Silent Nighthorse

Since the Durango Herald took this off its website after a week, I'm posting below the text to an opinion piece I wrote that appeared in the Sunday, May 23 edition, so people can find it and pass it on. (Note that a longer version of this essay is also on the Inside Outside website, here.)


So ... spread it around. And if you're interested in joining an email list for sharing news and information on Ridges Basin, email me at ken[at]sanjuanalmanac.com.



Silent Nighthorse:
Motorless lake could keep the wild in Ridges Basin

One night I was walking the lonely county road that used to run through Ridges Basin. It was a near-full-moon night, cold and quiet, when I saw what appeared at first to be an apparition: a square light from a dimly-lit trailer, and behind it some kind of big, bright mass swirling slowly in the meadow.

As I got closer, the scene came together: An old sheepherder’s wagon stood along the dirt road, and behind it a flock of sheep (600 head, I would soon learn) grazed in the moonlight. While I stood there in awe, in appreciation, relishing the unexpected spectacle, out of the trailer came the sheepherder himself.

The young Navajo shepherd shined his big flashlight over his charges while he told me of his task: driving the flock from La Plata, New Mexico, to Ignacio for lambing. He would cross Ridges Basin tomorrow, and push on into Ignacio a few days later.

Then came the hammer: He informed me that after 100 years, I was witnessing this outfit’s the last sheep drive through Ridges Basin. Why? Because next year the site of a new dam that would create Ridges Basin reservoir would be impassable.

"Why do they have to ruin good country?" he asked me, not really seeking answer. Because we both knew why: The Animas-La Plata water project.

Ridges Basin was good country: A wide forest-rimmed valley harboring wetlands and a perennial stream -- a rarity in this high-desert country. Just a few short miles south of downtown Durango, it was a sanctuary for both wildlife and people: a big, quiet, healthy and historic landscape close to town.

It was also until recently home to an estimated 300 mule deer and 100 elk, while as many as 1,400 of the hard-pressed animals migrated through or wintered there. In May and June, the basin served as vital elk calving grounds -- a diminishing commodity in a region where many meadows and valleys have metastasized into subdivisions and trophy homes.

Before A-LP, Ridges Basin was an amazing place. And it was supposed to stay that way.

The Bodo family, whose homes and ranch buildings still stood in the basin before AL-P's flooding, worked this land since 1914. The family gave up ranching in the 1970s, but not their love of the land. In 1974, they sold their ranch to the Nature Conservancy, with a clause in the deed: that Ridges Basin stay wild for wildlife forever. When the Nature Conservancy turned over the basin to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, creating the Bodo State Wildlife Area (read: public property owned by all Coloradoans) that clause remained intact: Forever.

Forever, that is, until 1991, when the CDOW had to deny access to the Bureau of Reclamation for testing for ALP. The Bureau then condemned 4,000 acres of the Bodo Wildlife Area -- to hell with the "public:" in public land, or the "wildlife" in Wildlife Area, or the "forever" clause the CDOW was entrusted with.

And Ridges Basin’s death sentence was issued. Today, that place where I encountered that bygone way of living will itself soon be gone, submerged under the  stagnant pool behind Ridges Basin Dam.

But ... There is still a chance to reclaim and retain some of those "forever wild" qualities to Ridges Basin. There is still a way we can resurrect the spirit and preserve some of the values and intentions of that Bodo gift.

The master planning process for the future of recreation in and around the Ridges Basin reservoir -- which now bears the marketing name "Lake Nighthorse" -- is still in its infancy, and much has yet to be determined.

In the fantasies of the industrial recreationists, Lake Nighthorse and its environs will be home to a regular Four Corners Disneyland that includes a four-lane concrete boat ramp, camping areas and facilities, and trail systems for hikers, bikers and equestrians. Just drawing up the plan for this playground is estimated to cost from $150,000 to $200,000. In 2000, the Colorado Department of State Parks estimated recreational amenities could cost upwards of $25 million -- not counting operations and maintenance.

In recent years, the Bureau of Reclamation, Colorado State Parks, La Plata County, and the City of Durango all have bowed out of the recreation-building business around Lake Nighthorse. Not to be deterred, though, in March the Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District took over the development of recreation at Lake Nighthorse. The District is reported to have $50,000 available.

The view from here, then, is that either full build-out doesn't seem likely, or, if the district can find investors to help them, then it's unlikely development will be done in ways that will maintain the quiet, remote, peaceful nature that Ridges Basin has known for millennia. (Or done in ways that are free and open to the public that paid for A-LP to begin with -- see the user fees recently imposed to support recreational amenities at the Bureau of Reclamation's Vallecito Reservoir.)

So here's an idea:

Let's have a silent Nighthorse. Every other reservoir in the Four Corners has been given over to motorized boating and industrial recreation. So let's keep Ridges Basin what it has been since the last ice age, and what the Bodo family intended it to be nearly forty years ago: A nearby sanctuary for both wildlife and people.

We can save both money and an irreplaceable landscape through two stipulations on any Lake Nighthorse recreation plan: Minimal building and non-motorized uses. And we can still make it happen. The ALPWCD has won a grant from the National Park Service River and Trails program, and, with the help of a private consulting firm, is working on setting up a process for public meetings and input on the design of recreation on and around Lake Nighthorse. Look for announcements in coming months on ways to get involved and speak your mind.

