Tim Smith

Catfish are what God made trotlines for. Set it at sunset, check it at midnight and dawn. Then go fish for bass or crappie or something that involves some actual fishing in the meantime.

And at the campsite too.... My son is walking the Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango, a 485 mile trek through the wilderness during which he needs resupply. I'm not in a position to walk that kind of distance over that much time, but it has been my pleasure to resupply him on the weekends. This weekend we met him at a USFS campsite and dropped off food. We also made him campfire grilled steak and veggies and garlic bread and a bunch of other fresh stuff to relieve him of the boredom of trail food. It was an important time to put down some calories, rest, and touch base. This week he'll walk 140 miles with over 50 pounds on his back. So there it is, 10:00 PM, the official USFS quiet time when things are supposed to wind down. Everyone is stuffed to the gills with great food and good conversation, and we head for the tents to sleep. Or at least we thought we were heading to the tents to sleep. The eight or so people in the campsite next to us had very different ideas. Here came the whiskey. And the beer. And the pot. And worst of all, the guitar. By 2:30 AM we had heard every misbegotten song ever written for a beginner's guitar manual. Johnny Cash, Hank Jr., Tom Petty, John Denver, Jim Croce all got mangled in their turn. By the end of the night there were no actual syllables left in these songs, so it's hard to know what other artists might have put through the grinder. They did seem to include quite a bit of "F..!!" and "SH..!! shouted at the top of the lungs. Maybe it was the Sex Pistols. I've broken up plenty of parties that got out of hand, but I didn't want to deal with the fallout from that in front of my kids. The best I could do was sit there and ride it out.There was a huge group of Missouri Mennonites camping around us as well, and I can't imagine how they felt. I know my son could have used that sleep. The best I could do for my 10 year old daughter was to explain that some people are idiots and they don't care about anyone but themselves and stay away from people like that. I was grateful to the camp host for giving us that night free, but was also pretty incredulous that he claimed not to have heard the noise. He should have shut them down from the get-go. The next night, the Sex Pistols had packed up and pulled out. The Mennonites had a church service and a supper that also lasted past 10:00, but was quiet and respectful with three times the number of people involved. Of the two groups there that weekend, they seemed to have had the better time. Colorado is full of National Forest where it is perfectly fine to settle down at a dispersed site far away from everyone else and party your brains out. A campsite completely full of other campers is not one of those. I've seen some scenes like this one in Missouri too. I wish there were better ways to deal with them... ....beginning with parents who raise their kids to care about the people around them.

...Just checked.... 1 pound 4 ounces...Missouri State Record for warmouth. Yours is probably a bit shy, but close enough I'd want a measurement.

Man I hope you weighed that warmouth. In Illinois it would have been very close to a state record. They aren't usually even close to that size.

Wealth of information here, gentlemen, my humblest thanks. Now to find those bass again....

Don't see the direct connection to natural resources or conservation...which every other post on this forum has. Jerry seems to be testing the boundaries a bit. I suppose he's ready to play the victim once this gets axed.

I can see part of JD's point. Hatchery trout are more or less domesticated. Deer could be as well. But that's not really a good thing. The attitude that wildlife is somehow a "crop" pretty well spells the end of wildlife. Heck, while you're breeding those deer to be bigger, you might as well go in and re-engineer their genes, yes? Give 'em great big orange bullseyes on the side so they're easier to hit. Or on a more serious note, take out their myostatin so they look like a bulked up bull in Pamplona (something we've already done with numerous species). Mess with things long enough and at some point you don't have a creature that's independent, you've got a moocher that's not adapted to its environment and can't survive on it's own. As for the disease issue, it's incredible to me how consistently agriculture claims there will be no escapes or contacts from production animals and how that's not true every single time. Think we're ever going to get damages back for feral hogs? Never going to happen.

Thanks guys. I suppose I should add the disclaimer that I was not the actual photographer here. My shots were taken much further away and through the trees. This shot could not have been gotten without the car... ...true story... When these bears appeared on the bank behind my brother, he retreated to the car where his son had been napping. He didn't have the keys with him, so he had to wake up my 5 year old nephew and get him to unlock the doors. All the while the bears were gradually moving toward the parking lot. Apparently for a while the kid was laughing through the window at everyone who wanted in the car but couldn't get in unless he let them in. He didn't laugh long. Here you go, JD. Here's a fellow who shares your concerns. I'm sure it won't be long before those bears learn to operate the door locks and chow down on the family. http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/f0uh68/threatdown---all-bear-edition?xrs=synd_facebook_071614_cn_44 ....although the real threats know how to do that already.

I have been adding to my fly fishing skills over the past couple of years and have finally gotten around to using the 6 wt. to try for bass. The few times I've used a fly rod in the past, I've caught a few bass here and there, but they were always relatively small. This weekend I got into some larger fish but lost them on the hook set. There was a nice, solid "thunk" but they got off immediately. I'm pretty sure that was because the flexible nature of the fly rod I didn't drive in the hook far enough. With spinning gear I use a relatively stiff rod and I'm not shy about hook sets. What can I do to be sure I get the hook home with the more flexible fly rod? I was using a popper with a sharp, brand new hook. The tippet was pretty thick (not sure what size or how stretchable). I'm not sure I see an immediate solution. Multiple hook sets?

Dude. Get a grip.

*Forehead slap. Move it over to the Conservation forum side boys if you care to have your denialist disinformation rectified there (and my compliments on a series of...gems....posted above). I agree this part of the site is better off as a demilitarized zone.

It has been 90s and mid 90s in Denver pretty much all summer. Haven't had the AC on yet either because we always cool off at night. Weather just broke today. Not sure how long this will last, but tonight is definite cool snap.

