I have survived my brief but harrowing journey through the deep south. Mom and I entered Texas amidst a massive thunder, lightening and wind storm. The wind whipped the six flags of Texas threadbare and when we arrived at the little state park that we were planning to camp the nearby town was eerily dark and quiet. We finally surmised that the power was out. After a brief attempt to summon the courage to camp in the rain and the strong winds, we opted to try for a hotel a little farther down the road with some warmth and electricity.

We ended up in Austin the next day and spent a good part of the afternoon exploring the capitol building. It is the tallest capital building in the US, even taller then the nation's capital building. We spent the better part of the evening looking for happy hour deals on drinks, nachos (which is ironic because of the proximity to Mexico and all the Mexican restaurants in the area) and good music. We eventually found all three. We found great beer at a place called the Gingerman. It had over 80 beers on tap and twice that many in bottles. It had a great little outdoor patio and we made lovey dovy eyes at all the dogs that folks had with them. I had a great German hefe from Live Oak Brewery out of Austin and mom had pecan porter from 512 Brewing Company, also out of Austin. We tried to get nachos at Maria Maria, Carlos Santana's restaurant, but they were dinky little things with a total of 12 chips and so we ended up searching a bit more and finding a place with a giant pile of nachos. Then we proceeded to search out live music, which there was a ton of. All the bars have glass windows to the sidewalk and leave there doors open. They also have recruiters standing outside the door, trying to entice you in. We settled on JT Coldfire Hot Rockin' Blues at Friends Bar. They were playing rockin' blues and the lead guitarist even played with his teeth on some guitar solos. Then we moved to another bar where a group of six guys called Statsborough Review were playing some great alt-country rock. The Austin scene on a Monday night was quite manageable but a little bit reminiscent of Bourbon street, a little.

We pushed on to San Antonio the next day. We had all the good intentions of being good little tourists and visiting the Alamo, which is near and dear to every Texan's heart, as well as the famous River Walk. However, we only got as far as the ATT Center where the very first PRCA professional rodeo of the year was going on. We got off the bus for a brief look around but ended up buying tickets to see that night's rodeo along with a performance by the famous country rock star Taylor Swift (I hadn't heard of her until the moment we bought the tickets...but then again, I don't really listen to country). We wandered around the fair-like exhibits and things for sale and then piled into the giant stadium where the San Antonio Spurs normally play basketball. The rodeo was a skeptical of loud music, clowns, men in tight jeans and big belt buckles, girls in sequined shirts, bucking broncos, angry bulls, barrel racing, calf tying and big hats. It was great...well the calf roping and wrestling was actually quite disconcerting. Then the Taylor Swift concert began and it was a flurry of golden sequins on her dress and silver sequins on her guitar and music videos above her head and overall it was a really good performance. It also turns out that I have heard one of her songs! She seems to be really popular with the 8-18 year old crowd as she tends to sing about boys and crushes etc. She was all about hope and the ability to change and/or reach your goals.

We went to the Gulf Coast next and camped on the beach. We were treated to spectacular sunrises and sunsets and I even went for a refreshing coastal run.

We drove to Louisiana. We drove all day. Texas is a big state! When we got to the State Park in Louisiana that we were going to camp at, our attention was immediately grabbed by the "alligator active in this area" sign. I had been a bit concerned about the reptiles since we started this trip and it has become a bit of a running joke that the alligators are out to get us, but now...here it was, a reality. Well...that's not quite true. We grilled the lady at the desk about how dangerous it actually was and she assured us that an alligator would not get us in our tent and that there were not alligators in the ponds surrounding the camping area. We were in the thick of a swamp though. The air was crowded with mosquitoes and we were surrounded by cypress trees and boggy marshy type ecology. There were a bunch of tent campers though and that helped. We survived the night and, as it turns out, the real thing to worry about was the rain that poured down at 4 in the morning. We had left the rain fly off to look at the stars.

We passed up visiting New Orleans in the heat of Mardi Gras celebrations and rushed through Mississippi, pausing only long enough to get a picture and 16 ounces of Cajun boiled peanuts from a gas station. I should note that the welcome center was handing out free cokes, here in the deep south, all soda is called a coke.

