Our Giger Commode

Calling our new toilet sexy might be putting unneeded strain on our language, so I won’t go that far. Still, our new commode features design elements that set it apart from your typical workmanlike models. I like it.

In profile, the toilet reminds me of the work of Swiss artist H. R. Giger. His artwork is always surreal and often blurs the line between organic and mechanical forms. You may recall his creation of the iconic creature from the 1979 movie Alien.

The toilet, however, is bright white—whereas Giger’s works are typically dark in every sense of the word.

At any rate, I installed our new commode yesterday. I’m sharing two photographs of that, along with one of Giger’s works as a point of reference.

Side View

Set in Place

H.R. Giger

—Mitchell Hegman

Morning Report, November 8, 2025

After setting my coffee to brewing, I waddle to the woodstove and start a fire. At first, a single flame dances tenderly, seemingly innocently below an assembly I made last night in the firebox. The flames soon waver up into fingers clutching at the split lengths of wood.

I watch.

In a matter of minutes, the fire has become a thing of greed. Embers grin red at blackened fringes. Heat shoulders against me. Flames fill the entire box.

Hello, old friend.

I consider.

I am old. This is not how I identify, but this is how I classify. The passing years and all of my memories have somehow gathered themselves into a monolithic presentation. Yesterday feels the same as the times I sat sharing an afternoon cup of coffee with my grandmother forty-some years ago. In my mind, I’m still celebrating our landing on the moon. And directly beside that, I’m cutting the stray ends of my wife’s hair last week.

Hello, new friend.

—Mitchell Hegman

An Empty Room

We’ve fully engaged in a remodel of the common bathroom in our house. While the room has been repainted once, and I installed crown trim along the walls at the ceiling a half-dozen years ago, the vanity, toilet, and flooring are now 34 years old.

You may recall that this is the bathroom I inadvertently flooded a couple of years ago. That mishap damaged the vanity and swelled the subfloor in several locations. I removed the vanity a couple of days ago, and yesterday I pulled the toilet and prepped the room for painting.

It now feels strange and a little uncomfortable walking past the empty bathroom on my way down the hall to the bedroom. The feeling isn’t quite as jarring as finding an empty cupboard, but it’s close. The bathroom hasn’t looked this bare in 34 years.

On a final note, I’m not going to miss the toilet. Faithfully cleaning it all these years hasn’t exactly endeared me to it. Truthfully, I’m excited about the shiny new number we’ve chosen as its replacement. The new one is sleek and sports interesting curves.

We can have a full-on toilet talk later.

Before Toilet Removal

Empty Bathroom

—Mitchell Hegman

A Big Kitty in My Tree

It’s not unusual to spot a housecat in a tree. They are natural climbers. Even some of the bigger wild cats will climb. But finding a long-extinct saber-toothed cat in your golden willow registers as fairly remarkable.

Weirdly enough, that very thing happened to me.

More on that in a minute.

During the Ice Ages, Montana was home to a variety of exotic fauna, including mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats. Fossil evidence suggests the big cats roamed the northern plains alongside herds of bison and other large prey. These cats were built for power and ambushed the herd beasts when they wanted dinner. All of these large animals disappeared around the end of the last Ice Age (10,000 to 12,000 years ago), likely victims of a changing landscape and possibly the growing presence of early humans across North America.

So, while on a walk along the lakeshore yesterday, I spotted a saber-toothed cat—not of the flesh-and-blood variety, but rather a flat version of one fashioned from metal, wood, and composite materials. The big cat was fastened to a limb by means of lag screws. The obvious work of my neighbor, this.

The cat in my tree came from a now “extinct” and dismantled display of the Pleistocene epoch at the old Montana Historical Society Museum. Surprisingly, I’m not opposed to keeping the big kitty in my tree. I’ve always liked cats. Even flat ones.

I’m sharing two photographs of the cat in my tree:

Saber-Toothed Cat Up Close

Saber-Toothed Cat in the Golden Willow

—Mitchell Hegman

Our Conversation About Dinner

[Scene: The kitchen. A sharp aroma hangs in the air.]

 

ME: (entering) “What’s that smell?”

DESIREE: “Fish sauce.”

ME: “It doesn’t smell very good. What are we eating, exactly?”

DESIREE: “Veggies.”