There can still be a Ridges Basin that is wild. Forever. If we make it so.

Pulling out the river gear ...

At last.

Got on the river a couple of times this past weekend, finally moving the Summer (in the broad, six-month-long season sense) from the getting-the-gear-out stage to the getting-out-with-gear phase. At last!

(Read about my affection for that Spring ritual of pulling out gear in "Getting in Gear," this month's "San Juandering" column, in the June Inside Outside. )

On Saturday some friends and I took my niece and her husband on a rollicking paddle run through town. The river had peaked that morning, at 5,100 cfs. It was a wet, fast, and rockin' ride -- and my niece's husband's first-ever river trip. A good one, fer sher.

And on Monday, a slice of our river-trip tribe gathered for a duckie trip down a little-run section of our home river, paddling the Animas from Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane. This lovely, riffly, meandering stretch features big cottonwoods, sweeping views of the redrocked upper Animas Valley and upstream toward Engineer Mountain and surrounding still-snowfielded peaks. We also passed the confluence of Hermosa Creek and the Animas.

Let Summer roll!



Read "Getting in Gear" here.

Check out some pics of the Baker's Bridge to Trimble Lane run on the Animas River here.

Losing Lost

Well, it's over.

In one sense, my response is thank God! I can finally quit being lost in Lost! There's always a sense of relief when any long-term project ends. And keep up on Lost is nothing if not a project one must be devoted to in order to make it through all six seasons of the show's many -- very many -- convoluted and often confusing plot trajectories.

In another sense, though, I'm sad. Because the end of Lost also means the end of one more family ritual for our slowly aging and not-so-slowly growing-up family.

For the past few years (we came into Lost via DVD, after the show had already aired for three seasons), Lost has been our family campfire. Once or twice a week, we would meet together in front of the TV at a predetermined time for another wild chapter in this epic tale we were sharing in.

While most any television show could serve this gathering-around function, Lost was a particularly good family campfire. It managed to engage and entertain us adults as well as our two teens, with deep, effective characters wrapped in an engrossing, if warped, ongoing and ever-unfolding adventure-tale. And it was a literary tale that spoke to its audience in a uniquely compelling way: by unfolding on a human scale -- years, just like real life does -- that few, if any, other forms of literature can claim.

So this allowed us, for the past few years of our lives together, to get wrapped up in the same narrative. And it was a narrative that in turn provided more than just the actual "campfire" time together.

Lost also offered ample fuel for the fires of conversation, too. Because Lost -- as this week's series finale drove home -- was all about allegories for the various questions and challenges of life and living -- from parenting/child relations, to love, to honor, to religion, and ... well every Lost fan could come up with their own list of the many things they read between the show's scripted lines.

From my own fully-biased point of view, a major theme of Lost was tribalism: How we function as intertwined individuals. How we become or select leaders. What our personal boundaries are. Responsibility, cooperation, and self reliance. And, as individuals, how we accept, swallow, and move on from our own pasts -- and how those in our lives do the same for us, and for themselves.

And, ultimately, as the last episode drove home in all its trademark bizarre beauty, Lost was about one question: How do we do those things well? How and why should be we be our best in the face of the often convoluted, sometimes confusing, and always ultimately inexplicable mystery that we we're all -- and all together --always surrounded by and engaged in, even if we don't crash on a weird island.

And these are things adults and parents have been discussing -- prompted by strange tales and metaphoric legends -- around campfires for a million years.

The callings of Spring

Spring has finally, in big brilliant blast of sunshine, blessed us, and the earth is burst forth.

Or somesuch. In our neighborhood, that basically means that families like ours spend a lot time working around the yard in the sunshine. The wives among us tend to be digging with little bitty shovels and patting the earth with gloved hands. And doing a lot of pointing with those gloved hands, directing us husbands -- who brandish real shovels -- and the teen-aged draftees into this yardscaping enterprise, on what to move where and where to dig with those real shovels.

Oftentimes, while my wife is not looking, hunched over, working the ground and murmoring encouragement to some bedrazzled scrub, I find myself leaning against my shovel and staring ... out there, at the greater -- in both size and grandeur -- landscape around us. Up and away toward Perins Peak, or the La Platas, or some distant butte in Utah that I can see in my traveler's mind's eye beyond the curvature of the earth.

I often see my son when it's his shift in the Boda Garden, as we call my wife's yardly handwork, also staring off, perhaps kicking some skateboard trick in his mind.

Seems the gene doesn't fall very far from the double-helix.

Because this, I have found from a very unscientific, but usually very festive, survey, seems to be the norm among my married middle-aged male counterparts: Women work the yard, and men help. But they're really faking their enjoyment. (One good turn deserves another, eh?) What were really thinking about is ... going, out there, somewhere.

And we're thinking: God already made a garden, darlin'! Let us let Him tend to it with His all-powerful ways! And let us go forth and folic in his Creation! 

But my wife ain't buying it.

Anyway, while I may not always be the most exuberant of employees, I much do appreciate the fruits of this forced labor. And I enjoy seeing my wife's creativity and sense of beauty made manifest.

And given those gender differences in how we might prefer to spend sunny spring afternoons, I particularly appreciate my wife's long-running rock-garden project, because I think it represents the beset of us merged:

Sarah has lined the gardens around our yard with rocks gathered and carried from literally all over the world -- from the San Juan River to Alaska, from Mount Sneffels to Kauai, from the Upper Penninsula of Michigan to Norway to the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon Coast.

