I think the most important tool that we have to our people, it's the men and women on the ground. It's the communities that live there. They know historical wildfire. They know what assets they got. They know what the values at risk are.
Curtis Hartenstine:So that's the tool, and that tool is never gonna go away. I'm a big believer in technology and the human component, I don't think, could ever be removed from the equation.
Elizabeth Schilling:Welcome to Western Watts, the podcast where Tri-State and our cooperative members explore what it takes to power the West. From reliability to wildfire mitigation, we dive into the energy issues that matter most to rural, agricultural, and mountain communities across Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Wyoming.
Curtis Hartenstine:Well, thanks for all first of all, for having me. I am the wildfire mitigation program manager.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thanks for being here. Alright. We'll start with just some basic background on you. Where are you from?
Curtis Hartenstine:I grew up in a rural part of Southern New Jersey, not far from the Delaware Bay.
Elizabeth Schilling:How did you get here? When did you get here?
Curtis Hartenstine:When did I get here? Like many good stories, there's a girl involved. I after graduating from college, after working a little bit here and there, I entered the Peace Corps. And as I was flying to our Peace Corps location, which was Nepal, wound up sitting next to this beautiful blue eyed gal named Amy from Ohio. One thing led to another.
Curtis Hartenstine:We're a couple. Three years later, we've gotta leave the country. Where do we go? Well, let's go to Colorado because she got into grad school, and I was just tagging along at that point.
Elizabeth Schilling:And you've been here since then?
Curtis Hartenstine:Over twenty years now.
Elizabeth Schilling:Wow. That's great. Where did you go to school?
Curtis Hartenstine:I went to school my undergrad from a little liberal arts college in Western Pennsylvania called Juniata College. Just about 1,200 students there. Beautiful setting out in the coal country of Western Pennsylvania. And I studied forest ecology there and also had the opportunity to study abroad while I was there too. So a little bit of time in in Ecuador at that point.
Curtis Hartenstine:And then I did my master's degree several years later in Colorado once I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, from the University of Colorado at Denver where I get a master's in environmental science and water quality.
Elizabeth Schilling:So are you in Denver, or where do you live exactly?
Curtis Hartenstine:We currently live in Lyons, but I've lived in Denver. I've lived in Durango. I lived in Berthoud, and Lyons is the best of all in my opinion.
Elizabeth Schilling:Sounds great. Well, Julia is our expert treasure hunter, so I think she found some good additional questions about you.
Julia Perry:Oh, yeah. I perused your resume. You were a ship rigger.
Curtis Hartenstine:That's right.
Julia Perry:What is that?
Curtis Hartenstine:What goes back to my roots in rural South Jersey, being so close to the bay, the ocean, we're water people. Even though I'm a pasty redhead with
Julia Perry:the the wrong spot if you're a water person.
Curtis Hartenstine:No. This is true. And it's pretty sunny for a a redhead like myself. But having that affinity towards the ocean easily lend itself to getting on the boats and fishing and crabbing with friends. My father was in the marine police.
Curtis Hartenstine:When I was in college, I helped to restore a 1928 Delaware Bay oyster scooter about 120 feet, from stem to stern. And as a a tall ship, it's actually the official tall ship of New Jersey, so it's all that tall ship stuff. The big mass and huge hawsers and heavy sails. And so I got an appreciation for sailing and rigging and working those kinds of systems on on old wooden boats. And after I graduated college from in that school in Pennsylvania, floundered for a little bit, made my way to Martha's Vineyard where my brother was living, and needed a job.
Curtis Hartenstine:And didn't wanna be a plumber, didn't wanna be electrician, wasn't quite ready to use my degree. So, I found some work in maritime industry and started working for the Martha's Vineyard Shipyard, and and there I would rig sailboats. And in the winter, we would take all the rigging off and the and the mass off and then bring them on shore and store them. In the summer, we'd put them all back and tow boats and take sailing trips and voyages and all that kind of fun stuff.
Julia Perry:I watched a documentary once about a great coal country town, and what really surprised me was that the forest there are gorgeous and old and, you know, it almost feels European, you know, how just kind of ethereal they are. You know?