ME: “Well, the fish sauce doesn’t smell great.”

DESIREE: “It’s fermented.”

ME: “That makes sense. Do I like veggies with fish sauce?”

DESIREE: “Of course.”

ME: “Good to know.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Message in a Bottle

More than a century after Private Malcolm Alexander Neville sailed off to fight in World War I, a message he wrote to his mother washed ashore on a remote Australian beach. Written on August 15, 1916, and sealed inside a Schweppes bottle, the letter struck a hopeful tone. “Having a real good time,” he wrote. “Food is real good so far, with the exception of one meal, which we buried at sea.” The 28-year-old soldier signed off, “Your loving son Malcolm … Somewhere at sea,” and added a note asking that whoever found the message send it to his mother in tiny Wilkawatt, South Australia. Neville was killed in action in France in April 1917.

The bottle surfaced 109 years later on Wharton Beach near Esperance, discovered by a family while collecting rubbish. Amazingly preserved by sand and time, the cork still held, and inside lay the faded pencil letter of a man long gone but not forgotten. “We believe it’s been buried because it’s so well preserved,” said Debra Brown, who helped recover the note. “If it had lived in the ocean for 109 years, it would have sunk to the bottom.” Using surgical tweezers, the family gently freed Neville’s two-page letter and later tracked down his surviving relatives, who were deeply moved by the message that had finally made its way home.

The Bottle

Malcolm Alexander Neville

—Mitchell Hegman

Laws of Nature (Personal Observations and Preferences)

• It’s dumb that the foods you crave are always bad for you.
• You should be able to choose the direction of gravity’s pull.
• Male pattern baldness is just wrong.
• I’d be a lot better off if water tasted like Cold Smoke beer.
• Spiders should be optional.
• There should be some room for adjustment in winter temperatures.
• Bottom line: more flowers.

—Mitchell Hegman

Flat Tires

Not surprisingly, the tire shop didn’t have a Cold Smoke beer… and I really needed one.

Allow me to explain.

The rear, passenger-side tire on our car developed an air leak. As soon as I noticed this, I pumped it full of air and raced off to the tire shop. While a technician worked to find and repair the problem, I poked around the shop a bit. I immediately found a small collection of objects technicians had removed from tires over the years: long screws, nails, a small wrench, and various lengths of metal. Next to this collection, I found three sections cut from tires with large objects impaling them.

This is where I needed the Cold Smoke beer. I wanted to place a beer beside the sections of tire for a better sense of size. Instead, I resorted to placing a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in the foreground before taking the photograph I’m sharing today. I’m astounded by the damage to the tires featured here. What sort of road dynamics can account for this?

After repairing my tire, the technician presented me with the rather tiny rock responsible for my slow leak. Not impressive at all, actually. I’m surprised this little guy managed to work all the way through the tread. I’ve posted a proper photograph of this rock next to a Cold Smoke beer.

Tire Shop Examples

Cold Smoke and Rock

—Mitchell Hegman

Something Voltaire Said

Long before the age of electric guitars and rock stars giving themselves single names such as Sting or Slash, a French writer named François-Marie Arouet did the same. He reinvented himself as Voltaire. Under that single banner, he wrote bold treatises challenging the norms and authorities du jour.

Following are three biting quotes from Voltaire:

—"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”

—"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

—"To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.”

—Mitchell Hegman

The “Happy” Pillow

I sleep with two pillows. One is somewhat firm; the kind you rest your head on as you’re drawn into your dreams. The other is soft and squishy. I call this my “hugging” pillow, and I rather abuse it nightly. I punch and squash it into shape before finally hugging it or sprawling over the top of it.

And then there’s the “happy” pillow. Technically, I share this one with Desiree. It doesn’t serve any practical purpose. I don’t sleep with it. It’s more of a “show” pillow. It just sits there and tells us to be happy. And somehow, looking at it makes me happy.

The Happy Pillow

—Mitchell Hegman

The Good Apprentice

Yesterday, I taught a class filled with a dozen apprentice electricians in their fourth year of training. These are the finest young men and women you can imagine. They proved both intelligent and attentive as we waded through some technical material related to the use of digital multimeters.

I enjoy teaching the willing.

At present, there exists great demand for electricians. And we will need many more as we surge into our electrified future. I found myself particularly impressed when I engaged in side conversations with the students. These are highly motivated people, and all of them revealed how much they enjoy their craft.

