The Monkey Wrench Dad

Lake Nighthorse recreation planning process continues this week

2010-12-06T16:29:00.001-07:00

Click pic to enlarge

A reminder: This week are two workshops on the Lake Nighthorse recreation plan:

Shared Solutions to Water & Shoreline Recreation
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
4:00-8:00 pm
Durango Community Recreation Center

Developing Shared Solutions to Land-Based Recreation
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
4:00-8:00 pm
Durango Community Recreation Center

Everyone is welcome -- and needed. Come!

And so ... in preparation, I've offer ...

my reasons why I'm in favor of an engine-free and undeveloped Campbell Reservoir and Ridges Basin

Non-motorized and undeveloped wildlife habitat and quiet open space are the basin's best use ...

Ecologically because of its location -- low elevation habitat linking the high country and the chaparral to the south, and historically heavily used migration and wintering area. Its still relatively undeveloped condition, despite its flooding and the new county road, make it both a rare (and growing rarer) and vital piece of our region's wildlife habitat.

Economically also because of its location and undeveloped condition. As well as protecting wildlife, and thereby supporting our tourism and hunting economies, an engine-free and development-free area expands the marketable recreation options in the area. Engine-free, Ridges Basin and Campbell Reservoir are excellent and unique nearby commodities -- offering quiet water and water-side open-space experiences, feeling very remote yet very close to downtown Durango.

Aside from mere convenience, as an industrialized and motorized recreation area, though, Ridges Basin would be only mediocre among the several other, much bigger and better nearby motorized reservoir areas. And then it would always be just mediocre open space and wildlife habitat, as well. So while gas stations in town might pump some more fuel, Ridges Basin would be just a lower-level option for powerboating tourists, while it could be a top-notch unique lure for those seeking a close-to-town quiet and wildlife-rich human-powered lake experience.

Realistically because the reality is, the area is too small to serve as both: The size and amphitheatre-like natural configuration of Ridges Basin means the noise of engines precludes and diminishes the area's other values as wildlife habitat and quiet open space.

Ethically Ridges Basin should remain motorless and undeveloped because those above qualities and values of Ridges Basin were why the area was public land and a DCDOW Wildlife Area before the reservoir site was condemned and appropriated by the Bureau of Reclamation, bypassing legal challenges and dodging public input. Given that history and circumstances, there is an obligation to honor this land's historic use and the original intentions of the land: Wildlife and open space.

Morally, this is a unique opportunity to step back from visions of immediate fun and gain and think, what is the best thing to leave our kids, and our kids' kids? The ecologically healthy, economically valuable, and historically significant place readily accessible from town that a quiet and engine-free Ridges Basin would be? Or yet another motorized, industrialized, and commercialized landscape?

Looking ahead, what will our kids need more?

Bonus reason!

Quagga mussels and water quality, which threaten the intention of the Animas-La Plata Project and primary purpose of the reservoir, would be a certainty with powerboating on Campbell Reservoir.

Learn more about the Lake Nighthorse planning process here.

Find helpful information about Lake Nighthorse here.

Report from Lake Nighthorse public meeting

2010-11-19T15:18:00.001-07:00

Some of my notes from the Campbell Reservoir public meeting on Tuesday, 11/16. Feel free to pass around any additions, clarifications, corrections, etc.

Highlight of the night:

Ron and Randy Bodo, the grandsons of Mike Bodo, who homesteaded the basin at the turn of the last century, we present. Roy spoke, and spoke in favor of keeping the lake engine-less (or, at a minimum, a no-wake lake). "We feel the lake is too small for motorboats," Ron Bodo said. He also said they were in favor of keeping the area for day-use only, and that they'd like to see hiking and biking trails.

"We did not want to see this area developed," he said. "We were (when they transferred the land to the CDOW via the Nature Conservancy in 1974) insuring the legacy of good stewardship would carry on."

Key issues:

Park Service representative Joy Lujan explained that a "successful" plan coming from this recreation planning process will have to meet four criteria:

- Publicly acceptable
- Economically viable
- Environmentally acceptable
- Technically feasible

She also noted that depending upon what the management plan ends up allowing, there may need to be a supplemental EIS.

It was re-affirmed by Lujan and BuRec people that whatever plan comes out of this process will be binding to whatever agency or group ends up managing the Lake Nighthorse and surrounding BuRec land.

It was again asserted that the boat ramp funding requires and assures engines on the lake. [But: This is increasingly looking like it's just not so (despite the long-time claims of Jim Isgar, sponsor of the move the got the boat ramp built. (Soon to be named the Isgar National Boat Ramp?)) More will be forthcoming on this issue ... ]

Other interesting tidbits:

A BuRec official said that, even before any withdrawals are made from the reservoir, water levels will fluctuate about five feet per year just from evaporation loss alone. Well, with a surface area of 1,500 feet, that's 7,500 acre-feet of water per year lost to evaporation alone (never mind groudwater seepage). That is enough water for 30,000 people (and heavy water-using people at that).

Access for ATVs, motorcyles, and snowmobiles
are issues that are still on the table.

A representative of the Animas La Plata Association, which manages the water-pumping and control facilities for ALP, stated flatly that "a safe and reliable water supply" is the reservoir's first priority. He said that quaggua mussels are a major threat to those missions, and that the reservoir is prime mussel habitat. He also said gas, oil, and parking lot drainage are a major threat to the reservoir's water quality.

A Coast Guard reservist who works at area reservoirs noted that, bottom line, Lake Nighthorse is too small to safely, or even enjoyably, use speedboats or jet skis. "This is where you can bring your kids and grandkids and not get run over by a powerboat," he said.

The reservoir has already been stocked with 50,000 trout.

Learn more about Lake Nighthorse at the official Lake Nighthorse site, and the (very!) unofficial Silent Nighthorse Wiki.

Reminder: Lake Nighthorse public forum Tuesday!

2010-11-15T22:18:00.001-07:00

Click to embiggen.

Remember: Tuesday night is the public forum for the Lake Nighthorse (more properly referred to as Campbell Reservoir) recreation management planning process.

5 - 8 p.m. at Needham Elementary School, in Durango. (Click to see a map.)

Here's what the agenda is planned to look like:

The first 30 minutes will include a fact-based presentation by the design team, an explanation of the meeting process and stage setting by Joy Lujan from the National Park Service, brief comments from Bruce Whitehead from ALPWCD, a statement from the Bureau of Reclamation, and a statement from Randy Bodo.

From about 5:30 to 7:30, will be input from the public. People will tell the gathered officials and the audience what their interests, issues, ideas and concerns are by making a statement from a microphone at the front of the room. Visual aids are welcome.

The final half hour will be an exercise to explore people's interests further. People will be be asked and answers tabulated to general questions like what kinds of recreational uses people engage in now, what their concerns about recreation at the lake, what kinds of recreational uses they might like to see at the lake, etc.

The entire meeting will be video taped.

Learn more about the Lake Nighthorse planning process here.

Find helpful information about Lake Nighthorse here.

See you there!

Lake Nighthorse recreation planning process begins

2010-11-10T19:23:00.000-07:00

Public meetings have been announced for input on the recreation management plan for the Ridges Basin/Lake Nighthorse (aka Campbell Reservoir, at least around my house).

I spoke with the National Park Service's Joy Lujan, who is organizing the meetings, and some BuRec people at the first open house, and they assured me that the management plan that comes out of this process in the Spring will be a binding plan for whomever ultimately manages the recreation on and around the reservoir.

Click to enlargen. Or visit the official Lake Nighthorse site.

Learn useful info about the project at the Silent Nighthorse Wiki.

It's baaaack!

2010-10-27T12:05:00.001-06:00

Time to tune them skis!

Robert Reich tells "the large narrative" of our economy

2010-09-30T17:57:00.001-06:00

I was at a meet-and-greet last night with Brian O'Donnell, who's running for State Representative for District 59, and he and I got to talking about things I was feeling about Obama (what is it with his inability to articulate clear rationales and guiding visions?), the Democratic Party (how can they continue to be so staggeringly fumbling, bumbling, and timid since the Carter Administration?), the Tea Party (who are fighting tirelessly for our RIGHT to get dicked by insurance companies, to have our jobs outsourced overseas, to a crappy education and low-paying unskilled jobs!), and -- of course! -- to the economy (when will someone have the backbone to say that Free Trade has been the biggest shafting of the middle-class worker since Indentured Servitude?).

Well, I enjoyed the meeting, even if it might have been a bit heavy on the "greet" for poor Mr. O'Donnell. But he listened (or feigned listening) as politely as a ... well, a politician. Which he's not. Yet. (Despite J. Paul Brown's supporters are mailing literature accusing O'Donnell of being a "tax and spend politician," even though he's never held office. He has, in fact, been working as a wildlands advocate for Trout Unlimited.)

O'Donnell and I did end up find some shared ground, though: Our respect for economist Robert Reich.

Last night Reich reminded me why that's so, when he was interviewed on NPR's "Fresh Air." In the 20-minute interview, Reich is refreshingly clear, logical, and honest as he explained his view of where we are economically, and how we got here. And where we are is where we were at the start of the Great Depression: with a historic concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest few, and a crushed middle class unable to afford to keep fueling the economy.

In 1928, says Reich, 23 percent of the country's wealth was in the hands of the richest 1 percent of the population; in 2007, the had 23.5 percent. Census data released this week show that the top-earning 20 percent of Americans received nearly half the income generated in the United States.

Reich cites some clear steps in how we got here, including the mechanization then out-sourcing of the workforce, an overly indebted middle class, and an absurdly wealthy upper class that turns to speculation as sport.

And he shares the concern over President Obama's lack of skill in articulating the situation and a rationale for moving beyond it, playing into the hands of Tea Partiers and those who would keep the status quo. "He [Obama] has failed to connect the dots," says Reich, "and failed to provide the public a large and understandable narrative."

Like Reich can.

Listen to or read the "Fresh Air" interview here.

Watch an interview with Reich about his new book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future here and below.

Autumn, Full Moon, and Snow! Oh my!

2010-09-23T14:14:00.001-06:00

Click to enlarge

Oh, yeah! is more like it.

Had to drive out to the airport early this morning, and got to see -- between quick glances at the road -- the clouds lift and the mountain world emerge into the first Autumn dawn light.

Over Hesperus hung the full Harvest Moon, a great glowing cue ball (or maybe that was a flashback to El Rancho last night ...). And beside it stood the dimly lit La Platas, wearing on its peaks a fine but distinct patina of powder ...

Yum!

I didn't have a camera with me (which is probably best, given my distracted, lustful mountain-staring from behind the wheel anyway). But I was able to get some shots before that mean old sun melted away the season's first snow.

Have a taste.

Click to enlarge

The ultimate fishing trip ... or, fish tripping ...

2010-09-22T16:41:00.001-06:00

Here's a delightful and, well, much thought-provoking piece of journalism from Sports Illustrated circa 1964.

In "A Dreamy New Era For Fish," from the March 30, 1964, issue, Robert H. Boyle writes about an, let's say, intriguing plan to improve fishing through LSD.

Sounds like a good idea, right? I mean, fishing is a bit boring at times anyway. Except he means, by giving LSD to the fish.

See, back in 1964, when LSD was still somewhat new and edgy -- and legal -- a Mr. Howard Loeb, senior aquatic biologist at the New York State Conservation Department Fish Laboratory, (and delightfully described as "an imaginative ex-paratrooper") started pushing LSD on fish of various species to see what would happen. He got the idea from a suggestion by the director of a mental institution who'd read about Loeb's great achievements in developing methods of poisoning fish en-masse. (Really. That's what it says.)

Of course many readers of Sports Illustrated in 1964 may not have known what LSD was yet, so the writer also provided a nice quick summary (which I'll now share for those of you today who may not know):

The drug is perhaps best known to the general public because of the psychological effects it brings about. Colors take on great depth, music is physically felt rather than heard and happiness or frustration is often extreme. It produces in a normal person a state believed to be similar to schizophrenia.

Well, needless to say, when Loeb -- also inventor of the electric fish shocker -- starts dumping loads of LSD into tanks filled with happy, swimming fishes, hilarity and zaniness ensues.

He starts with Siamese fighting fish. Why? Because they're "plentiful, cheap, almost as sensitive to LSD as humans." (Not sure how that sensitivity was measured, but perhaps it's because under the influence they're prone to long, disjointed, rambling discourses, and they all sway in unison when "Uncle John's Band" is played.)

Carp, of course, are the most resistant fish. But no one's surprised, really. "Goodness knows what kinds of hallucinations carp have," notes the reporter, "but they become noticeably lighter in color." And sometimes they swim backwards. Dude.

And another non-surprise: A major pharmaceutical company jumped on board Loeb's project, offering boatloads of LSD.

Just so you know, there is a happy ending. "No one knows what would happen to a person who happened to swim in or drink from a treated pond or lake," the writer notes. "But the tests are most encouraging and the possibilities unlimited, both for sport and commercial fishing."

Undoubtedly. Now where'd I leave that fishing pole?

Read the article here.

(via Boing Boing)

A Norwegian morning ...

2010-09-09T16:44:00.001-06:00

Click to enlarge

Or so it seemed, as Rio and I made the dawn-patrol stroll up the mesa above Durango. The mountain-chill air and a dense, enveloping fog created an oceanic scene that triggered a body memory of walking a Norwegian fjord.

Or the coast of Maine. Or the Oregon shore. Anywhere but the high-desert country of Durango, Colorado.

But there it was, and there we were, and I could feel it. Especially since I couldn't see more than ten yards downfield as Rio and I wandered uphill through that thick atmospheric filter.

An hour and a half later, as I commuted to work -- walking up that same dirt trail -- the fog was finally lifting under the glare of the rising sun, slowly releasing the familiar landscape from its grasp. And I had a camera ...

Loveliness.

Click to enlarge

Only two things money can't buy ...

2010-09-08T15:46:00.002-06:00

... "that's true love and homegrown tomatoes."

So sings the great Guy Clark. And every year at this time, I think he's right.

Why do homegrown tomatoes taste so much better? According to the University of Illinois Extension Service, it may have to do with commercial tomatoes' being picked green so they ship better, but it also can be linked to micro-amounts of volatile chemicals that are sensed not by the tongue, but by the olfactory nerve in the nose. (Read the entire article in the Illinois Times here.)

Whatever the reason, for a couple of weeks every year, I get both love and tomatoes: homegrown tomatoes on bagels and cream cheese. It don't get much better ...

So pull up a ripe one and enjoy this: Not a great recording, but a fine version of Guy Clark performing "Homegrown Tomatoes."

Yard sale days

2010-09-07T08:47:00.000-06:00

What could possibly be better? A lovely, clear late-Summer Saturday, on Labor Day weekend.

Doing our part to support the local underground recycling economy.

Hanging and chatting with neighbors, both known and those we didn't know we had.

And we got to disgorge a heap-o-stuff -- mostly to folks who are really excited for both the object of their desire and the bargain price they're getting their gratification for.

And we're make some beer money whilst we're at it.

Oh, and lest we forget: Those yummy -- and healthy! -- bloody marys ....

Field & Stream magazine features Alpine Loop in high San Juans

2010-09-03T15:59:00.002-06:00

click to englarge

This from Trout Unlimited, which has been doing some fine work generating support for protection of the high country in the heart of the San Juan's known as the Alpine Triangle (which is also known as the Alpine Loop, for the popular 4x4 route through the area). And now they've gotten coverage in one of the most-read "hook and bullet" magazines, Field & Stream.

Here's what Ty Churchwell, local coordinator for TU's Alpine Triangle campaign, says:

Trout Unlimited has teamed up with Field and Stream magazine to highlight some of the "Best Wild Places" in the West. F&S is the nation's largest sportsmen's magazine with over 2.5 million monthly readers. The Alpine Triangle is one of six locations where the Best Wild Places tour stopped to showcase the amazing sportsmen's opportunities while touching on the work TU is doing to protect these special places.

Check out "Best Wild Places" in Field & Stream here.

On this main page you'll find the photo galleries with commentary, which are a lot of fun. Also, you'll see TU's six locations listed here. Click on the Alpine Triangle in the "choose a location" section to read the blogs of each day's adventures. The actual paper edition of F&S, with the full story, will appear in the December/January issue, which comes out around December 1st.

We had an absolute blast doing this tour!! The fishing was fabulous, the scenery unbeatable and the Alpine Loop OHV roads were something none of the F&S participants expected to enjoy as much as they did. For those of us who know this resource well, we knew the Alpine Triangle was going to blow these guys away...and it did!

Furthermore, we now have a Facebook page for the Alpine Loop campaign. If you're on Facebook, please visit the page and join us as a "fan."

Watch a TU video about the Alpine Triangle campaign:

Inside Outside Southwest magazine ceases publication after 11 years

2010-08-26T11:55:00.001-06:00

Time of death: 5 p.m., August 23, 2010.

After more than 11 years of exploring, reporting, celebrating, and defending the Four Corners country from its home in Durango, Colo., Inside Outside Southwest magazine joined the ranks of publications that have drowned in its attempt to find a piece of ground to stay afloat on in the new media economy.

And the Four Corners lost its voice -- for no other publication covers this economically, ecologically, geographically, and politically linked region as a whole.

Read editor Jan Nesset's farewell here.

The final issue will the September issue, to be released next week.

While Inside Outside really found its voice and carved what seemed a solid niche in the past several years, under the editorship of Jan Nesset, I'm honored to have been the publication's first managing editor, for its first year and a half of life, from 1998 - 2000. It was a damned fine time.

