mcgyver5: Outdoors

Sun, 23 May 2004 02:45:54 GMT

Just took Maggie and Frank and the two kids next door fishing at Lake Nokomis. I spent the whole time untangling lines and freeing snagged lures. I got to cast once. Everyone took their shoes off and waded and Maggie eventually fell over and got wet. She immediately turned blue and started shivering, so it was time to leave.

It was the first fishing adventure of the season and I was totally unprepared and disorganized. 2 out of the 4 fishing rods aren't working right and I didn't have half the stuff we needed.

So, for me and for anyone planning to take kids fishing, here is what you need:

5-gallon bucket
folding chairs
vest with pockets for tackle
plastic cutting board
a bunch of hooks with the barbs filed off.
change of clothing
snacks
sandals that can go in the water.
tools: pliers, scissors, knife
one working fishing pole for each kid
one lure or hook per pole already tied on
bait you don't mind getting wasted
sunscreen
bug repellant
drinking water

DNR Trout Stream Easement GIS Layer

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 21:23:59 GMT

My cube neighbor is creating a database of all the easements owned by the state along trout streams. It will soon be available in GIS format. That is, you can download the data and make pictures like this, which is the new data layed over arial photos. This particular selection is Lower Gavin Brook in Stockton, MN:

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 22:52:18 GMT

For some reason, the ever so humble blog reduces my blood pressure whenever I read it. I think it is the pictures of the birds at her bird feeder. Or maybe the picture of boots at the top. Discovered it via true life

Trapping Turtles

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 04:13:33 GMT

This is a turtle tag. If you are a turtle seller or recreational turtle trapper, all of your traps require one. The DNR sells about 50 turtle licenses each year. Three people here have told me they taste like chicken. If not prepared properly they can be very high in contaminants because their fatty tissues store contaminants from their scavenger diet.

To prepare a snapping turtle, you chop the head off and let it bleed out for 24 hours because the involuntary movements last that long. If you don't hang them up while they are bleeding, they can crawl away without a head and get lost. Turtle is a popular item on the menu of area restaurants west of St. Cloud. I want to find out where I can try some.

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 21:02:37 GMT

Roland just came by the office. He is always interesting to talk to. His work is organizing fishing education events. He is putting together a kids fishing training event outside the Twins game on May 10. The DNR puts on lots of great family events like this. The schedule for all of these is on the DNR events calendar . He also told me about two blogs by friends of his: True Life and David Anderson's Lost City.

Woodland Mayhem

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 20:44:47 GMT

Cold and windy morning. Took my kids plus the kids next door to Wood Lake Nature Center in Richfield. On a long path through the woods, I got far ahead of the gang and while waiting, I picked up a stick and started whacking dead branches off of a tree. Whack whack whack.
I started remembering how I used to do this all the time as a kid. Whack whack whack.
When I returned to the present, I noticed that all four
kids were gathered around in mute astonishment. The responsible adult was whacking the crap out of a tree. And with each whack, they felt a constraint
on their own behavior fall. Once they recovered their wits, they all started searching around for sticks of their own. There were lots of fallen trees around that needed whacking. Were they ever tired when we got home.

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 04:16:55 GMT

New Minnesota weblog. All about canoe racing. A Radio weblog. He works at the DNR, in fisheries no less.

How to use an outhouse.

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 01:54:07 GMT

On the first day of Boy Scout camp, scoutmaster Bob Marshall, who wore a scoutmaster's hat and a whistle around his neck, gathered the troop around the outhouse to tell us how to use it. He said, among other things, to never put toilet paper in the urinal.

On my first sit in the outhouse, I pondered this rule and came to the conclusion that the thing I am sitting on must be the urinal because there sure wasn't anything else in that room that resembled a urinal. I therefore decided to throw my toilet paper into the convenient metal receptical on the wall of the outhouse. It looked kind of like a trash can.

