San Juan archaeological site

Powder day brings town to Purgatory

BIG powder day at Purgatory today.

A series of fat, wet Pacific storms -- courtesy of your regional El Nino -- have pummeled southwest Colorado, and bulls-eyed the southern San Juans in particular. Those storms have (so far) left behind a shroud of some three feet of snow in downtown Durango, and kindly deposited upwards of four feet of white manna at our little local ski area.

In advance of the biggest of the three-storm whacking, the Weather Service yesterday announced a 24-hour winter-storm and blizzard warning for our little corner of the Rockies, from 6 p.m. Thursday through 6 p.m. Friday.

Accepting what that means for an area already in snowbank gridlock, around noon on Thursday Fort Lewis College, the 9R School District, the City of Durango, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, and just about every other business, agency, club, group, coven, and institution canceled anything they might have planned for Friday.

And that meant ... great joy in Mudville. Or Snowville, since baseball season is still (only!) two months away. (Mud season will be coming ...)

So with a city-wide hall pass for Friday, and 18-or-so hours' notice, Purgatory today was -- not "was like," but actually was -- a grand, ad hoc, spontaneous festival for locals merrily dancing and prancing and laughing all the way through the ridiculous depths of fresh powder we all awoke to today.

Almost too much snow at first, I must say. On the first runs, it wasn't so much a great powder day as it was just a ... bizarre day -- you could barely pole through the uncut multi-foot layer of snow on the first runs. But once the thick layer was cut, the skiing was most glorious.

And the scene -- populated by college kids, high school kids, and just about everyone else you could possibly know or recognize from town -- was like the ultimate local's day: The town shut down, and everybody gathering to do what it is we most love to do.

Oh, yeah: And it dumped all day. Can you say, encore tomorrow?

Check out some images from the glory day here, and below.

Well I DO have a lot to say ...

... but when I ain't been working, I've been playing God: carving canyons and building mountains in my own backyard:

With another three to four feet predicted to be on the way, I may be a while ...

A day in the high country

Followed some maniacs on a three-hour climb up then ski down in the La Platas this weekend. Good to know I can still do it at my age.

Check out some shots here:

All work and low snow makes Jack a paranoid ski-area owner ...

Okay, this is getting weird.

Following Durango Mountain Resort's pulling the season pass of a nagging ski-area critic, two more bizarre cases of ski-resort dictatorship have appeared.

The first involves the firing of well-known ski writer Bob Berwyn from Breckenridge's Summit Daily News after he wrote a somewhat humorous column knocking Vail Resorts' PR attempts to exaggerate the amount of snow its Colorado ski resorts had received from early-season storms. (Read Berwyn's offending column here.)

"I sometimes wonder whether the ski industry wouldn't benefit more from being completely transparent about weather and snowfall with its customers," Berwyn concluded in his column. "but when snow=money, perhaps that's expecting too much."

"Apparently, I hit a nerve," Berwyn writes in a post on the High Country News "Goat Blog," "because Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail, called me a few hours after the column was published to complain that I had questioned his personal integrity. I told him that I've lived in the mountains for a long time and that I recognize a snow job when I see one. Katz replied that the column called into question his company's ability to work with me and my newspaper."

Seems Vail Resorts did more than just call that relationship into question. Later that week, Vail Resorts pulled advertising with the newspaper -- which accounts for a quarter of the publication's advertising.

Berwyn was then fired a week later, for reasons "not directly related to the column," his editor informed him -- in an email. The paper also offered Berwyn $3,000 to not talk about the firing, Berwyn says. He declined the hush-money.

The second example of ski-area paranoia happened last week, after long-time local singer Dan Sheridan trotted out a song from his 2003 album "Recycle" for a new year's day performance at a bar in Snowmass owned by Aspen Ski Company. The song, called "Big Money," takes a look at the effects of resort's development on the once-little mountain town of Aspen. The song ends with the chorus, “Down in the graves you can hear the miners sing/ ‘Big money ruins everything.'”