Here you can read a collection of my favorite excerpts from Inside Outside's early years (from the magazine's 10th anniversary issue).

Below is a brief history of Inside Outside's start-up days that I wrote for that 10th anniversary issue.

The Way It Was: A brief personal history from the (former) Editor

Publications, like wars, are sacred causes. -- Charles Bowden

In the summer of 1998, I was approached by two men who had a business idea: a free, alternative magazine for the Four Corners. They sought my thoughts because – or maybe despite -- I already had been failing at something similar for several years.

Since 1993, some friends and I had been publishing the San Juan Almanac, which we smugly tagged, “Your cattleguard on the information superhighway.” In that guerilla spirit, we did our journalistic dirty work in my house on a budget drawn mostly from handouts, a few kind benefactors, and change found under sofa cushions. After five years, we decided we had done our karmic duty to the literary culture of the Four Corners, and accepted the fact we were as much businessmen as the Bureau of Reclamation are conservationists. We, though, knew when to quit.

Regardless, Phil Lauro and Daniel Esper thought I could offer some useful insights when they sought to launch Inside Outside Southwest, which they envisioned as a journal of entertainment, culture and recreation bonding the entire Four Corners area. Business-wise, all I could do was giggle. But they had start-up money, by gods! So, I offered to write stories, do some editing, and contact writers I knew from the Almanac days.

Six months later, my dream of a regional publication, like Jason, like the Colorado Rockies, like Al Gore, was somehow alive again after logic, experience, and common sense insisted otherwise. I did some editing and wrote the lead feature for the premier issue – a brilliant (ahem) intimate literary portrait of the reclusive Stone-Age hunter and author David Petersen – which then led to my taking a fifty percent cut in salary from my “real job” to become Inside Outside Southwest’s first Managing Editor.

Dreams are cheap, but following them isn’t.

Underway, we settled into the restored principal’s office in the former Smiley Middle School building, in downtown Durango. His partner already had fled, so Phil sat behind a big desk playing Publisher (think: “Rosebud …”); I wrote, edited, planned issues, and lined-up writers; and graphic-arts genius Todd Thompson was brought on board as art director. (One late night, Todd brought to life the vague notion I'd had about a crossed monkey wrench and pen as an iconic logo for our mission ...) We had computers, space, views, some money to work with, and a refrigerator stocked with an endless supply of Ska Brewery beer (keep it local!).

So began the glory days.

Mostly it’s a blur. Putting out a magazine, especially a start-up publication, is like rowing into a steady headwind in low financial flows. But we made it, for a while, and, I like to think, with style – subtly subversive and vocally local. Each of our issues was chock-full of well-written stories (partly to take up the space where the ads should have been) by both local and nationally renown writers. And, thanks to Todd’s dedication and skill, our pages looked as good or better than many “glossy” publications.

We had our moments. We scored exclusives with some big-name writers, including John Nichols – who premiered a chapter of a new novel in our pages -- Ed Quillen, Will Hobbs, and the aforementioned David Petersen. We enlisted a few outstanding columnists – Art Goodtimes, Rob Schultheis, and David Feela (a holdover from the Almanac who still writes in Inside Outside Southwest). We had some fun provoking our new readership: Shultheis’s “Moron of the Mountains” column drew raging hate (and love) mail; and if that didn’t, Phil’s many pseudonyms under which he wrote stories and letters (Victor Lazlo, Artimus Vark, et al.) did.

We even had a special “Edward Abbey” issue that garnered national attention, sporting a cover drawn by artist Bryan Peterson and featuring a “lost” Abbey short story that no one, not even Abbey’s wife, had seen since the mid-1950s.

Mostly, though, I remember just doing the magazine. Late nights (and early mornings) poring over paste-ups and tinkering with layouts with Todd while chipping away at those six packs of Ska … breaks out on the roof of the Smiley Building, overlooking downtown Durango … day-time breaks tossing a Frisbee on Third Avenue … and quick breaks sitting in the hallway watching the participants arrive for the dance class in the room next door.

And we always looked forward with great anticipation to the crazy “issue release” parties Phil would throw at local bars to stir up interest in the magazine. And the wacky visitors alternative magazines attract … whew.

But, as happens to most start-ups, after a year and a half of glory days, the headwinds finally outstripped our ability to row toward financial security. Fortunately, though, for Inside Outside Southwest – and for readers in the Four Corners – there’s a happy ending to this story. In 2000, Phil sold out to The Durango Herald, and Inside Outside Southwest was, like Jason, the Rockies, and Nobel-prizing-winning Gore (!), given a new life. And that life, under the steady hands of its later editors – Pete Pendegrast, and now Jan Nesset – is still beating, and growing stronger.

Long live crazy dreams.

Sad. It hurts. But, it was a damned fine run.

And now the question is: What's next, Four Corners writers, reporters, and readers??

Monsoons & canyons ...

2010-08-25T16:30:00.001-06:00

Two great sights that look great together.

#1 Skyhawk Soccer season is here!

2010-08-23T10:41:00.001-06:00

The World Cup is over, but if you're still hankering for some soccer, then it's time for Saturday afternoons on the pitch.

The #1 ranked and 2009 NCAA Division II national champion Skyhawk Soccer team began its quest for a third national title on Saturday when the 2010 team faced off against former Skyhawk players in the annual alumni exhibition game.

A couple of hundred fans passed a lovely August afternoon at Dirks Field -- perhaps the most scenic soccer pitch in the world (but I'm biased) -- as the varsity squad squeaked by, 4-3, an alumni team that fielded several players from last year's and 2005's national championship teams, including former MLS player John Cunliffe.

The Skyhawks open their campaign at Colorado School of Mines on Sept. 3, and play their home-opener against rivals CSU-Pueblo at Dirks Field at 1 p.m. Sept. 19.

To get you stoked for this season, below are two videos Fort Lewis produced last Spring (and which I had the pleasure working on) to celebrate the program's second national title and the "hooligan" fans who make an afternoon at Dirks Field even more entertaining than the outstanding play already does.

Enjoy! And see you at the pitch ...

Watch a review of the 2009 National Championship season here.

Watch a humorous profile of the Skyhawk Soccer "hooligans" here.

Read Durango Herald coverage of Saturday's alumni game here.

Learn more about Skyhawks men's Soccer here.

You can purchase a DVD that includes these shorts as well as a documentary on the history of the program and more here. Sales support the Skyhawks men's Soccer program. Learn more here.

Abbey lives! in new documentary

2010-08-20T20:24:00.004-06:00

Well, it's looking like a movie version of The Monkey Wrench Gang isn't going appear anytime soon -- even though Ed Abbey's eminently popular modern-Western classic has been on retainer somewhere in Hollywood ever since shortly after it first appeared some 35 years ago.

But that doesn't mean The Gang hasn't been completely overlooked by filmmakers.

A documentary about the people who inspired the infamous characters who star in The Monkey Wrench Gang is set to be released later this year. Lines Across the Sand promises to profile the real-life Doc Sarvis, Seldom Seen Smith, Bonnie Abzug, and George Washington Hayduke, while also exploring the effect the book -- as well as Jack Loeffler, John DePuis, Ingrid Eisenstatder, Ken Sleight, and Doug Peacock -- have had on the Western enviironmental movement.

Also, acknowledging the tribal nature of Abbey's followers -- and the grassroots-generating potential of the internet -- the makers of the film, through the International Documentary Association, is soliciting online for financial support for the film's production.

Watch the trailer for the film here:

Watch a documentary about the film below and here.

Donate to the project here.

This is your brain on silt ...

2010-08-19T10:16:00.001-06:00

We all who crave the river understand: Things are different out there on the water. Especially after several days on the river.

"Things," of course, don't actually change -- but our perceptions of things change after a few days of floating. Our views of the world, both the real physical world, and the "world" we construct in our minds with our daily living. That's one of the reasons we go on the river -- especially for long river trips: to not only get out there in the real "real" world, but also to change the way we see the cultural/social/economic worlds we live in most of the time.

Because those changes in our psyches wrought by the rio are, we know from experience, real and valuable and better than the way we perceive things after having been submerged in our daily at-home worlds. That's why "re-entry" after a long river trip is sometimes such a hard and jarring affair.

So, what is that change that being "out there" induces in our ways of perceiving the world around us? Is it just an environmental thing, a shifting of ideas? Or is it an actual, physical, mental re-wiring of our brain brought on by silt, sun, and time on the water?

That was the question addressed by a group of neuro-scientists recently when the took a five-day trip down the San Juan River earlier this summer (Mexican Hat to Clay Hills). While no answers were uncovered on the trip, the five researchers used the river trip as an environment more condusive to brainstorming -- because of that calmness and clarity of mind found on the river -- future research looking at how the brain reacts to wilderness experiences.

And the trip's effects on the otherwise un-wilderness-y scientists themselves also became fodder for future study. "If I looked around like this at work," one relaxed researcher observed," people would think I was goofing off."

This trip and its questions are chronicled in an Aug. 15 New York Times article "Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain," by Matt Richtel. It's a worthwhile read for those of us who get what the river does, but, well, haven't thought too much about how the river does it.

As a side note, scientists or not, seems ike men, at least, are the same on the river: Talking about the middle of the trip, Richtel observes, "The men drink Tecate beer and talk about the brain."

Now that' a man's brain on the river, eh?

Below is a brief video included with the article. In the video, one of the group wraps his canoe in Government Rapid. When we went down the same stretch in mid-June, a few weeks after the trip described in the article, that green canoe still sat submerged and fully wrapped at the top of the rapid.

Read the article here.

Check out some of our own "brain research" from a June San Juan trip below. There was, shall we say, a lot of drinking Tecate and talking about the brain ...

Only in the Rockies ...

2010-08-17T11:28:00.003-06:00

... do you get driving hail, torrential rain, thunder, lightning, flooding -- and sunshine -- all at the same time.

Read more about yesterday's wicked monsoon storms in the Durango Herald here.

Back from ... Summer!

2010-08-12T10:11:00.000-06:00

Okay, I've been a sucky-ass blogger for the past two months. But, hey, I've been away.

Not far away, for the most part. I've done a few forays -- a couple of long river trips, a quick visit to the Midwest, a backpack, some nearby road trips. But mostly I've been around. But I can't really say I've been "here" -- at least in terms of "here" meaning engaging with my normal routines, like blogging.

But that's Summer, y'know? And Summer, well, it's really important to me. Always has been. In fact, in the spirit of "Dirty Jobs" host Mike Rowe, who proudly proclaims "I took my retirement early and in installments," I've taken my retirement early and mostly in Summers.

Aside from one foolhardy, fruitless Summer I spent "career building" by commuting in and out of Boston, my Summers since I graduated from college sometime in the mid-to-late last century have been devoted to river guiding and fishing and backpacking, living out of tents and cars, and traveling -- the West, Canada, the East Coast, Europe, Africa.

Since having kids, my Summers have been spent, well, river running and fishing and camping, spending time around home with the kids, and traveling -- Alaska, England and Norway, British Columbia and Yukon, the Upper Midwest ...

Then, back to nine months of hard labor to finance those Summers. Nine months made passable knowing they make that next Summer possible ... (And, of course, that "career building" has, well, let's say, suffered. Ah, well.)

In my adult life, like my childhood, Summers are sacred. As they should be -- as kids know them to be. Yes, they're fun -- as in getting out a lot. But having kept alive that childish annual ritual of "getting out of school" for the Summer has lent something else to my life. A certain structure that includes a big chuck of unstructuredness that allows me to do an annual restructuring of my life. And even of my Self.

Summers have always been the time of year, every year, when I explore and re-invent myself. When I disrupt the daily routine that runs most of my mostly-normal lifestyle, and reassess, reconnect, re-evaluate, and ultimately re-vision my living and revise my lifestyle. When I walk away from my routines in May every year, every August I return to them changed, and with a fresh ambition and aim for that upcoming work-year.

"To die often is to live much," says an ancient Buddhist aphorism. I die and am reborn every year, in the Summer. Because of Summer.

This Summer has been a little different than most (hey, I don't want routines even in my routine-breaking ...) in that I stuck around more than usual. (Yet still applying that traveling craving to the Four Corners -- still "going," but going at home.) But, as is evidenced in the two-month space since the last MWD post, my not going away hasn't deterred my determined walking away.

Fortunately only one person noticed that the Almanac had been idle. And he's on my payroll, so I at least know he's been doing his job.

But, as the pagan poet-philosopher Jono urges in the face of love's and life's many futilities, "Onward! Heartbreak breathlessly awaits!" So the MWD plunges on, shipping dispatches from our little corner of this funky world into the great wilderness of cyberspace.

Rejuvenated. Renewed. And ready to rock.

Ken Salazar and ALP

2010-06-12T18:29:00.000-06:00

Counterpunch for June 4 has a scathing indictment of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that cites his roots with the Animas-La Plata Project -- which the author also has a fun time disembowling -- as evidence of his legacy of servitude to big resource industries.

Here's just a tasty morsel of Phillip Doe's case against Salazar from "Scapegoating Birnbaum, Saving Salazar":

In Colorado, Ken Salazar has been an outspoken, lifelong supporter of ALP, the project American Rivers saw as threatening a river. He supported it while Colorado Governor Roy Romer’s chief legal advisor and head of the Department of Natural Resources, then as Colorado Attorney General, then as U.S. Senator, and now as head of Interior. He even used ALP to help propel himself into the senate seat through the spectacle of publicly kissing the ring of the lawyer who was the project godfather, of course with an adoring and uncritical press in tow. On that occasion he declared with great humility that everything he knew about western water law he learned at the knee of the godfather. I’m not kidding.

As for ALP, it is a shocker of a water project, even by western pork barrel standards. It has no uses, just some laughable nonbinding scenarios for uses published in the project’s final EIS, of which 5 were written as due diligence smoke screens for this monument to mindless federal pork. The construction costs of the project are over $600 million already, with hundreds of million more needed to move even a small portion of the water to any conceivable point of use since, at present, only a reservoir perched on a hillside exists with a complement of energy guzzling pumps needed to lift the water 500 feet from the river to the reservoir. Billions more in interest payments will ultimately be added to the fiscal insanity since the public pays for all but a sliver of the costs.

The reservoir is fittingly named for Salazar’s predecessor in the senate, Ben Nighthorse Campbell. He resigned from the senate while under felony investigation for influence peddling, thus opening the way for Salazar’s relentless climb.

Read the entire rant/article, "Scapegoating Birnbaum, Saving Salazar" in Counterpunch.

Report from Silent Nighthorse

2010-06-09T21:48:00.001-06:00

I met with several people from the Bureau of Reclamation on Wednesday at a meeting put together by several landowners whose property abuts BuRec land around the reservoir in Ridges Basin. The BuRec staff were helpful, and the meeting clarified and sortrf out some issues, and generated some thought on others.

In particular, the meeting addressed the fence being constructed in Ridges Basin, public access and recreation management, and motorized boating on "Campbell Reservoir."

The fence

Several of the property owners were concerned about a $442,000 fence the Bureau has recently surveyed and staked out, construction of which is set to begin later this month (June). Folks are concerned about access and wildlife effects.

The fence is three strands of high-tensile smooth wire (not barbed wire). It stands three-feet at the top, and so is considered "wildlife friendly." (Although someone at the meeting questioned that, having seen what such fences can do so horses.)

The fence will be primarily along the western side of the reservoir, from Basin Ridge to the new County Road 210 (which replaced CR211). Along CR210, areas will be fenced as needed to deter off-road travel.

The fence is rather standard operating procedure at BuRec sites. The purpose of the fence, it explained, is to deter trespass, particulary by ATVs and 4x4s, and to mark the Bureau's boundary so property owners don't "encroach" onto BuRec land.

Some at the meeting argued that the private property along the fence line would already keep people out, and that the topography there is difficult to access anyway.

Motorless

The reservoir at this point is expected to allow motorboating, especially after a four-lane concrete boat ramp was constructed. BUT: Invasive mussels are an issue than can yet effect that mandate.

While at places like Vallecito, inspection stations are being employed to keep invasive species from catching rides on boats into new waters, places that are presently clean and without boating have been kept boat-free or motorless to deter invasive species.

And since "Campbell Reservoir" will be a clean body of water -- and likely good invasive mussel habitat (which is being studied now) -- that argument may be a strong one here.

Public access and recreation

This was the most interesting part to me -- the topic area that seemed to suggest the biggest opportunity to influence the future of Ridges Basin.

There is presently no public access to the BuRec land surrounding "Campbell Reservoir." And despite newspaper reports of that lasting only until the reservoir is full, there will not be public access until a land manager -- either a government agency or through private contractors -- is found and puts a recreation plan in place.

(For examples, other BuRec projects are ... Navajo Reservoir is managed by Colorado and New Mexico State Parks, Lemon Reservoir is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, and Vallecito is managed by the Pine River Conservation District.)

Right now, the ALPWCD and SWWCD are taking on the task of starting to create a recreation plan. But they have little money, and seem likely to seek out private partners if no agency steps forward to fill the void. So far, all agencies have bowed out of the offer.

It seems to me that the private contractor/partner option -- enlisting companies willing to invest in recreation with an eye toward turning a profit -- is the worst-case scenario. Right behind that is Colorado State Parks, which basically run state parks as industrial-recreation cash registers.

It seems like the City of Durango and/or La Plata County could step here -- either as managers themselves, creating city or county park, or as forces pushing another agency to act. They could then perhaps be persuaded to see the marketing value of offering an alternative amenity to Durango-type vaction folks and locals: a beautiful quiet (motorless) lake and park just outside of town.