Curtis Hartenstine:Yeah. Yeah. The beautiful mixed deciduous forest of of that part of the country are really fantastic because there is still some old growth there, which is pretty rare, especially on the East Coast Of The United States because so much of it was was removed and and turned into housing and ships and and industry back when, you know, the the the reals of our country were getting going, and and they were building our society. So to find those passive old growth were really special. Got to study in a lot of old growth beach forest.
Curtis Hartenstine:We got to do some research in rhododendron forest, and, yeah, it's always felt home for me. So I've always enjoyed it.
Julia Perry:Is that kinda what sparked your interest in going to school for forestry?
Curtis Hartenstine:It was. Plus, my middle name is Forrest. No lie. Two r's. But I always felt at home in the woods.
Curtis Hartenstine:Being a a young kid running around, at the end of my street was was a was a Forrest. Just some I don't know who owned it. Private state, whatever. We rode our BMX bikes all over that place, and that's where I would go every day after school with my golden retriever and go walk him and run with him. And and I'm sure that's led me, part of the reason why I'm here today.
Julia Perry:Sounds like a storybook.
Curtis Hartenstine:Me and my golden retriever lived in the forest. Yeah. Maybe.
Julia Perry:Also, it sounds like you're contractually obligated to go into forest stuff. So
Curtis Hartenstine:Well, I was I was definitely obligated to get out of my house because my mom was a single mom, and she needed me to meet and my brother out of the building on occasion.
Elizabeth Schilling:I wanna hear a little bit more about the Peace Corps. It seems like you've got a desire to give back. Tell us about that.
Curtis Hartenstine:Yeah. So, I mean, I mentioned in my undergraduate degree, I got an opportunity to study abroad in Ecuador, and my college degree is in forest ecology. And when I went to Ecuador, I was studying tropical forest ecology. And, of course, they have a portion of the Amazon Basin there. And when I was first getting orientated to the program in Ecuador, getting to know my host family, getting to know the university in Quito, I learned that the university had a field station deep in the jungle on the other side of the Andes.
Curtis Hartenstine:And we got to visit that field station, and it just blew my mind as a kid who was interested in the woods because it was, you know, all the things you think about in the National Geographic book of jungles. It was pink river dolphins. It was piranha. It was 11 species of primate, 300 species of birds, huge saber trees, saw jaguar, you know, all these things. And I thought, wow.
Curtis Hartenstine:How do I get back there? Well, in studying during the course of my studies, I came to befriend the director of the field station who's one of my professors. I expressed my interest with him to to to to engage more with the research field station, and he suggested an internship. So So I wound up cutting my studies short in Ecuador. I finished that first semester.
Curtis Hartenstine:The plan was to do two semesters. I finished that first one, took a leave absence from school, and then went and did an internship at the field station where I lived in the buildings with the local guides and the builders and Ecuadorians and tribal folks. And so I learned Spanish, and I really liked it. I really, really enjoyed it. So I started thinking later as I got back stateside, well, how can I, you know, further that experience both, on a personal level of learning the cultures and the people and the new experiences, but also, you know, what I learned educationally and, you know, ideally professionally at some point about forests and and management, of those kinds of forests, and what what can I learn from a completely different experience?
Curtis Hartenstine:And all those thoughts culminated with a recruiter from the Peace Corps that came to my college during my senior year, and the light bulb kinda went on. I was like, oh, this is how I could do it. And the the path to Peace Corps back then, this was, gosh, 1998, '19 '90 '9 when I was initially applying. It was fairly lengthy. It took about three, four months, to go through, but that's ultimately what launched my application into the Peace Corps, which which got me in.
Curtis Hartenstine:How it worked for me in the Peace Corps was I gave them all the skills and abilities I had, which, you know, to be honest, were not that many. I mean, I was a young kid who had never really practiced forestry, but I had a degree and I had some drive and I had a little bit of knowledge. And I had availability, you know, and I I presented those to the Peace Corps and they sent me a letter and they said, okay, Curtis, let's go to Nepal in February. And I said, that's great. Let's go to Nepal in February.