We made it to Mobile, Alabama where we learned that the city is the "mother of Mardi Gras" so we didn't miss out on the celebrations after all. We quickly made our way downtown and to the local brewery. It is quaintly named Hurricane Brewing Company and has such beers as Tropical Wheat Warning and Floating Car Blonde Ale, Flying Debris Mardi Gras Ale, Projected Path Amber, Storm Surge Stout etc. I loved the place and especially their dunkleweizen! We joined the revelers on the street for a parade at around 6:30. The sky had opened up and unleashed a torrent of rain but the floats and the bands rolled on for nearly an hour. The floats are filled with folks hurling Mardi Gras paraphernalia at the crowds lining the streets. They hurl beads, moon-pies, stuffed animals, hoola hoops, candy, hurricane cups, chips, peanuts and all sorts of other trinkets and sparkelies. I was pelted several times by a flying wad of beads. There were puddles everywhere and many an unfortunate stuffed animal met its doom in a muddy wake of rainwater. Mom and I had a great time and we ran from street to street so we could keep up with the bands. Then, soaking and laden with beads and moon-pies, we retired to the brewery where a wonderful band was playing the night away.

We drove all the next day to get to Jacksonville FL. The entire drive, all 400 miles of it was in a corridor of slash pine trees and that is all that I know of Florida. It is a corridor of slash pines. We spent two nights with a friend on the outskirts of town and reconnoitered a bit. We fly to Mexico City in two days for about 12 days with Jo Tuxbury, a friend of my mom's. It should be an interesting and challenging adventure.

Saguaro Cactus in Phoenix South Mountain Park

Little Bear Canyon in Gila Wilderness of New Mexico

Saguaro National Park in Tucson

Grand Canyon Trail

Grand Canyon sunset

My friends!

I have embarked on yet another adventure, an extended roadtrip from Missoula to Miami.

Currently, I am in New Mexico, heading to Austin, Texas today. Highlights have included hiking to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and spelunking Karshner Caves in New Mexico as well as 4 different breweries, one of which we caught the Bruce Springsteen half-time show of the Superbowl. We have also had fun exploring the Senoran Desert Museum in Tucson and the 10 miles of trail in the South Mountain Park in Phoenix as well as cave dwellings and petroglyphs in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. I will be in Mexico especially Mexico City February 17-28 with my mom and Whitney's mom.

Bumblebees
Kimiko Hahn

The foraging bee that doesn’t make it
back to the hive

and companion warmth
fastens to a leaf.

Bumbling-bees?

Or does the nectar so distract

it forgets the cells
called home?

The lapse is a cause for concern
the entomologist reports—

because its tiny body slows to the stillness of dew.
Is that quiescence

or acquiescence?

Or simply stupidity
one always forgets a day later?

"My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving. That's simple, right?"-George Hayduke from "The Monkey Wrench Gang" by Edward Abbey, page 228.

I have not completely had my fill of the discussion of the desert of Utah and Nevada. I just finished reading the Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel by Edward Abbey. Basically, the novel describes four like-minded misfits who are dedicated to the destruction of things that pollute and destroy the environment of the southwest. The group haphazardly burns billboards, sabotages bulldozers and coal trains while all the while plotting to destroy the biggest transgressor of all, the Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado River. Lovers of wild lands, this group may be, but they they bare little resemblance to the bleeding-heart environmentalists of today. The group has little scruples about littering, driving big trucks and eating a lot of red meat and has little regard for the Sierra Club. However, the book has been credited as the inspiration for several environmental organizations that advocate minor vandalism as a means of "saving the environment" from the despoiling of land, befouling of the air and destroying nature and its sacred purity. I have read from several sources that Abbey was not actually trying to start a movement with his book nor was he trying to reform the land management agenda. Nonetheless, this book stirs up a deep wonder of the beauty and complexity of the desert as well as a new found disgust for the run-of-the-mill development that so many of us have become complacent about. Abbey has a great sense of humor as well and the book is compassionate as well as thrilling and funny. I love the character of Hayduke, an ex-Green Beret, with a horrible temper and an even worse mouth. I have read that the character is modeled off of Abbey's close friend Doug Peacock. I recently finished reading the Last Grizzly by Rick Bass, where Peacock is the main instigator of a search for the last grizzlies in the Colorado San Juans.