I know, because I, Webb and Anna carried them from where ever Sarah found them.

And I love it. This is, when I look at it now, a true coming together of  both our traveling and our homemaking. And that truly is making our home more beautiful.

A little getaway goes a long way ...

Every little bit helps. And lately, help has been needed.

Specifically, the help needed lately has been to get out. To get out there, anywhere. Anything to dilute the numbing of work and school and a cold, cloudy, restless spring.

The anywhere Webb and I chose this weekend was Muley Point, on the edge of Cedar Mesa, overlooking the San Juan River -- where, we both agree, we'd really like to be. But can't, yet. So we settled for a spontaneous and quick "little bit" -- a 24-hour getaway to where we can at least say hey to the country we ache for.

So on Sunday afternoon we threw camping gear and some food and our guitars in the truck and headed west. Dinner and a fire and some guitar playing and chatting on the rim while the newly-waxing moon floated over the canyonlands -- and the space station zipped by overhead. Then sleeping under the milky spillage of the Milky Way. Then waking for coffee and a walk and ... well, just breathing the air, savoring the silence, drinking in the views and sucking the spirit of the landscape we both love. Then, back home to do our daily duty ... but recharged, some.

It was a little bit, but it sure helped. Until we can get the dose of out there we really need. Soon ...

Can Ridges Basin yet survive the Disneyification of Lake Nighthorse?

I've always had this odd predilection: I'm drawn to little places. Ever since I was a kid, I would seek and see the nooks and crannies and the subtle, hidden gems right around where ever I happened to be. And they nearly always harbored interesting and complete -- and wild in their own way -- little worlds.

Big, dramatic landscapes are quite lovely, no doubt -- and damn well worth defending, of course. That's obvious -- because the big, dramatic places are so obvious.

But the little places -- the little stashes and caches of wildness and flow that remain within and amidst the greater general environmental de-evolving development unfolding and/or unraveling everywhere we happen to be today -- well they're important, too. Because even if they aren't as meaty as the big, dramatic landscapes, these little places are the connecting sinew and muscle holding our less-wild worlds together. And they're still essential -- especially because of their proximity -- for keeping us sane and in touch with the undeveloped world.

And they're vital now more than ever, as in the 21st century the lingering big blocks of landscapes get either locked up for chopped up. Now our hungers turn their longing eyes on the little places. Nearby, I cite Hermosa Creek -- which may be on the cusp of getting some needed protection. And the HD Mountains, which recently lost its protection.

And Ridges Basin. Which lost its protection when the ALP project dammed the Basin to created Lake Nighthorse -- but which may yet get a partial retrieve. If enough of us speak up.

The Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District has won a grant from the National Park Service River and Trails program, and, with the help of a private consulting firm, is working on setting up a process for public meetings and input on the design of recreation on and around Lake Nighthorse . 


We can save both money and what has always made Ridges Basin a treasure through two stipulations on any Lake Nighthorse recreation plan: Minimal building and non-motorized uses.

This is the argument I make in "Silent Nighthorse," my San Juandering column in the May issue of Inside Outside.

One night I was walking the lonely county road that used to run through Ridges Basin. It was a near-full-moon night, cold and quiet, when I saw what appeared at first to be an apparition: a square light from a dimly-lit trailer, and behind it some kind of big, bright mass swirling slowly in the meadow.

As I got closer, the scene came together: An old sheepherder’s wagon stood along the dirt road, and behind it a flock of sheep (600 head, I would soon learn) grazed in the moonlight. While I stood there in awe, in appreciation, relishing the unexpected spectacle, out of the trailer came the sheepherder himself.

As the young Navajo shepherd shined his big flashlight over his charges, I learned he was driving the flock to Ignacio for lambing, having walked from La Plata, New Mexico, a few days earlier. He would cross the Ridges Basin tomorrow, pushing the sheep down through Basin Creek’s narrow outlet canyon, to the Animas River, and on into Ignacio a few days later.

His story amazed me -- that that people still had jobs that required walking a hundred miles of lovely country – but then came the hammer: He informed me that after 100 years, I was witnessing this outfit’s the last sheep drive through Ridges Basin. Why? Because the next year the site of the dam that will create Ridges Basin reservoir, the construction of which had already begun, would be impassable.

We were quiet for a while, pondering the import of all that. The he broke the silence: "Why do they have to ruin good country?" he asked me, not really seeking answer. Because we both knew why.

The Animas-La Plata water project ...

Read the entire "Silent Nighthorse" here.

As a side note, to see a possible nightmare future at Lake Nighthorse, check out the new user fees instituted by the Pine River Irrigation District at Vallecito Reservoir recently to pay for recreational facilities there.

I'll be providing news and updates about public hearings to shape the fate of Ridges Basin and Nighthorse Reservoir on the San Juan Almanac.

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.

Lawn Chairs Kings rock El Rancho to launch new CD

We headed out with a big band of friends Saturday night to celebrate with one of Durango's most iconic bands, The Lawn Chair Kings, who feted the release of their new CD at Durango's most iconic bar, El Rancho Tavern.

It was a match made in Purgatory.

LCK shared the spotlights with The Freeman Social, who also were cranking out the tunes for a new CD. It was a rocking night for a packed house.

