Maps and Questions

France in about 1035. Toulouse, Mirepoix and Leran are part of the County of Toulouse. Across the Pyrenees is the County of Barcelona. This is the first I've seen France broken down into counties. Is this because it was produced by English speakers or were there counties in France at that time? Anyone know? The legend breaks down the Counties, Duchys, Kingdoms, Maquisates, Seigniorys and Viscountys. Most of the south of France is designated as "Other fiefs held of the Crown". In other words, irrelevant, backwater, not worthy of our attention. It also shows the boundaries of the Roman Empire of the German Nation, or the Holy Roman Empire. Our neck of the woods was not part of that empire but Provence was. Hmmm. What's up with that? It's not a particularly old map; my guess is that it was produced in the early 20th century.

What jumps out at me on this map is the mountainous topography in the eastern half of France, and down near the Pyrenees, while it is relatively flat in the north and west. No other map I've seen shows this as readily. Now look at the previous map. Did topography dictate those politics? I'm forced to look at this from a perspective of geography because that's my background. I had only one semester, perhaps two, of Western Civilization and we might have discussed Southern France for 5 minutes. What do you think? Was there some historical event that made the south irrelevant? Or was it topography?

Here's France in 1791 showing the Departments and former Provinces. The French Revolution wasn't over yet. Ariege shows up on the map, the Aude is there too. What I like is the nomenclature of "Seine Inferieure" just to the north of Department of the Seine-et-Oise which is no doubt "Superior". Not too different from today, but I would bet that someone who intimately knows French history and geography, well, like a Frenchman, could pick out lots of differences. What interesting things do you see?

These next two maps are totally correlated. Population pretty much follows industry, or perhaps industry follows population. Again, the people and goods are in the north and the swath along the Pyrenees is blank, irrelevant. You can look at the map below and see where the money and influence are, and they are not in the Ariege. The industrial and population centers generally have easy access to transportation. Paris has the Seine as an easy route to the sea. Bordeaux has an easy outlet to the sea and has always shipped lots of wine. Marseille is the French window onto the Mediterranean. Toulouse had the Canal du Midi but it must have had only regional impact. Lille and Metz puzzle me but I can only guess that population and industry there must be related to the coalfields, the Rhine and the industrial powerhouse of the Ruhr Valley of Germany. Can someone enlighten me? In any case, the striking thing to me is the lack of population to the south of Bordeaux. Another map claims it is heavily forested, the biggest patch of green in all of France, so there must be little in the way of agriculture. The topography map shows it is relatively flat. What is the story of that huge flat triangle?

Allright class, that's it for today. Answer my questions and get those term papers on my desk right now. And remember, click on 'em to enlarge 'em.

Finally, A Post About France, Roque Sainte Christophe

In May of 2006 Nancy and I took our tour of France with the intention of finding the region to buy a house. We started in Provence, (beaucoup euro) then went to Mirepoix and Leran, which we found both beautiful and reasonably priced. Then we went off to the Dordogne. It was very beautiful and expensive, and in addition, we heard so many English voices we knew it had already been discovered. While we were there we saw the Roque Sainte Chistophe. This large prehistoric settlement complex is found about 9 km north of Les Eyzies, on the south bank of the Vezere River. It's in a very scenic and attractive location, and by a stroke of luck, we rented a house for a week about 100 yards from the entrance. La Roque St Christophe is the largest such settlement in Europe and our first impressions were how similar it was to Mesa Verde in Colorado. The differences are obvious, of course, the climate and the relatively short length of time Mesa Verde was occupied. The similarity is of course how a culture took a natural feature, such a overhanging rock, and made a fortified village. Another striking difference is that in Mesa Verde much of the structures are intact, whereas the buildings here have been cannibalized for other villages in the region.

Roque Saint Cristophe is an extensive series of caves that have been carved out of the soft limestone cliff, initially by the action of the river. The cliff is at least a half mile in length (800 metres) and around 90 yards (80 metres) high. Over the years man carved all kinds of artifacts into the limestone, including shelves and passageways. The walls are covered with all kinds of slots, hooks, steps, handholds and other indentations too wierd to figure out.

The site from the air showing the river on the far right.The village was in the dark crease between the new road and the forested top of the cliff.

Approximately 55,000 years ago man first started to inhabit these natural caves. From the 6th - 16th centuries that the cliff also became developed as a village, with numerous buildings and fortifications backing onto the cliff. It seems likely that the village was occupied continuously during this entire period, until it was finally abandoned in 1588.

Lifting tools were quite massive and must have hauled up considerable amounts of food, firewood and water too.

Notice the carved archway, the scaffolding and the knotted rope hanging down. Your guesses are as good as mine.

