Solar Design and Botany

An amazing evening last night. Spent 4 hrs talking in spanish with Francisco and Jorge, the architects for the new Patagonia National Park in Chile. Doug Tomkins, founder of The North Face and Esprit, and Kris Tomkins, former CEO of Patagonia clothing company own the estancia, all 151,000 acres, which they would like to join with the Tamango Conservation Area and HeniMeni Park to create a new Park with the Chilean Government. Doug hooked me up with the architects to go over potential solar designs for the new buildings. My spanish was challenged with teaching mass to glass calculations and design priciples, along with energy efficieny, heat storage, air leakage ratios, insulation types and ratings, green materials, technical building techniques and plan design. Needless to say, my spanish reached new heights, and it is exciting to help with such a huge and gallant project.

The evening before, I was also challenged with another task, calling my Botany degree into action. I research the invasive plants that we are controlling to determine their exact species identification, their reproductive cycles and therefore determine if the methods we were using to control them were correct. Little research has been done here in Chile on invasive and native plants, so I left the spanish websites and started on American ones. UC Davis had some of the best info, along with hundreds of others, and I was able to identify three of the plants and determine that the plants are biennial not annual as previously thought here. This has changed our control methods as they had been ignoring removing the first years growth, a basal rosette of leaves, and were only removing the second years seed pods. Also interesting to note, was the Hierba Del PaNe, or so called Mullein in the US, has between 100,000-240,000 seeds per plant and the seeds will live for 35-100 years! It doee, however, make simply the best toilet paper in the world.

Hopefully our work will start to show as the sheep are slowly taken off the fields, the natural grasses start to recover and slow down the exotic plant invasion. There is also a particularly thorny prehistoric yet beautiful plant, the Neneo, which is native, but tends to spread with overgrazing like sagebrush in Colorado and Wyoming.
This plant is particularly offensive when rolling fence or trying to take a cat nap.
The piminelas, or stickers from several plants here, migrate everywhere, even managing to somehow get inside bras and socks. Top it off with Stinging Nettles, Calafata (tastes like a sour blueberry but has 3/4¨thorns), and thistle, and you have quite prickly adventure whether you are hiking working, or feeding the cat.

Conservation Patagonia

Side note: Still one space left on my Indian Himalayan Heli-assisted Ski Touring Trip, April 8-15th.

I'm writing from Chilean Patagonia, on a Estancia (ranch), volunteering with 6 folks who work for Patagonia clothing company and Conservation Patagonia (formerly the Patagonia Land Trust) to help create a new national park here. Sounds glamourous, but truthfully the work is quite brutal, although rewarding. Our two main objectives are to remove invasive exotic plants and fences. With the addition of roads and the contribution of overgrazing by 18,000 sheep on the ranch in the past has stressed local plant health and reproduction, allowing non-native plants such as thistle, mullin, dock, and poison water hemlock to thrive. With 70km of roads in the Estancia Chacabuco alone, the task is immense. First we clip the seed heads off each plant and put them in a bag, then we pull the plant, hoe or pick axe it down, and depending on the plant, also pick axing the root out. We then scour the area for the baby plants, next year´s seed producting adults, and hoe them out also. Some plants are 6 feet tall with hundreds of seed pods, often resulting in 20,000 potential new plants.

The next fun job is removing the fence with prevents yound Guanaco (a type of wild native camel) from migrating or feeding. Competition with sheep for food, hunting, and fences have severely decreased local populations. Owners Doug and Kris Tompkins, along with local Wildlife specialist Chritian, have prioritized certain fences to be removed to promote wildlife recovery. Of particular interest is the small endagered Huemel Deer, which we were lucky enough to see at the Tamango Conservation Area, just west of the Estancia. First we hammer out the fence barbs, and then roll the barbed wire. After wire cutting, we roll up 30 meter sections of fencing. Then comes the fun part of pick axing, crowbarring, shoveling, and groveling the rocks and dirt from around the post to about 18¨ or until the post wiggles. Then we use the same 40lb crow bar with a chain, carabiner and log to lever the post out of the ground. Even those in the best of shape and with good backs are counting the hours until 5pm, let alone the brave and tenacious desk/office workers who have volunteered for the trip.

The vistas are immense, mountains tall and spiky, plants thorny, glaciers gianourmous, rivers clear turquoise, steppes windy, people friendly, mutton chewy, dogs clever, and Gauchos are classic. We head to HeniMeni National Park on the 25th for two nights of camping and a butload of driving. The nearest town or people are one hour away, so i'm expecting two long days of driving just to visit the park right next door. The goal is to combine the Estancia Chacabuco, HeniMeni, and Tamango to create the new Patagonia National Park. Then back to fence/weed yanking and home to the states and some work for Patagonia Clothing Company in California.

Changing the World?

I'm off today to Chile - Valle Chacabuco in Patagonia to volunteer for the Patagonia Land Trust.
I'll be pulling fence posts and rolling up old barbed wire, restoring grass lands, and pulling non-native plants from old Estancias that will now become Conservation Patagonia's fourth new national park. Should be quite a change from the 15 feet of snow we have here in Crested Butte!

I became an aunt twice over on tuesday. Anika and Asher were brought into the world, and i'm proud to say I got to be there for the whole epic 40 hours or so. Even videod the whole thing, which was quite indescribable.

gotta go pack and run to the airport!

New Experiences

Something new today - I decided at 7am this morning after my ORE Board retreat/worksession was cancelled, to enter a 42 kilometer cross-country skate race called the Alley Loop in Crested Butte. Start was a 10am, so i didn't have much time to wax, eat, dress and find a costume, but the upside of the deal was that i had little time to get nervous or worry about my sea level vegas/LA/utah trade show whiskey training. The first two laps were not too bad, but the reality that i had only gone X-country skate skiing once this season definately hit home once my hands started to blister and the trail started to alternate between fuzzy and clear. My goal was to finish the race, and hopefully before the four hour cuttoff time. My rhythm started to get better on the third lap and the cheering and cow bells of each of town alley sections was a good distraction to the pain. I heard more than once, "Is that Alison?" (Needless to say, i'm not quite known as a nordie). Enter the beginning of the 4th lap, and i had some dreary moments, but the reassurance that this was the final loop helped pull me through. Towards the end, i passed a woman who blew by me earlier, and I started to get fired up and charged the final big hills, almost closing in on a few more folks at the end. I ended up finishing a respectable 3:20 or so. We are now off to the big air contest on our main street for the winter carnival.
Skiing was excellent the past few days on the mountain - deep powder!!! Nice change from the florescent lights of the shows to say the least. Teocalli Bowl and Third Bowl were skiing the deepest, as the wind blew all the snow over to the north east. Skied yesterday with Ethan Mueller, the son of the new CB owners and Chris Salomon, a writer doing a story on CB and our new funky mayor, Alan Bernholtz for Men's Journal. I also have been working hard on my ORE (Office for Resource Efficiency) Non-profit. We had some exciting new developments at our board meeting on Thursday - Western State College is moving forward with the first LEED certified green building in our county. This may sound like basic news, but when we at ORE started meeting with Western State, they had not even heard about LEED or green building. Crested Butte Mountain resort has also signed on as a new partner, and we have an exciting list of green projects for the ski area for the upcoming year. I also arranged to have a speaker present to CBMR about New Urbanism, and it looks like now they are going to plan the entire new North Village around this concept (pedestrian friendly, small lots, mixed use, mixed zoning, affordable housing - in general, like an old school european village).
Tomorrow I plan on skiing more powder, and then heading to Boulder to be at the birth of my sisters twins. I've never been a catcher before, or gotten to see a birth, so I can't wait for another new experience.