The Flying Cowgirl

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I work with a couple of cowboys on a roundup.

The call came over the weekend. A local rancher wanted to know if he could hire me to take him and his son — the cow boss — to look for some stray cattle. I laid down the rules: I can help you look for them, but I can’t move them. No problem, I was assured. We set a date for Tuesday at 6 AM.

I got to the airport at 5:30. I’d left Zero-Mike-Lima out overnight so getting ready for the flight was easy. A quick preflight, remove the pilot door, stow the charts under a seat. The cowboys — Pat and his son Patrick — arrived ten minutes early, but I was ready for them. I gave them a preflight briefing and we decided who would sit where: Patrick beside me and Pat behind me. When I told them I’d stow their hats under the seats, they seemed to pale. “We’ll put them in the truck,” Pat said. Cowboys are very protective of their hats.

I got the whole story from them as I warmed up Zero-Mike-Lima. They’d spent the previous week working on a round up, moving the cattle over to some grazing land near ranch headquarters. This was the OX Ranch (pronounced oh-ex, not ox), which grazes north and south of the Date Creek Mountains, from the town of Congress to Date Creek. Headquarters is on Date Creek, accessible via the unpaved Hillside Road out of Congress. They’d counted up the cattle and thought they might be short some. They knew they were missing three bulls, one of which was crippled. (I think they had another cowboy working on him.) They figured that they could fly the 160,000+ acres of their range and see if they could spot any cattle they’d missed.

We left Wickenburg at about 5:55 AM and headed due north to Congress. Both men commented about the view and how much they could see from the windows. Then, as we flew over the west end of Congress, Patrick started directing me. We were about 200-300 feet up, cruising at around 70-80 knots. Patrick immediately spotted two black heads of cattle. He asked me to circle around so he could see what sex they were and both men agreed they were bulls. (I think it had something to do with the color of their ear tags more than anything dangling in the vicinity of the animals’ back legs.) I continued on a standard search pattern in the area between route 71 and the Date Creek Mountains. Patrick spotted another group of cattle and we circled to get a count: four cows and four calfs. The bulls were obviously doing a good job. A few minutes later, I spotted a bigger group of about a dozen cows and calfs.

Pat, sitting in the back, was thrilled. We’d already found more cattle than they thought they were missing — probably because of all those extra calves.

We kept flying. We saw some more cattle, but they were on the other side of a fence that separates the OX Ranch land from a neighbor’s. By this time, we’d pretty much finished combing the flat area and now needed to search the Date Creek Mountains themselves. It was the north side of the mountains that they were most interested in, and not quite all the way to the top. The Date Creek Mountains aren’t very tall — they rise perhaps 500-1000 feet above the desert floor — but they are very rugged, with huge boulders scattered all over them. We flew along the north side of the ridgeline, passing cattle tanks, windmills, and old mining trails. We didn’t see any more cattle, but we did see some javelina, frightened away by the sound of the helicopter. Then we searched the north slope of the mountains, all the way down to Date Creek. I could see the cattle they’d already rounded up, all penned inside a big field. But no more stray cattle.

Satisfied that we’d found all there was to find, Pat told me to head back to Wickenburg. They could now form a plan to retrieve the cattle we’d found. I imagined them saddling up horses and trailering them out to the Congress area, then mounting up and heading out with their dogs. All the cattle we’d seen were within a few miles of each other, so it probably wouldn’t take more than a day to get them all.

When we landed, Pat told me how pleased he was with what we’d done. In 1.1 hours, we’d accomplished what it would have taken over a week to do on horseback. He assured me that he’d call me again, and asked if I ever did work in Flagstaff, where they had a summer ranch. I told him I wouldn’t be far from there in July and August, at my place at Howard Mesa. I gave him a bunch of cards and told him to tell his friends.

I’d enjoyed the assignment and look forward to doing it again.

Where Would YOU Rather Be?

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A quick comparison of temperatures.

I’m a Mac OS X 10.4 user. Dashboard, a new feature of the operating system, enables me to display, with a push of a key, “widgets” that look up information on the ‘Net. I’m a weather nut, so I have the Weather widgets set up to display when I press the F12 key to display Dashboard.

Here’s what two of my Weather widgets look like right now: Now can you see why I prefer to spend my summer at Howard Mesa, just 35 miles south of the Grand Canyon, than in Wickenburg?

Weather

Yarnell Daze — Another Success for Flying M Air

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We fly up to Yarnell and spend the day giving helicopter rides.

A while back, I wrote an entry that mentioned Yarnell Daze and the good feelings I got from the folks who wanted me to do helicopter rides there. This is an update.

