Tomorrow is Christmas. For kids and some, it is a good time. I don’t particularly like it and I sort grit my teeth to get through it. There will be no AltF4.co tomorrow, but I wanted to leave on a high note. I am recapping a little bit of some of the finds I stumbled upon while I was on my hunting trip. This was in my plans for October but got buried under all the things that I didn’t get to. When I look at these pictures, I have a good feeling and so I thought that I would share.

Starting with the upper left, I had some kind of giant bird fly into a nearby tree. I think it was a Peregrine falcon but I am not 100% certain which is why I took the picture in the first place. Strange things sometimes happen in the woods, I have had owls fly around as if they are protecting something that I never saw. Sometimes there are occurrences that I have never experienced just by proximity to new or unusual circumstances. It was odd to have a giant bird land so close to a tree that I was next too.

To the right of that picture is a clear sign of predator activity. It was getting late in the week and the weather had finally changed from Indian summer to wet and freezing in the morning. I was walking a clear area and I stumbled upon some rib bones that were still bright red. If I had to guess, this was a remnant from a hunter’s recent butcher job that got carried away by a coyote. It was the only bones in the immediate vicinity but not the only bones in the area. It reminds us that this is a wild area with real, wild activity, even if it is not seen.

The picture on the farthest left is another thing I ran across in the woods. It is hard to say how old that can actually is. But I will say this, I have never seen a can like that before. This tells me that it was probably in the 1950-60 range. My guess is that this is a remnant from the original timber cutting of the area. Not only that, but I have never eaten canned potatoes. It makes me wonder what life was like back then. Is the person that left the can still alive? What were they actually doing in the woods? I see a lot of trash in the woods, but something vintage has a nice pedigree to it.

The last picture is some kind of plot marker. I spent some time looking at the sign because it was fascinating. First, it was made with super tight growth ring timber, likely ponderosa pine. It had both embossed and painted information on it. I don’t know if the marker was embossed first and then painted or repurposed by the painting. The sign was clearly hand painted and had some kind of cartographic information on it. Finally, it was nailed to the tree. Once again, I would guess that this hails from the 1950-60s.

Last week, I showed a picture of me standing in front of a defunct fire tower. That tower was build in the mid-1990s and taken out of service in 2023 because it was deemed unsafe. It looked pretty good to me but if I had to speculate, I would guess that the galvanized hardware had started to corrode. It is too bad because fire watch today is predominantly done by satellite, airplane and cameras.

There are still a few active fire towers in Oregon. It used to be that people like teachers would camp out during the summer months to keep an eye out for smoke, likely after lightning storms during the summer months. These things would dot the forests from line of sight to line of sight and were crucial on getting the jump on fire response. Some of them are available to stay overnight as a sort of weekend getaway. I helped myself to use of the vault toilet. It was very clean and private and it sure beats digging a hole. It also helped that the best cell phone reception in the area was at the tower. I actually conducted some business up there.

End Your Programing Routine: A hunting trip is a lot more than shooting an animal to me. It’s a good thing too because I haven’t shot any animal in ten years. It was camaraderie that doesn’t exist in the in-between years. It is the treasures that are found, some of which I documented. It is the wonder and mystery of man kind and nature. This is why I look forward to a hunting trip every couple of years. Merry Christmas everyone.