It warmed me to hear that. We need these young people on our side. And here we have them.

—Mitchell Hegman

Self-Assessment

Clearly, my thinking is too small to fill even the tiniest crack in the face of a mountain. The slowest-growing pine will reach higher than me. Though both silent and fleeting, the shadow of a passing cloud has a broader impact. But I can out-frenzy the best of them. And if need be, I can raise enough dust to baffle everyone.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Cattle Drive

Montana is known for perpetually supporting a larger population of cattle than people. Though the cow-to-person ratio has narrowed a bit in recent years, data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in early 2024 reveal 2.12 million cattle roaming the state alongside 1.14 million people.

As we might say in my hometown of East Helena, Montana, that’s a plethora of cows. Just kidding. We would never say that. First, we call them cattle around these parts. Second, saying “plethora” might earn you a disciplinary punch in the shoulder.

The other afternoon, as Desiree and I were driving home, we fell in behind—of all things—an old-fashioned cattle drive just as we reached the causeway.

Droving cattle from place to place is no small task. Pushing them in the desired direction can be about as effective as shoveling dirt with a pitchfork. In this instance, two sheriff’s officers and about a dozen cowboys and cowgirls—some on horseback, others in trucks or bouncing along on ATVs—strove to move the herd and keep them together at the same time.

The causeway confounded the cattle. They didn’t appreciate crossing that narrow strip of pavement with water jostling on both sides. The drovers frenzied around the knot of restless animals to keep the herd from blowing up or turning back. In the end, the process of urging them on cost us about a half hour, but Desiree and I enjoyed the event all the same.

Vehicles and Cattle on the Causeway and Strung Along Lake Helena Drive

Cattle Milling on an Open Hillside

A Cowgirl Watching Over the Herd

—Mitchell Hegman

An Alchemist’s Dream

In simpler times, alchemists spent endless hours trying to turn base metals into gold. Their attempts failed, of course. But yesterday, Desiree and I drove a country road and discovered a place where autumn had turned the trees into tall stands of fluttering gold.

A Golden Country Lane

Desiree Under a Shroud of Gold

—Mitchell Hegman

Stacking “Junk” Sounds Together

Watch and listen to the video I’ve shared today. After this, you’ll never carelessly cast aside another “junk” sound again.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jQCurDh9yrQ

My Reincarnation

If reincarnation is a thing, I’ve decided how I want to come back. I want to be that one bird in a string of twenty perched on a wire, facing the wrong direction.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Good Fortune of a Gully Washer

A literal “gully washer” rainstorm swept through the ranchlands late this summer. The heavy runoff waters gouged down all the slopes and thrashed through the gully bottoms, removing and dragging off the accumulations of pine needles and pine cones. In some places, the water scrubbed away thin layers of overburden and exposed an underlayment of rocks.

This occurred in some of my prime rock-hunting ground.

Yesterday, I took a hike through some of the rumpled land and bloodhounded down through the deepest gully bottoms, looking for rocks. I quickly filled my pockets with shale, quartz, and specimens of multicolored jasper. But the most interesting and unusual rock is a weathered chip of limestone.

The bottom is gray and smooth as an eggshell. The top is white and looks like a skyrise city in miniature. What makes this more fascinating is the fact that my neighbor, Kevin, collected a smaller piece similar to this many years ago.

Top View

Bottom View

Side View

—Mitchell Hegman

A Good Reason for Eating Live Frogs

The title of this blog is somewhat deceptive. There really is no good reason to eat live frogs. More on that later.

For now, let’s talk about Traditional Chinese Medicine. I’m referring to the fringe stuff, like eating tiger penis and testicles to treat erectile dysfunction or improve sexual performance. Or that thing where you eat flying squirrel feces to stop bleeding.

I’m a firm “no” on both counts. Mind you, I’m all in on great sexual performance, and I’d prefer not to bleed all over, but there must be better solutions.

Still, there are people who subscribe to all manner of offbeat ways to cure the most ordinary ailments. Recently, an 82-year-old woman from Hangzhou, China, found herself in a shiny new Western-style hospital after swallowing eight live frogs in an attempt to relieve her persistent lower back pain from a herniated disk. Following more folklore than science, she had enlisted her family to catch frogs smaller than the palm of her hand.