We flew up at 7:30 AM yesterday. Mike and Alex came with me. (No, not Alex the Bird. Alex, my new ground crew kid.) We brought everything we needed except shade.

Wendy at the Buzzard’s Roost had presold 11 tickets. Not exactly enough to get me excited, but enough to get me up there for the event.

The day started off beautiful: cool and calm. The skies were clear — and stayed clear all day. I did a bunch of rides before taking a break for the parade. My last ride before the parade actually flew over town as the parade was starting, so I did a low, slow fly-by with passengers aboard. They were two teenaged girls and I told them that they could tell their friends they’d been in the parade.

We were set up about 3/4 mile north of town, in a field alongside the road. It was a tricky landing zone because it was surrounded on three sides by wires. That made only one safe way in and out, and there was a mountain in that direction. I’d lift off, make a 180¬? pedal turn, and take off toward the mountain, gaining speed until I went through ETL (effective translational lift), give the cyclic a harder push forward, and then bank to the left toward Peeples Valley. I’d go as far as Hiddens Springs Ranch (a thoroughbred horse ranch), then turn to the left back toward Yarnell. We’d fly over Yarnell and then over the cliff there, so there was suddenly 2000 feet of empty air beneath us. (Very dramatic; the passengers loved it.) Then another right turn, back over town, and back to the landing zone. I’d approach it from the north, making a tight right turn as I slowed and descended to land on my spot. Time elapsed: 8 to 10 minutes.

I shut down during the parade (10 AM) and walked into town with Alex to get lunch. The Buzzard’s Roost had a BBQ lunch special. It was a little skimpy on the meat, but it did include chips and a drink for $5. We bought three and walked back to the LZ. By that time, it was getting hot and the only shade was inside the helicopter. We climbed aboard and ate.

The flying started up again as soon as we dumped the 10 gallons of fuel we’d brought into the ship and took off my door. And it didn’t stop. The people just kept coming. It was a good flow of people because they didn’t all come at once, so no one had to wait more than about 15 minutes. Finally, I got to the point where I needed to fuel up again. I made a trip down to Wickenburg with three passengers aboard. The woman at the FBO, who isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, took nearly 20 minutes to screw up my fuel order. I took another 3 minutes to add 10 more gallons of fuel, then brought my passengers back to Yarnell and kept on flying.

The heat was definitely affecting performance. By noon, I didn’t feel comfortable flying with three full-sized passengers on board. It wasn’t the flight that concerned me. It was take off. The wind had picked up and I was taking off with a tail wind. At times, it may have been as much as 10 knots. Great for landing into, but tough for taking off with at your back. So I gave Mike definite instructions about total passenger weights and told him to use the scale we’d brought. One 255-lb guy got pissed when we wouldn’t let him on board — my legal per seat weight limit is 250 — but I didn’t care. Safety first. We just gave him his money back. At least his daughter got to fly with me.

We did two freebie flights for folks that work for the Yarnell Chamber of Commerce. I still owe Wendy a flight for all the work she did selling the tickets.

It was about 2 PM when we called it quits. I shut down to stretch my legs and help the guys load up. Another potential passenger showed up, but we told her we were done for the day. Done isn’t the word. I was well done, like a roast left in the oven too long.

We flew back down to Wickenburg and I landed in one of the helispots. I shut down while Mike fetched his car and cranked the air conditioner. Then I just locked up the helicopter — with all our gear in there — and we went home, stopping to drop off Alex the Ground Crew Kid at home and pick up Alex the Bird at work.

I figure we flew about 50 people — our second best event ever. And it was a real pleasure to help contribute to the success of the event.

Thanks very much to the folks at the Yarnell Chamber of Commerce. I hope I can do this again next year!

It’s 103°F. In the shade.

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The “indoor season” begins in Wickenburg.

In most places, winter is the “indoor season,” the time of year when you want to spend most of your time indoors. But not in Arizona’s Sonoran desert.

I remember my first New Year’s Day in Arizona, back in 1997. I’d gone “down the hill” from Wickenburg to a K-Mart in Glendale to buy a pair of cheap bar stools for the apartment I was living in. I wore a T-shirt that day without a jacket and wasn’t the least bit cold. This is great, I remember thinking, conjuring images of the folks back home.

Cold winters were the reason I left New Jersey all those years ago.

Will hot summers be the reason I leave Arizona?

It’s a dry heat. Sure. But it’s still heat. 103.8°F (that’s about 40°C for you metric folks out there) at 2:35 in the afternoon is killer, no matter how dry it is.

And — for Pete’s sake! — it’s still only May.

