Category: Backpacking
-
They are not yours
It’s been tough work the last 18 months, becoming a hunter, and not because the discipline itself is so multifaceted. Video by Adam Moffat. The difficulty has to do with hunters, and with hunting itself as it all too often practiced in the US. I’ve heard endless chest-thumping bravado, about “smoking” an animal and cultivating…
-
A walk in late June
Snow diverted use from our original objective. While it poured for 72 hours in town last week, three feet fell in the highest reaches. The critters are in full summer feeding mode. rufukkinwidme? Plan B turned to Plan C when still more snow sent us down and around the first lake, rather than up through…
-
Another weekend
First I went bear hunting, and then we went backpacking. June is when a low level of panic begins to set in. Do the math and you realize that the weekends between today and the first fall storm are few, not nearly enough for half the things on the list. But right not the streams…
-
92,000 cfs
Gibson Reservoir overtopping the dam, June 1964. Photo via the USGS. Last weekend I checked the Middle Fork Flathead gauge, as I habitually do almost every morning, and noticed a big number. 92,000 cfs; the historic maximum, set in 1964. As the first week of June came to a close in 1964, unusual but not…
-
Liebster’d
Courtesy of Woodtrekker. The Leibster Award has fuzzy origins, and amounts to a series of questions to answer, and a series of questions you in turn ask of the bloggers to whom you pass on the award. Amusingly, the german word has a platonic, male connotation. The answers: 1: Who are some of the people…
-
The 2014 Bob Marshall Wilderness Open: It will never be the same
Sometimes you get a bad feeling, and it needs to be obeyed. Walking along the upper North Fork of the Sun River Sunday afternoon, my feet were swollen and tired. The river, quite small above Lick Creek, was not small that day. It was dark, swollen up into the willows, and churning with a swift…
-
March of 2003
Forrest recently posted photos and video from a trip in the Escalante which made one of my favorite memories even more vivid. Spring of 2003 was my last semester of undergrad. In spite of taking three seminars/thesis-level classes in three different departments, I really had my shit together. Grinnell College had a two week spring…
-
The validity of health
Sometimes it all makes sense. Sudden news this morning: Niels Albert is retiring, at the age of 28. Why would you care? Albert has been, for the past 3 or 4 years, the second best cyclocross racer on earth. Cross is rather like speed skating, in that it’s popularity (and by extension $$) in one…
-
One Bear
Spring. Rain. A damn big pile of sticks. Grizz. After getting shut out of bears last month, I figured it was worth another try. I saw one bear, the big chocolate griz that left the above tracks, but nothing of black bears besides tracks. Committing to shooting a bear back in the Bob means committing…
-
The Future of Yellowstone
This originally ran as an Op-Ed in the Missoulian. I see the current debate about paddling in YNP as having to do with a lot more than just boating. It’s about Yellowstone’s repeated indifference to non-traditional forms of human-powered recreation, and more broadly about the future of national parks generally. A lifetime ago Yellowstone National Park…
Bedrock & Paradox 
You must be logged in to post a comment.