Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Forced Vaccines for Americans and None for Border Invaders

The Biden administration has created a massive human invasion and humanitarian crisis on the southern border of the United States, a continuation of the ill-devised, anti-American policies of the Obama administration.

The border and legal immigration laws are no longer respected by Democrat socialist politicians and freedoms of the American people are trampled increasingly each day. The economic policies are marching us from stagflation, a stagnant economy coupled with inflation, to galloping inflation. Politicians are infatuated with excessive spending and ad nauseam money printing, not backed by any goods and services, worthless paper, too much money chasing too few goods, and hurting the middle class.

While unvetted foreign invaders are allowed into the United States and some bussed into conservative small towns in the cover of darkness, with not so much as a Covid-19 swab test, Americans are being fired for not allowing the government and their employers to mandate forced vaccinations against their religious and health beliefs, students are disenrolled from schools, some doctors refuse medical care to non-vaccinated patients, and other medical professionals harass their patients into compliance and demand that they show a copy of their vaccination cards which they in turn must provide electronically to health departments in various states.

As I learned today, some pharmacies no longer fill prescriptions as their number one job, they vaccinate and vaccinate. My prescription today at CVS pharmacy in Montclair’s Target store was not filled after 36 hours. The pharmacist claimed that she needed another hour since she had to do twenty vaccines per hour, especially boosters – that is a vaccine every three minutes! She did not seem to care that I needed my prescription yesterday.

When did our medical system become so lousy, fast resembling the socialized medical care under communism? It all changed in March 2020 when a national emergency was declared, and we have been in perennial lockdowns and now forced vaccinations that do not seem to work very well and patients need endless boosters which is great economic news for pharmacies and manufacturers alike.

Nursing homes are keeping their patients under national emergency lockdowns again, a cruel move since there are zero cases of Covid-19 sickness in the Pro Medica nursing home where my mom is a patient. Additionally, the staff must wear masks and shields even though nobody is showing signs of illness.

Visitations are allowed through a glass wall in the tiny antechamber where people come and go all the time. One visitor at a time can sit in a chair and talk through a smart phone to their loved one who is in a wheelchair behind the glass wall of the lobby. Even hard-core prisoners have more rights than what this Pro Medica facility allows their permanent residents.

Freedoms are being squeezed each day and we silently accept the political and medical tyranny.

Friday, October 22, 2021

Past and Present History Demonstrate Abuse of National Emergency

National emergency is an interesting and useful government tool. History in general demonstrates the point.

The national lockdown to “flatten the curve for two weeks” has turned into three mandatory shots, that may or may not work, to keep your job and feed your family. Many nursing homes in Fairfax, Virginia, have been under lockdown again, with staff wearing not just masks but shields as well and patients wearing masks even when alone in their rooms.

The corporate owners of the nursing home where my mom is a resident admitted that there were zero positive Covid-19 tests among the patients and zero positive Covid-19 tests among the staff. Have they lifted the lockdown? No, they are waiting for further instructions from the health department of Virginia, they claim. Even prisoners in jail get more free time outside for fresh air, sunshine, and recreation than the nursing home patients.

Are we really free in America anymore or is it just an illusion of the masses who are dumbed down to levels not even the most staunch Soviet or fascist totalitarians would have ever dreamed of?

Lockdowns were presented to the American public as a national emergency due to a pandemic. Billions of dollars have been made in profits at the expense of the American public while pharma “saved” their lives with Covid-19 vaccine, rushed to the market under emergency use authorization.

Cheap drug cures were denied to people and still are in many states and countries. The globalist propaganda vilified useful drugs and fired any doctors and nurses who were actually preserving their Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. They kept most of their patients alive without vaccines.

Four weeks after Hitler took office, a national emergency was proclaimed.  It was not a medical one but it violated the rights of men just the same. None of the ordinary German citizens thought the emergency extraordinary or that it violated or even mildly inhibited their rights as human beings. None of the “little Hitlers,” as Milton Mayer called them, local or provincial officials, ascribed any moral evil to Hitler or to his constant edicts and mandates.

According to Mayer and the ten ordinary Germans he interviewed after WWII, Hitler was a man, who had his fellow Germans’ interest in mind, and, by doing what he did, became a testament to democracy, to the “ability of us little men to become great and to rule the whole world. Such a man is the modern pattern of the demagogical tyrant, ‘the people’s friend’ of Plato’s mob democracy.” He was a “charismatic leader,” not unlike some modern leaders.