The best bet, though -- perhaps the agence most aligned to the motorless/low-development argument -- might be the Colorado Division of Wildlife. It makes sense:

- CDOW already managed the area for more than 15 years.

- The Bodo family intended the land be kept undeveloped for wildlife.

- If left motorless and undeveloped, the land would return the land (to some degree anyway) to its priceless role of being an essential wildlife sanctuary in our increasingly developed area -- which is what the Division of Wildlife is for.

- The Durango area can still reap the marketing rewards of having a lake and de-facto park for its human-powered outdoors tourist and local demographic. (And so the City and County could push for CDOW to come on board for the sake of "saving" the area.)

Conclusions (mine, I mean)

After this meeting, I've come to think that some key strategies here area

- to encourage some agency to take over the management of recreation in Ridges Basin.

- the best agency will be one predilicted toward keeping the area motorless and undeveloped.

- the CDOW might be the best choice for that, especially with the support of Durango and La Plata County.

- therefore, also push for a view of a Silent Nighthorse as a blessing, as a environmental gift, AND as a great economic marketing tool for the area!

Yucca season

2010-06-09T10:29:00.001-06:00

A walk up the mesa-side above our house shows that even the yucca are grooving on the long-awaited Spring sunshine ...

Silent Nighthorse

2010-06-04T14:57:00.003-06:00

Since the Durango Herald took this off its website after a week, I'm posting below the text to an opinion piece I wrote that appeared in the Sunday, May 23 edition, so people can find it and pass it on. (Note that a longer version of this essay is also on the Inside Outside website, here.)

So ... spread it around. And if you're interested in joining an email list for sharing news and information on Ridges Basin, email me at ken[at]sanjuanalmanac.com.

Silent Nighthorse:
Motorless lake could keep the wild in Ridges Basin

One night I was walking the lonely county road that used to run through Ridges Basin. It was a near-full-moon night, cold and quiet, when I saw what appeared at first to be an apparition: a square light from a dimly-lit trailer, and behind it some kind of big, bright mass swirling slowly in the meadow.

As I got closer, the scene came together: An old sheepherder’s wagon stood along the dirt road, and behind it a flock of sheep (600 head, I would soon learn) grazed in the moonlight. While I stood there in awe, in appreciation, relishing the unexpected spectacle, out of the trailer came the sheepherder himself.

The young Navajo shepherd shined his big flashlight over his charges while he told me of his task: driving the flock from La Plata, New Mexico, to Ignacio for lambing. He would cross Ridges Basin tomorrow, and push on into Ignacio a few days later.

Then came the hammer: He informed me that after 100 years, I was witnessing this outfit’s the last sheep drive through Ridges Basin. Why? Because next year the site of a new dam that would create Ridges Basin reservoir would be impassable.

"Why do they have to ruin good country?" he asked me, not really seeking answer. Because we both knew why: The Animas-La Plata water project.

Ridges Basin was good country: A wide forest-rimmed valley harboring wetlands and a perennial stream -- a rarity in this high-desert country. Just a few short miles south of downtown Durango, it was a sanctuary for both wildlife and people: a big, quiet, healthy and historic landscape close to town.

It was also until recently home to an estimated 300 mule deer and 100 elk, while as many as 1,400 of the hard-pressed animals migrated through or wintered there. In May and June, the basin served as vital elk calving grounds -- a diminishing commodity in a region where many meadows and valleys have metastasized into subdivisions and trophy homes.

Before A-LP, Ridges Basin was an amazing place. And it was supposed to stay that way.

The Bodo family, whose homes and ranch buildings still stood in the basin before AL-P's flooding, worked this land since 1914. The family gave up ranching in the 1970s, but not their love of the land. In 1974, they sold their ranch to the Nature Conservancy, with a clause in the deed: that Ridges Basin stay wild for wildlife forever. When the Nature Conservancy turned over the basin to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, creating the Bodo State Wildlife Area (read: public property owned by all Coloradoans) that clause remained intact: Forever.

Forever, that is, until 1991, when the CDOW had to deny access to the Bureau of Reclamation for testing for ALP. The Bureau then condemned 4,000 acres of the Bodo Wildlife Area -- to hell with the "public:" in public land, or the "wildlife" in Wildlife Area, or the "forever" clause the CDOW was entrusted with.

And Ridges Basin’s death sentence was issued. Today, that place where I encountered that bygone way of living will itself soon be gone, submerged under the stagnant pool behind Ridges Basin Dam.

But ... There is still a chance to reclaim and retain some of those "forever wild" qualities to Ridges Basin. There is still a way we can resurrect the spirit and preserve some of the values and intentions of that Bodo gift.

The master planning process for the future of recreation in and around the Ridges Basin reservoir -- which now bears the marketing name "Lake Nighthorse" -- is still in its infancy, and much has yet to be determined.

In the fantasies of the industrial recreationists, Lake Nighthorse and its environs will be home to a regular Four Corners Disneyland that includes a four-lane concrete boat ramp, camping areas and facilities, and trail systems for hikers, bikers and equestrians. Just drawing up the plan for this playground is estimated to cost from $150,000 to $200,000. In 2000, the Colorado Department of State Parks estimated recreational amenities could cost upwards of $25 million -- not counting operations and maintenance.

In recent years, the Bureau of Reclamation, Colorado State Parks, La Plata County, and the City of Durango all have bowed out of the recreation-building business around Lake Nighthorse. Not to be deterred, though, in March the Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District took over the development of recreation at Lake Nighthorse. The District is reported to have $50,000 available.

The view from here, then, is that either full build-out doesn't seem likely, or, if the district can find investors to help them, then it's unlikely development will be done in ways that will maintain the quiet, remote, peaceful nature that Ridges Basin has known for millennia. (Or done in ways that are free and open to the public that paid for A-LP to begin with -- see the user fees recently imposed to support recreational amenities at the Bureau of Reclamation's Vallecito Reservoir.)

So here's an idea:

Let's have a silent Nighthorse. Every other reservoir in the Four Corners has been given over to motorized boating and industrial recreation. So let's keep Ridges Basin what it has been since the last ice age, and what the Bodo family intended it to be nearly forty years ago: A nearby sanctuary for both wildlife and people.

We can save both money and an irreplaceable landscape through two stipulations on any Lake Nighthorse recreation plan: Minimal building and non-motorized uses. And we can still make it happen. The ALPWCD has won a grant from the National Park Service River and Trails program, and, with the help of a private consulting firm, is working on setting up a process for public meetings and input on the design of recreation on and around Lake Nighthorse. Look for announcements in coming months on ways to get involved and speak your mind.

There can still be a Ridges Basin that is wild. Forever. If we make it so.

Pulling out the river gear ...

2010-06-03T09:58:00.004-06:00

At last.

Got on the river a couple of times this past weekend, finally moving the Summer (in the broad, six-month-long season sense) from the getting-the-gear-out stage to the getting-out-with-gear phase. At last!

(Read about my affection for that Spring ritual of pulling out gear in "Getting in Gear," this month's "San Juandering" column, in the June Inside Outside. )

On Saturday some friends and I took my niece and her husband on a rollicking paddle run through town. The river had peaked that morning, at 5,100 cfs. It was a wet, fast, and rockin' ride -- and my niece's husband's first-ever river trip. A good one, fer sher.

And on Monday, a slice of our river-trip tribe gathered for a duckie trip down a little-run section of our home river, paddling the Animas from Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane. This lovely, riffly, meandering stretch features big cottonwoods, sweeping views of the redrocked upper Animas Valley and upstream toward Engineer Mountain and surrounding still-snowfielded peaks. We also passed the confluence of Hermosa Creek and the Animas.

Let Summer roll!

Read "Getting in Gear" here.

Check out some pics of the Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane run on the Animas River here.

Losing Lost

2010-05-25T22:11:00.001-06:00

Well, it's over.

In one sense, my response is thank God! I can finally quit being lost in Lost! There's always a sense of relief when any long-term project ends. And keep up on Lost is nothing if not a project one must be devoted to in order to make it through all six seasons of the show's many -- very many -- convoluted and often confusing plot trajectories.

In another sense, though, I'm sad. Because the end of Lost also means the end of one more family ritual for our slowly aging and not-so-slowly growing-up family.

For the past few years (we came into Lost via DVD, after the show had already aired for three seasons), Lost has been our family campfire. Once or twice a week, we would meet together in front of the TV at a predetermined time for another wild chapter in this epic tale we were sharing in.

While most any television show could serve this gathering-around function, Lost was a particularly good family campfire. It managed to engage and entertain us adults as well as our two teens, with deep, effective characters wrapped in an engrossing, if warped, ongoing and ever-unfolding adventure-tale. And it was a literary tale that spoke to its audience in a uniquely compelling way: by unfolding on a human scale -- years, just like real life does -- that few, if any, other forms of literature can claim.

So this allowed us, for the past few years of our lives together, to get wrapped up in the same narrative. And it was a narrative that in turn provided more than just the actual "campfire" time together.

Lost also offered ample fuel for the fires of conversation, too. Because Lost -- as this week's series finale drove home -- was all about allegories for the various questions and challenges of life and living -- from parenting/child relations, to love, to honor, to religion, and ... well every Lost fan could come up with their own list of the many things they read between the show's scripted lines.

From my own fully-biased point of view, a major theme of Lost was tribalism: How we function as intertwined individuals. How we become or select leaders. What our personal boundaries are. Responsibility, cooperation, and self reliance. And, as individuals, how we accept, swallow, and move on from our own pasts -- and how those in our lives do the same for us, and for themselves.

And, ultimately, as the last episode drove home in all its trademark bizarre beauty, Lost was about one question: How do we do those things well? How and why should be we be our best in the face of the often convoluted, sometimes confusing, and always ultimately inexplicable mystery that we we're all -- and all together --always surrounded by and engaged in, even if we don't crash on a weird island.

And these are things adults and parents have been discussing -- prompted by strange tales and metaphoric legends -- around campfires for a million years.

The callings of Spring

2010-05-21T15:13:00.001-06:00

Spring has finally, in big brilliant blast of sunshine, blessed us, and the earth is burst forth.

Or somesuch. In our neighborhood, that basically means that families like ours spend a lot time working around the yard in the sunshine. The wives among us tend to be digging with little bitty shovels and patting the earth with gloved hands. And doing a lot of pointing with those gloved hands, directing us husbands -- who brandish real shovels -- and the teen-aged draftees into this yardscaping enterprise, on what to move where and where to dig with those real shovels.

Oftentimes, while my wife is not looking, hunched over, working the ground and murmoring encouragement to some bedrazzled scrub, I find myself leaning against my shovel and staring ... out there, at the greater -- in both size and grandeur -- landscape around us. Up and away toward Perins Peak, or the La Platas, or some distant butte in Utah that I can see in my traveler's mind's eye beyond the curvature of the earth.

I often see my son when it's his shift in the Boda Garden, as we call my wife's yardly handwork, also staring off, perhaps kicking some skateboard trick in his mind.

Seems the gene doesn't fall very far from the double-helix.

Because this, I have found from a very unscientific, but usually very festive, survey, seems to be the norm among my married middle-aged male counterparts: Women work the yard, and men help. But they're really faking their enjoyment. (One good turn deserves another, eh?) What were really thinking about is ... going, out there, somewhere.

And we're thinking: God already made a garden, darlin'! Let us let Him tend to it with His all-powerful ways! And let us go forth and folic in his Creation!

But my wife ain't buying it.

Anyway, while I may not always be the most exuberant of employees, I much do appreciate the fruits of this forced labor. And I enjoy seeing my wife's creativity and sense of beauty made manifest.

And given those gender differences in how we might prefer to spend sunny spring afternoons, I particularly appreciate my wife's long-running rock-garden project, because I think it represents the beset of us merged:

Sarah has lined the gardens around our yard with rocks gathered and carried from literally all over the world -- from the San Juan River to Alaska, from Mount Sneffels to Kauai, from the Upper Penninsula of Michigan to Norway to the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon Coast.

I know, because I, Webb and Anna carried them from where ever Sarah found them.

And I love it. This is, when I look at it now, a true coming together of both our traveling and our homemaking. And that truly is making our home more beautiful.

A little getaway goes a long way ...

2010-05-18T09:38:00.002-06:00

Every little bit helps. And lately, help has been needed.

Specifically, the help needed lately has been to get out. To get out there, anywhere. Anything to dilute the numbing of work and school and a cold, cloudy, restless spring.

The anywhere Webb and I chose this weekend was Muley Point, on the edge of Cedar Mesa, overlooking the San Juan River -- where, we both agree, we'd really like to be. But can't, yet. So we settled for a spontaneous and quick "little bit" -- a 24-hour getaway to where we can at least say hey to the country we ache for.

So on Sunday afternoon we threw camping gear and some food and our guitars in the truck and headed west. Dinner and a fire and some guitar playing and chatting on the rim while the newly-waxing moon floated over the canyonlands -- and the space station zipped by overhead. Then sleeping under the milky spillage of the Milky Way. Then waking for coffee and a walk and ... well, just breathing the air, savoring the silence, drinking in the views and sucking the spirit of the landscape we both love. Then, back home to do our daily duty ... but recharged, some.

It was a little bit, but it sure helped. Until we can get the dose of out there we really need. Soon ...

Can Ridges Basin yet survive the Disneyification of Lake Nighthorse?

2010-05-12T06:18:00.001-06:00

I've always had this odd predilection: I'm drawn to little places. Ever since I was a kid, I would seek and see the nooks and crannies and the subtle, hidden gems right around where ever I happened to be. And they nearly always harbored interesting and complete -- and wild in their own way -- little worlds.

Big, dramatic landscapes are quite lovely, no doubt -- and damn well worth defending, of course. That's obvious -- because the big, dramatic places are so obvious.

But the little places -- the little stashes and caches of wildness and flow that remain within and amidst the greater general environmental de-evolving development unfolding and/or unraveling everywhere we happen to be today -- well they're important, too. Because even if they aren't as meaty as the big, dramatic landscapes, these little places are the connecting sinew and muscle holding our less-wild worlds together. And they're still essential -- especially because of their proximity -- for keeping us sane and in touch with the undeveloped world.

And they're vital now more than ever, as in the 21st century the lingering big blocks of landscapes get either locked up for chopped up. Now our hungers turn their longing eyes on the little places. Nearby, I cite Hermosa Creek -- which may be on the cusp of getting some needed protection. And the HD Mountains, which recently lost its protection.

And Ridges Basin. Which lost its protection when the ALP project dammed the Basin to created Lake Nighthorse -- but which may yet get a partial retrieve. If enough of us speak up.

The Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District has won a grant from the National Park Service River and Trails program, and, with the help of a private consulting firm, is working on setting up a process for public meetings and input on the design of recreation on and around Lake Nighthorse .

We can save both money and what has always made Ridges Basin a treasure through two stipulations on any Lake Nighthorse recreation plan: Minimal building and non-motorized uses.

This is the argument I make in "Silent Nighthorse," my San Juandering column in the May issue of Inside Outside.

One night I was walking the lonely county road that used to run through Ridges Basin. It was a near-full-moon night, cold and quiet, when I saw what appeared at first to be an apparition: a square light from a dimly-lit trailer, and behind it some kind of big, bright mass swirling slowly in the meadow.

As I got closer, the scene came together: An old sheepherder’s wagon stood along the dirt road, and behind it a flock of sheep (600 head, I would soon learn) grazed in the moonlight. While I stood there in awe, in appreciation, relishing the unexpected spectacle, out of the trailer came the sheepherder himself.

As the young Navajo shepherd shined his big flashlight over his charges, I learned he was driving the flock to Ignacio for lambing, having walked from La Plata, New Mexico, a few days earlier. He would cross the Ridges Basin tomorrow, pushing the sheep down through Basin Creek’s narrow outlet canyon, to the Animas River, and on into Ignacio a few days later.

His story amazed me -- that that people still had jobs that required walking a hundred miles of lovely country – but then came the hammer: He informed me that after 100 years, I was witnessing this outfit’s the last sheep drive through Ridges Basin. Why? Because the next year the site of the dam that will create Ridges Basin reservoir, the construction of which had already begun, would be impassable.

We were quiet for a while, pondering the import of all that. The he broke the silence: "Why do they have to ruin good country?" he asked me, not really seeking answer. Because we both knew why.

The Animas-La Plata water project ...

Read the entire "Silent Nighthorse" here.

As a side note, to see a possible nightmare future at Lake Nighthorse, check out the new user fees instituted by the Pine River Irrigation District at Vallecito Reservoir recently to pay for recreational facilities there.

I'll be providing news and updates about public hearings to shape the fate of Ridges Basin and Nighthorse Reservoir on the San Juan Almanac.

Durango dust bowl ...

2010-05-11T18:00:00.001-06:00

It started a deep-blue day. Then some thin clouds slid in; then the breeze picked up, quickly maturing into a blustery wind.

Then the all-too-familiar silver sheen fell over everything, making the La Platas and Missionary Ridge and Perins Peak seem to slip behind a thin veneer, a sheer sheet making the valley's surrounds slowly fade into a general whiteness.

This is the spring routine we've grown used to, as dust storms driven by spring fronts dredge the deserts of the Four Corners, then drive that dust up the Colorado Plateau, billowing up along the wall of the San Juans.

That was today.

Then, around 4, when I was heading out to pick up my daughter, something else appeared in the west: A great yellow-brown smudge come to blot out whatever visibility remained.

