Yucca season

A walk up the mesa-side above our house shows that even the yucca are grooving on the long-awaited Spring sunshine ...

Durango dust bowl ...

It started a deep-blue day. Then some thin clouds slid in; then the breeze picked up, quickly maturing into a blustery wind.

Then the all-too-familiar silver sheen fell over everything, making the La Platas and Missionary Ridge and Perins Peak seem to slip behind a thin veneer, a sheer sheet making the valley's surrounds slowly fade into a general whiteness.

This is the spring routine we've grown used to, as dust storms driven by spring fronts dredge the deserts of the Four Corners, then drive that dust up the Colorado Plateau, billowing up along the wall of the San Juans.

That was today.

Then, around 4, when I was heading out to pick up my daughter, something else appeared in the west: A great yellow-brown smudge come to blot out whatever visibility remained.

Once this ground cloud swept over the neighborhood -- turning the afternoon light a spooky and heavy gold -- there was nothing on the horizon taller than a tree or rooftop.

Like a white-out in winter, this was a -- yet another -- yellow-out in spring. I could feel the grit in my teeth. It tasted like Utah.

According to the Sustainable Development Strategies Group, there were four major dust storms in the Four Corners in 2005, eight for each of the next three years, and 14 major events in 2009.

Here's a story about the dust-bowl conditions on the Navajo Nation.

Here's a Durango Telegraph story about SUWA's proposal to designate more wilderness in Utah to fight dust storms.

Skiing Purg's dusty corn ...

The cherry on top of this ice-cream sundae of a ski season is getting to ski Purg in April. The ski area is staying open weekends in April this year after having to open late, a lack of snow causing a delay until early December, and then receiving more than 200 inches after that.

Through April, weather and climate change permitting, the area is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday to Sunday, with the "six pack," Lift 3 (the quad), and Lift 8 running.

That means corn. And for the first time in my experience, that means corn on the "backside," off Lift 8.

T'was a fun and Scrapple-y weekend up at our neighborhood area. Especially on Sunday, when the sun screamed and we were treated to Silky cream-corn bumps, not many people (but lots of people we know), no lines, and only the occasional stray snow-bike jackass.

And live music on the "beach" in front of Purgy's -- the eternal Ralph Dinosaur and his band on Saturday, and on Sunday the heir-apparent to the Ralph Dinosaur Empire, Hounds of Purg. (Does that make them an "heir band"?)

A strange, somewhat surreal aspect to the weekend, though, was the dark and thick layer of dust that had been laid down by the season's first dust storm last week. Earlier in the week, you could see the dark tinge the storm had cast across the La Platas, but I was stunned by the spray-painted look of the snow at Purgatory. And you could hear and feel the gritty grind across the bases of your skis.

Last year, too, Utah blew all over the San Juans in early spring, darkening the snowpack and causing it to run off up to a month and a half early. According to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, BLM policies in southern Utah are fueling and exacerbating the phenomenon, with more problems to come.

Check out the rather dry but informative PowerPoint video below.

Also check out SUWA's "Red Dust Melting Colorado Snow" page here.

Red Snow in Winter?

Ringing in Spring with Bodo Corn Camp 2010!

Well, what else are a bunch of olde tyme ski bums going to do on the first day of spring?

They are, of course, going to dress up all goofy and skin up their skis and head up within sight of their hometown and ride some early-season high-desert corn.

For the second year in a row, the Four Corners climate cooperated with the zaniness, delivering a warm(ish) first spring day and some intense sunbeams, gently microwaving the big-winter snowpack and serving up a hefty heapin' helpin' of corn. Best washed down with snow-chilled PBRs.

On hand were many of the usual suspects: Our Master of Ceremonies, Captain Cornacopia; Mr. Chips (a.k.a the Chiptator); The Canadian Cosmo Kramer; Joan Jett of the Rockies; Laird Cornilton (with surfboard); Corn Shrek; some creapy guy in boxer shorts, suspenders, and a trucker's cap (Cob the Ripper?); and yours truly, Corn Yastrzemski. And many others.

As Abbey said: "Down with Empire! Up with Spring!"

Check out some more pics here and below:

Happiness and longing ...