While writing the introduction to his book, They Thought They Were Free, Milton Mayer stated: “As an American, I was repelled by the rise of National Socialism in Germany. As an American of German descent, I was ashamed. As a Jew, I was stricken. As a newspaperman, I was fascinated.”

As a newspaperman Mayer analyzed Nazism and the Nazi doctrine based on racial superiority by interviewing ten ordinary Germans. Mayer even tried to get a meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1935ing  but failed.

Mayer wrote that Nazism was the mass movement of the average German and “not the tyranny of a diabolical few over helpless millions.” While he did not find the average German, he claimed, he found instead “ten Germans sufficiently different from one another in background, character, intellect, and temperament to represent, among them, tens of millions of Germans and sufficiently like unto one another to have been Nazis.”

Mayer concluded that “Nazism overcame Germany  not by attack from without or by subversion from within,” but it was what most Germans wanted, under pressure of combined reality and illusion.” And Mayer realized that citizens from any country, who would succumb to that kind of pressure, “no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm.”

Not unlike our large cities today, the radicalism of the German cities bred howling Communists, then howling Nazis, and “nobody knows just how they will howl tomorrow.”

Uneducated men, young and old, who knew nothing about politics, history, wars, and the world, claimed to be Nazis, national socialists. The massive newspapers, fliers, and posters everywhere spewing non-stop propaganda convinced them that they knew what they were talking about. Many had a copy of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, but never opened it.

How did they “feel” about the regime? The regime promised the uneducated bread and a “thousand year Reich.” It did not matter to the masses how long this empire would last. The uneducated masses were only concerned about the pebble in their shoes as the Roman soldiers used to say. In this case the pebble in their shoes was bread and a people’s car (Volkswagen) in every driveway.

History does repeat itself. American masses want free education, free food, free housing, free health care, free child care, free guaranteed income, equity of outcomes, and free travel. That they are going to get it at the expense of someone else’s freedom and violation of their human rights, they don’t care.

Most educated Germans were offended by the Nazi book burnings and even by the Nazi burnings of synagogues, and by Kristallnacht. Then there was the Reichstag fire, the burning in 1933 of the Parliament building, four weeks after Hitler took power. It was blamed on the communists. Then synagogues were blown up as a “safety measure” and Jews were locked up for their own “protection.”

The “little men” in Germany had no substantial status in the community - “if everybody is little, nobody is little.” And such men can be easily manipulated, controlled, and ruled. The “little men” were sixty-nine million plus in a nation of seventy million. “They were the Nazis, the little men to whom, if ever they voiced their own views outside their own circles, bigger men politely pretended to listen without ever asking them to elaborate.” (Milton Mayer, p. 45)

These little men believed in the Nazi program and practice, “the democratic part.” They did not know that Nazism [national socialism] was total tyranny which degraded its adherents and enslaved its opponents and adherents alike; terrorism and terror in daily life, private and public; brute personal and mob injustice at every level of association; a flank attack upon God and a frontal attack upon the worth of the human person and the rights which that worth implies.” (Milton Mayer, p. 47)

One German, when asked why he believed in National Socialism [Nazism], he replied, “Because it promised to solve the unemployment problem. And it did. But I never imagined what it would lead to. Nobody did.” (Milton Mayer, p. 47)

But with it they enjoyed ten-dollar holiday trips for the family in the ‘Strength Through Joy’ Nazi program, trips to Norway in summer and Spain in winter, trips to people who had never before dreamed of such trips. Nobody went hungry, nobody was cold, nobody was sick and uncared for. What is there not to like about Nazism from the standpoint of the ordinary German? The horrors of the Nazi regime were never advertised anywhere nor did they reach any ordinary German. (p. 49)

The National Socialist regime promised bread and butter and delivered housing, cars, health, and hope, a New Order the average German liked. They were enthralled during Nazi festivals by everyone’s enthusiasm after so many years of galloping inflation and disillusion. They explained the looting in this euphoria of predatory behavior with euphemisms such as “little men gone wild.”