The next day, scoutmaster Bob gathered us around the outhouse for another lecture. He pointed to the metal receptical. "Someone stuffed toilet paper into here. Don't ever do that again, or we are going to have real problems" I must point out that he never gave clear instructions on what, exactly, to do with the toilet paper.

So, on my next sit, I had to come up with some method of disposal of my used toilet paper. I carried it out to a pile of boulders about 10 feet away from the outhouse and carefully stuffed it down there as far as I could.

The next day, scoutmaster Bob called us back up to the outhouse for a lecture. He pointed to my toilet paper wedged down into the rocks. "Who put that there?", he asked No one said a word. I didn't know much about outhouses, but I knew not to admit guilt by asking where to put the toilet paper.

So, on my next sit I decided I was just going to toss it down the crapper because it would soon become unrecognizable anyway.

Review of Poachers Caught!

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 05:02:25 GMT

From Poachers Caught!, a book by a retired Minnesota Conservation Officer:

In mid-March, a crust formed on the melting snow overnight, preventing already weakened animals from getting to food sources only 30 feet from the trail. Deer were slowly starving.

Many rural dogs located these weakened populations and their primitive instincts prevailed. The size and breed of the dog had no bearing on the dog's desire to kill; they were pets transformed into wolves. The morning was the critical time for the killing sprees. The snow, still crusty after a cold night, would support the dogs' weight and allow them to take long romps far from home over the frozen surfaces. A pack of mutts would actually form a hierarchy, the largest and strongest dog assuming leadership.

Just after sunrise, I patrolled the edges of yards known to have "pack dogs" looking intently for fresh canine tracks entering the woods.

The first set of tracks was quite large, ambling ahead of two smaller prints. The thin crust was unable to hold my weight, forcing me to limit my forward stumbling to the deer trails. Within five minutes of my grueling march, I spotted the first sign of mutilation: a yearling deer lay half buried 3 feet off the deep path. It appeared to have hardly struggled while raging teeth had torn it apart. Dogs on a deer mission seldom eat their prey; they only kill for the primal thrill!

Twenty yards farther was another red swirl of devastation. Two more fawns lay a few feet apart amid a layer of brown and white hair strewn about the otherwise white surface.

Before my morning trek was finished, I witnessed 16 carcasses of deer, all slaughtered and left for the ravens and coyotes to complete the feeding cycle.

I appreciate the book. It gives a real education in natural resource enforcement.

I learned:

A good way to poach fish at night without attracting attention is to sink a light into the lake and spear the fish as the come to check out the light.
Don't tell the conservation officer that all the fish you have cut up and packaged are rock bass. He won't believe you.
Poach in an area without vehicle access or surrounded by private lands.
Don't mark the path to your illegal gill netting operation with orange tape
If you use booze to control the alchoholic butcher that processes your poached deer, keep the shack were he lives locked.

There is a great deal of "It was a dark and stormy night" writing here. However, the exciting stories and insight into north woods culture make the "forward stumbling" through the flowery prose worth while.

Pretty much a meat and potato storyteller, he wades into the technical detail of his work without a look back. I find the details interesting. He has a deep knowledge of the biology of the resource he is trying to protect and great skills at watching and dealing with people. I read in the Star Tribune that he published the book himself. He could have used a better editor.

Despite the rough writing, he made his poachers come alive. There are sheepish tourists that know they are breaking the law, drunken, gun toting hard core poachers who physically intimdate the officer. He nails the descriptions of these people and that in itself is entertaining.

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 05:13:16 GMT

If you are into end-of-the-world scenarios, this one about the pentagon preparing for "Abrupt Climate Change" filled me with dread. Younger Dryas here we come.

What does the web have to say about it?

Doug Carmichael's Roughcut sees a use for it in the upcomming campaign.

This British blogger sez the british press sexed it up into a "suppressed secret report"

boingboing has a good post about how speculation turned into certainty in the press.

Article in the Oakland Tribune sez:

Left-wing bloggers and conspiracy-minded environmentalists seized on news of the report as a sign that President Bush still is hiding the real threat to America and that Mother Nature must be a Democrat."