I don’t remember the heat affecting me this badly years ago. Back in 1997, in May, we were just starting our house hunt. We’d finally sold our home in New Jersey early in the month and Mike and Spot (now deceased) had joined me in Wickenburg. The other half of our belonging arrived by moving van and we rented a second apartment in the Palm Drive complex to store it and set up our offices. Then we started making the rounds with Connie, our Realtor, who spent the entire summer showing us every home available for sale, no matter how poorly it matched our list of requirements.

I still remember walking up driveways and walkways and around houses in the summer heat, getting more and more depressed with every outing, but not really feeling the heat. Was that a mild summer? Or had my thin blood welcomed the warmth after so many fickle East Coast summers?

To give you an idea of the mindset of people where we’d come from, when we told people back home that we’d bought a new house, their first question was, “Does it have air conditioning?”

What the hell do you think? I felt like replying. Do you think we’re idiots? That we’d buy a brand new house without air conditioning in a town where summer temperatures routinely get into the triple digits?

Phoenix temperatures make big news in New York. New Yorkers love to hear about how hot it is in the summer here, the same way people in Arizona love to hear about how cold and miserable it is in New York in January. Of course, I’ll take a 103.8°F on a May day in Wickenburg long before I take an 80/80 day in New York. (That’s 80°F with 80% humidity.) A typical forecast on a summer day in New York would be the “3 H’s” — that’s hazy, hot, and humid. Ick.

But if that first summer wasn’t bad, things changed. It seemed as if every summer became hotter than the one before it. We bought blinds for the three big 8 x 4 windows on our second floor and they stayed closed every morning (and most of the afternoon) from equinox to equinox, just to give our air conditioning units a fair chance at keeping up. I made the fatal error of leaving my purse on the dashboard of my car one day while it was parked in the driveway. My credit cards, slipped into their individual slots in my wallet, melted flat and would no longer make an impression at the store. Thank heaven the magnetic stripe still worked.

Two years ago, it was unbearable to me. That’s when I realized that any outdoor activity had to be completed by 8 AM (at the latest) and the rest of the day had to be spent in air-conditioned comfort. Air conditioned house to air conditioned car to air conditioned office to air conditioned car to air conditioned store to air conditioned car to air conditioned house. Get the idea? The windows go back on the Jeep in mid May and it’s sealed up tight, just so the air conditioning worked better. Better yet, don’t go out at all. After all, it takes at least ten minutes for the air conditioning to cool down a hot vehicle. And heaven help you if you have black leather seats or fail to shade the steering wheel when you run into the grocery store.

Last summer, I had some relief. I worked as a pilot up at the Grand Canyon. My schedule was 7 days on and 7 days off, although I normally worked a 6 on/8 off schedule. I lived at our Howard Mesa property while working. It’s about 15 miles north of Williams (as the helicopter flies) at an elevation of 6700 feet. The heliport at the Canyon was at 6300 feet. High altitudes make a big difference. I don’t think I experienced a day above 95°F while I was up there. And when I came home for my week off, I spent every day in my office, cranking out the books that pay the bills. The summer seemed to fly by (no pun intended).

This summer, I’m going back to Howard Mesa. I have one more book to write and it’s due on June 15. With luck, by June 20, I’ll be up there with my camper and my horses and my bird and my helicopter. I have a big project to work on this summer — converting a 12 x 20 shed to a cabin with a bathroom and kitchen — and a book project to work on in the evenings. I think this is going to be a killer summer and there’s no air conditioning at Howard Mesa, but I think (and hope) I’ll be able to deal with it for the two and half months I plan to be away.

I’ll cheat Wickenburg’s indoor season the right way this year, using the same cop-out the snowbirds use: I’ll just leave town.

The Coyotes are Howling

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And other items of interest.

It’s just after 6 AM on a Tuesday morning. This time of year, we wake up when it gets light. Alex is like an alarm clock and he starts singing and whistling when the room gets light enough to see. I know I could just throw a blanket over his cage and keep him quiet until we’re ready to wake up, but these days, we still wake up before him at least two or three days a week.

Off in the near distance — perhaps over by Rancho de los Caballeros — a bunch of coyotes are singing their coyote songs. I once tried to research why coyotes howl. A few articles on the Web addressed the subject, but none were conclusive. The coyote song is one of the things I like about living in the desert.

Took a break to go down and feed the horses. It’s getting hot these days — in the 90s every day — and the fly situation down there is getting bad. This year, I’m trying a new fly control system. Called Fly Predators, they’re tiny little “non-nuisance” flies that eat “nuisance” fly larvae. The idea is that you spread these little flies around where the annoying flies lay their eggs — primarily on horse manure — and they eat the eggs. Supposedly, if you have enough of the little buggers, they’ll eat just about all the fly eggs, thus killing the fly population before it grows.

