Headed to Black Kettle Lake

I’ve been happy to see the state of the prairie this year, but it looks like that’s about to change fast. We had 106 degrees here today, and looking for 111 tomorrow. It was 111 in Buffalo today, which is not far from Fort Supply. There’s no sign of the heat cap moving, and no sign of rain.

The prairie dog is a herbivorous rodent that lives in burrows that are as much

as 30-ft. long and 6-10 feet below ground.  In these temperatures, the

burrow is critical to their survival, and they will spend much of the

 hottest hours below ground. They pop up and down out of their

burrows, and get the "dog" name from their habit of rising on their

hind legs and barking to warn others in their colony of approaching harm.

I also wanted to get you a better picture of the Great Western Cattle Trail. The first picture didn’t really show how deep and significant the trail depression is. Even this one doesn’t do it justice. It may be like taking pictures of waves at sea. You can never capture what a 40-foot breaking wave is until you’ve been in one, no matter how many pictures you look at. This may be somewhat the same. I found it really impressive. I would guess that if you laid in the grass on one bluff and looked straight across to the bluff on the other side, you could nearly hide a ranch house in the trail notch and not see but the peak of its roof. That’s quite a dent in the earth from the passing of 11 million longhorn cattle.