Our backyard -- still ...

 

But! March offers welcome signs of rebirth! 

Unless you're talking about my canoe ... which is somewhere under yonder ...

Launching the 2009 river season: Take me to the river ...

... Drop me in the water.

It wasn't how I planned to launch the river season -- or the Next Big Life Project I'm on. But somehow it was the PERFECT way to launch both:

With a hefty heapin' helpin' of humility.

See, I was cocky. No doubt about it. My buddy Jono was visiting from San Francisco, and for his last day I planned a grand -- and very nearby -- adventure: a canoe float down a stretch of our home-town Animas River. It would be, I assured him, just a two-hour cruise ...

... a two-hour cruise ...

Jono and I have been on several multi-day canoe ventures together, so this one seemed like a leisurely trip -- from Baker's Bridge, at the north end of the grand Animas Valley, down to Trimble Lane, where we usually put in for our canoeing day trips down the valley to town. This stretch is, I had been assured by a kayaking friend of mine (renown for his class- V paddling expeditions, which should've suggested to me that I get a second opinion), a flat-water float through wide, slow, low-water meanders.

It was, he assured me, just a ... two-hour cruise ...

With Spring starting to spring, the river season a'comin', and my paddling pal in town, I decreed that this quick two-hour trip also, then, would be the first run of my life's next Big Project: Over the next few years I will paddle my canoe down the lengths of the San Juan and Animas rivers, as both my 50th Birthday pilgrimage, and also to serve the narrative thread that will run through my next book.

So with all those auspicious beginnings afoot, I knew: It was going to be a great day!

But I was cocky. It was, after all, flat water. (Even if I'd never actually seen this stretch myself ...) And we are experienced paddlers. And it is right close to home. (Even if one of the themes of this book-to-come is the adventures to be had that lie close to home ...) We wouldn't need much, then. Floatbags? Naw. Hell, I'll bring a little token bail bucket. Spare paddle? Ha! Ballast? I'll throw in a couple of bags of gear and a few beers. Dry bags? Well, I'll bring one, but I certainly won't seal it well. And I'll put the rest of our gear -- extra jackets and shells and hats and gloves -- in a day pack and call it good.

After all, it was just a ... two-hour cruise.

For us, it was about a hundred-yard cruise. Paddling anyway. Then we swam. Then we spent an hour running up and down the bank, recovering out boat and gear, and communicating with with comical versions of American Sign Language to our friends who had beached their boats on the far shore so they could gather our various jetsam and flotsam washing up on the other side of the river.

Meanwhile, my beloved canoe sat abandoned and flooded and lodged on a rock (there were a lot of rocks ...) in the middle of the river.

After an hour or so of recover and rescue, I and Jono (whom I, in my cocky "guiding" mode, urged to wear hiking boots and jeans for our mellow, flat-water float) were damn cold. Our "dry bag" was half-full of water and weighed about 50 pounds, full of now-sopping foul-weather gear. Much of the rest of my gear was either redistributed among the still-floating boats or (including our beer) had been sacrificed to the river gods.

We prudently chose to abort.

We humbly chose to abort.

We respectfully chose to abort.

Failure, then? No way. Yes, I still consider that short venture the start of both this year's river season, and of my grand multi-year paddling project. I also, though, now consider it the perfect start to both.

For now I will go into both the right way: With humbleness. And respect. And prepared.

The way one should always go to the river -- whether for a two-hour cruise or a multi-year project.

Our two companions continued on to finish the trip. Meanwhile, Jono and I are determined to tackle this unsuccessful venture again. Hell, maybe we'll make it an annual mission. We could call it the "Annual Baker's Bridge Classic": a triathlon that consists of a hundred-yard paddle, a 20-yard swim, and a three-mile trot along a cobblestone shoreline mostly carrying a 16-foot canoe.

The river will always be the winner.

Check out the pics below. Note that there are no pics of the actual flip, or of my canoe lodged like driftwood in the middle of the river, since my camera was still in the swamped canoe.



******

This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com. Check it out!

A Bum Family Tradition

It's corn season.

