The San Juan Almanac

Ski patroller Dylan Meshew lifts his heel both on and off the job. [appeared in the Durango Telegraph, March 5, 2020 ] It appears the ...

[appeared in the  Durango Telegraph, Feb. 20, 2020 ] It’s a Main Avenue landmark. For the past 75 years, when most people drive past the s...

Hanging Flume near Uravan, Colorado (photo by  Ealdgyth ) "Flume Fever" is a great little five-minute documentary about the co...

My dad learned a thing or two from me, too. This Father's Day is a special one, because it is the first in which I do not have a fat...

San Juan River 1991 -- two years into our 25 years of experiencing together My wife, Sarah, and I celebrated our 25th anniversary this w...

This gorgeous hand-drawn map was crafted by Captain Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, a retired military engineer when he was a member of the 177...

The weather may have curtailed this weekend's Iron Horse Bicycle Classic , but a few of us managed to slip in a lovely half-day float do...

If you come to the Durango Open Karate Tournament, at Escalante Middle School tomorrow (Saturday, May 3 -- spectators free), then you'll...

Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.                                                             -- Edward Abbey The Abbey Par...

Legend says it was the image the launched the modern environmental movement -- moving groups beyond just saving pieces of land, and merging ...

Among my many odd employments endeavoring to make a living here in our lovely little corner of the Earth, I was, for a brief while, an ...

We just spent a week at the ocean -- trading the great landscape of The Rockies for another: The Pacific . And it was particularly great b...

And yet he's somehow still around, eh? 25 years ago today, Ed Abbey moved on to the next great wilderness awaiting us all ... meanin...

It was a cocktail-fuel conversation lamenting that "few hunters' groups show any interest whatsoever conserving the wildlife resou...

Okay, this is crazy stuff: 13,000-year-old (at least) pictographs of woolly mammoths found near Bluff, Utah, along the San Juan River. Tha...

A little internet gem: A mini-documentary from 1958, "Magic Rails to Yesterday," which includes a 8-or-so-minute look at the ride ...

This might be the only river trip that we come back from the river with more ice than we left with. I thought that on Saturday morning, af...

I hit the road recently. It wasn't much of a journey -- down to Grants, New Mexico (La Frontera!), to see the parents for an eveni...

Well, another hunting season passes, and another winter with an empty freezer approaches. See, this hunting thing is my longest on-going ...

Well, it's been quite a summer for our little piece of Heaven, eh? Fire. Drought. Blazing heat. A murder or two. These kept Durango an...

We push off -- four families disbursed across five boats and a few duckies -- and out onto the low-water mid-summer San Juan River. And al...

The Lightner Creek Fire from downtown Durango on June 27 (photo by Matt Kenna) It's only early July, but already this is a fire yea...

The view from here is sweet. No doubt about it. From my yard, I can watch the sun rise behind a long earthy arm, hairy with pinion and jun...

It's been on my local bucket list for a long time. Finally got up the highest point -- that big overhanging wave of white stone -- for a...

Before the shipwreck It wasn't how I'd intended to launch the river season. But somehow it was the perfect way to go into it: fu...