Thursday, October 29, 2009

Marten Fest 09



Pine marten are not the kind of animal you'll likely see crossing the road, or even while hiking. They are wary, agile, and fierce members of the weasel family that live throughout the northern woods. Scott and Jill decided to make some fun out of his contract job with the DNR; a reintroduction program for pine marten in Northwest Wisconsin. Scott baited the marten in a series of traps where they were captured unharmed. He held them in his garage for a couple days, feeding them meat, until they were carted off to Wisconsin by the biologist.

The scenario, if you aren't from Minnesota, does seem a bit odd. Even more so when a bunch of people make a weekend out of it. But it did afford us the opportunity to get up close to a rarely seen animal.

They may seem cute, but like almost all wildlife, they can be frightnengly vicious. They were fast as mongoose, causing us to jump back when they lunged at our fingers through. There growl is like a miniature, high pitched roar. And the way they could twist and turn their bodies in the cages seemed almost serpentine.


It was a Minnesota moment to say the least. Scott and friends shot enough grouse for all of us to have a feast. The birds were fresh, the wild rice was hand harvested, and I made some pumpkin pie from WI pumpkins. You'd be hard pressed to have a more local meal.





Fall 09 in Duluth




Just a few of the images from this fall. Somehow there managed to be a couple of nice weekends amidst an October that rivals anything the Pacific Northwest can dish out. And we took advantage of them. A lot of free time this fall has been spent cooking.






Sunday, October 25, 2009

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Teton National Park

Summer seems far away looking at these pics. But it was only a month and a half ago that we were sweating our way up a 4000 foot incline to stand at the feet of Grand Teton. The Tetons are iconic for a reason. While I hiked in the Sawtooth's all summer and heard comparisons between the two ranges, my first view of these mountains sealed it. I can be long winded but there's no need. The cornerstone to a fun trip home.












Thursday, September 17, 2009

Summer 2009

Here's a great Josh Ritter song along with a bunch of pictures from throughout the summer. I think Ritter is from Idaho, McCall maybe.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Overnighting in ID

There are beautiful places all over the country, but not many quite like this, and only forty minutes from town, accessed by a road that cuts under dramatic ten thousand foot peaks. Our Portland friends got a taste of the little known wilderness of Idaho's Smoky Mountains their first night in town. We made good on the fair weather. If we had waited till Sat. we would have been packing up in a cool drizzle. And we all know how that feels.

This was my second trip to the Norton Lakes and it turned out to be the perfect distance. A five mile loop with under 2000 feet of elevation gain. I did overlook the fact that at 9000 feet there would be considerable huffing and puffing for Portlanders living at sea level. Nothing PBR couldn't fix.


Gotta love beer camping! Mark carried the bag of empties the remaining miles out of the mountains, clanging around like a frightened tourist wearing bear bells. He smelled like a lush.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Fighting Alarmism

In less than a year, Barack Obama has transmogrified from the very face of hope to a villainous orator of the twentieth century brand. Or has he? If you keep up with the news, Obama has seemingly been sinking into a moral snake pit. His health care reform threatens to kill our elderly and plunge the country into a socialist quagmire. His address to America's children has parents pulling their kids from school lest they arrive off the bus with glazed eyes and a copy of the Manifesto. The same zeal that fueled the pro-Obama mania has turned against itself. It's not his policies or plans that are hurting him now but rather the same media that exalted him in the first place.

The conservative right was probably surprised those first tea party antics garnered any attention at all. When the news networks picked it up, it appeared a grassroots reaction to Obama's policies had swept the nation. In reality, the ultra conservative wing that had yet to get on Fox, suddenly found itself with an audience. Glenn Beck and Rush were on the verge of calling for revolution and even Greta couldn't keep back an odd grin. Embellishment and repetition is still the formula for success. From WMD's to health care, it gets results. "Death-panel" is now a household term. The "liberal media" is taking the bait and conservative pundits keep dishing it out. How many parents in this country, and not those leaning so far to the right they could slap hands with Mussolini, are really keeping their children home from school today? Is there really a nation full of people so sure of Obama's plan to surreptisously indoctrinate their children that they would take off a day of work for it? It's ludicrous to even think the President, in this alarmist climate, would stray from the "be cool stay in school" message.