You know: eating size.

She downed three frogs immediately after their capture and finished the other five the next day. Not long after swallowing the last one, she was rushed to the hospital with abdominal pain, where doctors quickly determined she had a parasitic infection.

She accepted treatment and was discharged after two weeks. No word on the back pain.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Assembly, Part 2

At the end of one day, and at the beginning of another, we completed the assembly of our new TV table. Honestly, everything fell together spectacularly well. Let’s just go ahead and say that Desiree’s thoughtful direction eased us through. And I only broke one of the twisty hardware-holding whatchacallits, which was readily replaced by one from the packet of extra hardware pieces.

In the end, Desiree and I both love the quality and look of the table.

I’m sharing a photograph of the table finally pushed into place. Please note the Cold Smoke beer on top.

Cheers!

The TV Table in Place

—Mitchell Hegman

The Assembly, Part 1

You know you’re in for a furniture-building rodeo when they hang a long flag of plastic tape from the hardware box.

That flag was one of our first finds when we began to unpackage the thirty pieces required for the full assembly of our new TV table. Upon opening the hardware box, we found something approaching two hundred screws and pieces of hardware.

Faced with such an array of untethered parts stacked against us, Desiree and I did something we had to do: we reached for the instructions.

“You read. I work,” I suggested.

Fortunately, Desiree is fluent in four languages: Tagalog, Bisaya, English, and Construction.

Last evening, we set about assembling the new TV table from the heap of parts we’d scattered about our living room. As of this writing, we are still in the building process. Later today, we hope to finish and put the new table in play.

The Hardware Flag

Me With Instructions Amid the Scattered Parts

—Mitchell Hegman 

The Great Computer Crash of 2025

 My laptop computer did something extremely ungood. I had tethered my smartphone to the machine and was transferring a photograph from my phone when all hell broke loose. At once, everything on the screen began jostling back and forth rapidly. The open windows, icons, and folders on my desktop all distorted themselves into a constant blur. The Esc key didn’t work. Ctrl–Alt–Delete failed.

Finally, I resorted to jamming down the power button for several seconds, which forced a hard shutdown and instantly sucked the screen to black. After a mini-debate with myself, I poked the power button again to see if my machine would blossom back to normal operation.

Nope.

After the machine chased its tail for a minute or so, a message on the screen informed me it “couldn’t connect with the network.” I took a second run at rebooting and achieved the same result. Following that, I shut the laptop down for good.

This trouble makes perfect sense when you consider that my factory warranty recently expired. I’m on my own with this one and will be taking my machine to the computer shop today. At present, I’m writing this on my old laptop, which is limping a little and bumping into things as we proceed. But at least I’m not entirely dead in the water. I’m sharing a photograph of the message I got on the screen of my broken laptop.

The Message on My Computer Screen

—Mitchell Hegman

Thoughts and Statements

• If cheese hadn’t already been invented, I would have done it myself.
• I hear voices in running fans.
• I want to invent a comb that combs out stupid thoughts when people use it.
• In the Philippines, walking around with both hands stuffed in your jacket pockets is considered a sign of arrogance. Doing that here, in the midst of a Montana winter, is necessary.
• Often, the most important missions are those we can’t justify financially.
• Within six months, I plan on swimming with whale sharks.
• I’m convinced that working hard always pays off at some point.
• The technology that got me into the fix rarely gets me out of it.
• You may want to look into what Botox is made from before having an injection.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Heavy Metal Tree

Trees are capable of weird things. They’re also capable of thriving in the harshest of conditions. One way or another, they find a way to survive: from low, heat-warping deserts to high, blizzard-wracked peaks.

Here in Montana, trees must endure radical swings in weather. Some thrive in poor soil and dry, windswept environments. It’s not uncommon to see a pine tree growing straight out of a rock face. Ponderosa pines have learned to survive where wildfires regularly sweep through the understory.

And trees will find a way to work around all manner of obstacles.

I have a section of a fir tree in my cabin loft that grew around and nearly encased a long-dead three-inch lodgepole that had been blown over and caught up in nearby trees before reaching the ground. Early this spring, we felled a tree near my cabin with strands of barbed wire embedded deep inside it. Somewhere in the early 1900s, the tree had served as a living fencepost.

