There was a great interview on NPR's Fresh Air recently, with author and journalist Timothy Egan, on his new book, The Big Burn.
The book examines the largest forest fire in American history: in 1910, some 3 million acres of forest in Idaho and Montana, an area the size of Connecticut, burned in just a few days, killing 70 people.
The fire also saved the fledgling U. S. Forest Service, which was on Congress' chopping block. It also, though, argues Egan, shaped the future of the Forest Service, turning it into what he calls "the Fire Service." Today, half the Forest Service's budget goes toward "the fire industrial complex," he says.
It also, though, he argues, saved the modern conservation movement, and made it possible for the Forest Service to go from the brink of extinction to expansion, including the creation of National Forests in the East.
The story, though, is deeper than that, and is filled with drama and adventure, including tales of how the black Army forces, the Buffalo Soldiers, came in to help save day and were met with racism; of how Forest Service employees went from objects of scorn -- sarcastically called "Teddy's Green Rangers" -- to heroes in the eyes of the country; and how because of a complete ignorance of how to fight forest fires, both those heroic parties really just "became fuel" for the fire.
That 1910 fire still resonates, Egan argues, since today more than 20 million people live within a few miles of a National Forest.
I had the chance to attend the Hermosa Creek Workgroup meeting last night, where a draft of the management proposal for the watershed was presented and discussed.
I thought the group was smart and cooperative and well-informed (guided by three mandates: defining "truth" as that which is supported by facts and data, transparency, and consensus). It also contained perhaps the greatest concentration of grey ponytails -- both female and male -- I'd ever seen in one room. Good folks.
The workgroup is an 18-month-old citizen group spun out of a regional initiative called the River Protection Workgroup, formed in 2005 by the San Juan Citizens Alliance and the Southwestern Water Conservation District. A broad and diverse coalition of groups are participating in the group, working under a consensus model.
The Hermosa Creek Area is exceptional because it is a large intact (unfragmented) natural watershed containing diverse ecosystems, including fish, plants and wildlife, over a broad elevation range, and supports a variety of multiple uses, including recreation and grazing, in the vicinity of a large town.
At this point, the group is focusing on generating a land-management proposal, and is holding off addressing issues related directly to water or the creek itself until workgroups complete looks at all the watersheds in the southern San Juans, since water development is best served by a basin-wide perspective.
Here's the core of what I got from the proposal:
Creation of a 100,000-acre Special Management Area. This management plan would be written later, with ample opportunity for public input
Creation of a 50,000 wilderness area, and on the west side of the creek
The 163,000-acre Hermosa Roadless Area will be kept roadless
Multiple uses-- from recreation to outfitting to grazing -- will be allowed where presently allowed (with barring mechanized vehicles in the Wilderness Area)
Here are the few "rubs," as they were called, that are still yet to be hammered out about the plan:
Wilderness area boundary. In particular, how close to the creek should the boundary should run. Proposals range from at the creek's edge (or center, or floodplain ...) to up to a quarter-mile set back to keep the potential for future water development.
What to do about areas with minerals and mineral claims that lie on the edge of the Wilderness boundaries.
What to do about a SWSI -- Statewide Water Supply Initiative -- site in the valley. These sites are identified by the state as potential dam and diversion sites, although there is no legally-binding protection, water rights, or set-asides for these areas. Given that, the question is whether or not to keep that area in or out of protected areas (especially since roads for a dam site would cut into the present Roadless Area).
That's a major nutshell of what is a detailed proposal from a long, involved drafting process. But it gives a sense of what's going on.
So I figured I'd wander my way to some new things -- wandering around our home land here in the Four Corners. In the meantime, mulling over the whys, the hows, the WTFs and they why-the-hell-nots of life here in this wild, wonderful, and sometimes woeful landscape of ours.
In this first column I confess the rationale behind my torturing my children by making them do hard, challenging things like climbing Mount Sneffels.
Which means: You'll be glad to know (even if if my kids aren't always ...) that some things haven't changed!
This is scarier than anything Halloween has to offer.
Lest we forget ... Can't have too many reminders: a sobering avalanche video caught with a helmet-cam last April. The guy's Avalung and cool-headedness (pun sort of intended) saved his life.
Dimock is a fine historian and writer of very readable books on the Colorado River and the many characters who have plied its waters. (My personal favorite is his fascinating and fun profile of riverman Bert Loper, The Very Hard Way.)