A friend of mine pointed out that when we someday look back, the Lawn Chair Kings will be the soundtrack for our memories of Durango in the '00s.

Well, they may also become the soundtrack of the '10s for Durango -- and lots of other more far-ranging fans -- if the new CD is any indicator of what's to come from the band.

 "Lawn Chair Kings II" is a fun and festive blend of well-written and polished alt-country tunes -- done in a style the band calls "western garage."

The band is fronted by guitarist and vocalist Eric Nordstrom -- who also is the 2010 Durango High School Teacher of the Year. Backing Eric is Steve Mendias on drums, the versatile Kelly Rogers and lap steel and guitar, and Dan Leek on bass.

Garage, maybe; Western, fer sure. 21st century Western. It all says summer in the mountains to me. And when I'm heading up there (soon!) I know what'll be pouring out my truck's open windows.

Learn more and listen at lawnchairkings.com.

Check out the Lawn Chair Kings as they go all mop-top at KDUR's Beatles Cover Night, at The Summit, Saturday, May 22.

Recent DNA studies reveal the truth: Some of us are wilder!

More interesting clues and theories from the Fantastic Voyage-like world of DNA exploration ...

Seems that scientists have found remnant Neandertal DNA blended in with some people's Homo Sapien DNA. Some of us, it seems, are a bit more Neanderthal than others.

I, for one, am relieved to hear this, for I have long used Neandertal genes as an excuse for some of behaviors and tendencies. And I am also proud to say that I postulated that this very condition existed for others in the modern human race some time ago.

How did this intermingling occur? Scientists also recently posited that early Homo Sapien women found Neandertal men to be objects of their primal lusts. It would be logical to conclude, then, that the most handsome and manly of the Neandertal would be the ones most like to have gotten into Homo Sapien women's genes. So to speak.

This, I believe, is good news. Confirmation of this root-level genetic difference between some modern people and others -- those on my side of the family, for example -- can explain a lot of conflict throughout recorded history and today. For it's seems to me that rather dividing people along traditional, common lines -- race, country, religion, political party, sexual orientation, even gender -- you get a far more relevant and meaningful framing of how the world works -- and clashes -- if people are sorted into two categories:

• Domesticated: Those who are obsessed with control, of self and others, and imposed ways of doing things -- that whole agricultural/farming/factory/military/bureaucracy world, sometimes called "Civilization." Think of farm animals: linked to the mega-machine for so long that they're no longer wild or able to function on their own. And further breeding among this weakened gene pool only furthers the un-wilding. 

• Feral: Not "wild," because pretty much everybody today is "born on farm," so to speak. But there's those who can help but ... act wild. Be as wild as they can within the framework of the civilized social and cultural world they happened to exist in. So they go feral -- wild where they are, amidst the world of civlized control. They are self-willing, self-reliant, independent, tribal, curious and tolerant of others, and downright mutinous when conditions are necessary. Pirates, but often pirates plying the waters of the so-called "normal" daily world. They are Hunter-and-gatherers finding a way -- each his or her own way, because that's their nature -- in the modern paved-over landscape and economy. 

If you think about it, this one dichotomy is behind damn near every conflict, whether between the Romans and the Barbarians, the Cavalry and the Indians, or the boss and the empolyee. It even illuminates things like why the Democrats and Republicans are equally vile and FUBAR. Because they're the same species. And  a different species from many of the rest of us, who are not much represented.

Why? Because Neandetals don't often make good politicians. Or wage serfs. Or cubicle dwellers. Or businessmen. Or fascists. Or underlings. Or farmers.

The next question for research, then, might be: Where did all these Homo sapiens who supplanted -- and somtimes bedded -- my Neandertal forebears come from? 

Seems some scientists who are traveling on a bit more fantastic (and perhaps chemically aided) of a fantastic scientific journey have a theory for that, too: Ancient alien astronauts inserted genetic code (and probably more) into a select group of ancestral humans, forging those that went on to found agriculture, build cities, fight frequent and epic wars, and finally soil the Gulf of Mexico with oil.

Well, that explains A LOT.

Some of us really are wilder.

And modern chicks find us hot.

HD Mountains latest sacrifice to oil & gas gods

After a long battle against the San Juan Basin strain of oil-and-gas cancer, the HD Mountains succumbed the affliction on Monday when a federal judge pulled the plug on the region's legal life support.

On Monday, a district judge ruled against the San Juan Citizen's Alliance in the group's attempt to overturn a 2007 decision by the U.S. Forest Service to expand drilling in the HD Mountains, including in roadless areas. The ruling may end some ten years of legal battling to protect the unique and relatively undeveloped area.

I think this is a loss beyond the legal decision. Even beyond this particular area itself.

The HD Mountains are important not because it's a big, dramatic, alluring landscape. But because it isn't. It's a Little Place. The prime cuts have been parsed -- a few gems set aside and the rest thrown to the economic dogs. Now our hungry eyes turn to the little nooks and crannies -- the sinew and cartilage of the San Juan Basin wildlands. That's what we're eating now. We're down to gnawing the bones.

In fact, I wrote a story titled just that a few years ago, about the battle to keep oil-and-gas out of the HDs, and especially its special roadless heart. In that piece, I described the area:

The HD Mountains fall away from the southwestern corner of the San Juans like a dangling foot. Low and rumpled, never rising anywhere near treeline, they stand like choppy water between the Piedra River on the east and the flat plain of Florida Mesa on the west, finally pinching out on the south on the shores of Navajo Reservoir, the sunken middle trunk of the San Juan River. 