Curtis Hartenstine:I had no idea where I'd be sent. I figured they'd send me to that Latin American country because I could speak Spanish. Turns out it was more of a function of my skills and the time frame and what was open. So they enrolled me in a community forestry program there. So after about three months of training, I was equipped with a little bit of language, little bit of technical knowledge, and a and I kid you not, a huge briefcase of medical supplies.
Julia Perry:For when you get bit by something?
Curtis Hartenstine:Bit by something, ingest something, fall on something. There were medications in there that probably should not just be handed to people, but we had a lot of training that goes along with them too.
Julia Perry:What's the forest like in Nepal?
Curtis Hartenstine:The forest in Nepal is pretty diverse. If you think of Nepal, most people think of the Himalaya, and that's, only about a third of the country. But when you think about how steep those mountains rise, it's very similar to the front range here of the Rockies. Our rockies have a little bit of foothills, and then they then they grow up pretty darn quick. In Nepal, there's, like, no foothills, man.
Curtis Hartenstine:It just goes straight uphill. And so you've got these extreme relief in topography. And the way I can best illustrate that is where I lived at my first posting in Nepal was down in the river bottom, and it was subtropical. We were growing mangoes. It was hot.
Curtis Hartenstine:It was humid, and it was very tropical, subtropical environment. Well, every now and then, I'd need to go up to the big city, the big city. Right? The town as it were, a large village in reality. And that was about 2,000 feet up the mountain.
Curtis Hartenstine:And as you walk up that mountain, you'd start moving through these different biotypes, and you'd start getting into subtropical, into temperate, and then, you know, these different kinds of ecological zones. Okay. This one is suitable for growing rice, and this one's suitable for growing wheat. And you'd literally see that transition because it's pretty steep as you hiked up the hill all the way to the top, which where it was subalpine and ultimately, alpine above tree line. So many different forest types there.
Curtis Hartenstine:They have rhododendron forests that are, like, they're, like, 30 feet tall, these trees, with blooms that are the size of pie plates.
Julia Perry:It must smell really nice. Right?
Curtis Hartenstine:It does. It does. It does. Until you got around the water buffalo and then it didn't smell as nice. But
Julia Perry:which one did you like more? Did you like the forest of Ecuador or Nepal butter?
Curtis Hartenstine:I have to say from a biological point of view, an ecological point of view, I don't think the Amazon can be beat in in terms of the diversity of species there, the quantity of life there, the variety of even in such a small area, the kinds of environment you can have were were pretty extreme. So I thought that and it was so foreign for me to to be amongst that kind of of species and and those kinds of environments that that, for me, stood out more in in a an impression of the forest itself.
Elizabeth Schilling:And so from Tri-State's perspective, we have high voltage transmission lines across such diverse terrain. It feels like we can either, one, be at risk from fire or, two, be the risk of a fire. How does Tri-State look at both of those risks, and how do we approach all of
Curtis Hartenstine:that? And Tri-State's primary focus, not exclusive, but primary focus is to prevent that accidental ignition. Let's make sure that that spark doesn't occur, that that arc fault doesn't occur, and that we prevent that accidental ignition from even happening in the first place. So that's really where we place the bulk of our efforts.
Elizabeth Schilling:What's something you wish more people understood about the level of effort electric utilities have to put into wildfire mitigation overall?
Curtis Hartenstine:Well, you know, specific to Tri-State, I'd like people to appreciate how diverse our territory is and how many different ecosystems and landscape types in which we work. We've got over 200,000 miles of service territory. That's about 6,000 miles of high voltage transmission line running from Wyoming down in New Mexico and through Nebraska, Colorado. So if you think about that, there's there's sagebrush, there's short grass prairie, there's tall grass prairie, there's mixed conifer forest, there's there's subalpine fir, there's, you know, just an extreme variety of landscapes that all have their own wildfire fire risk. So Tri State has to develop a, a mitigation plan that can address all these different kinds of risk because the risk is not spread equally throughout our service territory nor any utility service territory.
Curtis Hartenstine:So the challenging part is identifying what those areas are, calculating what risks they have, and then applying the appropriate mitigation to those specific areas.
Julia Perry:Okay. So kind of explain the process you go through to figure out those danger zones, like, m five?
