I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever […]
Earth
Bad things happen quickly; good things take time. This isn’t a perfect pattern, of course, but I think it’s real and worth thinking about. A wildfire, explosion, earthquake, pandemic, gunshot, car crash, heart attack—all fast. Cancer typically starts out slow but then gets fast. Climate change seems slow, but the reason it’s so dangerous is […]
This post first ran in the spring of 2015 and I’ve often wondered if this patch of earth in Iowa is still guarded. A summer not long ago I went for a grueling 3-day backpack through GMO cornfields in Iowa, camping among walls of waxy green leaves that sawed against each other in the breeze. […]
Last week my family traveled to Oregon for an end-of-summer trip. We wanted to start in Bend, in the central part of the state. There we would hike and explore a bit—somewhat to her dismay, I was especially eager to take my daughter up South Sister, one of the Three Sisters volcanoes—before driving down to […]
The picture is of a bit of soft mountain lion fur plucked off the barb of a sagging barbed wire fence. I’m on day 87 of 100 walking 200 square miles around my house in Colorado, mostly on public lands where wild animals hold sway. Today was a steep, wooded draw choked with boulders and […]
A couple of weeks ago, I climbed Mount Adams with my good friend Carson. Our plan had been to climb Mount Hood, but schedules being what they were we could only get away from Friday to Saturday. Weekends on Hood can be pretty crowded, so Mount Adams was something of a fallback. A consolation prize. […]
This coming Monday is the new moon, which means by tonight we are in the soup. There’s nothing to block the stars but clouds…and us. Every month has its dark nadir and we’re pretty much there, stars as bright and numerous as they’ll ever be. That’s the thing about a full night sky, it’s as […]