Sunk Without a Sound tells the story of newlyweds Glen and Bessie Hyde, who in early December 1928 disappeared while on a solo river-running honeymoon in the Grand Canyon.
To write the book, Dimock and his then-wife made the journey themselves in a reconstruction of the Hydes' unusual fore-and-aft ruddered craft.
To this day, the mystery of the Hyde's disappearance remains unsolved, with some strange twists and clues.
This is a post I was planning on making a week ago, before I was slayed by the flu. But it's still worth putting out there, a week later. Because it deals with something I was feeling then -- and, trust me, after more than three straight days prostrate on my bed, drooling and hacking, watching Sigourney Weaver slay aliens and the Yankees slay the Angels and whatever other brain-slaying tripe I could find on TV -- something I feel even more now: Restlessness.
Snow lay on the ground today, but the weekend before last was a lovely, downright weepingly gorgeous, warm, screamingly-colorful October weekend. Remember? I do. Because for weeks my family and I had a circle around that Saturday as the day we were going to, for the first time this year, toss our skis in the rocket box and head up to our secret stash spot high in the gorgeous autumnal mountains and, as one big happy family, get our year's first turns together ...
Welp ... the weather more than obliged. But ye olde aforementioned Swine Flu had other plans. Before it decided to take up residence in my host body (why didn't Sigourney come pull that alien bug outta my chest??), it infested my kids. Yep, right on our perfect weekend.
I was, I say again, stir crazy. And I was taking everyone else with me. No Sigourney there -- think more Jack Nicholson a la "The Shining."All work and no ski makes Ken a dull sociopath.
I desperately, despairingly, direly needed to get out.
So, I did, anyway.
I grabbed my daypack and headed up. Not to the high country -- but higher than my neighborhood country. I drove three miles: up past Fort Lewis College and on through the once-ranch-like (now California-like) Skyridge/Jenkins Ranch, to the end of the road. There, above the city reservoir, I parked, let the dog out of car, grabbed my pack, and headed up the city's new Skyline Trail, built and maintained by Trails 2000.
I was out. Not far, but out.
And, I'm here to tell you (even if a week late), that it was a damn fine getting out. Way damn finer than I was expecting, or could've hoped for.
And it reminded me, once again, that Robert Louis Stevenson -- that old pirate-writer -- was right: "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go."
The Skyline Trail climbs steeply up the north end of Raider Ridge (named for Fort Lewis College's old moniker, The Raiders), to dived between the Animas Valley from Horse Gulch. The Raider Ridge Trail then follows the sharped-edged sandstone crest southward until it ends with a steep decent into downtown, near the corner of College Drive and 8th Avenue.
Took me about four hours to (very) leisurely walk the trail right back to my back door. And in that time I was soothed and becalmed by the stunning and sweeping views in all directions. Views that put both Durango and my life back in context: Oh yeah! This is where I live! And this is why I live here!
And it reminded me why I and we -- all of us who chose to struggle to get by in this remote mountain town -- want and need to have these public lands, these many lovely and communal places all around us, right near at hand -- these nearby faraways -- that, as always, need our protection. And appreciation.
And all it takes to be reminded is to slow down, wake up, and remember to look around, right around you where you are.
And to go.
Check out a slideshow from the walk below:
Also, here's a crazy POV video from this year's Singlespeed World Championships, which included the Skyline Trail and Raider Ridge Trail:
Well, just in case anyone but myself reads this here blog (would that make me a masterblogger?), I'd like to explain my week-ish disappearance from this here particular cyber space.
Today, on the day the page-one headline on our local newspaper is about Obama's declaring the H1N1 virus a national emergency, I'd like to add my own recently humbled and still-frail voice: dudes and dudettes, ye so-called Swine Flu is an ass-kicker. I think and hope I have come out the other side of my own personal week of pig-wrestling, but I want to warn you all, this pig can flatten you.
Just ask Webb. My 16-year-old son got very ill last weekend -- high fever, violent retching cough, a grey pall over his flesh, general misery -- which led my wife and I to take the precaution of getting him checked out. Sure enough, the misnomered Swine Flu had come to our home, and brought with it early-stage pneumonia. The two doctors we consulted were alarmed, but glad we'd gotten him checked out as soon as we did. He was prescribed Tamiflu and antibiotics, and after a few long days and nights, seems to have recovered.
