Counting blessings

I am truly blessed this holiday season: I’ll be passing it in a cabin in the woods.

It’s a solid and simple cabin in the lovely Northwoods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The cabin sits on a lake shore ringed with bone-white birch and droopy hemlock and winter-bare maple. In the summer, loons hatch and raise their young along the far shore, visible from the cabin’s deck. And I’ve heard wolves while sitting in a canoe at dusk in the middle of lake. In the winter, we ski tour the silent and stately snow-heavy woods. Sometimes, I pull lake trout for dinner out of ice-fishing holes in front of the cabin.

The cabin itself is respectful of the place that holds it, built with a small imprint on the landscape, and cradled by forest right to the edges of its hand-hewn log walls. Inside, it is humble but comfortable, well-built and functional, spare but able to hold the extended and expanding family that goes there to enjoy its space. It is a place where quiet rules and the only entertainment is what you make for yourself, or find by going out of the cabin’s doors.

The timeless days at the cabin are a welcome contrast to our workaday hours, and the spell this place casts is a magic we can bring back home to inject into our everyday lives.

And those characteristics of this place are not an accident. They are deliberate, planned and nurtured to last.

Not that I had anything to do with it. I merely married into it. The cabin, instead, is the product of the forethought, planning and long-range visioning of my wife’s parents and family. They did not invest in the cabin with an eye toward some snappy financial return; rather, they envisioned long-term rewards for the ever-expanding and dispersing family and friends who would gather there. More than three decades ago, they wanted to assure them all — even those still unseen in the future — a place to reconnect with each other, with the out of doors, and with their own selves.

I didn’t build it, but still, in 25 years of personal pilgrimages to the cabin, I have claimed this powerful place as my own. Which means both sharing in its pleasures and serving in its upkeep and oversight. And so, too, my wife and I teach our kids, who’ve grown up with this blessing in their lives by birthright, to appreciate and take care of it, so they, too, will have the cabin when they want and need it, to regenerate and re-enervate and reconnect with the family that congregates there — because they have a “there” where they can congregate.

And also to be sure their own kids — still way in the future — will have those blessings, too.

When the holidays are over, we’ll come home, back to our workaday lives. Which are also blessing-rich, I know … but, still, it’s the nature of the busyness of daily business to entrench and erode and wear our spirits down. Then, once again, we’ll need a place where we find that magic to bring home again.

Then I’ll remember that I don’t own a cabin. And, to tell the truth, I don’t want to own a cabin. Which is probably a good thing, since I can’t and don’t ever foresee myself being able to afford a cabin.

That’s why the best blessing of all is this: Where I live, I don’t need a cabin.

That’s because here in the American West each of us owns a cabin in the woods. In lots of beautiful places, in fact. We call them public lands: national forests, national parks and monuments, national wildlife refuges, BLM lands, Wild & Scenic rivers, national recreation areas … .

These are landscapes belonging to all of us on which we can raise each of our cabins — in the West, they tend to be tents, tarps, rafts, canoes, cars, vans, trailers, the caps on pickup trucks, pick-up campers and such — and where we can go to regenerate and re-enervate our spirits and our bodies, and reconnect with the land, our family and friends, and with ourselves.

Those blessings of public land in the West were of none of our making — they were established more than a century ago as our birthright as Americans, passed to us from those with vision of a future yet unseen. But they are ours none the less, to both enjoy and maintain.

And it is up to us to keep and protect those public lands for our kids, and for their kids, who’ll need those blessings even more than we do.

Read this column in the Durango Telegraph.

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The Big Game

Autumn in the high country. And for me, that means some long, full days of fall-gorgeous, super-slow, well-outfitted, and heavily-armed walks in the woods.

And another year of leaving those woods with less meat in the cooler than I went in with.

I'm going to come out of the gun closet here and make a brutally humbling confession: I've been hunting since I was a teen, but I've yet to kill anything more than a six pack around the fire at night.

My dad hunted every year. And I was raised versed in the view that to hunt was to be most Human -- that hunting, and the land we hunted upon, were the two sides of the mould that shaped our ancestors. And us. He lived through the other 50 weeks of his work year in anticipation of that annual pilgrimage to northern New England to put that humanness to use. All I know was that as a kid, those fantastic Fall days following my father across those ancient, worn mountains fed me in a way that had little to do with meat.

