The most often asked for bedtime tale from my children is a “Squirrel Story.” I’ve written a book about animal encounters in the wild, but this is a whole different matter. As the kids scoot beneath their covers, I tell them about a horde of blood-thirsty, mad-eyed squirrels who’ve built an enormous warren beneath our […]
Sarah dipped her fingers in mineral paint and lifted them to her face. Standing on the bold, white surface of the Harding Icefield in south-central Alaska, she painted brown-red stride-marks across wind-dried skin. We were several days into a trek by skis, ropes, sleds and backpacks, and were as far out as we’d get. She […]
A bear broke into my wife’s old teardrop trailer in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. It must have been yearling by the bite marks in bean cans, and the smallness of its hips where it busted out the door-window and dragged itself inside. The bear didn’t find much, leaving […]
Where it bursts through the gates of the southern Andes in the rugged interior of the Aysén region of southern Chile, the Rio Baker is a kicking horse. The most voluminous river in the country, it has been on the chopping block for several years, part of a 9-billion-dollar dam construction project that until last […]
I once found a beautiful pot, an ancient red seed jar tucked beneath a boulder in the desert. By ancient, I mean pre-Columbian, probably 800 years old. It was hidden along the rubble-choked slope of a canyon in Southeast Utah. The way it was placed, seated in shade and red blow-sand next to a once […]
Unusual dust storms have been rolling out of the Southwest and flying across where I live in Colorado, a state that doesn’t appreciate brown or red in its snow. These storms are vectors of change, fingers of desertification creeping up into better-watered country. I’ve lived near the upper ends of the Gunnison River in […]
Traveling in the north country, the open-skied Arctic of North America, you can’t help thinking of the first people and their journey across the Bering Land Bridge to this side of the world. They would have arrived in what is now Alaska and the adjoining Yukon Territory. The landscape has not changed much in the […]
The first tips of yellow leaves are showing among aspens and cottonwoods in western Colorado. Summer, though still plenty warm, is beginning to turn. You think about what inevitably comes, leaves dropping, opening the stage for snow and ice. You imagine what it will be like to hear the crunch of it every time you […]