{"id":77,"date":"2007-10-14T20:35:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-14T20:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/?p=77"},"modified":"2007-10-14T20:35:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-14T20:35:00","slug":"dipping-with-dippers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/?p=77","title":{"rendered":"Dipping with Dippers"},"content":{"rendered":"

I arrived at the hot spring at about 3:30 and set up a slightly illegal camp out of sight of the road (camping is only allowed in the established campground there, but the campground is closed for the season). As I was snapping tent poles together, I heard three gunshots not more than a half mile distant, and a few minutes later a man with a gun and a four-year-old boy walked by reporting that his brother had just killed a deer. It seems that every man in this state hunts – with millions of acres of public land and under a million people in the state, it is still impossible to get very far from the shooters.<\/p>\n

Tent erected, I took my new Tolkien book, The Children of Hurin, down to the hot springs and tweaked the diversion channels to cool the pool of a bit. I was soon joined by four young folks from Jackson, and we had a good time soaking and talking until darkness fell and they left. At some point we noticed a bird pecking at our clothes – an American Dipper. As it turns out, a trio of Dippers have taken up residence below Granite Falls, and I watched them constantly bobbing into the water and chasing each other around, occasionally walking almost right up to me.<\/p>\n

The night was clear, and I woke at 3 am to see the Great Cow of Orion overhead. The temperature dropped off well into the 20s, but I had plenty of clothes to keep warm. I woke at dawn but read in my tent until the frost melted, then wandered down to the hot spring for more reading. A few people came by to look at the falls, but no one joined me in the pool. I took a couple of self portraits (posted here<\/a>), and tried to get photos of the dippers but had trouble with lenses fogging in the steam from the spring.<\/p>\n

I drove to Jackson for lunch and groceries, then came home and finished the book (which has the most unsatisfying ending of any fantasy book I have read). Back to the birdramps tomorrow – alone as Kate is in Seattle until Thursday.<\/p>\n

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I arrived at the hot spring at about 3:30 and set up a slightly illegal camp out of sight of the road (camping is only allowed in the established campground there, but the campground is closed for the season). As … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luterra.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}