I first carried my own weapon into the woods when I was 16. It was a recurve bow (you wouldn't catch my dad, a two-time Massachusetts bare-bow archery state champion, buying his kid one of them damned compound bows), and with that simple weapon, in that first year, I was presented the gift of opportunity. It was a broadside shot at a whitetail at 15 yards. I took that shot, but buck fever took my form, and I was lucky my off-target arrow hit the side of the mountain we were on.

Still, it was a shot, and it was profoundly, primordially exhilarating.

Who knew that, with such a promising beginning, my hunting career would unfold like a redneck version of quarterback Dan Marino's, both of us in our first full seasons on (or in) the field getting our one shot at the Big Game. (Even if mine had four legs.)

Since then, aside from a few years distracted by chasing two-legged does, and another few herding a litter of human fawns, I have mostly been a devoted, determined, persistent -- and utterly unsuccessful -- predator. The reality is, I could be a hunting guide for PETA. Don't worry, folks. No critters will be dying today ...

You'd think, maybe, I'd take a hint: That here is a game -- like, say, professional football -- I am perhaps just fated to play only as spectator. But, like Dan Marino, who played for 16 more years with never returning to the Super Bowl, each Fall, like this Fall, there I am: Rising in the biting pre-dawn cold, bundling in clothes I'll end up hauling around in a pack most of the day, and scrambling for eight or ten hours up, down, and across hillsides, ravines, draws, thickets, and meadows whilst toting a loaded .308 rifle.

For me, "hunting" means basically hiking with a Winchester.

Except … hunting is not like hiking. Or like anything else.

Hunting -- in contrast to hiking, biking, skiing, four-wheeling, or however else we usually commune with the backcountry -- requires a uniquely rich and distinctively demanding moving across the land. It is richly sensuous. And deliberate -- painfully deliberate, in a way that is both exhausting and richly invigorating. It engages every aspect of your being -- body and senses and thinking, as well as the non-thinking, intuitive mind. And it employs those in unison, in collaboration, over long periods of slow, precise movement interspersed with long periods of thorough stillness.

Hunting is absolute and unrelenting attention to the immediate. For hours. And hours. With a presence that is charged -- and challenged -- by the extreme physical demands of both moving quietly across a rugged landscape and just sitting silently, seeking to become just another still part of that still landscape.

And all that time, the ancient art of stalking prey fires the intake valves of the senses and the data-processing center of the brain -- for which they were created -- so they hum in steady synchronization, finding a shared rhythm that is rarely, if ever, achieved in the sense-sucking, attention-atrophying, distraction-driven, news-infusing landscapes of our modern-day lives.

So … maybe I continue to return to the field each Fall, in the face of repeated failure, to get what my ancestors needed from hunting, and because of my success in getting what I need from hunting here in the 21st century: Less news, more knows. Maybe, like the Hall of Famer Marino, who every Fall got back on the football field despite year after year of watching the Big Game from the stands, I just love to play game.

Still … a freezer full of elk wouldn't suck.


Read or share this on the Durango Telegraph's site here.

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I just started writing a new column once a month -- in conjunction with a few other local writers -- in the weekly Durango Telegraph. The column, "La Vida Local," is weekly but we'll be splitting the column four ways. Should be fun. You can read my first installment at durangotelegraph.com, and below. Enjoy!

Be watching for other looks at "La Vida Local" here in and around the People's Republic of Durango from David Feela, Maggie Casey, and Lainie Maxson, as well.



Lava Lessons

I started worrying about Lava three years ago. That's when the Park Service reshuffled its Grand Canyon river permit system, and we were able to move our launch date from "someday maybe" to Summer 2011. A good time: my son would be graduating from Durango High School a month before we put on, and head off to college a month after we took off. A perfect rite of family passage for a family raised in large part on the river.

My son's first river trip was three days on the Dolores River. He had just turned a year old, and my wife, Sarah, and I crafted a system whereby we strapped one of those collapsible playpens atop a layer of gear. As we floated, Webb could sleep back there -- a tarp strapped across top of the playpen shaded him as he snoozed to the roll of the river -- and when he was awake, he'd stand in there, just his head and tiny hands reaching over the rim of the pen, babbling away earnestly if not intelligibly.

