This post originally appeared in September of 2020.
Climate
We had a doozy of a snowfall last week in southwest Colorado, the high desert blanketed a foot and a half deep, the mountains getting a good four feet. Knock on wood, I don’t like to tempt the fates of nature and climate change, and I’m not meaning to brag, I just want to celebrate […]
In Washington, D.C., in winter, a lot of horrible things fall out of the sky. We sometimes get a good honest snowfall. But usually it’s something worse – some godforsaken blend of snow and rain and ice and sleet that coats everything and makes you not want to attempt to stand on any hard surface […]
As we head into wave after wave of 100+ degrees Farhenheit temperatures in my home valley in Washington, this post from 2017 seemed worth re-upping: One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall […]
The slow stretch of river where I like to swim gleamed copper yesterday morning, reflecting sunlight tinted red by wildfire smoke. I sat and drank my coffee as the sun rose, watching the silhouette of a hummingbird zip across the dun-colored sky. Four mergansers cruised across the pond then dove underwater, leaving barely a ripple behind them. “Must be nice to be a boat, a plane, and […]
The most striking thing about Konrad Steffen is not his accolades as one of the world’s leading cryosphere researchers, but how he could light a cigarette in a 60-mile-per-hour gale screaming across the ice. He’d duck into his shoulder with a lighter and in a second or two reappear with a glowing cherry. He held […]
Arizona winter night, stars over pines, my buddy and I were heading for a hot tub on the outskirts of Flagstaff when a phone rang. It was a mutual friend, Jayme Dittmar, a dog musher on a 1,300-mile expedition by dog sled from Nome, Alaska, to the village of Utqiagvik on Point Barrow. She was […]