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The best trail
Last month I bought a new bike, my first brand new one in almost a decade. That one, nine years ago, was the first generation Salsa Mukluk, the first broadly available fat bike not called Pugsley. It has, because it still works great, a lot of things my new bike does not: straight steerer, one…
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Hiking Kant into the 21st century
Even professionals dread Kant. His style, especially in translation, is notoriously turgid, but the primary difficult with him is the same as with any writer pushing the edge of what language can do. Another way to put that would be, pushing the limits of what humans can understand about the world and themselves. Indeed, Kants…
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Good shoes
There is an emerging consensus is that 23% of the land on earth (excluding Antarctica) remains “unmodified by the direct effect of human activities.” In a similar vein, the mass of humans on earth is, currently, “an order of magnitude higher than the mass of all wild mammals combined. ” Thus it seems in retrospect…
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Small bikes
Yesterday proved to be a momentous one; Little Bear pedaled his 20″ wheeled Commencal Ramones unassisted, for the first time. Over 20 minutes he went from tentatively agreeing to try it, in the extended flat grass near the bike park, to pedaling circles with me assisting, to gleefully upshifting for sprints along the paved path,…
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The new dread
As with, I imagine, most of us, a big part of my day has to do with the numbers. How many new cases in our county, the counties of our friends, our state, and eventually, our world? Anxiety promotes the parochial, and throughout the last six months a major source of comfort has been how…
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Too many elk
Out on the prairie the clear night sunsets linger half an hour past those in the mountains, with light still sneaking back over the curve of the earth throwing shadows longer than human comprehension. Elk and trees and I blended in, each another thing taller than the grass and hilltops, whose rolled edges were themselves…
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Doors
So we have this house. We live in it, coming and going and back and forth every day, but don’t have as many pictures as we should. The fear I saw in it, three and a half years ago, remains almost solely in my memory. The sagging roof line along the sun porch remains, but…
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FAQ: so you want to move out west..
Another common question is from folks, like me, who grew up east of the Mississippi River, and would like to move closer to proper mountains and Big wilderness. While the answer, and the process to get one, depends greatly on personal preference and position in life, the question should be how, rather than if. M…
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Goats
In the modern hunting game opportunity is a watchword. It means having the opportunity to hunt a given species in a given place, something increasingly relevant as interest in western hunting increased as some game populations decrease. It also means having the chance, in a given hunt, to put a stalk on, actively pursue, and…
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Waters
A bit ago we bought a canoe, having searched casually all summer, and finally found the right one. It’s a plastic Coleman, very old, and quite cheap. Cheap enough that we didn’t feel bad surfing rocks down the Lewis River this past weekend, and old enough that the sun faded tan on the surface was…
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Bedrock & Paradox 
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