Yesterday, while splitting the last round of fir I brought home from the cabin, I came across a piece that refused to split. After several minutes of me “going at it like a one-armed man killing snakes,” as my friend Kenny used to say, I finally broke it apart with a wedge and sledgehammer. Inside, I found a hook of metal nearly a half inch thick, likely part of a giant broken nail.

I’m sharing two photographs of the metal. In the second, I held a Cold Smoke beer beside it for a sense of scale.

Freshly Split Wood with Embedded Metal

Cold Smoke and Metal

—Mitchell Hegman

Conspicuous Beauty

For the past few days, I’ve been breaking up my day by lugging a round or two from the fir tree I chopped up at the cabin out onto the drive and splitting a few pieces of cordwood by hand. This serves the purpose of satisfying my fairly constant need to “be busy” and provides a solid level of exercise.

A victim of pine beetle infestation, the wood clearly displays the gray-blue staining at the butt end of each round. A conspicuous sign of death. Clear evidence of the killing fungus vectored into the tree by beetles not much larger than a grain of rice.

I don’t like to say this, but the staining is beautiful in its own way. Finish wood milled from beetle-kill trees is quite appealing. Over the years, I’ve used blue pine for a variety of finish projects. I first used it over thirty years ago on the walls of a basement in a house in East Helena. The vaulted ceiling in the cabin runs end to end with tongue-and-groove blue pine. The north wall of our living room is finished with lightly whitewashed blue pine.

A Blue Pine Round

Blue Pine Split into Cordwood

Blue Pine Wall in Our Living Room

—Mitchell Hegman

The Little Big Move

About the only thing I didn’t need was the hand truck.

Allow me to explain. Following the successful installation of our new big-screen TV, I needed to move our old TV stand from the living room to what is now my office. We’re talking about something less than thirty feet in distance.

Oddly enough, this turned out to be “the little big move.” The job consumed the better part of a day and required armfuls of both hand and power tools. The difficulty arose from the fact that I had customized (read: made it really big) the old TV stand to accommodate a 48-inch TV several years ago. To make the move, I needed to unscrew and pry apart nailed pieces from a live-edge slab of blue pine I had used to extend the stand to something near six feet in length. I also removed a glass door and some shelves.

Following the disassembly, I used furniture sliders to push and pull the stand down the hall and into my office. I had no more than an inch to spare when rotating the hulking piece out of the hall and into the room. Once I wrestled the stand into the office, I dragged my collection of tools into the space and clambered around it, reassembling everything I’d torn apart.

Required Tools

The Stand in the Hall

Reassembled Stand

—Mitchell Hegman

Back to My Batchelor Days

Desiree and I purchased a 75” big-screen TV. Wall-mounting and commissioning it proved shockingly easy. That said, a weighty problem did surface—we need a low-built table to support all the associated hardware and, of course, the requisite rocks from my collection that deserve a place beneath the screen.

As a temporary solution, we’ve had to resort to the kind of furnishings I used back in my early, frugal bachelor days. You might recall the bookshelves made from concrete blocks and dimension lumber, giant wooden wire spools pressed into service as tables, and posters standing in for art.

For this project, an old cooler and a plastic storage bin are filling in as our temporary television table. I’m rather pleased with the look and feel of it, truth be told.

The Big Screen and Furnishings Below

—Mitchell Hegman

Buddha’s Hand

The Buddha’s hand is—apologies given now—hands down the weirdest citrus fruit on the block. It looks like a lemon trying to become an octopus. Its origins trace back to the lower slopes of the Himalayas and northeastern India. Botanically, it’s a close cousin of the citron, one of the ancestral citrus species from which many of our familiar lemons and limes descend. What makes it truly odd is the way its robust segments set out on their own and stretch apart as it grows, giving rise to the distinct “fingers” that make each fruit look more like a sprawling sculpture.

Unlike lemons or oranges, Buddha’s hand contains no juice—none at all. Inside, it’s mostly pith, thick and pale. But here’s the twist: the pith isn’t bitter. You can use the whole fruit, rind and all.

I find the scent of Buddha’s hand appealing. It’s bright and floral, with an obvious hint of lemon. Many people simply set a Buddha’s hand on a counter or shelf and let its fragrance fill the room. In the kitchen, it makes for a lively natural flavoring: thinly sliced and candied, infused into vodka or syrup, or grated over fish and pastries where a delicate citrus lift is wanted.

