Fire in the Lawyer Canyon

This past week there was a 600+ acre fire on the Flying B Ranch, the North side of the canyon from Suzie Creek east. Redneck Joe took a jump off the top of the cliffs to give us an aerial view of the burned area.  This is Joe's description:

"I took a flight to show where a recent fire burned. You can also see where water drops and retardant drops took place. The fire started near the sporting clays course and went east until it met up with the burned area from another fire started along the highway about a month ago."

One of the noxious weeds that plagues the Camas Prairie is Star Thistle.  I will be addressing the effects of and war against this weed in the book I am writing on the Canyon.  Concerning this fire and the weed, Joe says,

"The only benefit fire can have with star thistle is if you take advantage of the ground being bear to spray herbicide and or plant cover. We are going to be doing some seeding via fixed wing aircraft soon!"

This past week I have been trying to make sense of property data I scanned at the Idaho County Courthouse.  To collect the data I used my Galaxy2 phone which has an 8 megapixel camera.  I downloaded an app. called "Camscanner".  I was very impressed!  The documents I captured were clearer and easier to read on my PDF scans than the sheets of the actual book which are faded with age.  Technology is making this kind of research much easier. 

These records are not only central to mapping historic ownership, they also give me names to look up in court records and other archives.  I am currently entering the pertainate data from these property documents into my GIS database, so I can project and analyze the history of ownership in and adjacent to the Canyon. 

As I add dates and owners to the database, I will be able to project property ownership by decade from 1912 to the present.  This will give me a visual perspective of the people and ownership involved in the story of the Canyon as I write.

I have also been successful in "geo-referencing Google images into the map (attaching geographic coordinates to the captured images).  I can look closely now at features of the canyon.  Each close-up pic from Google has to be added to the map and correctly positioned with the added coordinates.  Each picture can then be turned on or off to make accurate layers for the map of vegetation type, trails, and so on.

Using the pictures, I mapped the forested areas this week.  I will use old Soil and Water Conservation Department and Idaho Lands Department photos which go back to the 1930s to look at how the surface has changed over the decades.

To the right is the current forested area of the Canyon and her arms.  Forested areas are a rather new addition to the landscape.  Historic pictures from the Kamiah Historical Society show very few trees.

So, the past few days have been tedious to say the least, sitting in front of multiple computer screens analyzing documents and doing what GIS cartographers call "digitizing features". 

The weather out side is gorgeous.  The leaves are turning; last week's smoke is disappearing, and being a computer geek is crazy.  I'm going to take a break this week and go up into the forest Ruffed Grouse hunting.  Maybe if Redneck Joe comes down from the sky, I can convince him to go along.  I do have one of his dogs staying with me, Cali.  I have no idea if that is the correct spelling of her name.  She has her picture in an earlier blog entry.

If you haven't already, make sure you go flying with Joe in the video above.  He gets to regularly have this unique view of the Canyon, as he sails over it most every week..  It is a close as I will probably ever get to jumping off a 1500 foot cliff.