*Gets out the broken record and plays that old familiar tune: "Gosh. It's cooler than average where I am right now, so it's obviously colder everywhere on the planet and it will be for decades to come" I suppose that one will be spinning for a long, long time.

Terrierman, as long as the fracking boom is still on (checking my watch here), I don't think the gas/cost issue will ever justify mileage in a truck. But the idea some people have that costs are going to stay where they are and this is some kind of unlimited, endless boom amuses this son of a 5th generation Texan to no end. And frankly, I love trucks but I care about my carbon footprint. So mileage is important to me. So you're right it is to some extent, ciRe, what's important to me. Or it gets at those issues anyway. You might be right about weight reduction and turbos, but does that necessarily exclude diesels? If they're getting 28 from the diesel 1500, what happens when they put it in a Dakota? What happens when they turbo charge it? What happens when they put an 8 speed trannie in it? What happens when Nissan comes out with their turbo charged small diesel later this year? You may be right that diesel has no future. I could, however, make the opposite bet that a fuel efficient truck at the right price puts the logic back into fuel refineries. It's already easier to make diesel. With enough demand, the cost of diesel could come down relative to "gas", the way it used to be back in the day. Add the fact that a good diesel engine is virtually eternal... I'm at least paying attention. I've owned Dodge, GMC and Chevy pick ups and I miss them all.

http://wot.motortrend.com/1402_2014_ram_1500_ecodiesel_epa_rated.html 20/28/23 36K...out of my range for now, but seriously excited. Dodge makes a good truck. Game changer?

You have to know what the error and biases might be, but analytic chemistry and social/ecological data are going to have two very different kinds of error. Biological systems add layers of complexity to the tidy laws of chemistry. That makes them more variable, more dynamic, more prone to change, more logistically difficult, more sloppy (and less vulnerable to slop), more resistant to generalization, and more likely to be idiosyncratic than anything that emerges directly from the fundamental laws of nature. In the case of any statistical analysis you might do with a data set like this, you're more or less at the level of hypothesis formation. Without controlled experiments, you're just making observations.... ....but given the ethical limits on experiments with humans, it's a good thing people are out there trying to compile these numbers.... ....so the liberal elite can turn us all into zombified brain eaters through public health initiatives and Tinky-winky brainwashing.

I think I see pigment spots in both the posterior anal fin and the soft dorsal of that middle fish. That would make it a green sunfish...or possibly a hybrid of some sort...it seems to be bigger than the average green (or warmouth) and the mouth seems slightly smaller. The fish and image quality makes it hard to be sure.

What Ness said. It's usually the interpretations that bog down. For instance, if you plot infant mortality against human population growth in this data set, you'll get a positive relationship (more dead babies = greater population growth). There are a lot of ways to interpret that wrong.

10 feet plus one lane of blacktop. Telephoto lens and a bit of cropping bring it in close... ...but the photographer was in a car. It wasn't risky.

Our family visited Yellowstone National Park last month. The fishing was good, and got even better when the bears dropped in for a visit. These two appeared on the bank behind my brother and then moved down the bank to where the rest of us were hanging out. We had to relocate briefly, but they weren't interested in us. By the time we had circled back to watch them from the cars, they were eating dandelions. The ones pictured here are black bears..despite the fact that one is brown. Also despite the color differences apparently the brown one is the mother of the black yearling cub.

It's data, Jerry.

http://www.gapminder.org/data/ If you're ever curious about how things are trending in the world, here's a great place to look. No spin. Just data. Gapminder gives you national averages of just about everything, usually with decades or even centuries of data behind it. Click on the "visualize" icon and you can watch an animated graph of history unfold before your eyes. Natural resources, human life expectancy, economic trends, morality from disease.... Were the good old days really what they were cracked up to be? Are we teetering on the edge of disaster? What happens to human population growth when mortality rates, infant mortality, and poverty increase? Give it a spin and see what you think.

Ok sorry. I did misunderstand what you meant.

Wait....isn't it still Federal land? You're not saying once someone starts using public land, they're entitled to it forever? If the Feds are managing the land, they have the right to adjust management schemes and decide how much extraction/development/recreation etc. occurs there. If those cattle were damaging that land to the point that they needed to come off it, it's the Fed's who decide that (although apparently that wasn't the case here). Similarly, when conflicting uses (for instance mining and grazing) are in close proximity, it's the Fed's who administrate what kinds of mitigation are needed, which one takes precedence and where. The public gets their say over the use of that land through permitting, public hearings, and the influence of elected officials. There aren't really any options to that arrangement. And I agree with you, F and F about the growing potential for a civil war, although I would frame the problem from the other side. We do have too many laws, but the days of Davy Crockett and the wild frontier are long, long gone. We can't just snap our fingers and pretend the world will ever be that simple again. Think we can live without the EPA? I personally do not want to go back to the days of burning rivers and Love Canal. The moaning I hear about over-regulation has so far offered no other solutions to the problems that government has stepped in to solve....and yes in the case of conservation and the environment, the government has done significant good. If the Libertarians could offer something other than mumbling and cussing on issues like this, I might even be tempted to join them. Unfortunately, so far, they've offered butkus.

Seriously? Half of Colorado is federal land and it's like the freaking Elysian Fields out here. I can walk straight up out of Denver in a hundred different places and go just about wherever I like. The east where private property is the rule...I'm never going back if I can help it....everything is locked up, private, inaccessible, chopped into tiny little pieces. Missouri has it pretty good with big chunks of national forest. Go to places like Texas and you are SOL for open natural areas...although it's not hard to find a ranch where you can pay to shoot a leopard in their parking lot. Most of the states where people are the happiest are mostly owned by the Feds.