Me? I don't want to believe it either. I like disorder and the concept of mankind punished by the gods as much as the next guy, but climate change doesn't get me there. I will be really really really sad if the Gulf Stream goes away. It seems like kind of a hard thing to get going again after it stops.

We can prove that our climate is changing and prove that climate change has happened very abruptly in the geologically recent past. The report does what good science fiction does; takes true trends and spins a tale around them. All the screaming doesn't help. Look how easy it is to point at the hysteria surrounding this report and use that to dismiss all talk of global warming.

ice fishing

Tue, 17 Feb 2004 02:29:32 GMT

I just came back from ice fishing on the St. Croix river. It is beautiful beyond imagining down there, but I froze my flesh to the point of morbidity and didn't catch any fish.

The people I was with all work for DNR fisheries and were kind of suprised at how slow it was. Walleye usually migrate there by now to get ready for spawning. We had two fish finders along and the guy who lives near there said that usually you can watch schools of fish swim by. Today there was nothing. We just saw our lures on there. Perhaps they are a little slow to make it up there this year.

Anyways, I had three hours to contemplate a hole in the ice. Jack caught two walleyes that were a little too small to keep. Then, right as we were getting ready to leave, he caught this bizarre thing with legs and gills called a mud puppy. It crawled around on the ice for a few seconds before freezing to a stop and then got pushed back down the hole. As they say, on a river, you never know what you'll catch.

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 01:07:57 GMT

I was channeling some bad parent energy today. I mean, I just had no tolerance. So obvious it was that I needed a break that I was encouraged to GET OUT. So, I went cross country skiing at the Hyland Lake Park Preserve. Kids thronged the visitors center and snack bar when I first got there at 3:30 but the crowds soon thinned out and I was just about to do the same when I realized they had lighted trails. I had them all to myself. Exercising to the point where the air 3 inches away from my body is a comfortable 70 degrees sure beats the chill.

A new skiing fee for that park irked me. I have to pay $5.00 combined county and state fees at a park of which I am already a patron? For one of the cheapest sports on earth? Just what contribution did the State of Minnesota make to my outing, I wonder?

Sat, 31 Jan 2004 02:52:01 GMT

I got a tip from a mailing list that it is so cold today that you can take boiling water outside and toss it in the air and watch it crystalize before it hits the ground. I figured, "a good experiment for the kids". So, I boiled some water and filled a one litre pitcher with boiling water and took them outside. So trusting was I of this missive that I stood on the sidewalk and tossed a litre of boiling water straight up in the air and then looked up to watch the show. Half of it did crystalize. The other scaldingly hot half rained down on my upturned face and scalp as I ducked. The kids liked that. A neat puff of snow in the air followed by dad screaming and putting snow on his face. I decided to try again, this time planning to throw less water a lot higher so that it would all crystalize. Boiling water may not all crystalize in the air, but it sure freezes fast. I walked out to the same spot as before and tossed the water with such force that my feet flew out from under me on the ice that had already formed from my first attempt and I landed on my side, more embarrassed than hurt. They apparently loved the show because now they want to do more "experiments".

Sun, 25 Jan 2004 23:57:10 GMT

I am looking for web sites relating to wastewater and found this nugget, a blogger who is posting his Experiences as a water and sanitation engineer in Guatemala....

But I can't find anyone talking about what I think is a huge sleeping budget issue: At some point, we as a society are going to have to fork over huge amounts of money to address water issues. Two big areas are immediately apparent to me: Projects that get water to people that have used theirs up and upgrades to our wastewater treatment infrastructure.

Wastewater:

It was more than 30 years ago that huge amounts of money were ploughed into building municipal wastewater plants. I remember when one of these was built outside of Springfield Mass. Bondi's Island. It made some neighborhoods of Springfield unbearable for a while and we could smell it up on the hill in Longmeadow on summer nights. We used to call a guy Bondi's because he let out a vicous fart one day at lunch.