On the north, looming over and dwarfing the HDs, rise the massive ramparts of the greater San Juan Mountains - a landscape of ragged, jagged, snow-field-patched peaks and green, stream-laced alpine valleys. Dramatic and charismatic, the San Juans are given their due by being largely protected in perpetuity under the shield of the Wilderness Preservation Act, as the Weminuche and South San Juan Wilderness Areas.

As a relatively little landscape - only about 40,000 acres - the HDs remain little-known, little-appreciated and little-visited. Few people outside of southwestern Colorado are aware of their existence, and even those who do live here mostly know them as the area of rolling hills south of the highway when driving U.S. Hwy. 160 between Bayfield and Pagosa Springs.

Little known, maybe; but they are also, remarkably, and importantly, little developed. In fact, RARE II, a government study in the late 1970s that inventoried the remaining roadless areas around the country larger than 5,000 acres, found 23,000 acres of the HDs qualifying as official Roadless Area designation. Other surveys claim as much as 40,000 acres - all but the outer foothills of the HDs - as de facto roadless area. Still, despite the RARE II findings, the Forest Service chose to not nominate the HD Mountains for protection when they had a chance under the Wilderness Act of 1980.

Even the judge, U. S. Senior District Judge Richard Matsch, noted that "this is not an opening up of a virgin wilderness." He still, though, recognized that the issue here is deeper than a mere legal one. Even though most of the 39-page decision focused on legal issues and environmental law, Mastch made a point to note in his decision, "Gas production is the antithesis of environmental protection. The national policies expressed in NEPA and in energy legislation are in direct conflict."

If we're going to fight for what's left and defend our public lands so our kids have some to share with their kids, then we need to argue on terms beyond law and legislation. We cannot win there.

What we need, I think, goes beyond law: We need new reasons -- 21st century reasons -- for public lands, for roadless areas, for the wild and semi-wild places that are left around us. Even and especially little places.

We need to find words and ways to say anew, not what we're fighting against, but what we're fighting for. And why. 

And we need to say those things for a 21st century world, for 21st century people living 21 century lives.



So ... what might be 21st century reasons to keep our public lands -- and our last lingering little pockets and connecting corridors of wildlands -- public and safe from the hungry gods of endless economic development and ruin?


Read about the HD Mountains in "Gnawing the Bone" here.

Read about Monday's decision allowing drilling in the HDs here.

Learn more abut the San Juan Citizen's Alliance here.

Putting the "neato" in "magneato" -- and in one's economic engine

You know how it is living here on the West Slope of the Bell Curve: To make a living to do that living,f you sometimes got to be mighty creative in how one accumulates enough economic bricks to build a foundation you can stand on.

I know I myself in my time here in southwestern Colorado have had to weave a paycheck patchwork from wage-paying sources ranging from river guide to bus driver to Cajun cook (with my Boston accent, I wasn't allowed to actually speak to the customers), to college instructor and news reporter and magazine editor (these last three at the same time).

I also, though -- even though in terms of business acumen I have the anti-Midas Touch -- have undertaken several independent entrepreneurial enterprises, most of which blossomed then wilted overnight, largely unseen, like an orchid deep in the woods. This includes two magazines, a few blogs, a karate club, a couple of t-shirt designs, a non-profit, an LLC, and ... well, you get the idea. Whatever it takes.

Anyway, believe it or not, this blog isn't about me. But it is about that income ingenuity that is so abundant and colorful here in West Slopers. In particular, this is about how that creativity has most recently manifested in my friend Todd Thompson, who was a West Sloper but recently moved to Virginia, but brought that whacky west-side Colorado attitude with him. (Like the time he went boating on the Potomac during the snowstorm of the century. Nice.)

Well, Todd's latest scheme to wring a living out of his new home habitat is MagneatoSpheres. MagneatoSpheres are, from my understanding, powerful rare-earth magnets coated with a glaze that makes them usable. And addicting, when they're brought together in large numbers to create patterns and structures and ... whatever you can.

Dude, that qualifies as West Slope-y in my mind, where ever it's done.

Still, it's the style that makes this, with my sense of hillbilly humor, a truly Colorado-esque endeavor. Todd and his partner in this project have undertaken their little economic excursion with tongues firmly in-cheeks. So the website alone is worth a visit and poke around: aside from the oddity of rare-earth magnetic balls to play with (but don't get them near your computer or phone!), the website is full of punny fun and curious bits of news and info about the invisible electromagnetic world both on Earth and beyond.

Nice.

Learn more about MagneatoSpheres here.

And check out the comical commercial Todd created starring his two young boys. Sure to launch rich and profitable careers in YouTube. Or futures carving their own creative economic paths on the West Slope of the Bell Curve ...

MagneatoSpheres: The bigger and more challenging toy for adults

It lives!

As Mark Twain said, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." So, too, with my canoe!

I always knew Royalex is an amazing material -- evil synthetic plastic it is -- but this is crazy. After writing my squished canoe off to a life of limping leakily around reservoirs due to injuries incurred beneath a crushing heap of compacted roof-slide snow, Nuannaarpoq executed a remarkable rebounding after spending a couple of days soaking in the healing rays of the spring Sun, straightening, rounding out, dents and kinks leaving scars but smoothing and stretching back flush.

