This is a picture of my mother sheltering from an Arctic wind from when this post first published in 2015. She’s nearing 80 now and I just connected with her last night in southern Utah where she’s joining me for a week on the San Juan River. She teeters more than she used to, not […]
Earth
The skirt of Las Vegas, Nevada, is a frictional zone scrubbed with busted tortoise shells and Joshua trees that lean toward the sun. High tension power lines intersect at substations and disperse from there into the desert. A buddy and I camped in this liminal space a couple months ago and all night long the […]
Lately I’ve been lingering in Bortle 1 zones, rare dark places untroubled by human lights. On the scale, 1 is where your eyes discern the faintest satellites and the fuzzballs of nearby galaxies. When you wake hours before dawn, the atmosphere lacks the flashing planes, and sometimes satellites seem to have fallen asleep. The stars […]
I was hoping for an extra few hours somewhere in the race between hither and yon to write something of substance, but it didn’t come. I do want you to know that instead of writing, I camped near Crystal Geyser in Utah and listened to it gurgle and throb all night long. I dreamt to […]
Returning to this creek was my stepdad’s idea. At 78, he wanted to try it again, but do it right this time. Twenty-some years ago, when we first hiked this mostly untrailed alpine canyon in Colorado, we planned it as a day trip with a car at either end for a shuttle. My mom was […]
This past weekend, I climbed Glacier Peak with a friend of mine. Glacier Peak is Washington’s fourth-highest mountain, and also one of the state’s five stratovolcanoes. (Perhaps you’ve heard of one of the others; I know I have.) What distinguishes Glacier Peak among its volcanic kin is its remoteness. It is at the eastern edge […]