Seems the resort's leaders didn't appreciate the sociological analysis offered by the song, and fired Sheridan last week from his weekly gigs. Read an article about the firing from the Aspen Times here.

As a coda, Sheridan was hired back late last week after he agreed to not sing "Big Money" at Aspen Ski Company-owned venues.

The lessons here? Money talks. And Big Money keeps others from talking.

Ski-at-home vacation

Hmmm ... last blog entry is dated Dec. 16.

Okay, so I've been away. Sort of.

Actually, we never made it away. My family and I had long been planning a two-week holiday visit to family in the upper Midwest -- a welcome getaway from our daily life here in the Animas Valley -- but the Christmas blizzard that whacked the middle of the country also nixed our planned getaway to Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

So with our plans dashed, we resigned ourselves to hunkering down here at home for our two-week break.

And we ended up having one of our greatest family vacations ever.

See, that perfect snowstorm that turned the Midwest into a scene from The Day After Tomorrow also added to the ongoing revival of Purgatory's ski season. After the thin and dry autumn, a series of light, cold, frequent, and fat snowfalls made the remainder of December a phat one for us here in the southern San Juans.

And, as unplanned as it was, we were here to enjoy it.

Enjoy it we did. Resigned to our not-so-terrible fate of being stuck at home for our holiday vacation, we passed our two weeks of freedom skiing. A lot. Damn near every day, in fact -- a string of ski days like my wife and I hadn't seen since we were ski bums in Winter Park back in the '80s. And a feat that our kids, despite having Purgatory ski passes for most of their lives, had never experienced.

And this unexpected and unscheduled ski vacation reminded me of some things that, sitting here at my desk, back at work in the New Year following our stay-cation, I now see as the greatest gifts I received this holiday:

First, I remember how much I love skiing. I mean the physical act. Oh, yes -- we already ski a lot (or so I thought), both backcountry and ski-area skiing. And, as I said, my wife and I have been getting our kids lessons and season passes since they were old enough to make a "slice of pizza" turn. And we, ourselves, deliberately built our married life around being near skiing -- that after meeting when we were both ski bums, and getting married at the base of a ski area.

But I think only this past couple of weeks' daily repetition of skiing really brought home to me how much physical joy -- sheer, wild, almost surreal joy -- I find in abandoning to both gravity and my skill at using that gravity to guide myself down mountains through snow.

Second, I remembered how much I appreciate having Purgatory ski area so nearby. Sure, it's loaded with funny and odd distinctive Purgatory quirks (Puirks?) that we all love to scratch our helmets over -- Why can't they figure out how to make liftlines work? Why don't they put up signs that say "Skip a chair" at the bottom of Lift 8, or "Make sure your chair is empty before loading" at mid-lift, so the lift-ops don't have to say those things over and over and over ... ? (More to come on that in a future post ...)

Overall, though, Purgatory is a blessing: A small, diverse ski area with good snow and a great climate. And it's a mountain built for telemarkers like us, with its broad diversity of terrain and aspects and limestone-bench pitches, and its many hidden stashes and lines that only those who ski there a lot really get to know.

Third, related to the above, this last few weeks have reminded me how thankful my wife and I are for having had those above things to share with our kids -- and the rest of our tribe of friends, and their young ski-bums-in-training. Having a place we all know, and sharing what we know and have discovered traversing this terrain over and over through an endless variety of weather and crowd conditions, binds us all -- as real "places" should.

Every day up there has its own conditions, personality, challenges, and storylines -- and those days act as threads that bind us all together. And a lot of that binding happens off the mountain -- and on the chairlifts. The lift rides on Purg -- especially on the "Backside," where lifts 5 and 8 are old and slow (and I mean that as a good thing) -- offer time rare and precious chances to rest our burning thighs while getting to just ... sit and talk. That time is something that is hard to carve at home, at work, or even when away at a family holiday vacation.