I remember how elated we were when we pulled into the takeout and realized our great child-rearing experiment had succeeded. Most fellow river runners we met there applauded and cheered our adventure. But not all. One couple waited for the accolades to pass to chastise us for exposing our toddler to the hazards of the river. Good thing for us, we thought, Social Services doesn't have a river patrol.

But we knew we were doing the right thing. A couple of years later, a daughter came along, fleshing out our fledgling litter of river rats.  We repeated the process, and have several times each year since, giving our kids, I believe, a long and storied childhood. Like a lot of young Durangoitas and Durangoitos.

Still … When I rowed my family up to scout Lava Falls Rapid on day 13 of our Grand Canyon Family Expedition this summer, a Fukushima-like anxiety burned in my gut. And that anxiety had the voice of that disparaging couple at that takeout 17-or-so years ago. Really? You're going to take your family through THAT?

Jeff, a veteran of the Grand Canyon, greeted me at the first scouting point. "Damn," he said leaning into me so I could hear him over the roar of 25,000 cfs of liquid going supernova. "After two weeks, 180 miles and sixty or so rapids, you think you're ready." He paused. "It lives up to the hype."

What to do?

What else to do? We strapped on our helmets, tightened our pfds, found and readied the rescue-rope bags, and reviewed our "Plan B": Hang on. Punch the waves. High side. Look for swimmers. And if I leave the boat, Webb take the oars.

Then we rowed out. I followed the boat in front of us until it did that crazy Grand Canyon thing: approaching a watery horizon line beyond which only whitewater fangs and the explosions of liquid shrapnel could be seen, the raft is suddenly sucked over the edge of the world. We see it again briefly, way downstream, airborne and perpendicular to the river, then it disappears again.

Then we're in.

And I'm immediately out. (Author's note: I did not fall out of the boat. I was WASHED out.) I rose to the surface a short distance away -- remarkably calm, I was surprised to find, considering this was the very real realization of my absolute second-to-worst-case scenario (behind only running my entire family through the rinse cycle) for the past 6 percent of my life. I floated behind the rower-less raft, following its radically parabolic course over the mountainous waves and into the yawning troughs.

Three quick strokes brought me to the side of the boat. I grasped a strap and yelled to my daughter. Crouching to punch the next deluge, she turned toward my voice, and two weeks' of river tan drained from her face. "Dad's in the water!" I lip-read her yelling.

Then something happened: My wife high sided. Webb jumped on the flailing, abandoned oars. Anna leaned over and used her full 95 pounds to hoist my bobbing butt back aboard. I got back on the oars. Our expedition continued.

Later that night, at the long-anticipated "Post-Lava Camp Costume Fest" (I sported a Star Trek uniform, boldly going where many have swum before), we toasted and boasted about our great skill and derring-do. At one point, I sidled up to Jeff. "Man," I exhaled, "it sure feels good to be below Lava."

He glanced at me with a smirk. "You're always above Lava."

Gawddamn backcountry Buddhists. But I knew what he meant, of course. I hope for more Grand Canyon voyages. And we'll face other river trips and their risks. But more than that, there's always some class IV or V stretch of life approaching, unseen, over the horizon line of our days.

Like just this week. A flash flood ripped through our family's life (as it does all our lives at some point). And while I, or we as a family, may not quite yet know what's to be done to navigate this challenge, I do know how I'm going to run it. And I am confident we can run it together.

Because we've done it before.

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Lake Nighthorse recreation plan dooms Ridges Basin

Game over.

And the game has been over for a long time, I came to realize once I saw the Lake Nighthorse draft recreation plan. It was just that a lot of us hadn't realized it. But any illusions to the contrary -- that the game might still be on, that there might still really be a chance to keep what was left of the precious undeveloped, quiet, wildlife-filled rarity that is Ridges Basin -- were fully put to rest at the public meeting on Monday, April 11.

On that night it became clear that Ridges Basin, and the reservoir contained therein created by the Animas-La Plata Project, was going to become an abomination, an orgy of motorized and industrial-scale fee-driven recreation. Truly Lake Nightmare. 

To some of us, anyway. And to us, my friends and fellow lovers of the open space and wildlife in Ridges Basin, the game has been over since A-LP was passed years ago. 