I'm damn near ready to start a Nuannaarpoq religion.

To test this -- and as first sacrament -- I hauled her down to the swelling and swirling Animas at the north end of town, where Rio and I paddled her upstream (well, I paddled whilst Rio lay there with her nose on the gunnel gorging itself on the spring riverine richness). We inched our way along the big sweeping cottonwood-lined bends under the flanks of Animas City Mountain, then turned and rode the brown snowmelt back down to town.

The redwinged blackbirds were ridiculous, just carousing and yelling to each other and singing and whistling away over their sense of ... well, nuannaarpoq.

And I felt my own joy. Because despite the garish Harry Potter scar that now runs down her midsection, my canoe's good figure was back and her geometry incredibly returned to form. She cut the water like she wanted to head upstream to mate.

Rivers do that to us ...

Anyway, it looks like we're back together. True, both of us have our dings and scars and weakened points on our resilient-but-travelworn frames -- and neither of us can probably withstand much of broaching any more.

But I'm happy to correct my previous obituary (especially for the reader who suggested turning Nuannaarpoq into a flower pot ... ). It looks like we have a few more runs in us after all.

A death in the family ...

... of sorts.

My beloved canoe, Nuannaarpoq, was a victim of our big winter. The 16-foot Dagger Legend, named for the Innuit word that means something like "to show great joy at being alive" (culled from Barry Lopez' staggering work of nonfiction Arctic Dreams), had carried myself, my gear, my beer, members of my family, and assorted sordid bowmen/barmen/comrades-at-paddle (although not all those at once) down many a river and across many a broad reach of open lake and on many an epic, and sometimes leisurely, journey. She also had joined us on several of our summer epics, including across western and northwestern Canada, to Alaska and back, and around Wisconsin and the Upper Penninsula Michigan.

For the past several winters, Nuannaarpoq had hibernated alongside the garage. Yes, on the north side, and, true, under the overhang of the garage's Pro-panel roof, but this was never a problem as its durable Royalex hull withstood everything any our drought-year winters could dump on her.

Not this El Nino winter, though.

(This, even, though I smartly placed two pieces of particle-board ping-pong table resting at a angles along her bulging center to protect her from the couple-hundred tons of compacted snowpack that accumulated six-feet deep upon her plastic carcass. Careful: Genius at Work.)

She suffered a severely creased hull, a split of the interior wall, and a general permanent bending toward river left.

So, basically, as early as I managed to flip my boat to start last year's river season (less than three minutes), this year I managed to broach my boat before I even hit the water.

I will endeavor to revive her for whatever she can handle -- perhaps she'll enjoy a retirement of ever-veering to the left whilst doing some lazy reservoir fishing. Still, aside from the sudden lack of means of paddling, on an emotional level it's a loss as bittersweet and wrenching as that of any kin. There's something about gear. Especially well-traveled and travel-worn gear. Each blemish is a story, and every scuff, scrape, ding, gouge, and repair represents a strand of our own life's DNA.

And each loss, a small death -- a mortitio -- in the family.

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?

An unexpected dose of "miracles" ...

Even we here in the land of mountains and rivers and powder days and translucent high-altitude sun can stand to be bonked on the head and reminded every now and then to look around and see the miracles all around us.

Well, you're about to get bonked.

Those once wicked-bad boys from Detroit, Insane Clown Posse, seem to have found either God, several gods, or several doses of strong pharmaceuticals. Or maybe they really are insane. Whatever it is, this ICP video bring sunshine and flowers into your day.

Because, as they rap, "Magic is everywhere in da bitch."

Insane Clown Posse - Miracles

My new organization that's going to change the world!

Today I am stoked to announce the launching of a new venture, STARFEET COMMAND.

It is, like everything else in my life, a not-for-profit venture.

Starting this group has been a dream of mine for a long, long time, going back to when I was kid and would sport home-made Star Trek uniforms for camping trips with my family. They never really got it -- although to their credit they never sought outside help -- but I knew even then that I was onto something.

Bringing Star Trek home.

Boldly Go -- yes. But the real trick is, Boldly Go at Home. Especially when your starship is a 1993 Ford Explorer.

The mission of Starfeet Command is pursue the adventuresome, curious, compassionate, valorous, and often studly values of Star Trek and live them here and now, where ever we are, whatever we do. It is based on the following principles:

• Star Trek is the only truly positive vision of the future being offered out there: That notion that not only can we handle technology, but it can actually enrich us and our world and our lives, if we use it that way. Star Trek says that we can embrace the great Mystery of the Universe (which science now says is actually more of a polyverse, like Star Trek always said) if we choose to do so.

• We can choose to do so by choosing to live lives -- and evolve a society and culture -- based on the conscience of Starfleet and the Federation of Planets in Star Trek: As explorers rather than exploiters.

• And that exploring is absolutely subservient to the Prime Directive -- non-interference with natural evolution of anyone and anything. That, I argue, is sort of the 23rd century version of "Earth First!" applied to all beings across the great intergalactic wilderness.

• And that is because in Star Trek, whether you're talking about Starfleet as an organization or the characters as individuals, the style is the message. The how is the point.