This pig of an illness, though, just moved to a new pen -- yours truly.
From Tuesday afternoon on, I have been pounded. Not violently ill, like some 24- or 48-hour blights and do -- but deep, low, full-body-sapping ill. An ill like getting sunken under a heavy, steady, slowly crushing weight. An ill like I have never been in my 50 years of experience.
A truly humbling ill.
No, I never thought I was going to die or anything. And I know that even a bad case of the flu is a far distance from those many more ailments and afflictions that can really make you wrap your arms around the Reaper's waist. But it offered at least jarring glimpse, like a face seen in a flash of lightning in the window, of what can happen to what has long been a reliable and dependable and strong body. And how easily it can happen.
And, according to my doctor -- who, the day before this virus decided to make its home in my body, gave me an "excellent health" thumbs up in my annual check up -- I'm supposed to be in the class of folks most resistant to the Swine Flu: those who were young during the flu pandemic of the late 1960s.
So let me say: If I'm "most resistant," then everyone else had better take this shit seriously. And it makes me damn glad we took it seriously with my son. For, folks, you're listening a newly and very humbled man. I've been blessed with good healthy and strength all my life, and, aside from a few token vices (my motto: "Everything in moderation, including moderation") have worked to maintain that good health.
But this ... was different.
I'm happy to say that, once again, the blessed and mysterious and divine Immune System seems to won the battle.
But now I know to append to that statement of victory: This time.
The question now, then, is: What to do with this new-found insight, this fresh -- and tangible -- reminder of mortality and temporality and inevitability? With this gift of humbleness?
In the recently released six-part, 12-hour long PBS documentary series, Smith offers commentary on events surrounding the founding of Mesa Verde National Park.
The park was created in 1906, after its many ancient pueblos were discovered by cowboys-turned-archaeologists from Mancos, Colo. Smith describes how a Swedish aristocrat and amateur archaeologist was detained in Durango when he tried to take his plunderings from Mesa Verde back to Sweden, until authorities concluded he wasn't breaking any laws and had to let him go.
Smith also relates the unusually powerful political role for the time that women played in getting Mesa Verde National Park created.
The film is especially relevant and timely in light of the recent government arrests for pothunting, focused in and around Blanding, Utah. One of the reasons the busts so rattled the community in Blanding is that pothunting is a long-time multi-generational tradition, dating back to a time when it wasn't so taboo.
Tradition is important -- but still there's ... common sense -- meaning a sense of the common good. Slavery was a long-time multi-generational tradition, too. Traditions -- even family and community traditions -- must evolve along with appreciation and understanding, with an eye for the common good.
This same transition of perspective on the governmental level -- that led to laws that led to busts, including the ones that have hit the Four Corners area -- is really the core story of the Burns documentary.
Well, not yet, anyway. But Monday morning at 9:30 a.m.that'll be me, on KDUR!
I'll be on the air as part of KDUR's fall fund drive, Oct.16 - 23, the theme of which is "It's a Family Affair." Why? I have no idea. I'll make sure Bryant Liggett explains it on the air.
While there, I'll be on talking the praises of community radio, and community in general, and our grand, festive, friendly, and oftentimes pleasantly peculiar community in particular. And rivers. And skiing. And fishing. And public lands. And ... well, you get the idea. That's my definition of "family."
So call in and give money when I'm there. Okay? 970-247-7262.
This year is -- sort of -- KDUR's 35th anniversary. Below is the first few paragraphs of a story I wrote for the Durango Telegraph on the station's 30th anniversary that explains its two anniversaries -- fake broadcasting, and real broadcasting:
On May 13, 1975, a strange, melodic sound spilled out over Durango. It was a flute, and a singer, and folk music. It was, to be exact, “Because of Rain,” by Tim Weisberg. And it was the first song aired on KDUR, the public radio station on the Fort Lewis College campus.
Actually, very few people heard that first song on the KDUR airwaves. The semester had already ended and the students headed home. And the 10-watt signal broadcast at 91.9 FM didn’t reach very far: this was verified by a friend of the DJ who chose that Tim Weisberg song for that monumental occasion. That friend was driving north on U.S. 550 carrying a transistor radio to see how far the signal would carry.