I partook in several of the extensive recreation plan workshops and meetings put on by the Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service, and DHM Design. And I think those folks were earnest, sincere and professional in their efforts managing the recreation-plan process. But what people -- especially naive people like me -- didn't realize about the process itself was this: 

The Lake Nighthorse recreation planning process was never about debating the merits of developing Ridges Basin versus preserving the basin's remaining open space and quietude. It was about accommodating as many users and uses as possible. This process was predestined to -- it was, in fact, designed to -- find and define a "community designed" scaffolding supporting the highest point of the bell curve of all possible uses of Ridges Basin and Nighthorse Reservoir.

And what does the draft plan say the community has decided it wants to do with this still-undeveloped area just outside of downtown Durango? To accept nearly every use imaginable tempered by minimal restrictions (such as no wake zones, designated-use trail segments, an inspection station for invasive species, and a multi-stage filter system for parking-lot runoff) so those many varying uses can co-exist side-by-side.

 

The draft plan also acknowledges that accommodating the many needs of all these uses and their numerous impacts will be expensive. That's why a marketing consultant advised the crowd that development of the area will require maximum marketing and build-out to lure the maximum "user days" using maximum fee-charging facilities ("Trail users just aren't as good revenue producers as motor boaters," the consultant advised) to maximize income in order to cover the expenses from this full-use build-out.

At full build-out, the consultant estimated it will take 154,000 paying-user-days per year to cover the area's development and maintenance costs. In a 100-day season, that's more than 150 boats (those better revenue producers) per day on that little reservoir.

Basically, whoever takes over management of Ridges Basin (since no public entities have stepped to the plate) will have to shill the hell out of it to make it pay. Welcome to Lake Nightwhores. 

Here are other numbers offered at the meeting illustrating this maximum marketing and build-out: 

• Paved parking: 
• 209 parking spaces
• 22 trailer parking spaces
• 25 boat ramp area parking spaces and 
• 30 boat trailer spaces 

• Campground off County Road 210:
• 41 sites
• 5 group sites
• Day use area

• A "Tribute garden" highway pull-off scenic overlook, with facilities, off CR210.

• Extensive trail system encircling the reservoir, with various uses (horse, foot, mountain bike). (There will be seasonal closings of portions of the Basin for wildlife.)

• Interpretation facilities to show (of course!) what was once there. 

• The reservoir itself will be divided into several "zones": 
• Zone 1 swim beach (no wake)
• Zone 2 west side shallows (no wake)
• Zone 4 inlet structure (no wake)
• and Zone 3 center of lake for "open use"

This, of course, means that the development of Ridges Basin now has everything to do with money and motors and maximum marketing potential (even under the guise of a "community process"). And it means it has nothing to do with preservation or quiet or even justice. 

(Justice? Preservation? Sure. Lest we forget: Ridges Basin was deeded by the Bodo Family to the Nature Conservancy, who passed it to the Colorado Division of Wildlife with a "forever for wildlife" clause; the Bodo State Wildlife Area was created and funded with monies from hunting and fishing licences; when the Bureau of Reclamation couldn't acquire the land legally, they condemned and took possession of it. So, in a nutshell, we have a government-taking of a publicly owned and funded resource which is now using government money to enrich private industry. Which begs the question: Where are them Tea Partiers when you need'em?)

Given that, for most there at the meeting (for it seemed like the non-motorized crowd had withered away, knowing what was coming) the event was celebratory and festive and self-congratulatory -- like divvying up the booty after a successful raid. 

And for those bleeding-heart, tree-hugging, wildlife-loving sorts like myself, it was a funeral.

Game over. 

*****

Read the Lake Nighthorse draft management plan here. 

Learn more about Ridges Basin and Lake Nighthorse here. 

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Old ski bums don't die ...

... they just get on YouTube! 

A four-minute doc about 70-somethings keeping the bumming alive in the Kootenays:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYM8tLJLryU&feature=player_embedded

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Lake Nighthorse recreation planning process continues this week

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.

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Report from Lake Nighthorse public meeting

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. 

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Reminder: Public forum on Lake Nighthorse & Ridges Basin on Tuesday night!

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!

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Lake Nighthorse recreation planning process begins

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. 

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It's baaaack ...

Time to tune them skis!

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