Category: N.O.S.
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A year ago
It’s what you do right now: someone comes to visit, so you ride the closed road and hike to Avalanche Lake. McDonald Creek is going full bore, a kayakers impossible dream due to the Harlequin Duck closure April-September. Some horsing around was done. Compared to a year ago, conditions are impressively different. The trail up…
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Flooding
M’s sister is here visiting. She got sun for the first few days, but rain and cloud today. I’ve been swamped myself at work, which is a good excuse because I cannot begin to keep up. The last weeks very warm spell has meltoff at full bore. The main Flathead a few miles from our…
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Why i might be full of shit
or: Credibility and experience in blogging The Black Hole of White Canyon, January 1, 2007. Blogging has irrevocably changed the face of writing about outdoor adventure, in almost all respects for the better. The chief problem today, perhaps different from days previous in scale only, is how to allot proper credence amongst the sea of…
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Roller derby as postpostmodern feminism
Tara Ladyup jamming for Flathead Valley. Premodern (“proto”) feminism: Lucretia Mott. Modern feminism: Betty Friedan. Postmodern feminism: Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler. Postpostmodern feminism: Roller derby. [Go read the Katy Perry post if you want exposition.]
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Many manys
Sherburne reservoir: how is the second-most beautiful valley in Glacier home to an abomination driven by farming things a hundred miles downstream which shouldn’t be seen west of the 100th meridian? Our first wolverine site was up on Boulder Ridge, south of the Swiftcurrent Valley. It was hot in the sun. And cold in the…
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A brief rant concerning proprietary buckles
It used to be that if you broke the male end of a fastex buckle, a not entirely uncommon occurrence, the only metric you needed to worry about when finding a replacement was size. All buckles, be they 1″ or 3/4″, looked like the leftmost pictured below. One buckle, or part of a buckle, reliably…
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How miles grow
This time last week I was embroiled in internet discussions, trying without success to convince people to think outside the visitation box of American summer in the national parks, entreating them to embrace winter. Because cold and snow aren’t so bad. And we should go into the wilderness not just on terms friendliest to us.…
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Glacier, circa 1933
Last night, in a patrol cabin in the Glacier backcountry, I was rustling through the media drawer, mostly decade-old magazines, hanta virus info, the log book, and decks of cards, when I found something magic. A very old map of Glacier, still just barely in one piece. We were enthralled at all the changes which…
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Tracking Gulo gulo
I first met Sally in July of 2010, during this trip. I had crossed over the snow in the Fifty Mountain meadow and was amped to inflate my newish packraft on the Waterton River. After the patrol cabin the trail takes a brief uphill detour through thick cow parsnip, and I was motoring mindlessly before…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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