Dear Friends and Partners I took slow and deliberate steps up through the powdery deep snow, while trying not to crack the brush. I was exhausted. It was all I could do to maintain silence in the thick rosebriars, bright in the moonlight. I checked my watch by that same light: 2:24 AM. It was my …
The Soul of Soil
Dear Friends and Partners This in my minds eye: Bison. Thousands of them. They form a sort of brownish-black sea around me. The wave, or current of them parts around me slowly as they graze—a river in slow motion-- giving me an apprehensive look with their one-sided brown eye. Like a whale, their …
Wanderlust in the Woods
"Yaa HOE Ya HOE!" The last "Hoe" really rang and echoed through the wide open old-growth and open understoried forests of the Northern Appalachians. It carried and wound its way through rhododendron-filled bottoms and over mountain laurel cloaked hillsides, both intoxicatingly fragrant with a riot …
Close Encounters of the Salmon River Kind
The bizarre and unexpected sometimes show up in our headlights as we track through the Idaho wilderness night on twisty 2 lane highways. Linnaea, alone in her Outback, was carefully traversing the loneliness of highway 21 at 1 AM on a midwinter night a few years back. Idaho 21 is the only road …
Continue Reading about Close Encounters of the Salmon River Kind
From Hot Dish to Hat Creek
Dear Friends and Partners It was 1985, and it was raining. Hard. And spitting snow. Kneeling in the muck on a slope so steep that as I knelt, my feet began to lose purchase on the ground and I quickly reached into my near-frozen bag of trees for a Douglas-fir seedling. I put aside my hoedad, the …
The Lost Great Pyrenees
It was a cold mid-December day when Allie and her best friend and border collie, Clyde, made a run for it. They occasionally do, just exploring the river bottoms adjacent to the big pastures on the Alderspring prairie where our beeves run herd for the winter. They ran off like Mutt and Jeff, big, …