Once this ground cloud swept over the neighborhood -- turning the afternoon light a spooky and heavy gold -- there was nothing on the horizon taller than a tree or rooftop.

Like a white-out in winter, this was a -- yet another -- yellow-out in spring. I could feel the grit in my teeth. It tasted like Utah.

According to the Sustainable Development Strategies Group, there were four major dust storms in the Four Corners in 2005, eight for each of the next three years, and 14 major events in 2009.

Here's a story about the dust-bowl conditions on the Navajo Nation.

Here's a Durango Telegraph story about SUWA's proposal to designate more wilderness in Utah to fight dust storms.

Lawn Chairs Kings rock El Rancho to launch new CD

2010-05-10T16:27:00.001-06:00

We headed out with a big band of friends Saturday night to celebrate with one of Durango's most iconic bands, The Lawn Chair Kings, who feted the release of their new CD at Durango's most iconic bar, El Rancho Tavern.

It was a match made in Purgatory.

LCK shared the spotlights with The Freeman Social, who also were cranking out the tunes for a new CD. It was a rocking night for a packed house.

A friend of mine pointed out that when we someday look back, the Lawn Chair Kings will be the soundtrack for our memories of Durango in the '00s.

Well, they may also become the soundtrack of the '10s for Durango -- and lots of other more far-ranging fans -- if the new CD is any indicator of what's to come from the band.

"Lawn Chair Kings II" is a fun and festive blend of well-written and polished alt-country tunes -- done in a style the band calls "western garage."

The band is fronted by guitarist and vocalist Eric Nordstrom -- who also is the 2010 Durango High School Teacher of the Year. Backing Eric is Steve Mendias on drums, the versatile Kelly Rogers and lap steel and guitar, and Dan Leek on bass.

Garage, maybe; Western, fer sure. 21st century Western. It all says summer in the mountains to me. And when I'm heading up there (soon!) I know what'll be pouring out my truck's open windows.

Learn more and listen at lawnchairkings.com.

Check out the Lawn Chair Kings as they go all mop-top at KDUR's Beatles Cover Night, at The Summit, Saturday, May 22.

Recent DNA studies reveal the truth: Some of us are wilder!

2010-05-07T14:59:00.002-06:00

More interesting clues and theories from the Fantastic Voyage-like world of DNA exploration ...

Seems that scientists have found remnant Neandertal DNA blended in with some people's Homo Sapien DNA. Some of us, it seems, are a bit more Neanderthal than others.

I, for one, am relieved to hear this, for I have long used Neandertal genes as an excuse for some of behaviors and tendencies. And I am also proud to say that I postulated that this very condition existed for others in the modern human race some time ago.

How did this intermingling occur? Scientists also recently posited that early Homo Sapien women found Neandertal men to be objects of their primal lusts. It would be logical to conclude, then, that the most handsome and manly of the Neandertal would be the ones most like to have gotten into Homo Sapien women's genes. So to speak.

This, I believe, is good news. Confirmation of this root-level genetic difference between some modern people and others -- those on my side of the family, for example -- can explain a lot of conflict throughout recorded history and today. For it's seems to me that rather dividing people along traditional, common lines -- race, country, religion, political party, sexual orientation, even gender -- you get a far more relevant and meaningful framing of how the world works -- and clashes -- if people are sorted into two categories:

Domesticated: Those who are obsessed with control, of self and others, and imposed ways of doing things -- that whole agricultural/farming/factory/military/bureaucracy world, sometimes called "Civilization." Think of farm animals: linked to the mega-machine for so long that they're no longer wild or able to function on their own. And further breeding among this weakened gene pool only furthers the un-wilding.

Feral: Not "wild," because pretty much everybody today is "born on farm," so to speak. But there's those who can help but ... act wild. Be as wild as they can within the framework of the civilized social and cultural world they happened to exist in. So they go feral -- wild where they are, amidst the world of civlized control. They are self-willing, self-reliant, independent, tribal, curious and tolerant of others, and downright mutinous when conditions are necessary. Pirates, but often pirates plying the waters of the so-called "normal" daily world. They are Hunter-and-gatherers finding a way -- each his or her own way, because that's their nature -- in the modern paved-over landscape and economy.

If you think about it, this one dichotomy is behind damn near every conflict, whether between the Romans and the Barbarians, the Cavalry and the Indians, or the boss and the empolyee. It even illuminates things like why the Democrats and Republicans are equally vile and FUBAR. Because they're the same species. And a different species from many of the rest of us, who are not much represented.

Why? Because Neandetals don't often make good politicians. Or wage serfs. Or cubicle dwellers. Or businessmen. Or fascists. Or underlings. Or farmers.

The next question for research, then, might be: Where did all these Homo sapiens who supplanted -- and somtimes bedded -- my Neandertal forebears come from?

Seems some scientists who are traveling on a bit more fantastic (and perhaps chemically aided) of a fantastic scientific journey have a theory for that, too: Ancient alien astronauts inserted genetic code (and probably more) into a select group of ancestral humans, forging those that went on to found agriculture, build cities, fight frequent and epic wars, and finally soil the Gulf of Mexico with oil.

Well, that explains A LOT.

Some of us really are wilder.

And modern chicks find us hot.

HD Mountains latest sacrifice to oil & gas gods

2010-05-05T22:05:00.002-06:00

After a long battle against the San Juan Basin strain of oil-and-gas cancer, the HD Mountains succumbed the affliction on Monday when a federal judge pulled the plug on the region's legal life support.

On Monday, a district judge ruled against the San Juan Citizen's Alliance in the group's attempt to overturn a 2007 decision by the U.S. Forest Service to expand drilling in the HD Mountains, including in roadless areas. The ruling may end some ten years of legal battling to protect the unique and relatively undeveloped area.

I think this is a loss beyond the legal decision. Even beyond this particular area itself.

The HD Mountains are important not because it's a big, dramatic, alluring landscape. But because it isn't. It's a Little Place. The prime cuts have been parsed -- a few gems set aside and the rest thrown to the economic dogs. Now our hungry eyes turn to the little nooks and crannies -- the sinew and cartilage of the San Juan Basin wildlands. That's we're eating now. We're down to gnawing the bones.

In fact, I wrote a story titled just that a few years ago, about the battle to keep oil-and-gas out of the HDs, and especially its special roadless heart. In that piece, I described the area:

The HD Mountains fall away from the southwestern corner of the San Juans like a dangling foot. Low and rumpled, never rising anywhere near treeline, they stand like choppy water between the Piedra River on the east and the flat plain of Florida Mesa on the west, finally pinching out on the south on the shores of Navajo Reservoir, the sunken middle trunk of the San Juan River.

On the north, looming over and dwarfing the HDs, rise the massive ramparts of the greater San Juan Mountains - a landscape of ragged, jagged, snow-field-patched peaks and green, stream-laced alpine valleys. Dramatic and charismatic, the San Juans are given their due by being largely protected in perpetuity under the shield of the Wilderness Preservation Act, as the Weminuche and South San Juan Wilderness Areas.

As a relatively little landscape - only about 40,000 acres - the HDs remain little-known, little-appreciated and little-visited. Few people outside of southwestern Colorado are aware of their existence, and even those who do live here mostly know them as the area of rolling hills south of the highway when driving U.S. Hwy. 160 between Bayfield and Pagosa Springs.

Little known, maybe; but they are also, remarkably, and importantly, little developed. In fact, RARE II, a government study in the late 1970s that inventoried the remaining roadless areas around the country larger than 5,000 acres, found 23,000 acres of the HDs qualifying as official Roadless Area designation. Other surveys claim as much as 40,000 acres - all but the outer foothills of the HDs - as de facto roadless area. Still, despite the RARE II findings, the Forest Service chose to not nominate the HD Mountains for protection when they had a chance under the Wilderness Act of 1980.

Even the judge, U. S. Senior District Judge Richard Matsch, noted that "this is not an opening up of a virgin wilderness," he still recognized that the issue here was deeper than a mere legal one. Even though most of the 39-page decision focused on legal issues and environmental law, Mastch made a point to note in his decision, "Gas production is the antithesis of environmental protection. The national policies expressed in NEPA and in energy legislation are in direct conflict."

If we're going to fight for what's left and defend our public lands so our kids have some to share with their kids, then we need to argue on terms beyond law and legislation. We cannot win there.

What we need, I think, goes beyond law: We need new reasons -- 21st century reasons -- for public lands, for roadless areas, for the wild and semi-wild places that are left around us. Even and especially little places.

And we need to say those things for a 21st century world, for 21st people living century lives.

We need to say anew not what we're fighting against, but what we're fighting for.

So ... what might be 21st century reasons to keep our public lands -- and our last lingering little pockets and connecting corridors of wildlands?

Read about the HD Mountains in "Gnawing the Bone" here.

Read about Monday's decision allowing drilling in the HDs here.

Learn more abut the San Juan Citizen's Alliance here.

Putting the "neato" in "magneato" -- and in one's economic engine

2010-04-28T21:58:00.001-06:00

You know how it is living here on the West Slope of the Bell Curve: To make a living to do that living,f you sometimes got to be mighty creative in how one accumulates enough economic bricks to build a foundation you can stand on.

I know I myself in my time here in southwestern Colorado have had to weave a paycheck patchwork from wage-paying sources ranging from river guide to bus driver to Cajun cook (with my Boston accent, I wasn't allowed to actually speak to the customers), to college instructor and news reporter and magazine editor (these last three at the same time).

I also, though -- even though in terms of business acumen I have the anti-Midas Touch -- have undertaken several independent entrepreneurial enterprises, most of which blossomed then wilted overnight, largely unseen, like an orchid deep in the woods. This includes two magazines, a few blogs, a karate club, a couple of t-shirt designs, a non-profit, an LLC, and ... well, you get the idea. Whatever it takes.

Anyway, believe it or not, this blog isn't about me. But it is about that income ingenuity that is so abundant and colorful here in West Slopers. In particular, this is about how that creativity has most recently manifested in my friend Todd Thompson, who was a West Sloper but recently moved to Virginia, but brought that whacky west-side Colorado attitude with him. (Like the time he went boating on the Potomac during the snowstorm of the century. Nice.)

Well, Todd's latest scheme to wring a living out of his new home habitat is MagneatoSpheres. MagneatoSpheres are, from my understanding, powerful rare-earth magnets coated with a glaze that makes them usable. And addicting, when they're brought together in large numbers to create patterns and structures and ... whatever you can.

Dude, that qualifies as West Slope-y in my mind, where ever it's done.

Still, it's the style that makes this, with my sense of hillbilly humor, a truly Colorado-esque endeavor. Todd and his partner in this project have undertaken their little economic excursion with tongues firmly in-cheeks. So the website alone is worth a visit and poke around: aside from the oddity of rare-earth magnetic balls to play with (but don't get them near your computer or phone!), the website is full of punny fun and curious bits of news and info about the invisible electromagnetic world both on Earth and beyond.

Nice.

Learn more about MagneatoSpheres here.

And check out the comical commercial Todd created starring his two young boys. Sure to launch rich and profitable careers in YouTube. Or futures carving their own creative economic paths on the West Slope of the Bell Curve ...

MagneatoSpheres: The bigger and more challenging toy for adults

It lives!

2010-04-19T12:07:00.001-06:00

As Mark Twain said, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." So, too, with my canoe!

I always knew Royalex is an amazing material -- evil synthetic plastic it is -- but this is crazy. After writing my squished canoe off to a life of limping leakily around reservoirs due to injuries incurred beneath a crushing heap of compacted roof-slide snow, Nuannaarpoq executed a remarkable rebounding after spending a couple of days soaking in the healing rays of the spring Sun, straightening, rounding out, dents and kinks leaving scars but smoothing and stretching back flush.

I'm damn near ready to start a Nuannaarpoq religion.

To test this -- and as first sacrament -- I hauled her down to the swelling and swirling Animas at the north end of town, where Rio and I paddled her upstream (well, I paddled whilst Rio lay there with her nose on the gunnel gorging itself on the spring riverine richness). We inched our way along the big sweeping cottonwood-lined bends under the flanks of Animas City Mountain, then turned and rode the brown snowmelt back down to town.

The redwinged blackbirds were ridiculous, just carousing and yelling to each other and singing and whistling away over their sense of ... well, nuannaarpoq.

And I felt my own joy. Because despite the garish Harry Potter scar that now runs down her midsection, my canoe's good figure was back and her geometry incredibly returned to form. She cut the water like she wanted to head upstream to mate.

Rivers do that to us ...

Anyway, it looks like we're back together. True, both of us have our dings and scars and weakened points on our resilient-but-travelworn frames -- and neither of us can probably withstand much of broaching any more.

But I'm happy to correct my previous obituary (especially for the reader who suggested turning Nuannaarpoq into a flower pot ... ). It looks like we have a few more runs in us after all.

A death in the family ...

2010-04-15T14:37:00.001-06:00

... of sorts.

My beloved canoe, Nuannaarpoq, was a victim of our big winter. The 16-foot Dagger Legend, named for the Innuit word that means something like "to show great joy at being alive" (culled from Barry Lopez' staggering work of nonfiction Arctic Dreams), had carried myself, my gear, my beer, members of my family, and assorted sordid bowmen/barmen/comrades-at-paddle (although not all those at once) down many a river and across many a broad reach of open lake and on many an epic, and sometimes leisurely, journey. She also had joined us on several of our summer epics, including across western and northwestern Canada, to Alaska and back, and around Wisconsin and the Upper Penninsula Michigan.

For the past several winters, Nuannaarpoq had hibernated alongside the garage. Yes, on the north side, and, true, under the overhang of the garage's Pro-panel roof, but this was never a problem as its durable Royalex hull withstood everything any our drought-year winters could dump on her.

Not this El Nino winter, though.

(This, even, though I smartly placed two pieces of particle-board ping-pong table resting at a angles along her bulging center to protect her from the couple-hundred tons of compacted snowpack that accumulated six-feet deep upon her plastic carcass. Careful: Genius at Work.)

She suffered a severely creased hull, a split of the interior wall, and a general permanent bending toward river left.

So, basically, as early as I managed to flip my boat to start last year's river season (less than three minutes), this year I managed to broach my boat before I even hit the water.

I will endeavor to revive her for whatever she can handle -- perhaps she'll enjoy a retirement of ever-veering to the left whilst doing some lazy reservoir fishing. Still, aside from the sudden lack of means of paddling, on an emotional level it's a loss as bittersweet and wrenching as that of any kin. There's something about gear. Especially well-traveled and travel-worn gear. Each blemish is a story, and every scuff, scrape, ding, gouge, and repair represents a strand of our own life's DNA.

And each loss, a small death -- a mortitio -- in the family.

Skiing Purg's dusty corn ...

2010-04-13T10:55:00.000-06:00

The cherry on top of this ice-cream sundae of a ski season is getting to ski Purg in April. The ski area is staying open weekends in April this year after having to open late, a lack of snow causing a delay until early December, and then receiving more than 200 inches after that.

Through April, weather and climate change permitting, the area is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday to Sunday, with the "six pack," Lift 3 (the quad), and Lift 8 running.

That means corn. And for the first time in my experience, that means corn on the "backside," off Lift 8.

T'was a fun and Scrapple-y weekend up at our neighborhood area. Especially on Sunday, when the sun screamed and we were treated to Silky cream-corn bumps, not many people (but lots of people we know), no lines, and only the occasional stray snow-bike jackass.

And live music on the "beach" in front of Purgy's -- the eternal Ralph Dinosaur and his band on Saturday, and on Sunday the heir-apparent to the Ralph Dinosaur Empire, Hounds of Purg. (Does that make them an "heir band"?)

A strange, somewhat surreal aspect to the weekend, though, was the dark and thick layer of dust that had been laid down by the season's first dust storm last week. Earlier in the week, you could see the dark tinge the storm had cast across the La Platas, but I was stunned by the spray-painted look of the snow at Purgatory. And you could hear and feel the gritty grind across the bases of your skis.

Last year, too, Utah blew all over the San Juans in early spring, darkening the snowpack and causing it to run off up to a month and a half early. According to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, BLM policies in southern Utah are fueling and exacerbating the phenomenon, with more problems to come.

Check out the rather dry but informative PowerPoint video below.

Also check out SUWA's "Red Dust Melting Colorado Snow " page here.

Red Snow in Winter?

An unexpected dose of "miracles" ...

2010-04-12T13:24:00.002-06:00

Even we here in the land of mountains and rivers and powder days and translucent high-altitude sun can stand to be bonked on the head and reminded every now and then to look around and see the miracles all around us.

Well, you're about to get bonked.

Those once wicked-bad boys from Detroit, Insane Clown Posse, seem to have found either God, several gods, or several doses of strong pharmaceuticals. Or maybe they really are insane. Whatever it is, this ICP video bring sunshine and flowers into your day.

Because, as they rap, "Magic is everywhere in da bitch."

Insane Clown Posse - Miracles

My new organization that's going to change the world!

2010-04-01T10:03:00.004-06:00

Today I am stoked to announce the launching of a new venture, STARFEET COMMAND.

It is, like everything else in my life, a not-for-profit venture.

Starting this group has been a dream of mine for a long, long time, going back to when I was kid and would sport home-made Star Trek uniforms for camping trips with my family. They never really got it -- although to their credit they never sought outside help -- but I knew even then that I was onto something.

Bringing Star Trek home.

Boldly Go -- yes. But the real trick is, Boldly Go at Home. Especially when your starship is a 1993 Ford Explorer.