In fact, even though this was KDUR’s first real broadcast, it wasn’t the beginning of KDUR radio. KDUR was officially birthed in 1974, when the college gave a small group of students a room in the basement of the College Union Building, some equipment that had been purchased years before, and $3,000 in student fees to found a campus radio station. The stipulation was that for the first year, KFLC (as they hoped it would be assigned by the FCC) was to “broadcast” through hardwired speakers in the CUB, so the staff could practice being responsible on-air personalities.
“We’re so used to the all the communications we have today, kids don’t realize we didn’t have those 30 years ago,” says Jim Vlasich, that Weisberg-playing DJ three decades ago, and KDUR’s first station manager. Vlasich today is a professor of history at Southern Utah University. “Music college kids were listening to back then wasn’t played on mainstream radio stations.”
This was nice to wake up to over that first cup of coffee on a cold October morning.
The Durango Herald ran this lovely photo on the front page of some first-of-the-season tracks in 20 inches of the year's first fresh down Grande Couloir above Silverton. The run was made on Tuesday by a guide for Mountain Goat Ski Guides, at Silverton Mountain Ski Area.
You can check out a 2-minute video of the run here. If you're like me, it's sure to make you drool all over yourself ...
Durango-area resident and editor of High Country News JonathanThompson this week notes how the Animas-La Plata Project was for a long time called "the last of the great dams," but that today even grander, grosser, and crazier water-diversion schemes are being proposed through out the West.
Here's what Thompson has to say about the topic and the story:
This summer, on the edge of my hometown of Durango, Colo., water started moving uphill. It was about a century ago that the endeavor to slurp water out of the Animas River and send it to the neighboring and often dry La Plata River was first conceived. After gestating for many decades (and taking on some pretty weird conceptual forms in the process), the Animas-La Plata project's giant pumping plant finally cranked up this June, and sent its first shipment of water to Lake Nighthorse, more than 200 vertical feet above the river.
In the early 1990s -- when its ultimate fate was still uncertain -- the Animas-La Plata project was considered to be the last big water project of its kind in the West. But today, a half-dozen new schemes are on the table, from pulling water out of southwestern Wyoming's Green River for Colorado's Front Range, to a plan to pull water from the dwindling Lake Powell, pump it uphill, and then back downhill to burgeoning St. George, Utah.
The Oct. 12 issue of High Country News focuses on what, for now, is the most contentious of the new generation of Western water projects: The proposal by the Southern Nevada Water Authority to pump water from rural Nevada aquifers, and ship it to Sin City and its sprawl. Acclaimed science writer J. Madeleine Nash takes us to the springs that could be affected by the plan, and introduces to the rare creatures that inhabit the Great Basin's oases. Our crack water reporter, Matt Jenkins, gives us an update on the politics of the plan. And I'm not shy about my opinion: It's time to rejigger the way we think about water -- and growth -- in the West.
You can pick up High Country News in Durango at Maria's Bookshop, Magpie's, and elsewhere. Check it out online at hcn.org. You can also subscribe to an e-newsletter, linking you to both free and premium content (that comes with a subscription to the magazine).
High Country News is non-profit entity offing award-winning investigative journalism and opinion about land issues in the West. There's nothing else like it. Check it out, subscribe, and support this and the many other (but never enough) good alternative media in the West.
of the autumn of the year and the spring of life, together.
This is a neighbor's yard, featuring the play equipment I built for my own kids in the mid-1990s. A couple of years ago, I dismantled it and passed over the fence to my neighbor, Sean, who rebuilt, expanded and refurbished it all, giving it a whole new generation of life. Death and rebirth ... death and rebirth. The theme of autumn ...
At his talk last night, Dave Foreman didn't talk about just saving wilderness and wild critters, who talked about rewilding -- creating full landscapes that can support the large carnivores essential to healthy wild ecosystems.
And key to rewilding, he insists, is maintaining the health of large core areas, and forging corridors connecting large core areas.
And at the core of good healthy core wild areas are roadless areas.
In Colorado, roadless areas are at a key juncture: Protected in 2001 as a lame-duck president, Clinton created his Roadless Rule that protected Western roadless areas. Then it was knocked down by the courts. Then-president Bush allowed Western governors to propose their own plans for their respective states, which Idaho's and Colorado's opted to do.