Curtis Hartenstine:Yeah. So what we do is we gather some maps. So these maps will tell us what the landscape looks like, what's a train. We'll gather maps that say, what's the fuel type? What kind of trees or grass or shrubs or whatever's there?
Curtis Hartenstine:What kind of weather maps do we have? And what what do we know about historical fire occurrence? We gather those maps, and we kinda layer them on top of each other. And we get an idea of what wildfire risk is from a purely landscape level without kinda human intervention. From that, we layer over our assets, our transmission lines, our substations, our communications.
Elizabeth Schilling:So we get to use some pretty interesting tools for the process of
Curtis Hartenstine:That'll be it.
Elizabeth Schilling:Vegetation management. Can you tell me a little bit about the different tools that are used?
Curtis Hartenstine:Uh-huh. I think the most important tool that we have and and this is not tongue in cheek. It it's our people. It's the men and women on the ground. It's the communities that live there because they know their communities.
Curtis Hartenstine:Because they know their communities. They know historical wildfire. They know what assets they got. They know what the values at risk are. And so I think from that point, you know, me engaging with our our linemen and women on what they're doing and and what they perceive as risk is is really, really important, for us to understand.
Curtis Hartenstine:So that's that's the tool, and that tool's never gonna go away. I'm a big believer in technology. The human component, I don't think, could ever be removed from the equation, and that's not just job security. That's my that's true belief there. Other tools we have, we've got some pretty impressive.
Curtis Hartenstine:We've got a couple of masticators out there, which are big excavator type pieces of equipment that run on tracks or maybe rubber tires that are huge lawnmowers. These are the big, massive size, excavators that you'd see on large construction sites that have been engineered in a way that they cons they can till the ground in a way and just chew up everything in their path. So they eliminate and really reduce the amount of fuels by rearranging those fuels and and taking that out of the danger zone and and putting them, in a position where they're less prone to wildfire. So that's that's a really cool tool that we have. Some of the other cool tools we have, relate to situational awareness.
Curtis Hartenstine:We've got a drone program here at Tri-State, and we're starting to develop ways in which we can use those those drones to relieve some of the stress from, our linemen and women to have to climb a pole and and really understand that asset. We can send a drone up. We can take a number of pictures. We can put thermal cameras on those drones. A lot of that stuff is still worse things that we're developing and still engaging and looking to incorporate into our programs.
Curtis Hartenstine:But that's another situational awareness tool that we have there too. And a lot of GIS tools. I mean, it's not the shiny, huge, heavy machinery that really gets people going. But the GIS tools and the team that we have here at Tri-State, their ability to consistently monitor weather conditions and understand changing conditions and and in real time, help us understand what that risk is and how it's changing are are pretty pretty useful tools as well for us. And and right now, Tri-State is currently redeveloping our own wildfire mitigation plan.
Curtis Hartenstine:So we've had a plan since 2020, and it's think of it as our toolbox. It's a it lists all the things that we can do to help mitigate wildfire risk, and that's, you know, maintaining, proper vegetation clearance that's, being situationally aware and knowing what the true wildfire risk is, hardening our system. How do we support each other knowing that we're a transmission organization and their distribution, so our equipment and our our our our functions are are inherently different. So how we mitigate is going to be different from how they mitigate. But I do think there's areas in which we can share information and and help each other understand what we're doing.
Curtis Hartenstine:We said Tri-State is a part of a larger network of utilities, some of which are members and some of which are not in Colorado, that meet, monthly. And we talk about wildfire risk. We talk about what we're each doing about it. There's a couple of transmission folks in there. Most of them are distribution.
Curtis Hartenstine:So I think one of the best things we can do is just get together and talk. Hey. What are you doing? What's effective? How did you pay for that?
Curtis Hartenstine:Is that working? How'd your members feel about that? It's it's really difficult to forecast when a hundred mile an hour wind may occur without NASA level forecasting. And and utilities in California have built huge teams of people to do that kind of forecasting, and still it's a challenge. So I think understanding kinda on the day to day, we can do that mapping exercise that we talked about and understand things.