As long as the “little men” were left alone in their mundane lives, the compulsory military service, the secret police, the rationing, the constant propaganda on street posters, in newspapers, on radio, on fliers, the Friday evenings and Sunday mornings compulsory public volunteer work, and the propaganda on public address systems were not meant for them. “Service to the tyranny” was necessary and non-compliance was highly frowned upon.

When on November 10, 1938, Mayer wrote, a mob of children were carrying sacks of candy out of a Jewish candy store whose windows had been smashed, parents and bystanders were watching and did nothing and said nothing. Only one witness is alleged to have said, “You are teaching your children to steal.”

In 2020 America, we all watched in horror as mobs of American young people looted and set fire to store after store and none were punished and sent to jail and good Americans did nothing, just watched.

Mayer believed that the ordinary Germans were guilty of tyranny and Nazism because “nothing was done, or attempted, that they would not stand for.” Nobody rose to protest the sacrilege, the lawless destruction of valuable property, statues, books, synagogues, stores, etc., and nobody clamored for authorities to uphold the law.

And history repeats itself in another place and in another time. The citizens go along with the program and remain silent.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Pro Medica's Perennial Lockdowns

I got a phone call this morning from a young lady named Martina, reading a canned corporate script which made her sound like a recording, apologizing, and blaming a computer glitch for not contacting families whose loved ones are residents in the Pro Medica-owned nursing homes.

I picked up the phone and she was none too pleased when I interrupted her prepared and written speech with annoying but logical questions. This was the second call on behalf of the corporate office in Colorado since the lockdowns started on March 14, 2020.

She informed me that last week there were zero positive Covid tests among staff and residents, yet they must wait another week of zero [a worthless test deemed so by the CDC] before they may hear from the health department to release them from lockdown.

They are the only nursing home chain in Fairfax County that is keeping their residents prisoners under a false pretense when nobody has been sick with Covid-19 lately at this facility, only one or two staff and a resident were positive but asymptomatic, according to various staff members.

The staff is being forced to wear masks and shields and the residents wear masks, even those who live alone in their rooms and do not leave their rooms.

I explained to the young woman that I have just returned from Florida and few people were masked there, mostly tourists from New York and other liberal states. The locals were getting sunshine, vitamin D, and fresh salty air. Florida flu cases had dropped to one of the lowest levels in the country.

I asked Martina, since the flu season is starting as the cold fall and winter seasons are moving in, prime time for any type of flu, are they going to keep everyone locked down in perpetuity as it is impossible to keep the population at zero flu cases? Her answer was, of course not. However, she could not tell me what the company’s plans were. I asked her about the facility’s death statistics, and she told me that she did not have those numbers, only corporate does. Who exactly does have those numbers at corporate? Not surprisingly, she did not know.

Martina did say that they must wait on the health department of Virginia and the CDC guidelines before they can allow patients to be free again. All the other nursing homes have been allowing visitations for weeks now while Pro Medica is keeping their nursing home patients under draconian lockdown.

Criminals in prison are treated better and have more freedoms than these patients have. As I tried to argue my point, it was ignored, Martina was only interested in reading the prepared script to me in its totality and did not like to be interrupted.

The insanity of these controlling people with their manufactured pandemic is appalling. Zoo people in Tampa, Florida, are giving Covid-vaccine to skunks because this gain-of-function flu virus is found both in animals and humans.

Covid-19 will never be eradicated among humans like the polio was. The polio virus hosted only in humans, never in animals, it was therefore possible to eradicate it in most western countries.

Are cases of previously eradicated viruses like polio coming back? Perhaps from third world nations, whose citizens are now pouring through our non-existent southern border, individuals who are neither tested nor forced to be vaccinated against their will like American citizens are.

Flu viruses mutate constantly. That is why each year people get a flu shot with a concoction of what pharma thinks may or may not be effective this year, with a success rate of below 50 percent. Are people in nursing homes in the U.S. and elsewhere in places like Australia going to be locked down for the rest of their remaining lives?

Something does not compute when the same people who told us that the earth is overpopulated and we must be culled down to less than a billion, are now trying to save our lives with a vaccine.