Lastly, I realized -- not "remembered" this time, but realized for the first time -- that these above things are going to play a larger role in my life. Especially after the kids leave us for their own lives out there. Sarah and I now see that skiing -- a lot, damn near every day, for as much of the year as we can muster -- is a path into that new future that is not so far away for us. And we realized that we are now looking forward to heading into that adventure, together.

And unplanned or not, those are the best holiday gifts I could've received.

"Mucking about with Mother Nature ... "

If you consider yourself any measure of a backcountry kinda guy, then you harbor at least a secret admiration for Survivor Man. Or Man vs. Wild. Or Dirty Jobs. Or any of those guys who -- at least in reality-TV fashion -- put their  self-reliance and so-called skills out there for all to see tried and tested. 

But for most of us, this is probably more like our true backcounty bad-assedness: The Wildeman.

WILDEMAN - watch more funny videos

Ski season, at last

So it finally got here.

Yeah, I'd gotten out in the backcountry. And, yes, Purg was open for a few days with a ribbon of man-made so-called snow. But that's not ski season.

Ski season, to me, is when winter finally arrives to deposit upon us those grand and glorious and deep San Juan dumps. And it's when we finally get up there to romp and ride that manna from the Pacific.

This is no small thing in my life. And my family's lives. And in our mountain-town tribe's lives. This is one of several potent and meaningful annual rituals in our lives. Along with the spring's first river trip, and ... well, that might be about it.

It's that big in our personal calendars. Seasonal rites and ceremonies for we mountain-town folk.

So this weekend we celebrated. Driving up the gorgeous gash of the Animas Valley in a driving snow. Gathering with those many other mostly local fellow snow acolytes. (Only in mountain towns does a blessing of "Praise Ullr!" rouse approval and agreement among strangers in a crowd.) And meeting up with other tribal members to practice our rites: Riding the chairlift, discussing and dissecting lines and powder stashes, cruising and carving and crashing and giggling with wintery glee down what were amazingly good early-season powder-skiing conditions this weekend.

And the kids? Oh, we crossed paths occasionally. But mostly they were off, meeting up with their own neophyte mountain-town tribal pals, finding their own lines. Forging their own mountain-town lives.

Damn good stuff.

Sacred stuff around these parts.

Some fireside reading

Snow, at last! So while you're sitting by the warming glow of the fire (or the computer screen), here are a few personally recommended articles of Four Corners interest for your winter-night mulling-over. Enjoy.

*****

"Dueling Claims," by Laura Paskus, from High Country News, looks at the repercussions of the creation of a "traditional cultural property" around Mount Taylor, in north central New Mexico. Mount Taylor, near Grants, N.M., is sacred to several Indian tribes in the region, and the U.S. Forest Service's designation could hinder a potential new uranium mining boom in the region still suffering from the bust of the last uranium frenzy. That last mining binge left a legacy of mine waste, illness, and post-boom poverty. But what the new TCP is creating is also toxic: anger between the pro-mining and pro-cultural resource groups. That anger may have also spilled over into a string of brutal beatings -- using bats, rocks, and brass knuckles -- of at least five Navajo men last summer.

Read "Dueling Claims" here.

Check out High Country News here.

******

"My Oh Mayan!" by Corey Pein, in the Santa Fe Reporter, is a lighter tale -- but with even farther-reaching effects. This is a fun and funny -- and not a little creepy at times -- romp through the hand-wringing over the upcoming supposedly-prophesied end of the world in the fall (or so) of 2012. Craziness or not, Plein -- who says that "2012 is the only year besides Y2K with its very own Library of Congress catalog" -- takes us on a ride with a few of the figures involved in the craze. That craze is generating no small change -- it has spawned dozens of books, seminars, videos, and recently a $200 million major movie -- and those who claim to have decoded the Mayan texts that reveal the prophecy aren't shy about bickering over the propriety rights to their "discoveries." And  in the meantime, a profile of a culture that gorges itself of such hype also emerges.