Curtis Hartenstine:We can prepare. We can harden. But but how do we know and when do we know when that hundred mile an hour wind might come? And and and will that cause a problem for our equipment? Will that cause a tree to fall into our line?
Curtis Hartenstine:Where exactly might that occur out of the millions of trees that are out there is a really challenging piece of this work.
Julia Perry:And Tri-State has a lot of ground to cover too because we have, like, 6,000 miles of line. So with identifying places to watch out for, how do you pick where you're prioritizing?
Curtis Hartenstine:Well, you gotta start with the information you have. Right? And the information you can forecast. You can't just throw your hands up. Please, that's not my approach.
Curtis Hartenstine:So we take many cuts, many bites at the apple. Let's say it that way. You know, we start with that landscape level modeling of wildfire risk, and we overlay our assets. And from there, we're able to rank our our transmission line and say, well, this one's got a higher wildfire risk for these reasons. And so from that, we tailor our management activities, our mitigation activities to then address those highest priorities first.
Curtis Hartenstine:And so we can proactively manage the vegetation within those high wildfire risk lines and and and go out and use that masticator and other tools to to mitigate that risk. But the other way we do it, getting back to the weather, is keep our eye on changing weather conditions. And right now, we're using red flag warnings and red flag watches that are are are put forth by the National Weather Service that feed into our operational systems. And at that point, our systems operators can make adjustments on on recloser settings on our lines that can help mitigate, wildfire risk should an accidental ignition or an arc fault occur on our system some way. And we're developing some more sophisticated tools involving satellite imagery to help us identify what those problem vegetation pieces are and and help help mitigate those too.
Curtis Hartenstine:So it's really very specific of what the risk is in trying to combat that risk, but you never know when that is gonna happen.
Elizabeth Schilling:It's good questions. So it seems like it requires a lot of coordination, your work, and different departments across Tri-State and organizations outside of Tri State. But thinking about the other departments you work with here, I think you named some, but can you give me a sense of the variety?
Curtis Hartenstine:Yeah. You know you know, great question, Elizabeth, because Tri-State had a wildfire program since they established the role that I have now, and it's been about a year and a half since this role was formalized. But we've been doing wildfire mitigation for fifteen years. So it's been transmission maintenance really leading that charge early on with a lot of the vegetation work and clearing those lines and preventing that accidental ignition from from a vegetation encroachment or strike tree or something like that. But, from those early days, man, we I I can't think of a of an institution in Tri-State that that I haven't worked with on this effort.
Curtis Hartenstine:I mean, sitting down and talking with folks like you in communications and and getting the word out on what we're doing and and generating awareness around the risk and and helping others to prepare for that, is something I think that's that's relatively new. Working more and more with operations to dial in our our systems controls and and how do we isolate, faults to the extent that we're able or sense those faults and looking to new technologies and researches to help us advance on that front, working with external affairs on policy at the state and federal level, but but here we are. So really, it spans the gamut. And I'm really pleased to say that there's a real heightened awareness in Tri-State about wildfire risk, and it's never been difficult for me to engage in staff on the issue and have those conversations and and talk more about what we're doing and where can we go with our work to to level it up.
Elizabeth Schilling:Are there any specific wins in the time that you've been in this role? Either a relationship you've you've built or a discovery you've you've made with another group that's helped move this program forward?
Curtis Hartenstine:I there is a win. For me, being new to Tri-State, it struck me as as seismic, and maybe that's an overstatement. But soon after I got here, we started, you know, going in-depth and talking to different departments about the work that they were doing. And and one of the organizations in our company that I started to talk with very early and frequently with was operations and understanding what their fire response plans are and what our state of readiness is. And I said one of them is to to consider moving to a year round fire safety setting posture, and Tri State has done that.
Curtis Hartenstine:And I'm very, very proud that we've made that. And and for me, maybe I'm overplaying it. That just seemed to be a a pretty big shift for an organization like ours because there's a lot that goes on to it because those fire safety settings do have consequences with the terms of reliability, which is one of our key functions. Sure. But so I I've recently started volunteering with my local fire department in Lyons, the Lyons Fire Protection District.
