Category: Cultural critique
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The democratic wild
If you live near one, come August it’s impossible to not think that the American National Park system is fatally flawed. Glacier National Park, our backyard, gets around 2.5 million visitors a year. I’ve not seen a month-to-month parsing, but my guess would by that well over 80% of those folks come in the 2.5…
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A Montana Wolf hunt
Randy Newberg has either the second or third best hunting show on television; Meat Eater is consistently better, and at it’s best (which isn’t all that often) Solo Hunter is too. It is worth mentioning that the competition is not very fierce, most hunting television is trite, formulaic, and fulfills negative stereotypes in an appalling…
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Grand Canyon Packrafting today
Back in 2007 Roman Dial started a discussion which led to packrafting being explicitly legal in Grand Canyon National Park for the first time. He and his group, and many groups to follow, were able to do a proper packrafting trip (hiking in and out, running significant sections of river) by obtaining a conventional noncommercial…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Hunting for Turkeys
It’s hard to get excited about turkey hunting. They’re a non-native critter, and so far as I could tell last month, when they were gobbling like mad, spring turkeys like to hang out in peoples yards. While there were surely some turkeys hanging out in some far off meadow in the woods, I didn’t prioritize…
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Buying the rapture
Last night I finished up an article about the current state of bikepacking, which gave me cause to do a little research into the current state of mainstream mountain bikes, a subject I typically all but ignore. Naively, I had not realized that the considerable technological innovations of the last 4 years had gone along…
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How Chris Sharma saved American Climbing
I started rock climbing in 1993. Climbing in America was different then. Commercial crash pads didn’t exist. No one sold “pre-made” quickdraws. The ATC had just come out. And in the world of pure rock climbing, Americans sucked. Not so much from being worse (read: less hard) climbers as a group than Europeans, but by…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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