I and choose to "how" like Captain James T. Kirk -- kicking alien ass and taking names and chasing green-skinned lovelies around galaxy. That's the style; only I do it with a raft, some skis, a backpack, and often barefeet, with my kids and wife and friends and neighbors as crew.

But nonetheless, boldly going where we are and have often been. 

Interested? Learn more here.  


Oh, and ... April Fools! (sort of ...)

Captain out.

Why I love this place, reason #332

What a difference a pass makes ...

All Durango schools go into lockdown because a student brought a knife onto a bus.

Meanwhile ...

In Cortez they're making knives in shop class.

A mountain man's stance on a flat earth

I was browsing my personal book-backstock, tucked away on backroom bookshelf, the other day. I was pulling out selections that sparked a mood or memory, then cracking them open at random pages to see what highlighted passages I might encounter, to see what spark of insight or creativity the aphorical wisdom therein might ignite.

I like to think of it as the I Ching of the second-rate writer.

Anyway, at one point I withdrew a paperback-version of a classic of Western nature writing, parted its pages reverently at a point I left it to greater powers to select ... and all the pages spilled out like leaves in windgust.

Was that some kind of ... sign??

Actually, no. It was cheap-shit Chinese book binding. But the event did extract a memory ...

I was teaching a course on Western Environmental Literature, and put this book on my reading lest, knowing the students would be surprised, engaged, and challenged by its story and messages.

And in keeping with my own message and theme of the course -- stand by your land -- I instructed the campus bookstore to order the book from a small, West-based publishing house.

Books came. Assignments made. Books purchased. Reading began.

Then the pages fell out of the damn things. Every damn copy of the damn things.

Was that some kind of sign? I doubt it. But the page facing up when own copy imploded displayed the information that this here edition of this classic of Western nature writing was printed in China.

I sensed the surge of money digitally passing out of the region and over the ocean ...

I felt the weight the many heavy cartons of books returning on that ocean encased in an enormous steel hull driven by kilo-barrels of oil ...

Email to publisher ensued, wherein I described the ... glitch, let's call it, in the bookbinding. They responded with, essentially, we know -- it was a bad batch of books. I replied, expressing my ... surprise, let's say, that they would still choose to ship an order -- especially an order for a college class -- knowing the books were doomed to vomit their insides.

And, I appended the hypothesis that even if the students didn't deserve such shitty-ass books, maybe the publishing house did, getting what it deserved for having their classics of Western nature writing printed in China.

Something like that. I'm sure I was quintessentially professorial through it all.

Anyway, my cyber-sparring oppenent seemed to absorb my digital jabs well enough -- except that last one. A terse retort snapped into my inbox:

"Well, it's a flat earth now." 

End of conversation.

An a most unsatisfying end to that conversation, that was. But, I'm here to report that, as I gathered up the fully re-shuffled fallen pages from that former textbook the other day, it still achieved its mystical, magical insight-sparking goal. Because I now have response to that flat-earth defense:

I, myself, like my earth with topography. With moutains and valleys and lakes and rivers and canyons. And with mountain towns and desert hamlets and riverside cities. And I like the variety of cultures that are shaped by those varieted topographies, a diversity reflecting the individual landscapes that hold and support the folks who choose to live there.

And I, myself, choose to work for and support that topography.

So, thanks for the insight!

Epilogue: That company based in the West but helping flatten the earth did later make recompense by sending myself and my class much more expensive and nicer hardcover copies of the book to replace the crap they'd shipped the first time.

I guess they make better books in Hong Kong.

Banff Mountain Film inspires extreme domesticity!

The Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour came to Durango on Sunday. The event, held at the Smiley Building, was a fundraiser for Colorado Wild, those good folks plugging away for us to keep Wolf Creek Pass from becoming Wolf Creek Village, Estates, Mall, Condos, Parking Lot and MegaResort.

Anyway, the whole family and some friends wandered over to check it out. It was a good time, and a nice sedentary way to get stimulated after a weekend of spring skiing.

The eight shorts and films we saw were, as the MC from the Festival promised during the warm-up, "inspirational." I'm glad the kids came along, because it did convey the message, emerging as the attitude radiating from each person portrayed in each film, that you gotta get yer ass out and do stuff.

Challenging stuff. Stuff that puckers your butt. Stuff that is a siren call direct to your quantum-level energy-being -- or whatever you believe animates us as living beings. Stuff that you cannot not heed. Or if you do, it's at your mortal risk.

Okay, the folks recorded in this particular series of shorts may have followed their inner voices to places and situations that I, myself, am happy to support from a safe and sedentary distance. Rowing across the ocean? Speed-biking down Mont Blanc? Pedaling a tandem bicycle from Prudhoe Bay to the tip of South America? Scaling Trango Tower -- bivvying on the cliff face for days on a "porta-ledge" -- then leaping off wearing one of those flying-squirrel suits?

Admirable. But not enviable.
Yet also inspirational.

It's true. At this point in my life, my extreme sport is parenting. (But I do have two teenages -- a riffly section life-stream ranging from pool-drop Class III to Class V waterfall.) And the overall grander epic I forge along on involves maintaining a house; navigating a network of close friends, neighbors and acquaintances; arranging and executing frequent forays into the mountains, rivers, and canyons around where I live; and -- this one is a rather constant challenge -- working at ways to pay for all that.

Yet settling somewhere that matters to me, creating a family, connecting with friends and neighbors, pursuing an occupation and skill -- those were deliberate choices I made. A predilection that called to me. A desire I sought to explore. A long journey I deliberately and of my own free will embarked up and still travel. Every day.