 

Friday, October 1, 2021

The Regressed American Society



It seems that every election cycle America-loving citizens pin their hope on a man or a woman at the local, state, or national level who is willing to support the interests of our nation instead of the communist globalist agenda.  They know deep down that all politicians are liars and have a price – they can be bought by the wealthy globalist swamp. Add into the mix the non-governmental organization (NGOs) and their lobbyists to whom the same politicians are beholden. But honest Americans who still believe in honest and fair elections do not give up despite massive voting fraud.

As soon as these potentially-honest politicians are in office, if they don’t play the globalist games that benefit only those in power and the idiot populace on perennial welfare and illegal aliens who do not speak English, do not understand the issues, nor do they care about our country’s history and traditions, only the continuation of the economic cash cow that they have invaded our borders for, the politicians are denied committee assignments of any significance and cash infusions for pet projects in their respective states, almost assuring that they will not get re-elected. Pay for play is a powerful incentive and tool to become corrupt even though you may have started with honesty and integrity.

If a candidate’s stated interests and platforms seem to coincide in some minor or major way with your vision, you become their tireless advocate, fundraiser, election officer, and overall supporter. If they lose to voter fraud, mail-in ballots or to boxes of miraculously found unopened ballots with exclusive Democrat voters, you dust off, you don’t give up, and continue to fight your losing battle against useful idiots, Marxist computer programmers, hackers, and armies of illegal voters who steal your legal vote. It is remarkable that you don’t give up and believe in miracles.

In the meantime, you are ignoring the brainwashing in public schools and universities that your children and grandchildren have been exposed to and still are. You are too busy making a living in order to give them the latest luxuries that seem to define them and to give their bored lives meaning.

You provide your children of all ages with so much materialism and abundance that they do not know what it is to suffer physically from hunger, from real pain and suffering, from deprivation, from lack of electricity, food, and basic remedies for illness.

You give your children the best. They are well fed, well clothed, have a luxurious and often expensive roof over their heads, heat, air conditioning, fresh water, bottled water, the latest entertainment gadgets, medical care on demand, expensive schooling in Ivy league colleges and universities staffed with Marxist professors who are busy washing their brains and transforming them into anti-Americans who loathe the very system that had made them so prosperous in the first place and their lives so easy.

They have everything they can possibly want or need. So they are bored and have lost gratitude for what they have. They have no faith in anything, they are unhappy, faithless, compass-less, triggered, micro-aggressed by others’ words, by alleged and imagined thoughts, and are so profoundly depressed in their plentiful lives.

They inject themselves with drugs to get high, spoiled and lost as they are, with no respect for anything or anybody, certainly not authority, not even for themselves. They hate their parents and grandparents and consider them stupid. Some Marxist activists, who are your children’s teachers, tell them how much smarter they are than their parents, and that their parents are stupid and woefully inadequate.

When those parents and grandparents who had experienced real oppression in other countries would have died, these new generations of spoiled, ungrateful, bored, drug-addled, confused, highly opinionated and unhappy brats will be the second generation of useful idiots who would have never known real freedom, and would consider their totalitarian government oppression as the norm.

The Democrats and their media empire have been quite busy for the last four presidential election cycles, advertising that the old system will never come back and they must get used to the “new normal,” the regressed American society marching towards a third world welfare culture in which elite globalists and their political lackeys are replacing Americans with illegals at an alarming rate. And Americans believed them!

 

 

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

Reading List for Summer

Every summer our Marxist teachers, prompted by the Communist Party’s Ministry of Education, sent us home with a reading list of classical literature titles as well as the dear leader’s latest propaganda and “enlightened” writings and speeches by the infamous Marxist “revolutionaries” such as Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

One of the items missing from the dear leader’s list was accurate information about their real biographies, not the lies about their “amazing” ideologies and bloody struggles.

These Marxists left in their social activist wake, in their effort to bring about communism to the masses, a false and miserable equality that killed people’s spirit, their freedom, their pride, their humanity, robbed them of their wealth, and put so many in gulags and mass graves while the “revolutionaries” prospered with confiscated wealth from the millions they killed.

There was no way to research through communist archives and few people were given access to any documents that might reveal embarrassing histories about their Marxist “heroes” and bloody psychopathic social activists.

I did not bother reading the dear leader’s latest propaganda, but I certainly enjoyed the classics. Many books were banned and forbidden reading, and could not be found in the local library I visited but other red-bound tomes that promoted the “class struggle” and other communist propaganda were on the shelves in multiple copies.