Models of the tools they used to haul up supplies are actually in working order although we didn't get to see them in action. The must have used some of the rock from the site itself and other from elsewhere in the region. This one relied on men going around in a circle. A capstan winch on a sailing vessel is very similar.

Fortified stairways were carved out of the limestone. Luckily, limestone is a very soft stone.

The site has re-creations of what the settlement might have looked like back in the day, both in miniature, and in life-size. There would have been structures on the ground level as well. Impossibe to defend but easy to access. No elevators to the second level. Nancy took all of these pictures, with the exception of the one I stole from another website about this most amazing place. Remember kids, click on 'em to enlarge 'em.

Death in Yellowstone (with apologies to Lee Whittlesey)

One of my first summers in Resource Management, I got a lesson in Murphy’s Law. That is, if it can happen, it will happen.


The hot pools, mud pots and geysers of Yellowstone can be very dangerous. People regularly burn themselves in the pools by sticking their fingers in the water to test the temperature. We would often see visitors walking around West Thumb Geyser Basin holding a "scalded" index finger in their other hand. When nothing else was happening, we would patrol the Geyser Basin, look for weeds, make sure people were staying on the boardwalks, and generally give people the impression that rangers were out and about.


The boardwalks run around the geyser basin and people are required to stay on them at all times. They were constructed for the visitors safety and to give them a good (and safe) viewpoint for all the thermal features. A valuable side effect was to lessen the visitor’s impact on the geyser basin itself so that people weren’t wandering around where they shouldn’t. Nonetheless, there were always a few footprints in places that would make you question the sanity of visitors.


As a visitor enters the boardwalk he would encounter signs that would advise them of all the dangers of thermal areas and how many ways a person could kill himself. But it seemed on every one of my visits to the thermal basin, there would be children running along the boardwalk, way ahead of their parents. Often I would see them trip on the rough wooden planks and take a fall. It didn’t take much imagination to see that if a kid took a tumble in the right place they could roll right under the guardrail and end up in a thermal feature. And if they did, they would not be the first person to die from burns in West Thumb Geyser Basin. I would warn parents to keep their children under control and many times would get a "Mind your own business" kind of look in return. (If you want to find out exactly how many people have died in Yellowstone’s Thermal Pools you can read Lee Whittlesey’s Death in Yellowstone.)


There were other deaths in Yellowstone, but only one visitor died in West Thumb Geyser Basin while I was working there. I didn’t see it first hand but I heard how it happened from a family member. Let me set the scene. West Thumb Geyser Basin had a large parking lot because if you entered the park from the South Entrance, this would be the first thermal features you encounter. After the construction and paving of the parking lot back in the 60's, a new thermal feature boiled up through the pavement, right near the entrance. Maintenance put up a fence. What else could you do?


A family arrived one day in a pickup truck with a camper on the back. They pulled into the West Thumb Geyser Basin and parked. The mom and dad and two kids got out of the pickup. The older of the two kids went to the camper and opened the door to let the dog out. She put a leash on the golden retriever and brought the dog out onto the pavement where it promptly took off. The girl could only hold on so long. The dog raced across the parking lot, under the fence and went into the pool. It probably died instantly. By the time the family got to the pool there was no dog to be seen and nothing we could do. Of course the family was devastated.


We monitored the pool for several days looking for some evidence of the poor dog. We saw nothing but a little fur and scum floating on the surface. The dog had boiled into broth and there was almost no evidence other than a foul odor that persisted for about four days.

This is the pool the dog went into. At the time of the incident, the water level was much higher.

Merry Christmas

Nancy and I are notorious Scrooges. We don’t send Christmas cards, we don’t give each other gifts anymore, we don’t get a Christmas tree. Perhaps there are others out there who are in the same boat as we are. If you are not religious and you don’t have kids, and your parents are long gone, and you don’t have family in the area, there is no reason whatsoever to get all worked up about Christmas.



However, we have had some wonderful Christmases with all the trappings (see North of Andorra, December 16, 2007). There is a Christmas that sticks in my mind and I think of it every Christmas, not to mention almost every time I ever put on the National Park Service uniform.



One year, I was the Seattle Center Santa Claus. More accurately, I was one of the several Seattle Center Santa Clauses.



Nancy was going to school at the University of Washington and I found myself unemployed. She had seen an ad in the paper that said if one were to successfully attend a class on how to be a Santa, one could get a part time job as a Santa. I did attend successfully and was chosen to be one of the Santas at the Seattle Center. The Seattle Center is where they staged the World’s Fair and it’s where the Space Needle still sits. As far as Santa’s go, I had a pretty good gig.