Read "My Oh Mayan!" here.

Check out the Santa Fe Reporter here.

*****

"Long To-Do List for New U.S. Parks Chief," by Todd Wilkinson, of the Christian Science Monitor (via the Flathead (Mont.) Beacon), is a nice look at the new head of the National Park Service, as he takes over the agency he has been part of for 32 years, and that in recent years has been underfunded, understaffed, and generally underloved -- and left with a $8-billion backlog in maintenance alone.

Read "Long To-Do List" here.

Check out the Christian Science Monitor here, and the Flathead Beacon here.

*****

Please support these publications that are still doing good reporting and offering fine writing!

Talk is cheap

Change ...

Hope ...

Nobel Peace Prize ...

"Meet the new boss

Same as the old boss."

         -- Pete Townshend

Check out, too, this response to Obama's announced troop surge from the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. 

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

An Old Bum's manifesto

Check out this month's rather philosophical installment of my San Juandering column in Inside Outside Southwest, titled "Bum is not a Four-Letter Word."

Snow on the ground. The mountains pearly and pretty and just a'beckoning me to come play. As I walk through the neighborhood, I'm searching for little scenic glimpses of the glistening La Platas through the leafless trees. When I'm driving around town and up the valley, I'm craning and scanning, seeking panoramas of the deeper and steeper crystalline San Juans.

All because I'm aching to go.

That's what this time of year does to me. Still. And I will go up and get out there. Soon. After work and school and the usual slew of daily demands, we'll head up there ...

It's true, I do not fit the classic profile of the ski bum anymore. I'm no longer renting a cabin with five other ski-heads, or working nights so I can ski days, or hitchhiking to get around. Today, I got me a job (several, actually), kids (two), a house (one), and responsibilities and demands and a damned full Google calendar (much and many).

But that doesn't mean that those callings and cravings of the ski bum have dried up in me.

 Read the entire story here.

I'm thankful for ...

... a daughter who also could wait no longer for snow.

So Anna and I headed up onto Red Mountain for some early-season turns. And Anna's first backcountry ski.

Hope everyone's Thanksgiving was grand!

Spectacular meteor lights up Utah

A planetarium director says that Wednesday night's meteor over the Salt Lake area was probably traveling some 80,000 miles an hours, and torched 100 miles above ground. 

Cool!

You can read a story and watch video and a newscast about it here (KSL-TV).

(via BoingBoing)

Kicked out of Purgatory -- and into the Soviet Union

Wow.

I mean, what else can you say about today's front-page story in the Durango Herald, "Durango Mountain Resort pulls critic's pass." I checked: It was definitely the Nov. 19 paper, not April 1.

Wow. It'd be funny, if it wasn't so sad.

And I don't mean sad for the critic -- she called Telluride Ski Area, told them her situation, and got a pass over there.

I mean sad for all of us who care for and have supported Purgatory (a.k.a. Durango Mountain Resort, if you like lots of syllables) for so many years. I mean sad that this is what "leadership" at our favorite local ski area has come to.


Look, let's face it: We all who ski here, live here, and work here have a stake in helping Purgatory succeed. And that's why the local community has a right -- hell, a responsibility -- to discuss decisions and actions by the management of our local ski resort in public forums, including (and especially) the local newspaper. Because those decisions affect us all.

This includes controversial decisions -- like making post-sale changes to the conditions upon advertised and pricey products like season and weekday passes. (Read about the proposed changes to Purgatory's passes that started the bruhahah here.) I'm not saying that decision was right or wrong, good or bad -- but it is big, and people -- especially those who laid out the cash to buy those passes, thereby helping the resort -- have a right to question and discuss those changes.

But is this really the way to do it? To revoke the ski pass -- and in such a cowardly, adolescent way -- of someone voicing their questions and reactions in the paper? (Read the letter from the resort explaining the revocation of the season pass here.) Is this quality leadership? Is this good community-building? Is this shared investment in our local resort? Maybe -- in the Josef Stalin School of Business.