The local librarian was a dull and ignorant communist apparatchik who fashioned herself as a learned person. She attended night school because her days were busy with propaganda and snitching on her fellow citizens, friends, and family. Her decaying and yellowed teeth from excessive cheap Carpați cigarette smoking made her look much older than she was. She wore an ugly grey suit with permanent food stains and a lapel bejeweled with a communist red star insignia.

Dry cleaners were hardly accessible or affordable to the oppressed masses and even to government informers like her. She pretended to be my friend to get information on innocent people that she could then turn in for extra cash or other rewards. But I had her number while pretending to be naïve.

I borrowed so many books, four at a time, from my summer list and read insatiably. I wanted to know as much as I could about the real world outside of our heavily guarded borders with menacing soldiers told to shoot anybody on site if they tried to cross without authority or in the dead of night. Our communist world was a prison that kept us locked in.

I found a cool place to read, away from noise and interference with my daydreaming. That place was under a lone small apple tree at the edge of a wheat field, not far from our concrete apartment complex. I could stop reading for a moment, raise my eyes to the clear blue sky and imagine my journey to a fascinating place, an impossibility over time, space, or tightly guarded and latched borders. Freedom existed only in my imagination which could carry me anywhere if I read the right kind of book, the magical carpet to amazing places.

At Maita’s house in the mountainous village, in the green grass in her orchard, under the plum or quince trees, I could lose myself in the pages of amazing books and fly away on imaginary trips to faraway places. At lunchtime her voice and the smell of cooking from the outdoor summer wood-burning stove brought me back to reality.

Surrounded by buzzing bees, the occasional chirping birds, the gentle breeze, sunshine, and the blue and green mountains, I was in my own garden of Eden. And I learned that freedom existed outside of our heavily guarded borders and people were happy, and the “evil” and “dangerous” capitalism allowed people to live much better lives than we did under the socialist boot of the Communist Party who filled our heads with daily propaganda and lies. I knew then that I had to escape.

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

The High Line and the Rotary Snowplow


A small park in Breckenridge is dedicated to the railroad workers of the South Park Line who kept the rail line operational from 1873 to 1937, a feat that required backbreaking work and sacrifice under harsh weather in winter – bitter cold, high winds, tall mounds of drifting snow, and avalanches. Brave railroaders fought the severe weather all winter long.

The winter days were so cold that, despite doubling up on wool underwear, shirts, pants, socks, coveralls, and jackets, by the end of the day, all clothes were frozen on the rail workers’ bodies. Returning home from a day’s work, men had to stand by the fire to thaw out before their wives were able to peel off their frozen clothing.

The Summit Historical Society in Colorado preserved amazing photos of the difficult snow weather conditions when the train and its huge rotary plow was covered in snow and frozen over. One photo shows an engine and the bucking plow at Kokomo in the Ten Mile Canyon, around 1915.

There were many things that could derail the train and cause horrible accidents in the middle of a gale and snow, when visibility was low – packed ice, snow, and rocks.

Archive photo of 1915

In blinding conditions, train engineers used a “bucking” or “butterfly” plow like No. 9 to push through the high snow drifts. When the engine stopped because of the high drifts, the engineer uncoupled the engine from the train and charged the drift, reversing the engine and “bucking” until “he rammed his way through.” According to the experts, the “bucking” required skill on the part of the engineer; if he did not back up fast enough, the engine could stall.


Railroaders were a tough bunch. They could not communicate with their dispatcher, they were on their own to extricate themselves from mountains of snow and ice, clear the track, and keep the train and the line moving. And they had one tool that helped them fight avalanches and tall drifts on Borcas Pass and Ten Mile Canyon, the “High Line” – the rotary snowplow.


The 108-ton rotary engine snowplow required six or seven “smoke-belching locomotives” to help propel it forward while the blades worked like a modern snow blower, blasting snow up to thirty feet on both sides of the railroad tracks.


According to the Summit Historical Society, the snowplow required four people to operate it – the pilot, the engineer, and two firemen. “The pilot sat in front, behind the blades, where he had a clear view of the track. Over the roar of the engine and blades, the pilot used whistle signals to communicate with the engines pushing the rotary.” Because the noise was so deafening, the pilot and the engineer communicated using bells and hand signals. I wonder how quickly this crew developed deafness from the high decibels, particularly since each shift lasted twelve hours.


