Category: The Adventures of Bear and Cloud
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Little Bear and Papa Bear have an adventure
Wherein adventure means that things did not go as intended. Until this past weekend LB had gone his entire life without spending a night apart from his mama. The fervent complication that is making sure an infant takes care of itself took me enough by surprise that all sorts of ambitions came and went while…
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New happiness
Or; what the hell I’ve been doing for the past month. When I look at a graph of the number of posts I’ve made here each month for the past 10.5 years a number of significant trends become obvious. First, that the average number of posts went down back in 2010 when I switched from…
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The 10 mpd club
One of the most significant moments in parenting, for us 21st century types for whom proliferation of the species is both an abstraction and a choice, is mourning the trappings of your pre-kid life as they are filed and filtered away, never to be seen again. With an infant around your life will become totally…
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Birthdays
Two years ago Little Bear was born on M’s birthday. Today we’re celebrating that fulfilling and challenging time, and looking forward to a few quiet days in a little corner of civilization and then the backcountry. See everyone on the other side.
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The miracle of 2017
Summer has emphatically arrived in Montana, with a solid week of highs in the 90s and little wind or thunderstorms to break things up, but enough lightning strikes in the broader neighborhood to get one worrying that August might justify its seed with a burly crop of fires. It was in brief an ideal time…
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Floating with the bear; what we’ve learned
Our Double Duck has been one of the essential kid purchases. That one boat can fit all of us, gear for 4+ days, and be under six pounds is remarkable (it’s lighter and packs smaller than the modern Yukon Yak). That said, it has acute limitations which heavier, bigger volume multi-person boats would not; namely…
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The Crown-Welcome Loop
When it comes to consistently spectacular routes, with no filler miles whatsoever, this is the best route I’ve done in the Bob. Bar none. The limestone cliffs and reefs are truly special, from the way Welcome Pass is tucked into a surprising break to the walls behind the Green Fork meadows devolving into stacked pinnacles…
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The ugliness of family packrafting
One of the relatively few regrets I harbor when it comes to trips not done concerns the summer of 2014 and the Smith River. 2014 wasn’t the biggest snow year Montana has seen, not by a long shot, but the spring was cool and exceptionally wet and the water table kept getting pumped full all…
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Echo Park
The water would have been right up there. It’s a thought that hovers 500 feet overhead and permeates what would otherwise be an overly lucent place, a pinch of silt dissolved in a pint of champagne. Echo Park was named by Major Powell, and might have been the first occasion for the 1869 river trip…
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Those Needles
The Colorado Plateau has endless hidden corners, more than can be understood in one human life, but from the distance of inexperience most of them seem like variations on a theme. And rock and sand and emaciated vegetation can only form so many combinations. This is as false as it is true, and the variations…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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