I know people are worried about health care, especially if you mention the government in the same sentence. And while the town hall template is purely democratic, it proved a call to arms for every outspoken yahoo in the country. With the smoke still clearing, a few yelling Americans looked like a tidal wave of change was bearing down on us. A nationwide grassroots movement against big spending turned out to be a few angry secessionists. And while Cheney is still out there lobbying for torture, Obama's speech to school children was more about quieting allegations that he was Saruman the Black. It's shameful the media has been sucked into the ring of non-news. By giving time to such nonsense we've pulled further and further from the source of the dialogue - our system is broken. Obama replied to months worth of garbage in his speech to the AFL-CIO last night, asking of all those spinning lies about health care - "what are you gonna do? What's your plan?"

Friday, August 14, 2009

Passing Through the Pioneers

There are creeks there too small for our recognition, vernal flows, some buttoned with squat willows, others stringing green cuts through grassy valleys. Then, surprisingly, after an hour kicking up dust on sinuous roads of rock and gravel, you look at the map to find some trickle given a name, maybe Porcupine, Muldoon or Baugh, perennial streams that defy the summer heat, harbor flickering brook trout, or a flat of ragtag cottonwoods like brooding jungle in the scrubby sage defined hills. These are the feet of the Pioneer Mountains, a range most likely unheard of outside of Idaho. It's a spare landscape marked by sagebrush steppe, rising at times to smooth ridges or the opposite; outcropped slopes and cone shaped hills sprouting craggy heads of rock. Summer brings sheep and Peruvian herders, huddling in green and white covered wagons. Wolves are close. Winter brings a dry blast of cold sun. Wind.
I've lived on its edge this summer, but explored mostly its margins, turned around by rough roads, waterless draws that led on to higher, sparser peaks with only the company of frost on summer nights. One occasion which we pushed further, brought us searching for pronghorn antelope, looking through binoculars for collars , listening to the varying bleeps individual signals transmitted through a radio. Justin was our liaison into this world, working in tandem with the Wildlife Conservation Society to study the range and habit of pronghorn migration.

At the northern reach of our outing, adjacent the classic T shaped entrance to a ranch, we searched the high hills leading to the bold, naked slopes of the high pioneers. A few cattle scuttled at a safe distance from our vehicle when we noticed the rumble of a distant truck pushing over the cattle strewn fields in a shout of dust. When the small, beat Datsun came to a halt, a woman in a weathered denim button down and baseball hat stepped out like a cop. "Do I know you?" her eyes hidden behind shades. The air pricked tense and laughter that earlier had rang between the five of us sharing the truck seemed to retreat to Hailey. Justin introduced himself with an air of confidence while I reached that real divide between us in our hiking boots, working for a land trust and the sense of belonging bestowed on those who choose the sun and wind. Her name was Jenny.We told her we were looking for antelope and she just looked at us stupefied. "Really? Antelope? Is that the new thing?" she asked, chuckling as if we were city folk taking pictures of cows. Justin put his foot atop her front tire and leaned on his leg calm and devoted, explaining the radio collars and their purpose. "I couldn't care less about antelope," she said.

"Well then let's talk about something else," he tried with a determined, methodical approach to the conversation. And the confrontational tones did eventually smooth out like slack water. A friendly conversation found a renewed congeniality. Yet talk with Jenny was like navigating a boulder field. With her views on antelope secured, talk turned to wolves, we veered only to find Sun Valley's pomp lurking ahead. We all stared north to the mountains while we spoke as if conversation itself was held up by the muscular peaks. Eventually the talk, becoming dominated by Jenny, who found what must have seemed like a crowd at her doorstep, evaporated. We were to go about our business.

As our Dodge bumped and switchbacked up the stark hills I realized us outsiders were going home and the harrowing political environment surrounding reform in the ranching west now loomed like the next rugged hill. Any entrance to the relatively sparsely populated range-land feels like an intrusion. Everything seems far away. The notion of a bill in congress that would affect a far flung locale like the Pioneer foothills is a joke. It's no wonder western congressmen break out the cowboy boots and wrangler jeans when they come back to their constituents.
As demonstrated by rancher's overwhelming political clout despite their low numbers, we tend to give in to their defenses, seeing something of that pioneer we dreamed about before the reality of a desk job. Perhaps we feel the need to honor their lifestyle for the difficulties it reveals. There may always be that doctrine in America that values hard work on the land over any and all else, despite the cost to the land itself, which conveniently was never given a voice.
We saw a lot of antelope that day, including a younger female who struggled beneath a livestock fence. At one stop we startled some sage grouse, a species in decline all over the west. I can say I'd like grazing on public lands to end. But I say that snug in front of my computer, not swishing through the cheat grass while the sun steals off westward with its heat. I don't live in that precarious holdover called the range. I don't have an investment that requires a lot of land, whether or not it's mine or all of ours.