The mission of Starfeet Command is pursue the adventuresome, curious, compassionate, valorous, and often studly values of Star Trek and live them here and now, where ever we are, whatever we do. It is based on the following principles:

Star Trek is the only truly positive vision of the future being offered out there: That notion that not only can we handle technology, but it can actually enrich us and our world and our lives, if we use it that way. Star Trek says that we can embrace the great Mystery of the Universe (which science now says is actually more of a polyverse, like Star Trek always said) if we choose to do so.

We can choose to do so by choosing to live lives -- and evolve a society and culture -- based on the conscience of Starfleet and the Federation of Planets in Star Trek: As explorers rather than exploiters.

And that exploring is absolutely subservient to the Prime Directive -- non-interference with natural evolution of anyone and anything. That, I argue, is sort of the 23rd century version of "Earth First!" applied to all beings across the great intergalactic wilderness.

And that is because in Star Trek, whether you're talking about Starfleet as an organization or the characters as individuals, the style is the message. The how is the point.

I and choose to "how" like Captain James T. Kirk -- kicking alien ass and taking names and chasing green-skinned lovelies around galaxy. That's the style; only I do it with a raft, some skis, a backpack, and often barefeet, with my kids and wife and friends and neighbors as crew.

But nonetheless, boldly going where we are and have often been.

Interested? Learn more here.

Oh, and ... April Fools! (sort of ...)

Captain out.

A mountain man's stance on a flat earth

2010-03-27T14:22:00.001-06:00

I was browsing my personal book-backstock, tucked away on backroom bookshelf, the other day. I was pulling out selections that sparked a mood or memory, then cracking them open at random pages to see what highlighted passages I might encounter, to see what spark of insight or creativity the aphorical wisdom therein might ignite.

I like to think of it as the I Ching of the second-rate writer.

Anyway, at one point I withdrew a paperback-version of a classic of Western nature writing, parted its pages reverently at a point I left it to greater powers to select ... and all the pages spilled out like leaves in windgust.

Was that some kind of ... sign??

Actually, no. It was cheap-shit Chinese book binding. But the event did extract a memory ...

I was teaching a course on Western Environmental Literature, and put this book on my reading lest, knowing the students would be surprised, engaged, and challenged by its story and messages.

And in keeping with my own message and theme of the course -- stand by your land -- I instructed the campus bookstore to order the book from a small, West-based publishing house.

Books came. Assignments made. Books purchased. Reading began.

Then the pages fell out of the damn things. Every damn copy of the damn things.

Was that some kind of sign? I doubt it. But the page facing up when own copy imploded displayed the information that this here edition of this classic of Western nature writing was printed in China.

I sensed the surge of money digitally passing out of the region and over the ocean ...

I felt the weight the many heavy cartons of books returning on that ocean encased in an enormous steel hull driven by kilo-barrels of oil ...

Email to publisher ensued, wherein I described the ... glitch, let's call it, in the bookbinding. They responded with, essentially, we know -- it was a bad batch of books. I replied, expressing my ... surprise, let's say, that they would still choose to ship an order -- especially an order for a college class -- knowing the books were doomed to vomit their insides.

And, I appended the hypothesis that even if the students didn't deserve such shitty-ass books, maybe the publishing house did, getting what it deserved for having their classics of Western nature writing printed in China.

Something like that. I'm sure I was quintessentially professorial through it all.

Anyway, my cyber-sparring oppenent seemed to absorb my digital jabs well enough -- except that last one. A terse retort snapped into my inbox:

"Well, it's a flat earth now."

End of conversation.

An a most unsatisfying end to that conversation, that was. But, I'm here to report that, as I gathered up the fully re-shuffled fallen pages from that former textbook the other day, it still achieved its mystical, magical insight-sparking goal. Because I now have response to that flat-earth defense:

I, myself, like my earth with topography. With moutains and valleys and lakes and rivers and canyons. And with mountain towns and desert hamlets and riverside cities. And I like the variety of cultures that are shaped by those varieted topographies, a diversity reflecting the individual landscapes that hold and support the folks who choose to live there.

And I, myself, choose to work for and support that topography.

So, thanks for the insight!

Epilogue: That company based in the West but helping flatten the earth did later make recompense by sending myself and my class much more expensive and nicer hardcover copies of the book to replace the crap they'd shipped the first time.

I guess they make better books in Hong Kong.

Banff Moutain Film Festival inspires extreme domesticity!

2010-03-24T16:38:00.002-06:00

The Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour came to Durango on Sunday. The event, held at the Smiley Building, was a fundraiser for Colorado Wild, those good folks plugging away for us to keep Wolf Creek Pass from becoming Wolf Creek Village, Estates, Mall, Condos, Parking Lot and MegaResort.

Anyway, the whole family and some friends wandered over to check it out. It was a good time, and a nice sedentary way to get stimulated after a weekend of spring skiing.

The eight shorts and films we saw were, as the MC from the Festival promised during the warm-up, "inspirational." I'm glad the kids came along, because it did convey the message, emerging as the attitude radiating from each person portrayed in each film, that you gotta get yer ass out and do stuff.

Challenging stuff. Stuff that puckers your butt. Stuff that is a siren call direct to your quantum-level energy-being -- or whatever you believe animates us as living beings. Stuff that you cannot not heed. Or if you do, it's at your mortal risk.

Okay, the folks recorded in this particular series of shorts may have followed their inner voices to places and situations that I, myself, am happy to support from a safe and sedentary distance. Rowing across the ocean? Speed-biking down Mont Blanc? Pedaling a tandem bicycle from Prudhoe Bay to the tip of South America? Scaling Trango Tower -- bivvying on the cliff face for days on a "porta-ledge" -- then leaping off wearing one of those flying-squirrel suits?

Admirable. But not enviable.
Yet also inspirational.

It's true. At this point in my life, my extreme sport is parenting. (But I do have two teenages -- a riffly section life-stream ranging from pool-drop Class III to Class V waterfall.) And the overall grander epic I forge along on involves maintaining a house; navigating a network of close friends, neighbors and acquaintances; arranging and executing frequent forays into the mountains, rivers, and canyons around where I live; and -- this one is a rather constant challenge -- working at ways to pay for all that.

Yet settling somewhere that matters to me, creating a family, connecting with friends and neighbors, pursuing an occupation and skill -- those were deliberate choices I made. A predilection that called to me. A desire I sought to explore. A long journey I deliberately and of my own free will embarked up and still travel. Every day.

Like those boundary seekers in those films -- but within my own framework of modern domestic wildness -- I find I myself also fervently endeavoring to travel my own life-expedition with the mind and heart of the Grand Adventurer. I watch those films, and I know that I follow the same spiritual compass bearing as those remote backcountry ice climbers who flew into the Canadian outback to admire and scale British Columbia's remote Hunlen Falls.

I just follow it across close-by, often residential and sometimes indoors terrain.

(Did I mention I have TWO kids? Both TEENS?? At the SAME TIME!??)

While I believe that harrowing wilderness adventures and excruciating physical challenges hold a primal allure for us as human beings -- hence the popularity of everything from the Banff Mountain Film Festival to action flicks to bungee jumping -- I also know from experience that it's also a deep, genetic, human calling to nurture and provide for a family, become a loving husband (for it takes practice -- take it from an Extreme Spouse), develop useful and practical skills, forge yourself a character, build a tribe, learn a homeland, and work to protect and improve those things for the next generation.

Those, too, are wilderness adventures. Those, too, are human doings that make us human beings. And those, too, require sustained effort and unbending intent; are fraught with extreme risk, struggle, challenge, learning, fear, pain, and risk of failure, injury, and death; and are best approached with senses of presence and adventure, and executed with both practiced skill and personal style.

And those too reward with an overwhelming, transcending, richly gratifying sense of accomplishment and success when done.

And done well.

*****

Learn more about the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour here.

Check out a clip of Roz Savage's rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, from the Festival.

Ringing in Spring with Bodo Corn Camp 2010!

2010-03-22T21:36:00.001-06:00

Well, what else are a bunch of olde tyme ski bums going to do on the first day of spring?

They are, of course, going to dress up all goofy and skin up their skis and head up within sight of their hometown and ride some early-season high-desert corn.

For the second year in a row, the Four Corners climate cooperated with the zaniness, delivering a warm(ish) first spring day and some intense sunbeams, gently microwaving the big-winter snowpack and serving up a hefty heapin' helpin' of corn. Best washed down with snow-chilled PBRs.

On hand were many of the usual suspects: Our Master of Ceremonies, Captain Cornacopia; Mr. Chips (a.k.a the Chiptator); The Canadian Cosmo Kramer; Joan Jett of the Rockies; Laird Cornilton (with surfboard); Corn Shrek; some creapy guy in boxer shorts, suspenders, and a trucker's cap (Cob the Ripper?); and yours truly, Corn Yastrzemski. And many others.

As Abbey said: "Down with Empire! Up with Spring!"

Check out some more pics here and below:

Why Charles Bowden is the most kick-ass living writer

2010-03-18T18:21:00.000-06:00

I won't even offer any teasers from this article, because I'd just have to re-post the whole thing. If you read just one thing this week, make it this: "Charles Bowden on The War Next Door," from High Country News.

Here Bowden is interviewed about his most recent book, Some of the Dead are Still Breathing.

U.S. 50 -- the "Lonliest Road" to loveliness

2010-03-16T21:29:00.000-06:00

As a traveler, I have several personal favorite ways of doing my going. They are, in order:

Walking
Paddling or rowing
Skiing
Driving

It may seem contradictory to a paleo-guy like me to love to drive (or blog, eh?), but love to drive I do. And long I have. I've even pursued this predilection professionally, including an extended string of mini-careers as a driver of public buses, commercial trucks, limousines, and taxis.

But my favorite driving has been long, epic voyages lashed to the steering wheel. And I've done many long drives -- crossing the U.S. dozens of times, hauling a camper trailer to Fairbanks, Alaska, and back, crossing the TransCanada Highway, and even navigating the fjord-gouged coast of my personal totem-land, Norway. I also lived for a good spell out of a Toyota hatchback, but that's a whole 'nother road best wandered down another day, in another post.

So it was that I was happy to captain last week's family spring break trip to California. Time, of course, was precious, so I merrily volunteered to make the drive straight-through, a 16-hour sitting marathon fueled by coffee and XM Radio.

And scenery.

Our route to Lake Tahoe took us across Nevada on U.S. 50, the aptly named "Loneliest Road in America" -- and a byway that I haven't rolled down in a quarter of a century.

And it hasn't seemed to have changed much -- it still stands (or lies) like a piece of pre-interstate Americana, a straight-line two-lane strip of pavement across broad basins of sagebrush (the Nevada state flower -- really) and and over rocky ranges, over and over again, broken only by the occasional widely spaced remote little outpost town.

Wonderful, lovely, expansive country.

I'd forgotten, to be honest -- both about the isolation of U.S. 50 across Nevada, and, well, about Nevada itself.

U.S. 50 stretches 3,200 miles coast-to-coast, passing through a dozen states and four state capitals, as well as the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. But in Nevada, U.S. 50 crosses what is truly one of the great stretches of wild and undeveloped landscapes left in North America. Some 95 percent of the state's land is public land, and the rest is sparsely populated, outside of the surreal extra-terrestrial hovels of Las Vegas and Reno. Nevada is as wild as any stretch of African veld or savanna (where I haven't driven -- but I have hitchhiked), except sliced by long, ragged, island-in-the-sky mountain ranges.

Even from the windshield of my truck, it was damned good to be back. And I know I'll be back more -- this time to travel Nevada some of those other ways besides driving.

Happiness and longing ...

2010-03-05T06:42:00.001-07:00

Our backyard -- still ...

But! March offers welcome signs of rebirth!

Unless you're talking about my canoe ... which is somewhere under yonder ...

Springtime in -- and with -- the Rockies

2010-03-03T12:52:00.001-07:00

Walp, got my windows and door open out here in my garage office (The Wordshop). The sun careens in off the snowfields of nearby backyards. The birds are back and yacking it up. And the (still chill) air wafts in, bringing (very) early spring richness and riches. It's almost like working outdoors.Where a writer should work.

Oh: And the season's first spring training baseball game streams in through the sorcery of the internet.

No more spells without baseball for another nine months.

Things are good.

So ... thought I'd drag out, dust off, and offer up this little blogdom chestnut.

(This one goes out to you, Jono!)

************

“People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball.
I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
—Rogers Hornsby

It takes skill, this following baseball. I mean following a single game, in progress. It takes practice. It takes training. Especially following a game on the radio, which I do a lot living out here in the Rocky Mountain West, where most of my baseball fixes are injected either through MLB.com or via XM Radio.

So while the dreary, dragging days of February at long-blessedly-last fade into the rebirth and reawakening that we call March, my favorite teams are at last in spring training -- The Red Sox in Fort Myers, Fla., the Cubs in Mesa, Ariz., and the Rockies in Tucson.

And while they're in spring training, so am I.

I mean getting this football-softened brain back into shape -- working hard on my ability to maintain a running consciousness of the status of a ball game whilst keeping up the pace of my multitasking of daily work and life. It takes me a few weeks before my mental dexterity returns to its major-league game-ready regular-season agility. So I'm thankful for those few weeks of spring training games to work on my own game.

But the reward for this spring training is more than merely sharpening my mental game-tracking skills, of course -- just the same way that the joy of following those Grapefruit League and Cactus League games is more than just notching the (relatively) meaningless wins and losses.

Spring training is about ... Spring!

So when I tune my browser to a pre-season Red Sox game from the humble City of Palms Park, or click my XM receiver to a second-string-players match-up between the Cubs and Rockies in the ever-summer climes of Arizona, sure, I'm rooting for each at bat. And, yes, I'm working on my ability to follow the game while I do my work, since games that matter are only a few weeks away (and work never goes away).

But, really, what I'm doing is listening to music, like some cool jazz, feeling the groove, tuning in to the musical soundtrack of Spring itself.

With the lyrical intonations of a Joe Castiglione, or Ron Santo, or Jeff Kingery on vocals.

It's music to my frost-bitten ears.

The Mountain View ...

2010-03-02T21:32:00.001-07:00

... is the title of this month's San Juandering column, in Inside Outside Southwest. I'm glad to be able to offer it up here, because I've been such a lame-ass blogger lately.

The view from my home town is pretty sweet. And it's that view that brought me to the mountains, and has kept me eddied out, a hostage of choice, here and in other Colorado mountain towns for more than half my life.

But that's not the only view from this, and those many other, mountain towns ...

Read the entire column here.

I've had this conversation ...

2010-02-25T15:06:00.002-07:00

(I'm the guy on the left.)

Emergence ...

2010-02-18T14:34:00.001-07:00

I can almost smell an afternoon barbecue and taste them cocktails ...

Out of the land of ice and snow ...

2010-02-16T12:48:00.002-07:00

My own short-term immigrant song ... a temporary immigrant to New Mexico.

A weekend venture to Grants to visit my parents was a startlingly refreshing respite from the full-bore winter wonderland we've been living in for the past couple of months. Once south of Farmington, only the islands in the sky like Taylor Mountain and the Zuni Mountains were thoroughly white washed. And I was surprised to find how welcome that experience was -- driving along with my window down, the badlands of Dinetah sere and sprawling and blessedly bare.

And my parents are happy to know -- I think -- that I haven't changed much, as I slept outside in their backyard every night, in February cold (but not as cold as Durango). But I could not not take in the February New Mexican sky, the winter desert air, the train in the distance in the middle of the night ...

And no snow, for a little while.

Rio and I both hung our heads out the window sniffing out hints of spring ...

Mount Taylor still hibernates in full winter behind economically hibernating downtown Grants .....

Remembering what bare and breathing earth looks like, near my parents' house ....

And then, back to the land of the ice and snow ...

How the other half lives ... during a blizzard

2010-02-08T19:56:00.001-07:00

What do them East Coasters do when they get hit with a Rocky Mountain-quality snow storm?

Check out below the results of the "historic" snowfall this past weekend on the mid-Atlantic states, and these guys out reveling in it. Former Durangoan Todd Thompson sent along this video of him and some of his new buddies from Virginia keeping alive his adventurous Colorado spirit in the face of the biggest blizzard to hit the region ... well, like, ever.

These guys start out checking out the shut-down city, then head to a marina on the Potomac River, where they motor out in the snow-laden craft to check out the icy river in its winter glory. (Sure, it's a nice big powerboat this crew goes exploring in ... but it's then explorer's spirit that counts, right?)

(Also check out the nice remix of Boston's "More than a Feeling" used as a soundtrack.)

Some ski porn to get you through February

2010-02-05T08:00:00.001-07:00

I know how it is. It's February, and you've been carving up Purg for almost two months now, and yer all like, dude, Paul's AGAIN? Snag ONE MORE TIME? Is Bull Run THE GNARLIEST IT GETS??

Well, grab a bottle of red wine and pull up your laptop next to the woodstove, because Travel & Leisure online has something to give you a couple hours' worth of vicarious pow thrills.

The article "World's Scariest Ski Slopes" compiles a list of 14 of what it considers the most puckering of ski runs in the world -- some in ski areas and some out of bounds but accessible. (The entries seem hardly "world" worthy, though -- it's either the Rockies, Vermont, or France, with one entry from Austria. Still covers more of the world than I've skied, though ...)

The fun part is, each entry also has video, much of it homemade, to back up its claim. Pour yourself another glass of wine and throw another log on the fire.

Runs in the West making the list are Al's Run, at Taos; Great Scott, at Snowbird; Rambo, at Crested Butte (sorry, but in my humble opinion, there are much scarier runs at C.B.); and S&S Couloir and Corbet's Couloir at Jackson Hole.