Desiree and I picked up a Buddha’s hand on our latest shopping trip. She used it to flavor baked salmon. I like the way it eased through the other flavors without tipping over any carts.

A Buddha’s Hand

A Look Inside

—Mitchell Hegman

Clearing the Way

I had to fix the creek at the cabin.

Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. The creek is fully functional, and the fish are fine. Rather, at some point during the summer months, a strong wind shoved a dead-standing fir to the ground alongside the creek, blocking the way for anyone (me, specifically) wishing to walk beside it and pitch random sticks, rocks, or pinecones into the water.

Montana being Montana, the weather obliged me yesterday with a cool, snowy day—exactly the kind I enjoy for cutting rounds with my chainsaw. So I lugged my saw down to the creek and powered through a section of the fallen tree. As I cut, the reason for the tree’s death became clear: beetle kill. Each round exposed the gray-blue staining left by the fungus the beetles carry in when they bore for lunch.

It’s the fungus, not the beetles, that chokes the trees to death.

After an hour or so, I had segmented about fifteen feet of the trunk, providing a clear path for walking. I lugged the rounds—the largest measuring sixteen inches across—to my truck and hauled them home for splitting.

The Downed Tree Alongside the Creek

Fungus-Stained Tree Butt

A Collection of Rounds

—Mitchell Hegman

Ponderosa Pine Cones

Let’s talk about pine cones.

For one thing, size doesn’t matter. At present, the tallest trees in existence are coast redwoods, which can attain a height of 350 feet. Yet the redwoods produce cones only about an inch long for the distribution of tiny seeds—about the same size as a tomato seed.

In my section of the woods, ponderosa trees produce the “big-daddy” cones. They’re durable, industrial-sized, and generally as big as a grown man’s fist. The local fir, spruce, and lodgepole pine produce far smaller and considerably more fragile cones.

Many of the ponderosas near my house have produced an abundance of cones this year. I find them beautiful in their symmetry and appreciate them whether hanging in the tree or shed upon the understory.

A ponderosa cone is built to both protect and distribute its seeds—and it does so with prickly authority. The outer scales are thick and armored, each tipped with a sharp, recurved barb—a cat-like claw. These barbs form the tree’s natural defense system, deterring animals from prying open the cone before the seeds fully mature. Handle one long enough, and the claws are bound to snag you.

When mature and dry, the cones open in warm weather, their scales flexing outward to release the winged seeds—each capable of spiraling away on a puff of wind. In cooler, damper conditions, the cones close again, guarding whatever remains inside. This simple, temperature-driven mechanism helps the tree time its seed release for the best chance of success.

I’m sharing a photograph featuring a Cold Smoke beer (as a size reference), a ponderosa pine cone (the larger one), and the much smaller cone from a spruce tree.

Pine Cones in the Tree

Pine Cone Comparison

—Mitchell Hegman

Fine Sand

As I’ve mentioned many times before, my house sits on a literal pile of rocks. I don’t have such a thing as native topsoil in my yard. My property lines are flung across what is essentially a heap of cobbles and boulders plowed into this section of our broad valley by ancient waters.

But an interesting twist flavors the rocky makeup of the ground at the front of my house. I discovered this many years ago when I planted a Russian olive and again when digging a hole for the linden tree outside the bay window. In both instances, while digging a hole in which I could plant the tree, I dug down into a layer of pure sand—almost as fine as flour. The layer of sand lies a bit over a foot below the surface and is at least a foot thick. The linden tree has thrived, I believe, by splaying its roots within this layer.

A few days ago, I started digging a hole for a tree (species to be determined) that we’ll plant some twenty or so feet southwest of the linden early next spring. Happily, after barring and shoveling my way down through the hard-packed rocks, I once again encountered the super-soft layer of sand.

Strange good stuff, this. I’m not sure what unusual dynamics account for layering the sand between shelves of stone, but I appreciate the effort.

I’ve posted photographs of my digging project. This includes a photograph of the sand alongside a Cold Smoke beer. The beer is not a reference for size in this instance—rather, it’s there because I earned a sip.

The Beginning of the Hole

A Sample of Cobbles

A Sample of the Fine Sand  

—Mitchell Hegman