According to the Herald, DMR CEO Gary Derck "said that (critic) Lauren Slaff's comments to The Durango Herald caused 'concern and confusion' among employees and customers, and the management team decided it would be best to'"part ways.'"

Uh ... huh? Gary, you want confusion? Stand in the lift lines at the six-pack or quad on a busy day. You want concern? Try sitting, freezing and in a blizzard, on a stalled Lift 8 for a half an hour.

But I digress. Besides, those quaint aspects of the Purgatory experience give the place charm and character. It's what we love about it.

And we do love it. And you don't hear us complaining up those. Much. Because we need each other, Purgatory and its locals. So let me phrase it this way: You want confusion? Try laying out several hundred hard-earned (we're not all CEO's, Gary) dollars for a ski pass to your favorite local ski, and finding out the management has decided to change what you bought. Want concern? Try finding out that if you speak up -- in our proud American tradition of speaking up -- about your confusion, that management will arbitrarily and childishly just "part ways" with you and that product.

Now that's leadership. Soviet style.

Wow.

Prayer rags

Praying for snow?

Paying for heath care the old fashioned way

According to NewWest. net, the Westerners are among the least-insured populations in the country. The reasons? Our service and other low-paying industries, our bum lifestyles, our overall youngish -- and so risk-taking -- ages in mountain towns.

I most certainly relate, given my piecemeal work life and bum-like lifestyle. And to deal with that, I have my own health care plan: Stay healthy.

Oh, I have insurance, sure. (Can't not have insurance in this, the richest country in the world, with damn-near the worst national health-care coverage in Western world, eh?) But with my "career" -- embracing that struggling-artist path -- I don't have and can't afford a nice full-blown insurance-coverage program. And in my Western lifestyle there ain't no benevolent employer stepping up to hand me one. So I have traded out the full-time work needed to pay for or be given a health-care package for paying for it myself.

Here's the path I have constructed:

• Major medical coverage -- for those "stray bullets."
• An emergency-visit insurance plan, that covers ER costs.
• I stay as healthy as I can.

For that last one, I don't mean hoping I stay healthy: I work at it. Regularly. Persistently. Consistently. I consider it an indispensable and integral part of my daily life. I work to make myself as healthy as I can -- work time that could be spent, I suppose, at a "real" job, with real health-care benefits. But I prefer to use my time my way, toward my own Quixotic writing-life projects.

So my active, deliberate, sustained working out is not a luxury -- it is my real "insurance." And so far it seems to be working rather well.

Like everyone else, it's often hard for me to find the time to exercise. But I make it happen. Like most folks, I may not be able to afford the time to work out -- but I, myself, cannot not afford the time.

I work out nearly every day. It's as much a part of my daily schedule and routine as working and eating. My personal exercise-routine tool box consists of lifting weights, trail running, karate, and stretching. I endeavor to do at least one of these every day, either as single block of time or in small breaks woven throughout the day. This generally takes an hour, give or take, of each day -- time I set aside, pretty much guaranteed.

An hour to work out every day?? Lots of people might see this as a luxury, like getting a hot-stone massage or lounging at a spa each day. Other's might even see it as caving into immature craving -- don't I have anything better to do with my time?!? But I see it as a necessity.

I do this because I like it, yes. But I also do it because working out pretty much is my health-care plan.

So, if I can get good health for the cost of a mere hour a day (especially if you pro-rate it out to an hourly equivalency over my personal meager income), then it strikes me as something of a bargain, even. Especially considering the perks. Because, of course, there are benefits aside from the health maintenance and cost savings of working out:

• First, working out regularly keeps me sane. The meditation time that comes along with working out is essential to my mental-health care -- time to think, or not think -- something that too few do too little of, yet that would alone likely also contribute a lot to our general health and quality of life. 
  

• As for thinking, working out time is also time I spend thinking through ideas, sorting out issues, and strategizing projects.
  

