fathers had in mind anyway.

I was thinking about fires and their causes and thinking of writing an article on washoevalley.org when we had one on the east side this week caused by a legal burn pile.

I was reading a community website the other day that discussed the potential fire danger in the woods from “hikers and campers”. It seems to me from my casual observation that very few of the wildland fires I have heard about were started by hikers and campers. By campers I mean “legitimate” campers. Not yahoos who only go out in the woods because that is where they can party, have bonfires and engage in other reckless behaviour because no one else is watching.

Lets see, The Martis Fire, that burned up the Truckee River canyon between Truckee and Reno several years ago: unsupervised kids (yahoos) playing at camping and fire. The fire dept. put it out but not well enough and it blew up the next day.
The Pleasant Valley fire a couple years ago: Shooters, although they deny it.
I don’t remember the fire down Carson City way a couple of years ago but it was caused by kids in a neighborhood pouring gas on lizards as they they ran burning through the brush- burned up several homes.
The most recent Washoe Valley fire: homeowner
The Waterfall fire a couple of years ago that burned to the edge of Washoe Valley: kids partying (yahoos) and playing with matches.
Last years fire at the new freeway bridge north of the valley: construction workers
Bridgeport fire: Marines on survival training.
A previous Verdi fire: Kids set the lookout tower on fire because they were “lost”.

I don’t recall any being caused by hikers or “campers” even though community paranoia had a proposed campground at Galena Creek Park denied a couple of years ago.

Most hikers have no reason to start a fire and, I suspect, don’t smoke while they hike. Backpackers typically use small self-contained stoves and don’t bother with fires. Car campers usually are in compgrounds with fire rings. Again- these aren’t the same type of people who exasperated the Forest Service workers in the Boca area last year when they sole a picnic table and drove it several miles to their camp to throw on their fire.

This link gives a statistical breakdown of one area in one point in time.

When I’m hiking or camping in the woods, I’m more afraid of yahoos and homeowners starting fires.

All my indoor projects/hobbies suffer when spring comes around. Indoor activities take a backseat to going outside and enjoying the warm air and sun. Plus, I get reminded of all the projects/hobbies waiting out there!

My brother-in-law from Tucson called and said the real estate market is tanking there. Hmmm, maybe the mild winters we’ve been having have been prompting many northerners to forgo the “snowbird trip” in the winter. Last winter, I swore when I got tired of the cold here around about February, we would go south for awhile, at least to Death Valley for a couple of days. But this year I didn’t even think about it.

The New York Times had an article the other day on how Arizona is losing its “sky islands”, mountaintop areas that used to be a higher, damper and much cooler climate zone from the heat of the valleys. Tucson residents used to explain away living in a furnace by saying they could escape to Mt. Lemmon and enjoy the alpine air. Now, after two devestating wildfires and marginal snows, the mountain seems a tad parched, like it did last spring when we visited.

All this makes our own ridgetops, the Virginia Range to the east and the Carson Range to the west, even more precious. We should all be extra careful about wildfires from now on.

Ha! One thing I’ve discovered since getting the mac is that its a computer, with an operating system, file system, memory, etc. In other words, it can have problems like the PC, only some are different. So, most of the Apple hype is just plain old snobbery. Snobbery is when you think something A is better than something B and you think you are superior for using something A. I hate snobbery in all categories.

We got a Coleman canoe once when they first came out and they are a garish orange/red plastic material. Very practical for dragging over rocks, etc. We decided to check out the local canoe club and when we pulled up we were put off by the disapproving looks form the “cool canoers” with the $1000+ canoes. That was my first experience with sports snobs. Same thing years later when a friend convinced us to go on a mountain bike ride despite our suspicians. We warned him we just liked gradual slopes and would probably stop to admire the views and identify wildflowers. Sure enough, when we got to the house to meet with his friends, they were literaly rebuilding theeir bikes in the living room preparing for the ride. One of the riders looked at my wifes Trek off-the-shelf bike and commented sympathetically, “Yes, that’s a nice bike”. We took one look at each other and politely said, “See ya later, have a nice ride”.

With me, the point is to have have fun, or at least enjoy what you are doing. Snobbery, which is a stepchild of a competitive nature, doesn’t enter into it. It acutally makes people look a little silly when they rant about how far superior Apple computers are to PC’s when at the same time they are filling online discussion groups with question and answers about crashes, glitches and arcane commands. Granted, a lot of my cynicism comes from being new to the Mac and we’ll see how I feel in a couple (?) of years when it is second nature.