Kids love Santa Claus. If you had four or five actors in costume and portraying, say; Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, God, Albert Einstein and Santa Claus, kids would swarm Santa Claus and ignore the others. And their parents would too.



Youngsters would sit on my lap and respectfully tell me what they wanted for Christmas. When they were finished they would almost always tell me that they loved me. Toddlers, teenagers, grandmas, kids of all ages. Young mothers would sit on my lap and flirt. It was one of the perks of the job. Very rarely, some smart ass teenager would tell me he knew I was an imposter, or tug on my beard. But they didn’t say Santa Claus didn’t exist. One day I decided I could manage to forego the extra pillow padding (I was smaller then). As I was walking to my throne, I heard a teenage kid say with derision, “Look, a skinny Santa”. (I never got a better compliment.) But for the most part, I got plenty of adoration and attention.



After six hours of getting all this love, an elf would escort me down to the dressing room to change into my civilian clothes. All the way to the dressing room, kids would wave, mothers would blow me kisses and teenagers would point and smile. Then, the denouement would occur. I would change clothes and walk out into the Seattle Center, and I was nobody. Walking out of the dressing room was possibly one of the most lonely feelings I ever experienced. Nobody waved, nobody smiled, nobody pointed. I was nobody. I felt invisible.



I often had similar feelings years later in Yellowstone. When I would take off the Park Service uniform in the evening, shower up and go to the Lodge for a beer, for awhile I would feel invisible. Nobody would ask questions, nobody would tell me about the bears they had seen, nobody would ask when Old Faithful was going to erupt.

Cabin Building Volume Four

After our whirlwind winter of traveling, Nancy went to work down in Grant Village in Yellowstone and I took the summer off to finish the cabin. Nancy came up each weekend to help me, but her main task was to do the chinking.



For those of you who do not know about chinking, let me give a short explanation. The old-timers used to stack the logs pretty much as I had done, leaving a two or three inch space between logs , which you can see in the picture above. We used this method because it takes far fewer logs and far less time to complete. There are log building methods that do not leave this gap and have logs scribed to the logs below them but it incredibly labor intensive and time-consuming. Instead, Nancy now had to fill the space between the logs. The old-timers used mud, horsehair, straw, moss, concrete, i.e. anything and everything. Thanks to the miracle of modern science, we used Styrofoam with an acrylic substance called Perma-Chink over that. Most of Nancy’s summer weekends were spent filling the cracks with chinking, inside and out. Perma-Chink is elastic and doesn’t fall out with changes of temperature and shrinking logs. The Styrofoam provides some R-value for insulation and between the inside and outside applications is a dead air space for more insulation. It was an exhausting task and boring as well. But, bien sur, Nancy did a fantastic job.

My summer began by getting ready to have the roofer come. The roofer was going to be the first hired help we had used on the cabin, other than Elroy, Belle and Bobbi. I had gotten a quote for a green metal roof and he had told me what needed to be done before he could begin. We needed to finish the dormer exterior walls because they would become almost impossible to do when the roof was on. We needed to have all roof protrusions installed; meaning the chimneys for the two wood stoves and the vents for the kitchen sink had to be in place.



In the above picture, take in June of 1996 you can see we had installed board and batten gable siding and we were just finishing the shingle siding on the dormers. We had cedar fascia board around the roof, windows installed, porch and porch roof constructed and the roofing felt was on. The exterior was mostly finished with the exception of the chinking which would take several more months. But, we were ready for the roofer.



The roofer spent about a week doing the roof and when he was finished, we were “weathered in”. The cabin would stay dry unless the rain came down sideways, which was not totally out of the realm of possibility. I could now take the tarp off the radial arm saw and begin construction of the interior. I spent July, August and September building the kitchen from scratch and trimming the windows inside and out.

Many times during that summer, as I was working on the front porch (and elsewhere), I used to dream about the day when I would have time to sit there in a rocking chair and have nothing to do. When that day came I was immensely satisfied. Several years later, I would sit in the rocking chair on the porch and I was bored. We needed a new project. But that’s another story.

My entire family came for a week in August and helped do all sorts of tasks that would have taken Nancy and I forever or just would not have gotten done. (From Washington: Darrell, sister Leslie, Sarah, Noah, Andrew, Cooper. From Colorado: Tony, sister Peggy, Anna, Ellie, Kate. And from Texas, sister Amy. ) Many hands make light work, it is said, and so it is. They gathered rocks from along the road to enclose the foundation. They cleaned up the building site and made massive piles of firewood. They installed insulation underneath the floor in the crawl space. They painted cabinets and stained window trim. They did some carpentry work enclosing the crawl space. I know I’m forgetting some of the things my family did, but I appreciate them just the same. I did hardly any work at all that week, but spent a lot of time supervising the various tasks that were taking place. Everyone worked very hard and claimed to have a wonderful time. Andrew stayed on for a week and helped me with the masonry for the hearth and install the wood stove. To this day, there is no way to thank them for all the help they provided, and since they can’t go to the cabin, I hope they will come to Leran.