One my favorite parts of the Monkey Wrench Gang is in the first chapters where two of the main characters, Hayduke and Seldom Seen Smith, a jack Mormon with 3 wives, encounter each other for the first time. Smith is camped on the Colorado river with one of his girls looking at the bridge and Glen Canyon dam:

Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado, 180 miles of reservoir walled in by bare rock. The blue death, Smith called it... Smith remembered something different. He remembered the golden river flowing to the sea. He remembered canyons called Hidden Passage and Salvation at Last Chance and Forbidden and Twilight and many many more, some that never had a name. He remembered the strange great amphitheaters called Music Temple and Cathedral in the Desert. All these things now lay beneath the dead water of the reservoir, slowly disappearing under layers of descending silt How could he forget? He had seen too much...Seven hundred feet below streamed what was left of the original river, the greenish waters that emerged, through intake, penstock, turbine and tunnel, from the powerhouse at the base of the dam. Thickets of power cables, each strand as big around as a man's arm, climbed the canyon walls on steel towers, merged in a maze of transformer stations, then splayed out toward the south and west-toward Albuquerque, Babylon, Phoenix, Gomorrah, Los Angeles, Sodom, Los Vegas, Nineveh, Tucson, the cities of the plain. Upriver from the bridge stood the dam, a glissade of featureless concrete sweeping seven hundred feet down in a concave facade from the dam's rim to the green-grass lawn on the roof of the power plant below. They stared at it. The dam demanded attention. It was a magnificent mass of cement. Vital statistics: 792,000 tons of concrete aggregate; cost 750 million and the lives of 16 workmen. Four years in the making, prime contractor Morrison-Knudsen, Inc., sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers.
"it's too big," she said.
"That's right, honey," he said. "and that's why."
"you can't."
"There's a way."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. But there's got to be a way."
...
"Like how?" she said.
"Who you working for?" he said.
"You."
"Okay, think of something."
"We could pray."
"Pray?" said Smith. "Now there's onething I ain't tried. Let's pray for a little pre-cision earthquake right here." And Smith went down on his knees...bowed his head, closed his eyes, clapped his hands together palm to palm, prayerwise, and prayed..."Dear old God," he prayed, "you know and I know what it was like here, before them bastards from Washington moved in and ruined it all. You remember the river, how fat and golden it was in June, when the big runoff came down from the Rockies? Remember the deer on the sandbars ad the blue herons in the willows and the catfish so big and tasty and how they'd bite on spoiled salami? Remember that crick that come down through Bridge Canyon and Forbidden Canyon, how green and cool and clear it was? God, it's enough to make a man sick. Say you recall old Woody Edgell up at Hite and the old ferry he used to run across the river? That crazy contraption of his hangin' on cables; remember that damn thing? Remember the cataracts in Forty-mile Canyon? Well, they flooded out about half of them too. And part of the Escalante's gone now-Davis Gulch, Willow Canyon, Gregory Natural Bridge, Ten-Mile. Listen, are you listen' to me? There's somethin' you can do for me, God. How about a little old pre-cision-type earthquake right under this dam? Okay? Anytime. Right now for instance would suit me fine."Smith concluded his prayer. "Okay God, I see you don't want to do it just now. Well, all right, suit yourself, you're the boss, but we ain't got a hell of a lot of time. Make it pretty soon, goddammit. A-men."
...
"Suppose your prayer is answered," the girl was saying in the silence. "Suppose you have your earthquake at the dam. What happens to all the people here [below the dam]?"
"That there dam," Smith replied, "is 12 miles upriver through the crookedest twelve miles of canyon you ever seen. It'd take the water an hour to get here."
"They'd still drown."
"I'd warn 'em by telephone."
"Suppose God answers your prayer in the middle of the night. Suppose everybody at the dam is killed and there isn't anybody left alive up there to give warning. Then what?"
"I ain't responsible for an act of God, honey."
"It's your prayer."
Smith grinned. "It's His earthquake." And he held up a harkening finger. "What's that?"
"I don't hear anything but the river," she said.
"No listen..."
Far off, echoing from the cliffs, rising then descending supernatural wail, full of mourning-or was it exultation?
"A coyote?" She offered.
"No..."
"Wolf?"
"Yeah...."
"I never heard wolves around here before."
He smiled. "That's right," he said. "That's absolutely right. There ain't supposed to be no wolves in these parts anymore. They ain't supposed to be here."
"Are you sure it's a wolf?"
"Yup." He paused, listening again. Only the river sounded now, down below. "But it's kind of an unusual wolf."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean it's one of them two-legged type wolves."
She stared at him. "You mean human?"
"More or less," Smith said.
...
Smith fiddled with his field glasses, looking for something he thought he had seen moving on a distant promontory above the gorge. He found his target. Adjusting the focus, he made out, a mile away through the haze of twilight, the shape of a blue jeep half concealed beneath a pedestal rock. He saw the flicker of a small campfire. A thing moved at the edge of the field. He turned the glasses slightly and saw the figure of a man, short and hairy and broad and naked. The naked man held a can of beer in one hand; with the other hand he held field glasses to his eyes , just like Smith. He was looking directly at Smith.