When the wind is right, I can smell the Pig's Eye treatment plant outside of the DNR. Security guards refer to it as the shit factory. One of the security guards at the DNR told me that she was stationed there for two days, but refused to go back because the smell made her sick. Another guard told me it is where they station you if you make too many mistakes at another place.

I work to keep the daylight world of work and family and recreation completely seperate from the subject of "what happens after I flush the toilet, but stories like "Minnehaha creek hit with 300,000 gallons of spilled sewage" remind me of the existence of an infrastructure that wisks away my defamation.

I am expecting this hidden world to inch its way into our attention. The decay is real. Pipes and pumps need replacing. Spills due to broken equipment are real. It will be interesting to see how communities, especially the ones who don't even want to pay for sidewalks, will deal with it. And it will be interesting to watch politicians, especially the ones who have bullshitted their way into office by promising lower taxes and smaller government avoid the issue.

mount washington 97 degrees below zero

Sat, 17 Jan 2004 02:07:04 GMT

In their blog, the interns and meteorologists living on top of Mount Washington say that with wind chill, it is nearly 100 degrees below zero there tonight. Do they stay inside? Do they wear protective clothing? Heck No!

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 06:07:34 GMT

The point of this post is to warn people about the bike tunnel under 35E along Shephard Road.

It is cold here, but the roads are clear of ice and it was a crisp, beautiful day. So I parked my car in highland park and intended to ride the rest of the way to work. 6 miles? They are completing a new tunnel for bikes under the highway so I thought I would try it out. Someone else already knocked down the orange fence and the keep out sign and so I rode on through, feeling the thrill of riding my bike somewhere I wasn't supposed to. I heard a distinctive ker-PUNK as something punctured my tire and when I looked closer, I noticed that there were nails and snipped up steel wires twisted into curly-Q shapes strewn all over the floor and standing upright in some of the lines in the cement. So, I had a long walk back to my car. I think tomorrow I will try it again and put up a sign warning people.

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 01:05:04 GMT

Huh? I see on Fark that minnesota may try deer contraception?

Wouldn't that suck to be on a hike and get hit by an errant contraceptive dart?

sledding

Sun, 23 Nov 2003 21:37:17 GMT

Snowed 6 or 8 inches today. The kids were out of their minds over it. I took them sledding at Todd Park, which has a tiny hill. They drove themselves to exhaustion after watching me demonstrate. up down up down. The wind blew pretty bitter and it turns out they both wet their pants rather than interrupt sledding. So, once the sledding stopped, the screaming began in stereo. Boots full of freezing cold urine. Shouldn't have used cotton socks.

I didn't think we had any sleds and was looking for pieces of cardboard when I came across two brand new sleds in the garage. These apparently came from Kate's dad a while ago. Thanks Grampa John!

We've got.... Wisconsinality

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 03:57:29 GMT

We up and drove east just to get out of town and landed in the warm, blindingly chlorinated pool of the AmericInn of Chippewa Falls. Donning hats and mittens, we hiked around in the beatifully desolate Lake Wissota State Park and planned what we would do if we saw a bear (Kate would lie down on Maggie, I would lie down on Frank and we would all play dead. I guess the bear would wait patiently while we arranged ourselves.). We ate dinner at Heckle's, a great family restaurant which single-handedly skews obesity charts in public health offices across the region.

Flying Carp in Minnesota

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 15:38:10 GMT

Asian carp have arrived in Minnesota. The fish pictured is a bighead carp, the first known asian carp caught in Minnesoata waters. It was caught in a commercial net in Lake Pepin yesterday and brought to our pathology lab for a "checkup". Asian Carp are known to jump suprisingly high out of the water when suprised by an approaching motorboat or other noise. Video of flying carp in action

Mapping with location tool

Fri, 03 Oct 2003 04:20:53 GMT

I have changed Brain Off's neat location.root tool code a little to make it point at a richer, layered map of Minnesota and I changed it to use UTM coordinates instead. So I will use this post to point to where I went fishing on the Mississippi River a few weeks ago.