• And it's creative time: I generally like to work out in the middle of the day, around lunch time, or else in the late afternoon after working and before the dinner rush (two teenagers, remember?). So I'm always in the middle of something -- and getting out of the office gives me the space needed to move in some directions I may not have drifted whilst hacking away at the keyboard. I always work out with a notebook in my back pocket or close by.
  

The biggest perk, though, to this path of paying for my health care is just feeling good. I feel strong. I feel alert and sharp. I feel actually healthy -- not just health-covered. And these other benefits of this ad-hoc health-care program are also "luxuries" we too often have a hard time justifying in our busy days of business and busyness, earning that income or job we need to keep our health-care coverage covered.

The question, though, remains: Do I stress about not having a good health-care package? Well, yeah, sure. Yep. But I bet my overall stress level is less than it would be were I to have some good full-time career in some office somewhere, fully covered with insurance, but staring out the window wishing I could be out on a run ...

When do the kids turn into adults?

Ah, life with kids. It's been my mission, my all-encompassing project, my focus and attention, my purpose, my meaning, my every day, and my everydays for a long time now. Sixteen-plus years, in fact.

So when does it end?

Working as a river guide I heard a bunch of times that silly tourist question that always arouses snickers around these parts: When do the deer turn into elk? Silly, but that, to me, is a lot like how we look at kids turning into adults.

But, seriously, when does a boy become a man? A kid an adult?

Not that I'm hurrying the end along. With that end in sight, I'm savoring every taste of those every days, and those everyday experiences of life with kids. But right now we're in an interesting transition zone around here: My 16-year-old son wants to be treated like an adult -- of course. But my wife and I find (or at least feel) we need to keep intervening in his life in the role of parents, because, well, in a nutshell, he's only 16.

And it's got me wondering, when, exactly, do those kids become non-kids?

There are several logical and easy landmarks proposed as marking the divide between adolescence and adulthood, including

• Getting a driver's license. The first sort of "adult" thing kids have to opportunity to do -- and about the closest thing our culture offers as a socially recognized rite of passage. Seeing many of my kids' friends now doing this, and hearing my son talking it up, I'd say it it's a start, but hardly proves, or rarely even indicates, any sort of "adultness" of the bearer. 

• Turning 18. This, of course, is the legal definition. Meaningless aside from a nice, clean -- and completely arbitrary -- number.
  

• Turning 21. When you are old enough to drink. Which, I, myself, think, is stupid. Frankly, I'd rather see the drinking age at 18 and the driving age at 21.  
  

• Graduating high school. 'cause then kids really get to see the fantasy they were living in high school. 
  

• Entering college or the military or getting a  job. This, I agree, almost surely gets shifts a kid's psychic transmission into the adult range of gears. It still often takes a while to learn how to use the clutch to keep from grinding those gears, though ...

• Getting married. Which is, as any married person can tell you, indicative of absolutely nothing related to being an adult. Except in the "adult film" sense.

All valid points of departure worth noting on the landscape between kidhood and adulthood. But none of them really are good, useful, or validating definitions of adulthood. None of them can offer some observable, viable, visible cue that a young person has moved from kid to grown up.

And as a parent, I'd like some measure. Something for myself, and that I can offer up as a compass bearing, a sort of psychic GPS, to my kids. 

So after much thought and observation, I'd like to propose the following two-point operational definition of "adult":

• Adults control their attitudes. Only children think they can always do only what they enjoy. Adults seek meaning and enjoyment, and endeavor to do their best, at whatever they do, in whatever circumstances they finds themselves in. Even -- and especially -- in situations they don't control. 
  

• Adults are responsible for their journey. Only a child thinks you can just float along and be okay. Adults actively, deliberately, strategically navigate their lives and their situations. It's like river running: adults learn to not blame fate or nature or the nature of things, they don't blame what got them where they are, and they don't blame others for where they are now. They act. They enjoy the float, but they also learn, observe, plan, and adapt. And if they flip, wrap or swim, they don't blame the river. They get back in and row again, wiser.
  