I’m not sure if its working. In fact, I suspect that it isn’t. Maybe I started too late. Or maybe it’s all a lot of bull. I asked a few people about their experiences with this solution and they all had good things to say. It’s costly — about $120 per season — but that’s the same amount we’d spend if we had to spray down the horses every day. Anyway, I spread my monthly batch of fly predators this morning. If I don’t see results within a few weeks, I’m going to assume it just doesn’t work. The horses like it a lot better at Howard Mesa. The flies haven’t taken hold there yet and, with luck, they won’t. No need for fly masks and the boys have 40 acres to roam around and graze. Last weekend we took them to Groom Creek Horse Camp in the Prescott National Forest. What a wonderful place. Nice, drive-thru campsites designed for people with horses. Two of the sites even had corrals (rather than rope ties) and we were lucky enough to get one of them. We did a 9-mile loop ride to the top of Spruce Mountain on Saturday and a 7-mile loop ride on the Wolf Creek Trail on Sunday. We were part of a group of perhaps 30 people/horses, although we didn’t all ride together each day.

Prescott is a nice place. At an elevation of about 5000 feet, it gets pretty cold in the winter and stays cool in the summer. Lots of recreation, parks, and shopping. Sun and shade. The other day, Vicki, the woman who’d organized the Groom Creek trip asked me where we lived.

“Wickenburg,” I told her.

“Wickenburg?” she repeated, obviously surprised. “But you’re too young to live in Wickenburg.”

“Exactly.”

I could go into detail here about how much this little conversation bugged me, especially since my Georgetown trip two weeks ago convinced me that I was living in the wrong place. But I’ll save that for another blog entry.

About a year ago, Mike and I spent some time with a Realtor, looking at homes in the Prescott area. It’s tough for us because our house is nearly paid for and neither of us wanted to walk into a big new mortgage. I couldn’t believe the dumps this woman was showing us — all above our price range. (Do Realtors ever listen?) What a waste of time. Then Mike got a job in Phoenix and we decided that the drive from Prescott would just be too darn long for him.

Sadly, there’s no chance of him ever getting a decent paying job in Wickenburg. Fortunately, I can work anywhere and still make the same living. But I do wish I lived somewhere where my helicopter tour and charter business would do better. It’s tough doing business in a town where so few people want to spend money. I guess that’s why so many of the businesses that start in Wickenburg fail within the first year. And why there are so many empty storefronts in town.

Other items of interest include the irony of a humane mouse trap. If you’ve been reading these blogs, you know that I use a humane mouse trap to catch mice and set them free far away from where I caught them. Last summer, I even took two mice for helicopter rides — you can find the blog entry about that somewhere on this site. Well, last week I noticed that a mouse was building a nest in the trunk of my Honda S2000. I love that car — it’s the last sports car I’ll ever buy — and I’m doing my best to make sure it lasts 20 or 30 years. Having a mouse use insulation beyond the trunk compartment to build himself a cozy home in the trunk was not desirable. So before we went away to Groom Creek, I set up the trap with a bit of peanut butter and closed it in the trunk. When I got home on Sunday, a tiny mouse was trapped inside, waiting to be set free.

I decided to drive him up the road and let him out at some bushes away from all the neighbor’s homes (and my garage). I parked alongside of the road, opened my door, opened the trap, and shook the little bugger out. He landed on the ground, but instead of running into the bushes, he ran under my Jeep. I figured: how stupid can the mouse be? He must have run across the road. He couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to hide behind one of my tires. Right? Wrong. I pulled back very slowly, giving him every opportunity to run away. But he must have been really dumb, because when I’d backed up about 10 feet, I saw his crushed body on the road.

Damn.

But you can’t say I didn’t try. Next time, I’ll get out of the car and drop the mouse in a clump of bushes.

Mike’s cousin Rick said I probably did the mouse a favor anyway. He’s right. It’s also snake season — there was a good sized rattler on my driveway on Sunday afternoon — and snakes eat mice. At least this mouse’s death was quick and painless.

We don’t kill the snakes unless they become a nuisance around the house. Don’t want the dog getting bitten. The snakes keep the mice away. One year, we had a bad mouse problem in the shed. Droppings really did a number on one of Mike’s old saddles and I had a saddle blanket ruined. The next year, a rattlesnake moved in under the shed. I’d see him in the corner of the chicken yard in the morning, coiled up, resting. The chickens didn’t bother him and he didn’t bother them. But there were no mice that year, either.

It’s almost 7 AM. Time to get dressed and take Alex to work. He’s chattering away as I type this. “Howdy partner!” That’s his latest vocabulary phrase and he really likes to say it. “Come on Jack, go outside.” I think he orders the dog around more than we do. The dog, of course, ignores him.