Like those boundary seekers in those films -- but within my own framework of modern domestic wildness -- I find I myself also fervently endeavoring to travel my own life-expedition with the mind and heart of the Grand Adventurer. I watch those films, and I know that I follow the same spiritual compass bearing as those remote backcountry ice climbers who flew into the Canadian outback to admire and scale British Columbia's remote Hunlen Falls.

I just follow it across close-by, often residential and sometimes indoors terrain. 

(Did I mention I have TWO kids? Both TEENS?? At the SAME TIME!??)

While I believe that harrowing wilderness adventures and excruciating physical challenges hold a primal allure for us as human beings -- hence the popularity of everything from the Banff Mountain Film Festival to action flicks to bungee jumping -- I also know from experience that it's also a deep, genetic, human calling to nurture and provide for a family, become a loving husband (for it takes practice -- take it from an Extreme Spouse), develop useful and practical skills, forge yourself a character, build a tribe, learn a homeland, and work to protect and improve those things for the next generation.

Those, too, are wilderness adventures. Those, too, are human doings that make us human beings. And those, too, require sustained effort and unbending intent; are fraught with extreme risk, struggle, challenge, learning, fear, pain, and risk of failure, injury, and death; and are best approached with senses of presence and adventure, and executed with both practiced skill and personal style.

And those too reward with an overwhelming, transcending, richly gratifying sense of accomplishment and success when done.

And done well.

*****

Learn more about the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour here.

Check out a clip of Roz Savage's rowing across the Atlantic Ocean, from the Festival.

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:

Why Charles Bowden is the most kick-ass living writer

I won't even offer any teasers from this article, because I'd just have to re-post the whole thing. If you read just one thing this week, make it this: "Charles Bowden on The War Next Door," from High Country News.

Here Bowden is interviewed about his most recent book, Some of the Dead are Still Breathing. 

US 50: The "Loneliest Road " to loveliness

As a traveler, I have several personal favorite ways of doing my going. They are, in order:

1. Walking
2. Paddling or rowing
3. Skiing
4. Driving

It may seem contradictory to a paleo-guy like me to love to drive (or blog, eh?), but love to drive I do. And long I have. I've even pursued this predilection professionally, including an extended string of mini-careers as a driver of public buses, commercial trucks, limousines, and taxis.

But my favorite driving has been long, epic voyages lashed to the steering wheel. And I've done many long drives -- crossing the U.S. dozens of times, hauling a camper trailer to Fairbanks, Alaska, and back, crossing the TransCanada Highway, and even navigating the fjord-gouged coast of my personal totem-land, Norway. I also lived for a good spell out of a Toyota hatchback, but that's a whole 'nother road best wandered down another day, in another post.

So it was that I was happy to captain last week's family spring break trip to California. Time, of course, was precious, so I merrily volunteered to make the drive straight-through, a 16-hour sitting marathon fueled by coffee and XM Radio.

And scenery.

Our route to Lake Tahoe took us across Nevada on U.S. 50, the aptly named "Loneliest Road in America" -- and a byway that I haven't rolled down in a quarter of a century.

And it hasn't seemed to have changed much -- it still stands (or lies) like a piece of pre-interstate Americana, a straight-line two-lane strip of pavement across broad basins of sagebrush (the Nevada state flower -- really) and and over rocky ranges, over and over again, broken only by the occasional widely spaced remote little outpost town.

Wonderful, lovely, expansive country.

I'd forgotten, to be honest -- both about the isolation of U.S. 50 across Nevada, and, well, about Nevada itself.

U.S. 50 stretches 3,200 miles coast-to-coast, passing through a dozen states and four state capitals, as well as the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. But in Nevada, U.S. 50 crosses what is truly one of the great stretches of wild and undeveloped landscapes left in North America. Some 95 percent of the state's land is public land, and the rest is sparsely populated, outside of the surreal extra-terrestrial hovels of Las Vegas and Reno. Nevada is as wild as any stretch of African veld or savanna (where I haven't driven -- but I have hitchhiked), except sliced by long, ragged, island-in-the-sky mountain ranges.

Even from the windshield of my truck, it was damned good to be back. And I know I'll be back more -- this time to travel Nevada some of those other ways besides driving.

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 ...

Springtime in -- and with -- the Rockies

Walp, got my windows and door open out here in my garage office (The Wordshop). The sun careens in off the snowfields of nearby backyards. The birds are back and yacking it up. And the (still chill) air wafts in, bringing (very) early spring richness and riches. It's almost like working outdoors.Where a writer should work.

Oh: And the season's first spring training baseball game streams in through the sorcery of the internet.

No more spells without baseball for another nine months.

Things are good.

So ... thought I'd drag out, dust off, and offer up this little blogdom chestnut.

(This one goes out to you, Jono!)

************

“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.

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.

The Mountain View ...

... is the title of this month's San Juandering column, in Inside Outside Southwest. I'm glad to be able to offer it up here, because I've been such a lame-ass blogger lately.

The view from my home town is pretty sweet. And it's that view that brought me to the mountains, and has kept me eddied out, a hostage of choice, here and in other Colorado mountain towns for more than half my life.

 

But that's not the only view from this, and those many other, mountain towns ... 

Read the entire column here.