Curtis Hartenstine:And we have very heightened awareness, especially when these high winds come. And it really, I I think, is is a change in how even fire departments have have become to acknowledge that the fire season is consistent. You know, the three tenants of of of fire behavior are temperature fuels and topography. And we've been proven that we can have a cold day and still meet some of those other requirements for having a a bad event.
Julia Perry:So you mentioned it before in just kind of the vegetation that Tri-State has, but are there a lot of fire fuels just with the nature of being rural and having wildlands and forests and those kind of systems?
Curtis Hartenstine:You you know, the more that we talk along those lines, really, we talk with respect to what's called the WUI, the Wildland Urban Interface. And this is something we've seen along with the shift in climate. We've seen a significant shift in human population moving into these wildfire prone areas. So where I live is is the WUI. It's the and it's it's a loose definition.
Curtis Hartenstine:I don't know if there is a proper industry definition for the WUI, but it's where humans are living in these ecosystems that had fire as part of their natural ecology.
Elizabeth Schilling:What are what are your hopes? Or what do what do you see? What are you optimistic about in the future?
Curtis Hartenstine:My hopes it's challenging sometimes to be hopeful. It really is.
Julia Perry:And that was the incorrect answer?
Curtis Hartenstine:I said it's challenging. But what's life without a good challenge? Right? But I I see hope in that there's more conversations around this now that that there ever have been. And and that's because the problem's larger than it is.
Curtis Hartenstine:Right? It's not just because everybody's kinda woke up to it. It's been thrust in people's faces, and now we have to answer the call. And so that's what gives me optimism. Folks like this.
Curtis Hartenstine:I mean, this this ability to have a voice that hopefully is is spread to help someone gain a little bit more awareness. Our ability to have the kinds of conversations we have with smaller utilities that aren't as, advanced as Tri-State and have the focus that we do. They're getting on board with these activities. Whereas before, it was kinda like, nah. It's not really a problem.
Curtis Hartenstine:How big of it could it possibly be? The it's hard to find someone who's sharing that same viewpoint these days. So while the problem's gotten bigger, the awareness and people's desire to do something about it has gotten bigger.
Elizabeth Schilling:So Tri-State is in this in this business of electricity. But why do we operate to minimize the potential of wildfire? What is the personal risk? Where do we all where do we all live? I mean, is this is this our neighbors we're protecting?
Elizabeth Schilling:How how do we approach this as far as why do we do what we do?
Curtis Hartenstine:Well, you know, first and foremost, what comes to my mind is we have a a moral obligation. So I think we've got to understand first and foremost, we work in an industry that's got a moral obligation to protect the environment and the people around it. The the second, maybe even equal obligation we have is to protect the people who will work for us in the communities that we serve. Right? The the men and women that service our lines and substations and and you folks and, you know, they all live in the communities and the co ops that we serve.
Curtis Hartenstine:So by us protecting and and doing wildfire mitigation, we're protecting the communities of our people and and the communities in which way they live and their livelihoods and the things they cherish, and I think that's incredibly important. We also protect the national interest. I mean, we are in an interconnected grid here. You know, add to that, we move through public land. We move a lot of our transmission lines through national forest, BLM.
Curtis Hartenstine:These are these are items of the public trust, and we wanna protect those, just as best as we can.
Elizabeth Schilling:That's great. So it sounds like you stay up to date. You stay up to date on a lot of information going on in the industry. One of our questions about what you're reading right now, are you a big reader? Do you do you turn to books or audiobooks or dare I ask podcasts to get information?
Julia Perry:Spoiler alert, he doesn't listen to podcasts at all.
Curtis Hartenstine:I this I have never actively downloaded listen to a podcast. So hopefully, I'm doing the right thing here.
Elizabeth Schilling:That's pretty great.
Curtis Hartenstine:And hopefully, show me someone will show me how to find this later on after it's published. I do read I don't much to my family's enjoyment because they love ribbing me on this. I don't read a lot of books. Let's say I don't read a lot of books quickly. I read books very slowly.
Curtis Hartenstine:I'm an early riser, pretty early riser guy. I used to be, like, bed fairly early, and I go to fall asleep in a second. So not a whole lot of time for me to read, like, before bed. So I do read news articles. I got a Kindle last year for Christmas.