My sister Leslie and niece Kate, who was perhaps eight, spent one night with me in the tipi in late August. Incredibly, that night there was an early snow of an inch or so. Late at night we heard raindrops on the tipi, and then they stopped, but we did not imagine that it was because the snow was silently accumulating on the tipi walls. This tipi had seen a lot of abuse and was in pretty bad shape. A year before, a black bear had clawed his way in while we were gone. He left big muddy paw prints and a huge rip in the side. By this time the tipi had been standing for a couple of years and the fabric had begun to deteriorate in the relentless sun. We had apparently gotten some bad fabric when Nancy constructed the tipi. We had painted the tipi with latex paint in a faux Native American design of a yellow sun with blue hailstones. Where there was paint, the fabric was protected and strong. However, you could put your fist on a blue “hailstone” and push your hand right through the tipi, but have in intact blue circle. We had to tie plastic tarps to what we now called the “tarpi”. It only had to withstand a few more weeks of the elements before we moved into the cabin.

Cabin Building Volume Three

By the end of September 1995, we had the cabin walls up and our season in Yellowstone had come to an end. Earlier, we had rented the house we owned in Bozeman, thinking we might just come up with Park Service jobs for the winter. We were not that lucky, so we lived in the tipi for the rest of the fall. We took showers at friend’s houses and at the truck stop in Livingston. We worked on the cabin each day, that is, with the exception of the days we’d make a jaunt into town to do laundry, buy food and get building materials. And things went along okay until it snowed. More about that later.

The cabin itself began to look like something with the roof framing starting to take form. In the first picture you can see that I have installed the floor joist for the loft. I put up some temporary sheets of OSB (oriented strand board) to walk on and began framing the roof. At this point two things happened. First, building with dimension lumber instead of logs, and working five or six days a week, made it seem as if the process was going in ulta-high speed. Secondly, our expenditures skyrocketed. All summer they were practically nil, except for food and gas. The logs were free. Suddenly we were buying lots of lumber. The second picture is the south side roof framing, looking out a window opening at the north end of the Absaroka mountains and the Yellowstone valley.

Framing the roof was very exciting. Nancy was my gopher (gofer this, gofer that) and laborer. Each day I could stand back and look at the cabin and it would seem like we had gotten lots done. Compared to the slow going stacking logs for a wall, the framing was going at lighting speed, and therefore, very gratifying.

During the summer, sometimes it was difficult to stay cool, now it was difficult to stay warm. We were toasty at night in the tipi with the barrel stove blazing, but it was impossibly cold in the mornings. It would warm up in the afternoon and we would be able to work without gloves.

The forth picture shows the roof framing substantially finished. We had one delivery of lumber to the end of the county road and we hauled it the rest of the way up the hill in our pickup. For the most part the weather was pretty good for a Montana fall. However, November brought snow and it presented a huge problem. It meant we no longer would be assured that we could drive up and down the road in the 4WD pickup. At times we walked in and out with our dirty laundry and back with clean clothes and food. Drudgery. We had enough snow to block the road in places, but not enough snow to snowmobile. And we didn’t have one anyway.

In the fifth picture, you can see winter had arrived. We broke down and purchased a used snowmachine. We got a sled/trailer that we pulled behind the snowmobile and that hauled our tools, water, food, and building materials. O’Malley loved snowmobiling. He ran alongside the snowmobile or behind it depending on how deep the snow was. You can see in the picture that we were able to put sheathing on the roof and beadboard insulation on the gable walls. I would have liked to get roofing felt up before winter set in. But after the first snow, I could not safely get up on the roof again. Just after this last picture was taken, we had some really cold weather and we decided it would be a good idea to head south for the winter. And we did for awhile. We visited friends in New Mexico and Arizona, took a backpacking trip in Utah, stayed three weeks with my sister Amy in Houston, Texas, housesat for friends in Marysville, Tennessee, visited Nancy’s family in Indiana and then headed back to Montana. It was still February so we didn’t stay long and we didn’t get much done. We had an offer from friends to do some work on a summer cottage on a lake in Saskatchewan so we spent three weeks in Lake Q’appelle. We stopped to see friends outside Glacier Park on our way to Washington State. We then spent a month building a guest cottage for my sister, Leslie. Spring arrived and we headed back to Montana. Nancy took a new job in Yellowstone and I went back to work on the cabin.