The weather was so rough, the plow’s doors would ice-shut and had to be pried open from the outside. The rotary plow would be overwhelmed by snow and stop. During such time, “snow diggers” (“snowbirds”) would shovel the soaring drifts by hand, bringing the snow’s height to the height of the plow so that “the rotary could resume chewing through the snow.” These snow diggers lived in box cars, going wherever the rotary plow went.

One engine of the rotary snowplow

Railroad water bucket

Travel across the nation has come a long way since those times. Humans have always used ingenuity to beat the harsh weather and terrain in their quest for mobility. Americans have always loved the open roads and the rough weather never stopped them from their quest to go to impossible places and rarified heights.

                                            

Monday, September 13, 2021

Labor Day Trip to Colorado


I have enjoyed enormously our last trip to Colorado, and it wasn’t just the breathtaking vistas of rocky mountains, dizzying drops, and majestic mountains 14,000 feet tall.

The red eye flight to Denver was uneventful and the drive to the suburbs took us again past the infamous blue bronco statue with red eyes, a stallion standing high and alone in the middle of a hay pasture. Another statue of two eagles stood deceptively on the side of the interstate, fooling us into thinking that they were real.

Breckenridge

The blue spruce, evergreens, and aspens colored our days with a palette of blues, greens, and white contrasting starkly with the vividly blue sky, sunshine, cold lake waters, and furious rapid waters the size of creeks carving into the mountain or running over rocks and boulders standing in the way.

Lake Dillon is a man-made reservoir that provides fresh water for the city of Denver and is in Summit County, south of I-70 and bordered by the towns of Frisco, Silverthorne, and Dillon. It has 18 moderate trails at an altitude ranging from 9,025 to 13,845 feet above sea level. At the bottom of the 79 ft. deep reservoir, fed by the Blue and Snake Rivers, rests the old town which was flooded after the population was relocated for the third time (1961-1963) and the dam built.

Vail slopes at above 11,000 ft.

We picnicked high above its rim, with breathtaking views of white sailboats floating gently on the deep blue waters. We accidentally crashed a country wedding taking place at a scenic view stop along the trail. The sun was bright, the humidity low, there were no bugs disturbing our lunch, and the trail lead us higher and higher along a dizzying drop with evergreens jutting from the ground here and there. One strange buzzing insect could be heard in the bushes and a lone chipmunk came out briefly to get some sun.

Lake Dillon from above

Rubber duck race in Breckenridge

Not the least entertaining was the rubber duck race in Breckenridge when thousands of competitors paid a fee to float their numbered yellow rubber ducks down the creek in hopes that they would win the coveted $1,500 prize. The rest was sheer fun and excitement among both children and parents who brought them there. My oldest grandson managed to fall in and wet his hiking boots and socks while the other grandson was upset because he did not get to fall in like his brother.

Snow plow in the former Breckenridge train station

The Breckenridge train station celebrated the steam engine that plowed its way through mountains of snow and through transportation history. Civilization could not have existed without the rail and the steam locomotive.

The hues of green and blue mountains were tinged with armies of white barked aspens, digging their roots only 12 inches into the ground but connecting to each other like an army of electrically connected strings of Christmas lights. When one aspen falls, they all do.

The 3 a.m. trip to the ER due to acute mountain sickness (AMS) allowed me to experience the next day the beauty of Vail in a climbing gondola and in the company of family I cherish.

However painful it was to wake up at 2:30 a.m. out of breath and with an excruciating headache and nausea like I’ve never felt before, my eyes were wide open watching the myriad of twinkling stars outside our window, so close and perfect that I felt that I could have extended my hands and touched some of them.

Vail at 11,00 feet

Stops in Frisco, Georgetown, Evergreen, and Idaho Falls, a lovely western-style town from a by-gone era when energy was provided by a water wheel, completed the journey. I even found minerals for my grandson who has a fascination with faceted minerals, rocks, and walking sticks. To him pyrite is not just fool’s gold, but a shiny sample of the magical inner earth hidden under the majestic beauty of rocks, luscious and thick forests of evergreens and aspens, and cold-water creeks and rivers.