Curtis Hartenstine:I made it through about three books, and I enjoy it. It's not a problem for me. It's just not something that occupies a bunch of my time. I do enjoy solace. I enjoy quiet.
Curtis Hartenstine:Living in Lyons, and I'm grateful to have a lot of open space near me. So if I get a break in the middle of the day, go out for a walk, then it's just me and whatever's going on out around side of me. You know, sometimes I'll put my headphones on, but usually not. So so, unfortunately, no. I'm not much of a bibliophile there.
Curtis Hartenstine:But This
Julia Perry:is the last book you read last year.
Curtis Hartenstine:Last book I read last year. Thanks, Julia.
Julia Perry:I don't I don't believe you can read anymore.
Curtis Hartenstine:I remember it was a good book. Oh, it's a book on white water rafting. That's what I read last year. It was the Emerald Mile. There's a book I'm a I'm a white water rafter.
Curtis Hartenstine:I'm a boater. And there's a book called the Emerald Mile, which documented a voyage that a white water rafter took down the Grand Canyon on an extreme hydrologic event that was really unprecedented after the creation of the the Hoover And Glen Canyon Dams, and he raced his dory down the Grand Canyon with a couple companions through whitewater that would scare the living crap out of anybody who saw it, but they did it to to set a record to go from Lees Ferry to the start down to the mouth of the canyon. And they did it, and it was great book.
Julia Perry:You're in Lyons. You're part of the golf carting community. Are are you also also, coaching basketball there?
Curtis Hartenstine:Yep. Yep. I coach. I help out with my daughter's team. She's in seventh grade right now.
Curtis Hartenstine:So that's the Lyons senior middle middle senior high school. We're a small community, so our middle senior schools combined. It's one building. So I've been assisting there. We got a game tonight.
Curtis Hartenstine:So looking forward to continue our winning streak throughout the season. I coached them, and tonight's actually my son's, fifth grade team's first practice. So we'll kick off his season. So from this, I'll go home, coach a couple of games, and go to practice. So it'll be very basketball evening for me.
Julia Perry:Less time to read.
Curtis Hartenstine:Yeah. That's that's it. I don't have any time for reading. I have coaching to do. Yeah.
Julia Perry:What are what is your daughter's team name? Are they the lionettes or something cute? Or
Curtis Hartenstine:No. They they go by the high school mascot, which I kid you not, are the Lyons Lions. Ah. So it's a lot of go Lyons Lions. Yeah.
Curtis Hartenstine:It's
Julia Perry:truth. Eventually becomes a tongue twister. Right?
Curtis Hartenstine:Right. Now my son, he gets to choose his team name because he's not in that program. We're in a we're in a a recreation league here. So I pressed him last night. I was like, you gotta think of a team name.
Curtis Hartenstine:I can't remember where we were last year. We might have the fighting five or something to that effect.
Elizabeth Schilling:How about the masticators?
Curtis Hartenstine:The masticators.
Elizabeth Schilling:I like that. Mistaken as mastodon on the list, so that's in the running too if you want.
Curtis Hartenstine:Mastodon would be good too.
Julia Perry:That would be such a good name for the masticator, though. We should just call nickname it the mastodon.
Curtis Hartenstine:I love it. Get some flames painted. No. Get some tusks painted on. Yeah.
Curtis Hartenstine:Yeah. That's what we need. That's
Julia Perry:pretty good. Pretty historic.
Curtis Hartenstine:I'm sure the boys would be fine with that. Yeah. I guarantee that you're fine with that.
Julia Perry:You've experienced two fires now. What is some advice you have for a homeowner to be prepared?
Curtis Hartenstine:I would encourage from a fire safety standpoint for everyone to have a go bag. Have a bag which has got some cash or card, you know, whatever you use these days. Got your medications, some copy of something that's really, really important that you can't live without, maybe some ID. And and if you are gonna evacuate, know what your evacuation route is going to be. Where are you gonna go?
Curtis Hartenstine:Which direction are you gonna go, or what directions are available for you to go. So don't wait for that moment to come because that's gonna be a terrible, terrible moment if you're not prepared.
Elizabeth Schilling:Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcast, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.