Read and watch the entire piece here.

Whet your appetite with this sample from the list: La Grave, in France.

Wolf Creek Pass avalanche triggered by skiers

2010-02-03T21:58:00.002-07:00

Some backcountry skiers set off a big slide on Wolf Creek Pass a couple of weeks ago, after the big snow.

The area had gotten 65 inches of snow in four days. The slope, says Aaron Cloud, who shot the footage, "was south-east facing and is about 11,000' in elevation. The slide was triggered by the second skier, our third lap on this terrain."

You can read the details of their adventure on the "Team Hayduke" blog.

Check out some video below:

The "rites of ski passage" come with risks

2010-02-01T21:43:00.001-07:00

My new "San Juandering" column is out in January's Inside Outside Southwest. Titled "Rites of Ski Passage," it walks through (or turns through?) the reasons Sarah and I have chosen to invest a sizable chunk of our annual spending monies into ski passes for us and the kids every year -- and the life-lessons those passes bestow upon our kids. And us.

You can read the column here. It's also in the print edition, available all over the Four Corners.

Getting those passes year after year, and skiing the same mountain over and over, have yielded good and valuable lessons, I believe. But one of the values I list can a bit harder to swallow than the others: Risk.

Here's what I wrote:

Risk. Uh, yup. Let's face it, it's part of skiing. It's dangerous. Early in the kids' skiing careers, it was just dodging flailing, wobbling tourists and hormone-whacked out-of-control teens on zinging snowboards. Then, as they grew independent, it was taking off on their own to navigate the mountain. Now that they're hormone-driven, but highly skilled, teens themselves, it's tree skiing and free-style moves. And -- new this year, as we enter the mid-teen years -- it's driving to and from the area. It's always something. But risk and danger are a part of life -- especially teen life -- so I'd rather have my kids exploring those boundaries in the mountains, with friends, doing something physical and exciting. With a helmet on.

Well, I didn't know it at the time, but on the day I wrote that paragraph, a 14-year-old girl from Bayfield was killed when she struck a tree at Purgatory.

Maddie Milner was also a local kid raised loving skiing, and was she was living the ski life I tout for my own kids -- and most any kids. Including the risks part of that ski life. My daughter, also a freshman in high school, had turned 15 just the day before Maddie's death. And like Maddie, she is already a ski addict. (This season she has already skied Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, and Alta -- way beyond my ski travels.) She skis fast. She does tricks. She loves skiing the trees. And she now wants to start skiing, and maybe competing, in freestyle.

I cannot (would not, and will not) pretend to even mildly speculate on what Maddie Milner's parents and family is going through since Maddie's accident. What they think. What they may or may not regret. How they feel about skiing and its risks following experiencing the worst-possible example of those risks. But as a parent I cannot not -- I would be remiss if I did not -- think about what I, myself, might think were that worst-of-things to befall someone in my own family.

So after a month of reflecting on that family's tragedy -- so similar to my own family, so close to home -- and other tragedies in the news in what is already an especially deadly year in skiing (and add to that another friend's 20-something-year-old son who was buried to his neck in an avalanche north of Silverton earlier in January, and survived unscathed), I can only conclude ... yes, skiing is dangerous. And yet I want my kids more than ever to keep doing it. For all the reasons I cite in that column.

In the face of such rick -- in skiing, and in all life-things that I am still in a position to instruct and guide them in -- I vow to endeavor to prepare my kids, to give them the skills they need to be as prepared as they can be, to discuss with them honestly and seriously the risks and dangers involved. And I will entreat the gods for their safety every damn time they walk out the door.

But then I will, again, push them out that door and onto that mountain ... or river ... or trail ... or road ... or whatever adventure they feel called to.

To put it brutally bluntly: I pray nothing happens to my kids, but I'd rather they died living.

And I hope I never have to stand by those words. But, if I do, I also pray I will.

I think of something else I wrote back when I was just starting to introduce my kids to the risky adventuring -- skiing, as well as river running, backpacking, camping, road tripping, etc. -- that my wife and I had chosen to build our lives in the West around. I still stand by those words, and hold them still as compass bearings. All while I pray for many safe returns.

I don't want my kids to fear death;
I definitely don't want them to fear life;
I want them to not fear living,
and to fear not-living.

(From Why I'm Against It All)

San Juan archaeological site

2010-01-25T10:40:00.001-07:00

Powder day bring town to Purgatory

2010-01-22T20:04:00.002-07:00

BIG powder day at Purgatory today.

A series of fat, wet Pacific storms -- courtesy of your regional El Nino -- have pummeled southwest Colorado, and bulls-eyed the southern San Juans in particular. Those storms have (so far) left behind a shroud of some three feet of snow in downtown Durango, and kindly deposited upwards of four feet of white manna at our little local ski area.

In advance of the biggest of the three-storm whacking, the Weather Service yesterday announced a 24-hour winter-storm and blizzard warning for our little corner of the Rockies, from 6 p.m. Thursday through 6 p.m. Friday.

Accepting what that means for an area already in snowbank gridlock, around noon on Thursday Fort Lewis College, the 9R School District, the City of Durango, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, and just about every other business, agency, club, group, coven, and institution canceled anything they might have planned for Friday.

And that meant ... great joy in Mudville. Or Snowville, since baseball season is still (only!) two months away. (Mud season will be coming ...)

So with a city-wide hall pass for Friday, and 18-or-so hours' notice, Purgatory today was -- not "was like," but actually was -- a grand, ad hoc, spontaneous festival for locals merrily dancing and prancing and laughing all the way through the ridiculous depths of fresh powder we all awoke to today.

Almost too much snow at first, I must say. On the first runs, it wasn't so much a great powder day as it was just a ... bizarre day -- you could barely pole through the uncut multi-foot layer of snow on the first runs. But once the thick layer was cut, the skiing was most glorious.

And the scene -- populated by college kids, high school kids, and just about everyone else you could possibly know or recognize from town -- was like the ultimate local's day: The town shut down, and everybody gathering to do what it is we most love to do.

Oh, yeah: And it dumped all day. Can you say, encore tomorrow?

Check out some images from the glory day here, and below.

Well I DO have a lot to say ...

2010-01-21T16:37:00.001-07:00

... but when I ain't been working, I've been playing God: carving canyons and building mountains in my own backyard:

With another three to four feet predicted to be on the way, I may be a while ...

A day in the high country

2010-01-11T16:59:00.001-07:00

Followed some maniacs on a three-hour climb up then ski down in the La Platas this weekend. Good to know I can still do it at my age.

Check out some shots here:

All work and low snow makes Jack a paranoid ski-resort owner ...

2010-01-09T10:57:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is getting weird.

Following Durango Mountain Resort's pulling the season pass of a nagging ski-area critic, two more bizarre cases of ski-resort dictatorship have appeared.

The first involves the firing of well-known ski writer Bob Berwyn from Breckenridge's Summit Daily News after he wrote a somewhat humorous column knocking Vail Resorts' PR attempts to exaggerate the amount of snow its Colorado ski resorts had received from early-season storms. (Read Berwyn's offending column here.)

"I sometimes wonder whether the ski industry wouldn't benefit more from being completely transparent about weather and snowfall with its customers," Berwyn concluded in his column. "but when snow=money, perhaps that's expecting too much."

"Apparently, I hit a nerve," Berwyn writes in a post on the High Country News "Goat Blog," "because Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail, called me a few hours after the column was published to complain that I had questioned his personal integrity. I told him that I've lived in the mountains for a long time and that I recognize a snow job when I see one. Katz replied that the column called into question his company's ability to work with me and my newspaper."

Seems Vail Resorts did more than just call that relationship into question. Later that week, Vail Resorts pulled advertising with the newspaper -- which accounts for a quarter of the publication's advertising.

Berwyn was then fired a week later, for reasons "not directly related to the column," his editor informed him -- in an email. The paper also offered Berwyn $3,000 to not talk about the firing, Berwyn says. He declined the hush-money.

The second example of ski-area paranoia happened last week, after long-time local singer Dan Sheridan trotted out a song from his 2003 album "Recycle" for a new year's day performance at a bar in Snowmass owned by Aspen Ski Company. The song, called "Big Money," takes a look at the effects of resort's development on the once-little mountain town of Aspen. The song ends with the chorus, “Down in the graves you can hear the miners sing/ ‘Big money ruins everything.'”

Seems the resort's leaders didn't appreciate the sociological analysis offered by the song, and fired Sheridan last week from his weekly gigs. Read an article about the firing from the Aspen Times here.

As a coda, Sheridan was hired back late last week after he agreed to not sing "Big Money" at Aspen Ski Company-owned venues.

The lessons here? Money talks. And Big Money keeps others from talking.

Ski-at-home vacation

2010-01-04T12:17:00.001-07:00

Hmmm ... last blog entry is dated Dec. 16.

Okay, so I've been away. Sort of.

Actually, we never made it away. My family and I had long been planning a two-week holiday visit to family in the upper Midwest -- a welcome getaway from our daily life here in the Animas Valley -- but the Christmas blizzard that whacked the middle of the country also nixed our planned getaway to Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

So with our plans dashed, we resigned ourselves to hunkering down here at home for our two-week break.

And we ended up having one of our greatest family vacations ever.

See, that perfect snowstorm that turned the Midwest into a scene from The Day After Tomorrow also added to the ongoing revival of Purgatory's ski season. After the thin and dry autumn, a series of light, cold, frequent, and fat snowfalls made the remainder of December a phat one for us here in the southern San Juans.

And, as unplanned as it was, we were here to enjoy it.

Enjoy it we did. Resigned to our not-so-terrible fate of being stuck at home for our holiday vacation, we passed our two weeks of freedom skiing. A lot. Damn near every day, in fact -- a string of ski days like my wife and I hadn't seen since we were ski bums in Winter Park back in the '80s. And a feat that our kids, despite having Purgatory ski passes for most of their lives, had never experienced.

And this unexpected and unscheduled ski vacation reminded me of some things that, sitting here at my desk, back at work in the New Year following our stay-cation, I now see as the greatest gifts I received this holiday:

First, I remember how much I love skiing. I mean the physical act. Oh, yes -- we already ski a lot (or so I thought), both backcountry and ski-area skiing. And, as I said, my wife and I have been getting our kids lessons and season passes since they were old enough to make a "slice of pizza" turn. And we, ourselves, deliberately built our married life around being near skiing -- that after meeting when we were both ski bums, and getting married at the base of a ski area.

But I think only this past couple of weeks' daily repetition of skiing really brought home to me how much physical joy -- sheer, wild, almost surreal joy -- I find in abandoning to both gravity and my skill at using that gravity to guide myself down mountains through snow.

Second, I remembered how much I appreciate having Purgatory ski area so nearby. Sure, it's loaded with funny and odd distinctive Purgatory quirks (Puirks?) that we all love to scratch our helmets over -- Why can't they figure out how to make liftlines work? Why don't they put up signs that say "Skip a chair" at the bottom of Lift 8, or "Make sure your chair is empty before loading" at mid-lift, so the lift-ops don't have to say those things over and over and over ... ? (More to come on that in a future post ...)

Overall, though, Purgatory is a blessing: A small, diverse ski area with good snow and a great climate. And it's a mountain built for telemarkers like us, with its broad diversity of terrain and aspects and limestone-bench pitches, and its many hidden stashes and lines that only those who ski there a lot really get to know.

Third, related to the above, this last few weeks have reminded me how thankful my wife and I are for having had those above things to share with our kids -- and the rest of our tribe of friends, and their young ski-bums-in-training. Having a place we all know, and sharing what we know and have discovered traversing this terrain over and over through an endless variety of weather and crowd conditions, binds us all -- as real "places" should.

Every day up there has its own conditions, personality, challenges, and storylines -- and those days act as threads that bind us all together. And a lot of that binding happens off the mountain -- and on the chairlifts. The lift rides on Purg -- especially on the "Backside," where lifts 5 and 8 are old and slow (and I mean that as a good thing) -- offer time rare and precious chances to rest our burning thighs while getting to just ... sit and talk. That time is something that is hard to carve at home, at work, or even when away at a family holiday vacation.

Lastly, I realized -- not "remembered" this time, but realized for the first time -- that these above things are going to play a larger role in my life. Especially after the kids leave us for their own lives out there. Sarah and I now see that skiing -- a lot, damn near every day, for as much of the year as we can muster -- is a path into that new future that is not so far away for us. And we realized that we are now looking forward to heading into that adventure, together.

And unplanned or not, those are the best holiday gifts I could've received.

"Mucking about with Mother Nature"

2009-12-16T08:00:00.004-07:00

If you consider yourself any measure of a backcountry kinda guy, then you harbor at least a secret admiration for Survivor Man. Or Man vs. Wild. Or Dirty Jobs. Or any of those guys who -- at least in reality-TV fashion -- put their self-reliance and so-called skills out there for all to see tried and tested.

But for most of us, this is probably more like our true backcounty bad-assedness: The Wildeman .

WILDEMAN - watch more funny videos

Ski season, at last

2009-12-14T20:51:00.001-07:00

So it finally got here.

Yeah, I'd gotten out in the backcountry. And, yes, Purg was open for a few days with a ribbon of man-made so-called snow. But that's not ski season.

Ski season, to me, is when winter finally arrives to deposit upon us those grand and glorious and deep San Juan dumps. And it's when we finally get up there to romp and ride that manna from the Pacific.

This is no small thing in my life. And my family's lives. And in our mountain-town tribe's lives. This is one of several potent and meaningful annual rituals in our lives. Along with the spring's first river trip, and ... well, that might be about it.

It's that big in our personal calendars. Seasonal rites and ceremonies for we mountain-town folk.

So this weekend we celebrated. Driving up the gorgeous gash of the Animas Valley in a driving snow. Gathering with those many other mostly local fellow snow acolytes. (Only in mountain towns does a blessing of "Praise Ullr!" rouse approval and agreement among strangers in a crowd.) And meeting up with other tribal members to practice our rites: Riding the chairlift, discussing and dissecting lines and powder stashes, cruising and carving and crashing and giggling with wintery glee down what were amazingly good early-season powder-skiing conditions this weekend.

And the kids? Oh, we crossed paths occasionally. But mostly they were off, meeting up with their own neophyte mountain-town tribal pals, finding their own lines. Forging their own mountain-town lives.

Damn good stuff.

Sacred stuff around these parts.

Some fireside reading

2009-12-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

Snow, at last! So while you're sitting by the warming glow of the fire (or the computer screen), here are a few personally recommended articles of Four Corners interest for your winter-night mulling-over. Enjoy.

*****

"Dueling Claims," by Laura Paskus, from High Country News, looks at the repercussions of the creation of a "traditional cultural property" around Mount Taylor, in north central New Mexico. Mount Taylor, near Grants, N.M., is sacred to several Indian tribes in the region, and the U.S. Forest Service's designation could hinder a potential new uranium mining boom in the region still suffering from the bust of the last uranium frenzy. That last mining binge left a legacy of mine waste, illness, and post-boom poverty. But what the new TCP is creating is also toxic: anger between the pro-mining and pro-cultural resource groups. That anger may have also spilled over into a string of brutal beatings -- using bats, rocks, and brass knuckles -- of at least five Navajo men last summer.

Read "Dueling Claims" here.

Check out High Country News here.

******

"My Oh Mayan!" by Corey Pein, in the Santa Fe Reporter, is a lighter tale -- but with even farther-reaching effects. This is a fun and funny -- and not a little creepy at times -- romp through the hand-wringing over the upcoming supposedly-prophesied end of the world in the fall (or so) of 2012. Craziness or not, Plein -- who says that "2012 is the only year besides Y2K with its very own Library of Congress catalog" -- takes us on a ride with a few of the figures involved in the craze. That craze is generating no small change -- it has spawned dozens of books, seminars, videos, and recently a $200 million major movie -- and those who claim to have decoded the Mayan texts that reveal the prophecy aren't shy about bickering over the propriety rights to their "discoveries." And in the meantime, a profile of a culture that gorges itself of such hype also emerges.

Read "My Oh Mayan!" here.

Check out the Santa Fe Reporter here.

*****

"Long To-Do List for New U.S. Parks Chief," by Todd Wilkinson, of the Christian Science Monitor (via the Flathead (Mont.) Beacon), is a nice look at the new head of the National Park Service, as he takes over the agency he has been part of for 32 years, and that in recent years has been underfunded, understaffed, and generally underloved -- and left with a $8-billion backlog in maintenance alone.

Read "Long To-Do List" here.

Check out the Christian Science Monitor here, and the Flathead Beacon here.

*****

Please support these publications that are still doing good reporting and offering fine writing!

Talk is cheap

2009-12-02T09:04:00.000-07:00

Change ...

Hope ...

Nobel Peace Prize ...

"Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss."

-- Pete Townshend

Check out, too, this response to Obama's announced troop surge from the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Talk is cheap

2009-12-02T08:48:00.001-07:00

Change ...

Hope ...

Nobel Peace Prize ...

"Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss."

-- Pete Townshend

An Old Bum's manifesto

2009-12-01T12:42:00.001-07:00

Check out this month's rather philosophical installment of my San Juandering column in Inside Outside Southwest, titled "Bum is not a Four-Letter Word."

Snow on the ground. The mountains pearly and pretty and just a'beckoning me to come play. As I walk through the neighborhood, I'm searching for little scenic glimpses of the glistening La Platas through the leafless trees. When I'm driving around town and up the valley, I'm craning and scanning, seeking panoramas of the deeper and steeper crystalline San Juans.