The two men studied each other for a while through 7X35 binocular lenses, which do not blink. Smith raised his hand in a cautious wave. The other mad raised his can of beer as an answering salute.

Abbey, Edward. "The Monkey Wrench Gang." 1975. J.B. Lippincott Company. Philadelphia. p. 31-37.

There are many other memorable moments from this book. I definately recommend that it be read!

Sweet Potato Pizza
Diabolical Dunkleweizen
(brewed Nov 11, bottled Dec. 10)

Baylee the Beagle's homemade dog treats

This is the route that Katie and I followed on our roadtrip.

Day 1: Missoula to Boise via Hwy 12

Day 2: Boise to SLC to visit MattDay 3. SLC to Capital Reef National Park

Day 4: CRNP to Bryce Canyon National Park
Day 5: BCNP to St. George/Larry via Zion National Park and Angel's Landing

Day 6: Snow Canyon State Park
Day 7: St. George to Death Valley via Las Vegas, Hoover Dam and the Mojave Desert
Day 8: Death Valley to Mammoth Lakes/Sarah Patrick via Scotty's Castle
Day 10: Mammoth Lakes to Nowhere Nevada via Carson City and South Lake Tahoe.

Day 11: Nevada to Boise in the snow and ice
Day 13: Boise to Missoula via Hwy 20, I-15 and I-90

Anasazi pueblo near a desert spring

Hoover Dam on the Colorado River

Road trips reveal many things...about the land, the country, yourself, your traveling companion...the nature of things. On my recent adventure around the great basin, I have discovered the desert and the so-called winter. The desert, as Katie and I have so narrowly concluded, "is a nice place to visit, not to live." In fact, my constant and over-riding thought about the desert has been "how do people live here?" In Death Valley National Park, I discovered that it was possible for a multi-millionaire to set up a mansion household in the desert because of his money. But first of all, how did the native people live here? With no roads and little to no food and water? Native plants probably provided ample, if not unconventional food such as prickly pear cactus and pinyon pine nuts. But water, their whole lives must have been consumed by the search for a steady water source. Yes, there are rivers, springs and even lakes in the desert and yes it rains but I can't imagine people (and I actually saw ancient settlements far from water) were able to stay near water and still find enough food to survive.

I read about how some people built dams to capture flash flood runoff. Ingenious, sure, but uncertain, almost certainly. A friend, who works 8 days at a time in the desert with a wilderness therapy group must make camp within a certain distance of a road to facilitate daily water drop offs from vehicles. In the summer temperatures are reported to reach 120 degrees F.