The next step is to add more fields for what layers I want and the magnification of the map.

Camp Coldwater

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 03:18:28 GMT

Took Frank on a walk today to another hidden part of the city: Camp Coldwater. It is only supposed to be open from 7 to 3 on weekdays, and there is a big locked iron gate blocking the entrance on Sundays, but there are a million ways into the park and we walked unchallenged down a dirt road that led through an open gate to some machine shed and across a lawn, past a design of branches in concentric circles and to the spring. Coldwater spring forms a pool about 50 feet across and topped off with an old stone tower. Near the pool is a bizarre assortment of abandoned Bureau of Mines buildings, weedy parking lots and mowed lawns. I am not joking when I say that for me, one of the most beautiful things in the world is an abandoned structure encroached upon by nature.

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 19:31:44 GMT

His hobby is exploring the springs of Minnesota and Iowa and he has :

Neato outdoor adventures and pictures.

Attributes in Blog Posts

Mon, 22 Sep 2003 20:16:55 GMT

I need to be able to add more attributes to my blog posts for sorting, searching, mapping and graphing. I want a seperate entry screen for, say, bike rides or graffiti sightings or fishing trips.

On the entry screen, in addition to the space for the text, will be blog post attribute fields: UTM coordinates, Lake ID number, Species + size caught, time spent, money spent, fish consumed, weather conditions, bait used, gear used, etc. These would then be stored by Radio somewhere and displayed on my blog in the order the reader selected. Radio could also make maps out of them using some kind of GIS service running on my desktop.

Now I just have to figure out:

How to create a new dialog box for radio
How to create new tables in radio
How to sort posts by something besides date
How to install mapserver so it works with radio
How to get radio to work with the scripting language of my choice

Hot Fishing Action

Fri, 19 Sep 2003 17:51:10 GMT

Fishing Below Ford Dam

I often follow familiar paths in this city thinking that there are no more interesting places to discover. I proved myself wrong this morning and busted a hole in the myth that one must go far and spend much to experience the outdoors.

Rick Lorenzen and I put his canoe in at Hidden Falls in St. Paul at about 6:30 am and paddled upstream until we were directly under the Ford Dam (We found the gate to Hidden Falls locked so we had to carry the canoe and equipment all the way down the bluff and to the water. The gate opens at 8:00 ). Rick is a canoe racing enthusiast, so I always get tips on my stroke when canoing with him.

I always begin fishing half-heartedly. "Am I using the right lure? Am I casting to the right place? Why would a fish bite this? And then BAM!

Hello big fish on the line!

Hello adrenaline rush!

That feeling will keep me coming back. Big fish were hitting the artificial lures we were throwing in. Mostly bass, but Rick caught a freshwater drum. I had two big, fighting bass on the line at different times, but I can only claim actually catching a smaller one. Rick caught a smallmouth that would have made a great lunch, except we aren't allowed to keep any gamefish from there.

It was a perfect time to go there. The cool air energizes the fish and the drought took care of the strong current. You could probably walk to where we were right now because the waterline is below the fence and trees that usually make access by foot impossible. We easily maintained position right off the spillway where the fish wait for tasty treats to come through the turbines. We got all our bites right by casting into the in the swirling edys just off the spillway. Birds wait too. Everyone gets their breakfast there.

Like I said, the artificial lures worked well. No more corn bait for me. Something was eating the corn, but whatever it was had too big of a brain to just swallow it and instead ate it off the hook.

The Mississippi River is a big grab bag. Pool 2 runs from the Ford Dam down to Hastings and habitats and food sources abound. From corn and beans that fall off of the barges to worms that flow in from 100 streams after a good rain. That means you can catch lots of different species. The freshwater drum was most exciting to me because they supposedly taste great, fight hard and they aren't labled as a gamefish around here, so there are no regulations on them.