All because I'm aching to go.

That's what this time of year does to me. Still. And I will go up and get out there. Soon. After work and school and the usual slew of daily demands, we'll head up there ...

It's true, I do not fit the classic profile of the ski bum anymore. I'm no longer renting a cabin with five other ski-heads, or working nights so I can ski days, or hitchhiking to get around. Today, I got me a job (several, actually), kids (two), a house (one), and responsibilities and demands and a damned full Google calendar (much and many).

But that doesn't mean that those callings and cravings of the ski bum have dried up in me.

Read the entire story here.

I'm thankful for ...

2009-11-28T22:16:00.002-07:00

... a daughter who also could wait no longer for snow.

So Anna and I headed up onto Red Mountain for some early-season turns. And Anna's first backcountry ski.

Hope everyone's Thanksgiving was grand!

Meteor lights up Utah

2009-11-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

A planetarium director says that Wednesday night's meteor over the Salt Lake area was probably traveling some 80,000 miles an hours, and torched 100 miles above ground.

Cool!

You can read a story and watch video and a newscast about it here (KSL-TV).

(via BoingBoing)

Kicked out of Purgatory -- and into the Soviet Union

2009-11-19T19:46:00.001-07:00

Wow.

I mean, what else can you say about today's front-page story in the Durango Herald, "Durango Mountain Resort pulls critic's pass." I checked: It was definitely the Nov. 19 paper, not April 1.

Wow. It'd be funny, if it wasn't so sad.

And I don't mean sad for the critic -- she called Telluride Ski Area, told them her situation, and got a pass over there.

I mean sad for all of us who care for and have supported Purgatory (a.k.a. Durango Mountain Resort, if you like lots of syllables) for so many years. I mean sad that this is what "leadership" at our favorite local ski area has come to.

Look, let's face it: We all who ski here, live here, and work here have a stake in helping Purgatory succeed. And that's why the local community has a right -- hell, a responsibility -- to discuss decisions and actions by the management of our local ski resort in public forums, including (and especially) the local newspaper. Because those decisions affect us all.

This includes controversial decisions -- like making post-sale changes to the conditions upon advertised and pricey products like season and weekday passes. (Read about the proposed changes to Purgatory's passes that started the bruhahah here.) I'm not saying that decision was right or wrong, good or bad -- but it is big, and people -- especially those who laid out the cash to buy those passes, thereby helping the resort -- have a right to question and discuss those changes.

But is this really the way to do it? To revoke the ski pass -- and in such a cowardly, adolescent way -- of someone voicing their questions and reactions in the paper? (Read the letter from the resort explaining the revocation of the season pass here.) Is this quality leadership? Is this good community-building? Is this shared investment in our local resort? Maybe -- in the Josef Stalin School of Business.

According to the Herald, DMR CEO Gary Derck "said that (critic) Lauren Slaff's comments to The Durango Herald caused 'concern and confusion' among employees and customers, and the management team decided it would be best to'"part ways.'"

Uh ... huh? Gary, you want confusion? Stand in the lift lines at the six-pack or quad on a busy day. You want concern? Try sitting, freezing and in a blizzard, on a stalled Lift 8 for a half an hour.

But I digress. Besides, those quaint aspects of the Purgatory experience give the place charm and character. It's what we love about it.

And we do love it. And you don't hear us complaining up those. Much. Because we need each other, Purgatory and its locals. So let me phrase it this way: You want confusion? Try laying out several hundred hard-earned (we're not all CEO's, Gary) dollars for a ski pass to your favorite local ski, and finding out the management has decided to change what you bought. Want concern? Try finding out that if you speak up -- in our proud American tradition of speaking up -- about your confusion, that management will arbitrarily and childishly just "part ways" with you and that product.

Now that's leadership. Soviet style.

Wow.

Prayer rags

2009-11-18T14:09:00.001-07:00

Praying for snow?

When do the kids turn into adults?

2009-11-11T18:34:00.001-07:00

Ah, life with kids. It's been my mission, my all-encompassing project, my focus and attention, my purpose, my meaning, my every day, and my everydays for a long time now. Sixteen-plus years, in fact.

So when does it end?

Working as a river guide I heard a bunch of times that silly tourist question that always arouses snickers around these parts: When do the deer turn into elk? Silly, but that, to me, is a lot like how we look at kids turning into adults.

But, seriously, when does a boy become a man? A kid an adult?

Not that I'm hurrying the end along. With that end in sight, I'm savoring every taste of those every days, and those everyday experiences of life with kids. But right now we're in an interesting transition zone around here: My 16-year-old son wants to be treated like an adult -- of course. But my wife and I find (or at least feel) we need to keep intervening in his life in the role of parents, because, well, in a nutshell, he's only 16.

And it's got me wondering, when, exactly, do those kids become non-kids?

There are several logical and easy landmarks proposed as marking the divide between adolescence and adulthood, including

Getting a driver's license. The first sort of "adult" thing kids have to opportunity to do -- and about the closest thing our culture offers as a socially recognized rite of passage. Seeing many of my kids' friends now doing this, and hearing my son talking it up, I'd say it it's a start, but hardly proves, or rarely even indicates, any sort of "adultness" of the bearer.

Turning 18. This, of course, is the legal definition. Meaningless aside from a nice, clean -- and completely arbitrary -- number.

Turning 21. When you are old enough to drink. Which, I, myself, think, is stupid. Frankly, I'd rather see the drinking age at 18 and the driving age at 21.

Graduating high school. 'cause then kids really get to see the fantasy they were living in high school.

Entering college or the military or getting a job. This, I agree, almost surely gets shifts a kid's psychic transmission into the adult range of gears. It still often takes a while to learn how to use the clutch to keep from grinding those gears, though ...

Getting married. Which is, as any married person can tell you, indicative of absolutely nothing related to being an adult. Except in the "adult film" sense.

All valid points of departure worth noting on the landscape between kidhood and adulthood. But none of them really are good, useful, or validating definitions of adulthood. None of them can offer some observable, viable, visible cue that a young person has moved from kid to grown up.

And as a parent, I'd like some measure. Something for myself, and that I can offer up as a compass bearing, a sort of psychic GPS, to my kids.

So after much thought and observation, I'd like to propose the following two-point operational definition of "adult":

Adults control their attitudes. Only children think they can always do only what they enjoy. Adults seek meaning and enjoyment, and endeavor to do their best, at whatever they do, in whatever circumstances they finds themselves in. Even -- and especially -- in situations they don't control.

Adults are responsible for their journey. Only a child thinks you can just float along and be okay. Adults actively, deliberately, strategically navigate their lives and their situations. It's like river running: adults learn to not blame fate or nature or the nature of things, they don't blame what got them where they are, and they don't blame others for where they are now. They act. They enjoy the float, but they also learn, observe, plan, and adapt. And if they flip, wrap or swim, they don't blame the river. They get back in and row again, wiser.

In short, adults know their lives are their true work and art, and that if they don't make it into something, others will.

I understand. This offers no nice clear number to mark this definition of "adult." You don't get any card. It doesn't even grant with any particular freedoms or abilities.

But it's still what I'm going to look for in my own kids as they get their driver's licenses, graduate from high school, move into the world, start their own families. Somewhere along those landmarks, I will be looking for real adults to appear.

And I will welcome them, as peers.

In a cabin in the (pinion and juniper) woods ...

2009-11-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

Had the pleasure this past weekend of getting to get down to check out a friend's property, and the very cool adobe cabin he'd built on the place. Its isolation and desert location made it feel like a much more distant venture than just twenty minutes south of Durango.

The cabin is up a remote canyon near the Colorado/New Mexico border. Reminding us how of the dramatic climatic dividing line we dwell on, this short distance brought us into a wash valley lined with bluffy cliffsides and and rolling, rounded, sandy hillocks up and down the valley. A winding narrow lane through the p-j brought us to my friend's place alongside the dry wash.

It was even cooler than I'd thought from what I'd heard. My son, Webb, joined me on this trip. He'd been stayed out here a few times with my friend's son and their friends -- in the mythic "Jack's Cabin." Now, I was finally getting out to check out this teen getaway. And after getting to hang out here, I now hope it becomes a middle-aged getaway ...

My friend John had picked up forty acres of his own crumbling, water-carved chalk-colored piece of the San Juan Basin desert about fifteen years ago, for less than $20,000. Back then, his kids were young and he was working hard, but instead of buying a new truck or bigger TV or something, he picked up this land.

Tinkering over a series of summers (the place gets either snowed or clayed in -- too sticky to drive or walk -- several months of the year), he'd taught himself how to build an adobe cabin, and then built this fine one-room, wood-stove-heated, brick-floored place out here. It cost him about $3,000, he figures. The adobe bricks he made himself from the very soil where the cabin now stands. There's also a great stonework fire ring outside.

Smart thinking. Good work. A great and nearby getaway for his family and friends.

I know I plan on hitting him up for heading down there more.

How the Forest Service was saved -- and shaped -- by fire

2009-11-06T09:29:00.001-07:00

There was a great interview on NPR's Fresh Air recently, with author and journalist Timothy Egan, on his new book, The Big Burn.

The book examines the largest forest fire in American history: in 1910, some 3 million acres of forest in Idaho and Montana, an area the size of Connecticut, burned in just a few days, killing 70 people.

The fire also saved the fledgling U. S. Forest Service, which was on Congress' chopping block. It also, though, argues Egan, shaped the future of the Forest Service, turning it into what he calls "the Fire Service." Today, half the Forest Service's budget goes toward "the fire industrial complex," he says.

It also, though, he argues, saved the modern conservation movement, and made it possible for the Forest Service to go from the brink of extinction to expansion, including the creation of National Forests in the East.

The story, though, is deeper than that, and is filled with drama and adventure, including tales of how the black Army forces, the Buffalo Soldiers, came in to help save day and were met with racism; of how Forest Service employees went from objects of scorn -- sarcastically called "Teddy's Green Rangers" -- to heroes in the eyes of the country; and how because of a complete ignorance of how to fight forest fires, both those heroic parties really just "became fuel" for the fire.

That 1910 fire still resonates, Egan argues, since today more than 20 million people live within a few miles of a National Forest.

You can read an excerpt from the book and listen to the interview on Fresh Air here.

You can also read an interview with Timothy Egan about The Big Burn in Smithsonian magazine here.

Hermosa Creek workgroup releases draft of management proposal

2009-11-04T18:24:00.001-07:00

I had the chance to attend the Hermosa Creek Workgroup meeting last night, where a draft of the management proposal for the watershed was presented and discussed.

I thought the group was smart and cooperative and well-informed (guided by three mandates: defining "truth" as that which is supported by facts and data, transparency, and consensus). It also contained perhaps the greatest concentration of grey ponytails -- both female and male -- I'd ever seen in one room. Good folks.

The workgroup is an 18-month-old citizen group spun out of a regional initiative called the River Protection Workgroup, formed in 2005 by the San Juan Citizens Alliance and the Southwestern Water Conservation District. A broad and diverse coalition of groups are participating in the group, working under a consensus model.

The workgroup is looking at protections options in the Hermosa Creek drainage, northwest of Durango. Hermosa Creek contains the largest block of roadless land managed by the Forest Service in Colorado, and contains populations of genetically pure Colorado River Cutthroat trout.The group's consensual state of values of the region states:

The Hermosa Creek Area is exceptional because it is a large intact (unfragmented) natural watershed containing diverse ecosystems, including fish, plants and wildlife, over a broad elevation range, and supports a variety of multiple uses, including recreation and grazing, in the vicinity of a large town.

At this point, the group is focusing on generating a land-management proposal, and is holding off addressing issues related directly to water or the creek itself until workgroups complete looks at all the watersheds in the southern San Juans, since water development is best served by a basin-wide perspective.

Here's the core of what I got from the proposal:

Creation of a 100,000-acre Special Management Area. This management plan would be written later, with ample opportunity for public input

Creation of a 50,000 wilderness area, and on the west side of the creek

The 163,000-acre Hermosa Roadless Area will be kept roadless

Multiple uses-- from recreation to outfitting to grazing -- will be allowed where presently allowed (with barring mechanized vehicles in the Wilderness Area)

Here are the few "rubs," as they were called, that are still yet to be hammered out about the plan:

Wilderness area boundary. In particular, how close to the creek should the boundary should run. Proposals range from at the creek's edge (or center, or floodplain ...) to up to a quarter-mile set back to keep the potential for future water development.

What to do about areas with minerals and mineral claims that lie on the edge of the Wilderness boundaries.

What to do about a SWSI -- Statewide Water Supply Initiative -- site in the valley. These sites are identified by the state as potential dam and diversion sites, although there is no legally-binding protection, water rights, or set-asides for these areas. Given that, the question is whether or not to keep that area in or out of protected areas (especially since roads for a dam site would cut into the present Roadless Area).

That's a major nutshell of what is a detailed proposal from a long, involved drafting process. But it gives a sense of what's going on.

See photos of the Hermosa Creek drainage here.

Get involved: the Hermosa Creek Workgroup meets monthly. Learn more here.

Also, workgroups for other southern San Juan watersheds will be launched in upcoming months, beginning with a group for the San Juan in January.

Back in the pages of Inside Outside Southwest

2009-11-02T12:39:00.002-07:00

Out today is the November issue of Inside Outside Southwest. And in it you'll find my new monthly column, San Juandering.

In February, I retired the Neanderthal Crossing column I'd been writing since 2001. Time for something new.

So I figured I'd wander my way to some new things -- wandering around our home land here in the Four Corners. In the meantime, mulling over the whys, the hows, the WTFs and they why-the-hell-nots of life here in this wild, wonderful, and sometimes woeful landscape of ours.

In this first column I confess the rationale behind my torturing my children by making them do hard, challenging things like climbing Mount Sneffels.

Which means: You'll be glad to know (even if if my kids aren't always ...) that some things haven't changed!

Check out an extended version of the print column here.

And a huge thanks for the San Juandering logo to my good friend and graphic-design sorcerer, Todd Thompson. Now move yer ass back here, Todd!

Backcountry ski season is here! And with that comes ...

2009-10-31T08:07:00.002-06:00

This is scarier than anything Halloween has to offer.

Lest we forget ... Can't have too many reminders: a sobering avalanche video caught with a helmet-cam last April. The guy's Avalung and cool-headedness (pun sort of intended) saved his life.

Read the story here, on Freeskier.com.

Grand Canyon honeymoon mystery featured in Ken Burns documentary

2009-10-30T14:01:00.002-06:00

I recently picked up a book for the the winter reading queue that I've been eyeing for a while, Brad Dimock's Sunk Without a Sound.

Dimock is a fine historian and writer of very readable books on the Colorado River and the many characters who have plied its waters. (My personal favorite is his fascinating and fun profile of riverman Bert Loper, The Very Hard Way.)

Sunk Without a Sound tells the story of newlyweds Glen and Bessie Hyde, who in early December 1928 disappeared while on a solo river-running honeymoon in the Grand Canyon.

To write the book, Dimock and his then-wife made the journey themselves in a reconstruction of the Hydes' unusual fore-and-aft ruddered craft.

To this day, the mystery of the Hyde's disappearance remains unsolved, with some strange twists and clues.

A good five-minute overview video of the Hydes' story from the recent Ken Burns documentary "The national parks: America's Best Idea" is available here.

Ed and Bessie Hyde video.

Foray into the Great Outfront

2009-10-28T13:05:00.001-06:00

This is a post I was planning on making a week ago, before I was slayed by the flu. But it's still worth putting out there, a week later. Because it deals with something I was feeling then -- and, trust me, after more than three straight days prostrate on my bed, drooling and hacking, watching Sigourney Weaver slay aliens and the Yankees slay the Angels and whatever other brain-slaying tripe I could find on TV -- something I feel even more now: Restlessness.

Snow lay on the ground today, but the weekend before last was a lovely, downright weepingly gorgeous, warm, screamingly-colorful October weekend. Remember? I do. Because for weeks my family and I had a circle around that Saturday as the day we were going to, for the first time this year, toss our skis in the rocket box and head up to our secret stash spot high in the gorgeous autumnal mountains and, as one big happy family, get our year's first turns together ...

Welp ... the weather more than obliged. But ye olde aforementioned Swine Flu had other plans. Before it decided to take up residence in my host body (why didn't Sigourney come pull that alien bug outta my chest??), it infested my kids. Yep, right on our perfect weekend.

I was, I say again, stir crazy. And I was taking everyone else with me. No Sigourney there -- think more Jack Nicholson a la "The Shining." All work and no ski makes Ken a dull sociopath.

I desperately, despairingly, direly needed to get out.

So, I did, anyway.

I grabbed my daypack and headed up. Not to the high country -- but higher than my neighborhood country. I drove three miles: up past Fort Lewis College and on through the once-ranch-like (now California-like) Skyridge/Jenkins Ranch, to the end of the road. There, above the city reservoir, I parked, let the dog out of car, grabbed my pack, and headed up the city's new Skyline Trail, built and maintained by Trails 2000.

I was out. Not far, but out.

And, I'm here to tell you (even if a week late), that it was a damn fine getting out. Way damn finer than I was expecting, or could've hoped for.

And it reminded me, once again, that Robert Louis Stevenson -- that old pirate-writer -- was right: "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go."

The Skyline Trail climbs steeply up the north end of Raider Ridge (named for Fort Lewis College's old moniker, The Raiders), to dived between the Animas Valley from Horse Gulch. The Raider Ridge Trail then follows the sharped-edged sandstone crest southward until it ends with a steep decent into downtown, near the corner of College Drive and 8th Avenue.

