Category: The Adventures of Bear and Cloud
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Granite
I couldn’t hear him breathing; not over the wind, which pushed eerie harmonics around the chimney pipe, and shoved the towers timber frame into groaning against the bolts that held it to the cables that held it to the granite ground. Nor could I hear him breathing over the flood roaring between my head and…
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Kids and Cabins
The other weekend we went to a cabin. It was off in the foothills down a snowy road, away from our (currently snowless) banana belt valley, along a creek that was high enough to have several feet of snow, and low enough to be forested and hidden from alpine harshness. The cabin was small, one…
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Forward the consumer
I have profoundly mixed memories of my first Outdoor Retailer. The barely 1 year old Little Bear had an ear infection come on while we were hiking in Glacier just before, was cranky on the drive down to SLC through the night, and the next night required a hasty visit to first urgent care and…
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Hunting the Kaibab
Last week, I fulfilled a longstanding ambition, and went Kaibab squirrel hunting north of the Grand Canyon. Kaibab squirrels are a subspecies of the Abert’s, a common, ear-tufted rodent seen through the more arid parts of western North America. The Kaibab developed its distinctive white tail and dark body due to geographic isolation, and are…
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Giving; part 2
When you’re 4, or 19 months, does it make a difference if the leaf pile or puddle is 800 miles away? Or an hour down the road? Perhaps our national crisis has as much to do with the realization that growth and novelty don’t guarantee meaning as it does with the profound and inevitable generational…
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Thanks; part 1
As married adults M and I were content, for over a decade, to ride through the holidays and end of the year without much intentionality. This year that changes, to fit the raised stakes two kids and their indoctrination bring. So we’re currently on the road, working on new habits and traditions. Doing old things,…
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The veneration of lameness
This spring I found myself delivering the quintessential adventure parent explanation, caveat, or excuse: that it is possible to have kids without becoming lame. That I was at the time struggling to both carry a conversation and hike decently fast up a short hill would seem to suggest lameness, at least insofar as my parental…
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New nature
M and I were both afflicted, as midwesterners, by birth, with a thirst for what Chiura Obata called Great Nature. It took over a decade of our adult lives and residences in a fists-worth of name brand destination towns for that thirst for novelty and spectacle to settle, and for us to put more time…
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Blue bike tales
Last week, at a yard sale, we saw this pretty blue Trek Antelope 850, and for $40 and in excellent condition I just couldn’t not take it home. A little digging reveals this Trek is from 1990, close to the vintage of the Bridgestone MB-5 which was my first real bike. Functionally identical performance between…
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Low water Dearborn
I was reminded recently that packrafts frame boating differently than just about any craft. Little Bear has recently kindled an interest in fishing, as well as a tolerance for all day endeavors, so I seized the last vestiges of spring which rush out of the southeastern Bob and charge through the northern remnants of the…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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