For a couple of years now, I have been pondering water... how it affects the ecology and geography of the land, where people settle or camp, how forests are managed or how trails are built. In a Natural Resources Policy class we discussed the importance of water in the arid west and what laws and doctrines have shaped water use today. This is a summary of what I learned, the bolded parts are, well, more pertinent:

To understand the current situation and conflicts of water in the West, one must first understand the circumstances under which water policy has evolved and the relationship between public policy and social values. In the mid 1800s and early 1900s, the United States government focused on passing policy that dealt with populating the empty Western frontier. The mission to spread democracy and freedom, expand and populate was called Manifest Destiny. Laws accomplished this end by aiding, promoting and facilitating the settlement and development of Western resources. Laws passed from this time period which are still on the books today are referred to as the “Lords of Yesterday,” “a battery of nineteenth century laws, politics and ideas that arose under wholly different social and economic considerations but that remain in effect due to inertia, powerful lobbying forces and lack of public awareness.” One such law is the 1902 Reclamation Act. This federal law funded irrigation projects for arid lands and set aside money from sales of semi-arid public lands for the construction and maintenance of irrigation projects. Much of the West could not have been settled by the original miners, ranchers and farmers without the water provided by the act.

The prior appropriations doctrine is a set of principles that evolved during the same time period to address water scarcity and embraced the Manifest Destiny ethos of use, consume and extract. The prior appropriations doctrine, itself, is not a law, but is the basis on which Western water law has formed. The fledgling doctrine began in the mines where miners freely diverted water from streams and rivers and solidified with farmers and ranchers who diverted water for crops and stock. Eventually, most Western states created laws and statutes that addressed water use rights based on the prior appropriations doctrine.

The prior appropriations doctrine’s tenets are the the fundamentals on which each Western states based their water laws. These features include the following: An individual does not own the water, the state does, and an individual only has the right to use the water. These rights are not bound to the land and can be bought, sold or inherited independently of land. Senior appropriators have the first right to the water. This is important because, in most cases, the water in a stream is either completely appropriated or over-appropriated, which means that during years of drought or low flow, junior appropriators (people who started using water from the stream later in time) might not get their full allotment, even if they are upstream. The prior appropriations doctrine calls for the beneficial use of water. Early settlers defined this as consuming and using the water in an out of stream manner. Little thought was given to the benefits of water left in the stream and if appropriators did not use all of their appropriated water, they lost their water right. The idea of “use or lose it” typifies the early utilitarian mentality on which the West was built; Unused resources are wasted resources and do not have any value in that form.

A right on paper does not necessarily translate into wet water, especially in low flow years. This is especially true of interstate water use. One way the federal government dealt with scarcity was by having the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Tennessee Valley Association engage in an era building dams, reservoirs and other water projects from the 1930s to the 1960s. Marc Reisner, the author of Cadellac Desert, points out that in the arid West “everything depends on the manipulation of water - on capturing it behind dams, storing it, rerouting it in concrete rivers over distances of hundreds of miles” (708). He also points out that some rivers have been siphoned, tunneled and manipulated to the point that they flow backwards, through mountains, in other rivers’ beds and have made lakes out of deserts or deserts out of lakes (710). The Yellowstone River is the only major Western river that has not been dammed. In defense of all these projects, which supply water to over twenty percent of all irrigated acreage in the West as well as to twenty million domestic users (712), former director of the Bureau of Reclamation, Floyd Dominy, pointed out the need for reservoir water over stream habitat when he said that humans can live without fish but they cannot live without beans and wheat.

Historically, the conflicts surrounding Western water have been between upstream appropriators versus downstream appropriators, senior versus junior and powerful versus powerless. These conflicts have begun to shift as more and more environmental concerns surface. The Colorado River is a contentious issue from both a conservation and an appropriations standpoint. It highlights the contrast between American mentality during the frontier era and the beginning of prior appropriations and evolving current goals. The river is dammed and diverted to the extent that, in some years, it does not even reach the sea. Indeed, the arid West relies on dams and reservoirs to supply water for megalithic cities with green lawns and fountains and for subsidized agriculture in areas that, were it not for the access to water, would be desert. In the early days of Los Angeles, Mulholland, the director of water resources, rerouted the Owens River for its water needs and left an arid dry river valley in its place. Other places like Mono Lake (which I visited) and the Salt Sea are suffering negative environmental effects because of rerouting and damming, as well.