Took me about four hours to (very) leisurely walk the trail right back to my back door. And in that time I was soothed and becalmed by the stunning and sweeping views in all directions. Views that put both Durango and my life back in context: Oh yeah! This is where I live! And this is why I live here!

And it reminded me why I and we -- all of us who chose to struggle to get by in this remote mountain town -- want and need to have these public lands, these many lovely and communal places all around us, right near at hand -- these nearby faraways -- that, as always, need our protection. And appreciation.

And all it takes to be reminded is to slow down, wake up, and remember to look around, right around you where you are.

And to go.

Check out a slideshow from the walk below:

Also, here's a crazy POV video from this year's Singlespeed World Championships, which included the Skyline Trail and Raider Ridge Trail:

It's heeeere ...

2009-10-28T09:57:00.000-06:00

Guess I won't have to take in that laundry until May ...

A message from flu to you

2009-10-25T10:55:00.001-06:00

Well, just in case anyone but myself reads this here blog (would that make me a masterblogger?), I'd like to explain my week-ish disappearance from this here particular cyber space.

Today, on the day the page-one headline on our local newspaper is about Obama's declaring the H1N1 virus a national emergency, I'd like to add my own recently humbled and still-frail voice: dudes and dudettes, ye so-called Swine Flu is an ass-kicker. I think and hope I have come out the other side of my own personal week of pig-wrestling, but I want to warn you all, this pig can flatten you.

Just ask Webb. My 16-year-old son got very ill last weekend -- high fever, violent retching cough, a grey pall over his flesh, general misery -- which led my wife and I to take the precaution of getting him checked out. Sure enough, the misnomered Swine Flu had come to our home, and brought with it early-stage pneumonia. The two doctors we consulted were alarmed, but glad we'd gotten him checked out as soon as we did. He was prescribed Tamiflu and antibiotics, and after a few long days and nights, seems to have recovered.

This pig of an illness, though, just moved to a new pen -- yours truly.

From Tuesday afternoon on, I have been pounded. Not violently ill, like some 24- or 48-hour blights and do -- but deep, low, full-body-sapping ill. An ill like getting sunken under a heavy, steady, slowly crushing weight. An ill like I have never been in my 50 years of experience.

A truly humbling ill.

No, I never thought I was going to die or anything. And I know that even a bad case of the flu is a far distance from those many more ailments and afflictions that can really make you wrap your arms around the Reaper's waist. But it offered at least jarring glimpse, like a face seen in a flash of lightning in the window, of what can happen to what has long been a reliable and dependable and strong body. And how easily it can happen.

And, according to my doctor -- who, the day before this virus decided to make its home in my body, gave me an "excellent health" thumbs up in my annual check up -- I'm supposed to be in the class of folks most resistant to the Swine Flu: those who were young during the flu pandemic of the late 1960s.

So let me say: If I'm "most resistant," then everyone else had better take this shit seriously. And it makes me damn glad we took it seriously with my son. For, folks, you're listening a newly and very humbled man. I've been blessed with good healthy and strength all my life, and, aside from a few token vices (my motto: "Everything in moderation, including moderation") have worked to maintain that good health.

But this ... was different.

I'm happy to say that, once again, the blessed and mysterious and divine Immune System seems to won the battle.

But now I know to append to that statement of victory: This time.

The question now, then, is: What to do with this new-found insight, this fresh -- and tangible -- reminder of mortality and temporality and inevitability? With this gift of humbleness?

Purgatory's plan for complaining skiers ...

2009-10-21T12:24:00.000-06:00

After all the complaints from whiny locals who felt Purgatory was disregarding mid-week ski-pass holders with their announcement of possibly being open only on weekends early in the season, perhaps the number-crunchers could just get rid of skiers all together.

These dudes rock the "phlat"

2009-10-19T11:10:00.002-06:00

At last! Snowboarding's answer to Spinal Tap!

Fort Lewis prof featured in new Ken Burns documentary on national parks

2009-10-18T11:26:00.002-06:00

Southwest Studies professor Duane Smith, who has taught Colorado and regional history at Fort Lewis College since 1964, gets his time in the limelight in the new Ken Burns documentary, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea."

Smith writes an occasional Durango-history column for the Durango Herald, and he is the author of more than 30 books. Six of those are specifically about Mesa Verde National Park, including Mesa Verde: Shadows of the Centuries and Women to the Rescue: Creating Mesa Verde National Park.

In the recently released six-part, 12-hour long PBS documentary series, Smith offers commentary on events surrounding the founding of Mesa Verde National Park.

The park was created in 1906, after its many ancient pueblos were discovered by cowboys-turned-archaeologists from Mancos, Colo. Smith describes how a Swedish aristocrat and amateur archaeologist was detained in Durango when he tried to take his plunderings from Mesa Verde back to Sweden, until authorities concluded he wasn't breaking any laws and had to let him go.

Smith also relates the unusually powerful political role for the time that women played in getting Mesa Verde National Park created.

The film is especially relevant and timely in light of the recent government arrests for pothunting, focused in and around Blanding, Utah. One of the reasons the busts so rattled the community in Blanding is that pothunting is a long-time multi-generational tradition, dating back to a time when it wasn't so taboo.

Tradition is important -- but still there's ... common sense -- meaning a sense of the common good. Slavery was a long-time multi-generational tradition, too. Traditions -- even family and community traditions -- must evolve along with appreciation and understanding, with an eye for the common good.

This same transition of perspective on the governmental level -- that led to laws that led to busts, including the ones that have hit the Four Corners area -- is really the core story of the Burns documentary.

Learn more about "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" here.

Learn more about Mesa Verde National Park here.

Read a very good AP story about the effects of the recent pot-hunting crackdown here.

There's also a rather funny review of the Burns documentary in this month's Outside magazine. Check it out here.

Below is a five-minute segment from the Mesa Verde portion of the documentary. Duane Smith appears at about 4:30.

It's a family affair on KDUR's 35th anniversary pledge drive

2009-10-15T15:21:00.000-06:00

Yep, that's me. On the radio.

Well, not yet, anyway. But Monday morning at 9:30 a.m. that'll be me, on KDUR!

I'll be on the air as part of KDUR's fall fund drive, Oct.16 - 23, the theme of which is "It's a Family Affair." Why? I have no idea. I'll make sure Bryant Liggett explains it on the air.

While there, I'll be on talking the praises of community radio, and community in general, and our grand, festive, friendly, and oftentimes pleasantly peculiar community in particular. And rivers. And skiing. And fishing. And public lands. And ... well, you get the idea. That's my definition of "family."

So call in and give money when I'm there. Okay? 970-247-7262.

This year is -- sort of -- KDUR's 35th anniversary. Below is the first few paragraphs of a story I wrote for the Durango Telegraph on the station's 30th anniversary that explains its two anniversaries -- fake broadcasting, and real broadcasting:

On May 13, 1975, a strange, melodic sound spilled out over Durango. It was a flute, and a singer, and folk music. It was, to be exact, “Because of Rain,” by Tim Weisberg. And it was the first song aired on KDUR, the public radio station on the Fort Lewis College campus.

Actually, very few people heard that first song on the KDUR airwaves. The semester had already ended and the students headed home. And the 10-watt signal broadcast at 91.9 FM didn’t reach very far: this was verified by a friend of the DJ who chose that Tim Weisberg song for that monumental occasion. That friend was driving north on U.S. 550 carrying a transistor radio to see how far the signal would carry.

In fact, even though this was KDUR’s first real broadcast, it wasn’t the beginning of KDUR radio. KDUR was officially birthed in 1974, when the college gave a small group of students a room in the basement of the College Union Building, some equipment that had been purchased years before, and $3,000 in student fees to found a campus radio station. The stipulation was that for the first year, KFLC (as they hoped it would be assigned by the FCC) was to “broadcast” through hardwired speakers in the CUB, so the staff could practice being responsible on-air personalities.

“We’re so used to the all the communications we have today, kids don’t realize we didn’t have those 30 years ago,” says Jim Vlasich, that Weisberg-playing DJ three decades ago, and KDUR’s first station manager. Vlasich today is a professor of history at Southern Utah University. “Music college kids were listening to back then wasn’t played on mainstream radio stations.”

Read the entire story here.

KDUR is Fort Lewis College's community radio station. Check it out at 91.9 or 93.9 in and around Durango. Or listen online at KDUR.org.

Read the entire article here.

Beer Four Corners style ...

2009-10-13T14:38:00.001-06:00

You can have your Corona on the beach ...

Give me Ska on the canyon rim, anyday!

Go Rockies!

2009-10-12T10:56:00.001-06:00

... pulling for the Rox to make it to the top -- from the top of Mount Sneffels, at 14,150 feet.

Check out a cool interactive panorama from the top of Mount Sneffels on photographer Jack Brauer's Mountain Photography website here.

YUM!!

2009-10-08T10:18:00.001-06:00

This was nice to wake up to over that first cup of coffee on a cold October morning.

The Durango Herald ran this lovely photo on the front page of some first-of-the-season tracks in 20 inches of the year's first fresh down Grande Couloir above Silverton. The run was made on Tuesday by a guide for Mountain Goat Ski Guides, at Silverton Mountain Ski Area.

You can check out a 2-minute video of the run here. If you're like me, it's sure to make you drool all over yourself ...

ALP is not, unfortunately, the last of its kind

2009-10-07T10:06:00.001-06:00

Durango-area resident and editor of High Country News JonathanThompson this week notes how the Animas-La Plata Project was for a long time called "the last of the great dams," but that today even grander, grosser, and crazier water-diversion schemes are being proposed through out the West.

The upcoming issue of the bi-weekly High Country News will look at a particularly outlandish plan: to divert groundwater from the Great Basin to feed bloated Las Vegas.

Here's what Thompson has to say about the topic and the story:

This summer, on the edge of my hometown of Durango, Colo., water started moving uphill. It was about a century ago that the endeavor to slurp water out of the Animas River and send it to the neighboring and often dry La Plata River was first conceived. After gestating for many decades (and taking on some pretty weird conceptual forms in the process), the Animas-La Plata project's giant pumping plant finally cranked up this June, and sent its first shipment of water to Lake Nighthorse, more than 200 vertical feet above the river.

In the early 1990s -- when its ultimate fate was still uncertain -- the Animas-La Plata project was considered to be the last big water project of its kind in the West. But today, a half-dozen new schemes are on the table, from pulling water out of southwestern Wyoming's Green River for Colorado's Front Range, to a plan to pull water from the dwindling Lake Powell, pump it uphill, and then back downhill to burgeoning St. George, Utah.

The Oct. 12 issue of High Country News focuses on what, for now, is the most contentious of the new generation of Western water projects: The proposal by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to pump water from rural Nevada aquifers, and ship it to Sin City and its sprawl. Acclaimed science writer J. Madeleine Nash takes us to the springs that could be affected by the plan, and introduces to the rare creatures that inhabit the Great Basin's oases. Our crack water reporter, Matt Jenkins, gives us an update on the politics of the plan. And I'm not shy about my opinion: It's time to rejigger the way we think about water -- and growth -- in the West.

You can pick up High Country News in Durango at Maria's Bookshop, Magpie's, and elsewhere. Check it out online at hcn.org. You can also subscribe to an e-newsletter, linking you to both free and premium content (that comes with a subscription to the magazine).

High Country News is non-profit entity offing award-winning investigative journalism and opinion about land issues in the West. There's nothing else like it. Check it out, subscribe, and support this and the many other (but never enough) good alternative media in the West.

Vibrant colors ...

2009-10-05T10:45:00.001-06:00

... of the autumn of the year and the spring of life, together.

This is a neighbor's yard, featuring the play equipment I built for my own kids in the mid-1990s. A couple of years ago, I dismantled it and passed over the fence to my neighbor, Sean, who rebuilt, expanded and refurbished it all, giving it a whole new generation of life. Death and rebirth ... death and rebirth. The theme of autumn ...

Last days for Roadless comments!

2009-10-02T15:27:00.000-06:00

At his talk last night, Dave Foreman didn't talk about just saving wilderness and wild critters, who talked about rewilding -- creating full landscapes that can support the large carnivores essential to healthy wild ecosystems.

And key to rewilding, he insists, is maintaining the health of large core areas, and forging corridors connecting large core areas.

And at the core of good healthy core wild areas are roadless areas.

In Colorado, roadless areas are at a key juncture: Protected in 2001 as a lame-duck president, Clinton created his Roadless Rule that protected Western roadless areas. Then it was knocked down by the courts. Then-president Bush allowed Western governors to propose their own plans for their respective states, which Idaho's and Colorado's opted to do.

Idaho's plan was lame as "protection," of course. But Colorado Governor Bill Ritter formed a committee that held hearings around the state to carve out a plan for the state that Ritter called an "insurance policy" in case the Bush Administration or some following administration came up with a really bad law.

Good idea. But in August the Clinton Rule was since returned by the courts. And Ritter's Colorado plan is in several important ways weaker than the Clinton plan.

The idea, then, is to urge Governor Ritter to either accept the Clinton Rule, or bolster a Colorado roadless protection plan that is at least as strong as the Clinton rule.

Learn more here.

Send the Governor an email supporting roadless protection here.

Dave Foreman in Durango tomorrow

2009-09-30T09:15:00.001-06:00

Thursday night you have a chance to see one of the great forces in the evolution of the environmental movement when Dave Foreman speaks at Fort Lewis College.

Foreman will talk on "The Rewilding of America" on at 7 p.m. on Oct. 1st in 130 Noble Hall. There will also be an informal discussion and Q&A with Foreman will also happen at 4:30pm, at the Center of Southwest Studies.

Read a quick bio of Foreman here.

The many flags Foreman has marched under in his eco-career -- from Wilderness Society to Earth First! to Sierra Club to Wild Earth to, today, the Rewilding Institute -- show his willingness to have a broad embrace of ways to embody what is his ultimate vision: putting the earth first in our society and culture and technology and lives. That's the true Earth First! -- a path and a compass bearing, rather than a mere group. No membership, just action. Whether that's politics, protest, science, or even personal silent solitude in the wilds.

In that sense, then, and equally importantly, in my mind, has been Foreman's role as not just enviro-meddler (as Ed Abbey called good environmentalists), or not even agitator, but as motivator. He's been a life-long cheerleader -- one who backs his cheerleading by reason and evidence and humor and the occasional howling -- who has hounded and cajoled and bugled others to take up the battle to put the earth first in whatever way each of us we can.

See and hear the show yourself on Thursday.

And check out this clip below of Foreman speaking at a Bioneers Conference in 2005:

And wipe that smirk off yer face!

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Yankee Boy Basin. Click image to enlarge.

Neighborhood harvest!

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Last night our friends and neighbors Matt and Janet hosted their annual neighborhood apple-harvest fest. It was an urban bounty.

They rented a cider press from Turtle Lake Refuge, and over the course of the evening -- from warm clear early sunset around the barbeque to cool first-quarter-moon-lit night around a back-yard campfire -- produced a few gallons of sweet and lovely amber cider. Some drank it straight, some punched it up with an assortment of harder liquids. All the apples were reaped from their own or other down-town apple trees.

We even got to see the International Space Station sprint across the early-night sky. A good omen, methinks, on a good night.

That time of year ...

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... when the summer's rafting-gear tarp and painting drop cloth are pressed into to the service of fall's home-grown tomatoes.

Last day of summer ...

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... comes with winter's first touch.

Looking north from Carbon Mountain yesterday. Before this storm moved in, we could see a stip of fresh snow lining Mountain View Crest, and some more distant peaks. (Click image to enlarge.)

One-gear minds ...

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Started the day (well, partway through, after yard-saling) with a not-atypical, yet still-new, Durangotan spectacle. A typical, in fact, Durangotan fruit salad of humor, plenty of cross-dressing, and extreme athleticism.

At 10:50 a.m. we and some neighbors and our kids wandered down to the end of the block with coffee in hand, a few lawn chairs for the still-waking, and watched the start of the first-ever Singlespeed World Championships.

Check out some shots (click to enlarge). We were right where the roll-up ended and became a race, marketed by some lunatic in drag blaring a blow-horn. We watched this nutcase get very-nearly mowed down by two cars, three cyclists, and a disoriented and distracted pedestrian.

Several of these mono-gearheads have been camped in my neighbor's yard most of the week. I enjoyed talking to a few in the rain over a keg of True Blonde one night. When I asked them, Um, why singlespeed?

A well-pierced young woman from California said she enjoys it more than regular mountain biking it slows down the ride, and even makes it okay to walk in places. So she gets more out of the ride.

A closer-to-middle-aged guy from Durango with two kids said that since he started singlespeeding only a few months ago, it's like all the trails around here a new again, but you have a heightened awareness of the terrain. You have to, to plan for hills and use you one gear to its best advantage.

Both very astute and aesthetic answers -- not the sort of rage-rock/X-game/MMA-style-of-cycling grunt of a response I was rather expecting.

Still, and even though I love my cruiser for those very same aforementioned reasons and the pleasure they make getting around town like, I still have no interest. To my reverent, faithful, God-fearing mind, mountain biking is exactly why God made gears.

Bumper sticker seen at Irish Embassy Pub last night: "If you ride a single speed and nobody sees you, is it still cool?"

We'll soon find out. We're headed up to the mountains camping tonight -- and trying Sneffels tomorrow -- leaving these one-track minded folks to themselves to celebrate.