In short, adults know their lives are their true work and art, and that if they don't make it into something, others will.

I understand. This offers no nice clear number to mark this definition of "adult." You don't get any card. It doesn't even grant with any particular freedoms or abilities.

But it's still what I'm going to look for in my own kids as they get their driver's licenses, graduate from high school, move into the world, start their own families. Somewhere along those landmarks, I will be looking for real adults to appear.

And I will welcome them, as peers.

In a cabin in the (pinion and juniper) woods ...

Had the pleasure this past weekend of getting to get down to check out a friend's property, and the very cool adobe cabin he'd built on the place. Its isolation and desert location made it feel like a much more distant venture than just twenty minutes south of Durango.

The cabin is up a remote canyon near the Colorado/New Mexico border. Reminding us how of the dramatic climatic dividing line we dwell on, this short distance brought us into a wash valley lined with bluffy cliffsides and and rolling, rounded, sandy hillocks up and down the valley. A winding narrow lane through the p-j brought us to my friend's place alongside the dry wash.

It was even cooler than I'd thought from what I'd heard. My son, Webb, joined me on this trip. He'd been stayed out here a few times with my friend's son and their friends -- in the mythic "Jack's Cabin." Now, I was finally getting out to check out this teen getaway. And after getting to hang out here, I now hope it becomes a middle-aged getaway ...

My friend John had picked up forty acres of his own crumbling, water-carved chalk-colored piece of the San Juan Basin desert about fifteen years ago, for less than $20,000. Back then, his kids were young and he was working hard, but instead of buying a new truck or bigger TV or something, he picked up this land.

Tinkering over a series of summers (the place gets either snowed or clayed in -- too sticky to drive or walk -- several months of the year), he'd taught himself how to build an adobe cabin, and then built this fine one-room, wood-stove-heated, brick-floored place out here. It cost him about $3,000, he figures. The adobe bricks he made himself from the very soil where the cabin now stands. There's also a great stonework fire ring outside.

Smart thinking. Good work. A great and nearby getaway for his family and friends.

I know I plan on hitting him up for heading down there more.

How the Forest Service was saved -- and shaped -- by fire

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.

You can read an excerpt from the book and listen to the interview on Fresh Air here.

You can also read an interview with Timothy Egan about The Big Burn in Smithsonian magazine here.

Hermosa Creek Workgroup releases draft management proposal

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 workgroup is looking at protections options in the Hermosa Creek drainage, northwest of Durango. Hermosa Creek contains the largest block of roadless land managed by the Forest Service in Colorado, and contains populations of genetically pure Colorado River Cutthroat trout.The group's consensual state of values of the region states:

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.

See photos of the Hermosa Creek drainage here.

Get involved: the Hermosa Creek Workgroup meets monthly. Learn more here.

Also, workgroups for other southern San Juan watersheds will be launched in upcoming months, beginning with a group for the San Juan in January.

Back in the pages of Inside Outside Southwest

Out today is the November issue of Inside Outside Southwest. And in it you'll find my new monthly column, San Juandering.

In February, I retired the Neanderthal Crossing column I'd been writing since 2001. Time for something new.

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!

Check out an extended version of the print column here.

And a huge thanks for the San Juandering logo to my good friend and graphic-design sorcerer, Todd Thompson. Now move yer ass back here, Todd!

Backcountry ski season is here! And with it comes ...

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.

Read the story here, on Freeskier.com.

Grand Canyon honeymoon mystery featured in Ken Burns' documentary

I recently picked up a book for the the winter reading queue that I've been eyeing for a while, Brad Dimock's Sunk Without a Sound.

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.

A good five-minute overview video of the Hydes' story from the recent Ken Burns documentary "The national parks: America's Best Idea" is available here.

Ed and Bessie Hyde video.

I was really sick!

I swear!



(via dooce.com)

It's heeeere ...

Guess I won't have to take in that laundry until May ...