Idaho's plan was lame as "protection," of course. But Colorado Governor Bill Ritter formed a committee that held hearings around the state to carve out a plan for the state that Ritter called an "insurance policy" in case the Bush Administration or some following administration came up with a really bad law.
The idea, then, is to urge Governor Ritter to either accept the Clinton Rule, or bolster a Colorado roadless protection plan that is at least as strong as the Clinton rule.
Thursday night you have a chance to see one of the great forces in the evolution of the environmental movement when Dave Foreman speaks at Fort Lewis College.
Foreman will talk on "The Rewilding of America" on at 7 p.m. on Oct. 1st in 130 Noble Hall. There will also be an informal discussion and Q&A with Foreman will also happen at 4:30pm, at the Center of Southwest Studies.
The many flags Foreman has marched under in his eco-career -- from Wilderness Society to Earth First! to Sierra Club to Wild Earth to, today, the Rewilding Institute -- show his willingness to have a broad embrace of ways to embody what is his ultimate vision: putting the earth first in our society and culture and technology and lives. That's the true Earth First! -- a path and a compass bearing, rather than a mere group. No membership, just action. Whether that's politics, protest, science, or even personal silent solitude in the wilds.
In that sense, then, and equally importantly, in my mind, has been Foreman's role as not just enviro-meddler (as Ed Abbey called good environmentalists), or not even agitator, but asmotivator. He's been a life-long cheerleader -- one who backs his cheerleading by reason and evidence and humor and the occasional howling -- who has hounded and cajoled and bugled others to take up the battle to put the earth first in whatever way each of us we can.
Last night our friends and neighbors Matt and Janet hosted their annual neighborhood apple-harvest fest. It was an urban bounty.
They rented a cider press from Turtle Lake Refuge, and over the course of the evening -- from warm clear early sunset around the barbeque to cool first-quarter-moon-lit night around a back-yard campfire -- produced a few gallons of sweet and lovely amber cider. Some drank it straight, some punched it up with an assortment of harder liquids. All the apples were reaped from their own or other down-town apple trees.
We even got to see the International Space Station sprint across the early-night sky. A good omen, methinks, on a good night.
Looking north from Carbon Mountain yesterday. Before this storm moved in, we could see a stip of fresh snow lining Mountain View Crest, and some more distant peaks. (Click image to enlarge.)
Started the day (well, partway through, after yard-saling) with a not-atypical, yet still-new, Durangotan spectacle. A typical, in fact, Durangotan fruit salad of humor, plenty of cross-dressing, and extreme athleticism.
At 10:50 a.m. we and some neighbors and our kids wandered down to the end of the block with coffee in hand, a few lawn chairs for the still-waking, and watched the start of the first-ever Singlespeed World Championships.
Check out some shots (click to enlarge). We were right where the roll-up ended and became a race, marketed by some lunatic in drag blaring a blow-horn. We watched this nutcase get very-nearly mowed down by two cars, three cyclists, and a disoriented and distracted pedestrian.
Several of these mono-gearheads have been camped in my neighbor's yard most of the week. I enjoyed talking to a few in the rain over a keg of True Blonde one night. When I asked them, Um, why singlespeed?
A well-pierced young woman from California said she enjoys it more than regular mountain biking it slows down the ride, and even makes it okay to walk in places. So she gets more out of the ride.
A closer-to-middle-aged guy from Durango with two kids said that since he started singlespeeding only a few months ago, it's like all the trails around here a new again, but you have a heightened awareness of the terrain. You have to, to plan for hills and use you one gear to its best advantage.
Both very astute and aesthetic answers -- not the sort of rage-rock/X-game/MMA-style-of-cycling grunt of a response I was rather expecting.
Still, and even though I love my cruiser for those very same aforementioned reasons and the pleasure they make getting around town like, I still have no interest. To my reverent, faithful, God-fearing mind, mountain biking is exactly why God made gears.
Bumper sticker seen at Irish Embassy Pub last night: "If you ride a single speed and nobody sees you, is it still cool?"
We'll soon find out. We're headed up to the mountains camping tonight -- and trying Sneffels tomorrow -- leaving these one-track minded folks to themselves to celebrate.
There was a great interview on NPR's Fresh Air recently, with author and journalist Timothy Egan, on his new book, The Big Burn.
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