Several days ago I found myself in Idaho, driving west along the St. Joe River with a couple of companions, when, rounding a bend in the road, we came upon a snake. The creature was sprawled in the east-bound lane, and although she wasn’t moving, she had a certain three-dimensional je nais se quoi that […]
The quietest place in America is fern-swaddled, lichen-draped, moss-blanketed. It is past the splintered tree, through the tilted spruce, beyond a damp pocket of bog, its precise location marked by a tiny cairn of polished riverstone. Its floor is a dappled jumble of deadfall and blowdown, nurse logs melting back into the earth even as […]
Last weekend Elise and I spent three days backpacking in the vicinity of Pyramid Pass, a high notch in the stony spine of the Idaho Selkirks. With a couple of friends in tow (don’t worry: absolutely no hugging!), we crested the pass and descended to a teacup lake nested in a bowl of granite and […]
The kitschiest town in Washington nestles in the Cascades, two hours east of Seattle and three west of Spokane, where the Wenatchee River elbows its way through a cleft in snow-veined mountains. This is the picturesque home of Leavenworth, a faux-Bavarian town that has gone all-in on a year-round Oktoberfest vibe. The ersatz chalets boast […]
Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have […]
Three weeks and approximately two lifetimes ago, I went to Rock Springs, Wyoming to meet some migrants. The pilgrims in question were mule deer, a whole herd of ‘em, who trek each spring from the sere sagebrush valley where they winter to alpine summer pastures, devouring fresh green-up as they wander. Along the way they […]
By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, […]
Earlier this month, on a night hike in Costa Rica’s Monteverde cloud forest, I made the acquaintance of the above insect, which, best I can tell, is a member of the Pterochrozinae, a group commonly known as the leaf-mimic katydids. (Entomologists, please correct me!) Walter, our guide, found this individual, which is fortunate because I […]