I mean my favorite kind of corn: corn snow groomed into a smooth lake-like surface, or corn snow sculpted into long fall-lines of steep waveforms that ski like surfing white-water chop.

I mean like the corn snow we found awaiting us on the first day of Spring at Purgatory this weekend.

So, as we do for a couple dozen days every ski season, we made some sandwiches and poured some coffee and put on our ski gear and jumped in the truck and headed up through the morning-glory blaze of the amazing Animas River Valley.

Another Wright family rite.

Skiing has been the sinew and tissue of our family. Since holding our three-year-old son under his arms so he can sail on his plastic boards on Chapman Hills' meagre slope, through our teen kids' having to wait for us -- sometimes with visible exasperation -- as their telemarking parents huff and grunt their way to the bottom of the lift, five months of our year is woven together with days passed skiing together.

Every year we make that big financial outlay in ski passes for the family. But, this, in my wife and my minds, is an sound investment in our family-health care. In fact, these frequent and, given Sarah's and my lives built around skiing (we met living at in a ski town, and married at the base of the town's ski area), damn-near religious days passed together on the nearby mountain -- and up in our nearby, amazing, gorgeous home-mountain range -- are the why of the what we have built our adult lives around.

We went from being ski bums to parenting bums.

The lift rides alone are worth it. This is why I hope they never really get around to replacing Purgatory's backside Lift 8 with that high-speed quad chair they've been threatening for years: Not only do I welcome that long rest after a long ground down the face of Paul's Park, but this is some the best time I get to spend with my kids: sitting on the chair and having the space in which you can only free-form chat.

Now, knowing there's only a few years of this frequent, ritualistic, intimate time left in our relationship with our kids, I savor every opportunity I get with them like this. Just-talking time, rather than the more common and pragmatic day-to-day talking-about-something-specific time. Time shared in some magnificent place. Time spent out-of-doors and honing and exploring a physical skill.

And the chance to teach them -- to show, not just tell them -- what I think life and living really are:

Do more. Want less.

The Bum life, however those values are manifested.

Watching them schuss the slush, I think they get it. And watching them run into their friends on the mountain -- friends of their often raised by friends of our who, too, live here to be Bum Parents -- I'm thinking they all -- the "Western Ski Bums: The Next Generation" -- get it, too.

*******

This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com. Check it out!

Spring Training for all

“People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
—Rogers Hornsby

It takes skill, this following baseball. I mean following a single game, in progress. It takes practice. It takes training. Especially following a game on the radio, which I do a lot living out here in the Rocky Mountain West, where most of my baseball fixes are injected either through MLB.com or via XM Radio.

So while the dreary, dragging days of February at long-blessedly-last fade into the rebirth and reawakening that we call March, my favorite teams are at last in spring training -- The Red Sox in Fort Myers, Fla., the Cubs in Mesa, Ariz., and the Rockies in Tucson.

And while they're in spring training, so am I.

I mean getting this football-softened brain back into shape -- working hard on my ability to maintain a running consciousness of the status of a ball game whilst keeping up the pace of my multitasking of daily work and life. It takes me a few weeks before my mental dexterity returns to its major-league game-ready regular-season agility. So I'm thankful for those few weeks of spring training games to work on my own game.

(And this year we'll also have the World Baseball Classic to tide us over until Major League Baseball kicks off on April 5.)

But the reward for this spring training is more than merely sharpening my mental game-tracking skills, of course -- just the same way that the joy of following those Grapefruit League and Cactus League games is more than just notching the (relatively) meaningless wins and losses.

Spring training is about ... Spring!

So when I tune my browser to a pre-season Red Sox game from the humble City of Palms Park, or click my XM receiver to a second-string-players match-up between the Cubs and Rockies in the ever-summer climes of Arizona, sure, I'm rooting for each at bat. And, yes, I'm working on my ability to follow the game while I do my work, since games that matter are only a few weeks away (and work never goes away).

But, really, what I'm doing is listening to music, like some cool jazz, feeling the groove, tuning in to the musical soundtrack of Spring itself.

With the lyrical intonations of a Joe Castiglione, or Ron Santo, or Jeff Kingery on vocals.

It's music to my frost-bitten ears.

* * * *

This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com.