Beginning with Jimmy Carter, in the 1970s, environmental concerns and legislation on both a federal and state level continued to change the face of water law. Over the years, prior appropriations has become somewhat of a shadow doctrine, being preempted by state laws and federal statutes such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Environment Protection Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act (CWA). In addition, some states have moved away from the traditional definition of beneficial use by making provisions for in stream appropriations. In Montana, the Montana Water Use Act of 1973 installed a permit process for new or changed water rights, established water judges, and also allowed the state to set aside water for existing beneficial uses and for maintaining minimal flows and minimal quality of water. It is important to note, that not all new legislation is conservation oriented and despite the efforts of or special interest groups to change the paradigm of use, consume and extract, we are still attempting to turn the desert green.

So with all this information roiling around in my head, I traipsed through the desert of Utah to the Hoover dam on the great Colorado River. Dams...another technology made possible by a lot of money and a lot of "need." The Hoover and Glen Canyon dams make it possible for Las Vegas and Los Angeles to not only exist but to be cities with green golf courses and cool fountains. Before the arid desert communities sucked up the Colorado and reduced it to a trickle that doesn't even reach the Gulf of California, they sucked up innocent lakes like Lake Mono. People taking valuable resources from other people. Sounds familiar and we have all heard it before; there will be wars fought over water just as they are being fought over oil now, just as they are/were fought over land. People have no business building golf courses and sustaining fountains in the desert. Live there...fine. As far as I can see, natives did it sustainably for years. But don't expect to drain waterways as you see fit. I have heard tell of pipes through mountains and pipes flowing from Montana lakes to quench the thirst of big arid towns trying to make wet wonderlands and I won't have it. As Edward Abbey said, "The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders."

I have also discovered on this trip that perhaps people can be characterized by a triangular spectrum of mountain, water and desert or prairie...a generalization for sure, thus the word spectrum. Many of us are not blue or yellow but somewhere in between in a nice teal or kelly green.

Broadly speaking, there are mountain people who prefer to see their horizons above them and feel inspired by the peaks above them, comforted by their shelter yet challenged by their snowy passes and distant lakes. Mountain people work hard and play hard-ski, hike, mountain bike, log and ranch. We like to feel cozy and able to quantify our surroundings while also knowing we could go for days in the expansive wilderness. I like to be surrounded in my bed and I can't sleep uncovered or on my back, symptoms of being a mountain person, I'm sure. Mountain people like to know where they are going, fixate on it and push towards it. Mountain people must be goal oriented. We know the value of the warming sun and the cooling lakes. We like variety, diversity, adrenaline rushes. We are strong, we are calm, we are stoic, we are explosive and gentle. We like the stars close and we like the animals big and furry. Mountain people expect great change.

Broadly speaking, there are ocean people too, or maybe water people. They like the purgatory between solid and liquid. Thrive on salt water and all the recreation it affords. Ocean people ebb and flow, follow the moon, follow the gravity. They know two worlds, two natures and feel moisturized by the salty sea breeze. They delight in the patterns of nature and bounty of the sea. I sometimes with to be an ocean person but can't fully understand or explain them.

Broadly speaking, there are desert or prairie people. I expect, they like the freeness that the open horizon explores. They are the slow and steady who win the race. They are fearless, love adversity and to problem solve. They like extremes and then again, they like predictable evenness. Desert people are difficult to read but open and seductive. Desert people must be tough on the outside. Desert people are a mystery and there other qualities are unknown to me.

"Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful." -Edward Abbey

Katie and I just returned from an epic road trip around the great basin. I have many thoughts and accounts to shared and document. This is the first: Along the way, which was long, over 2000 miles, I found many beautiful places. I did not expect the desert or the flat of the great basin to be beautiful or interesting or captivating. Generally, I expected an expanse of sand and perhaps snow, pricked with cactus and occasional oases. Actually, I expected to see some amazing things, given that Utah is home to some of the most visited national parks. In fact, I have briefly visited Moab and Canyon Lands. As the quote so eloquently describes, a desert is beautiful when it is allowed to be a desert. One cannot expect a desert to be breathtaking in the same way as a mountain range. In turn, one cannot expect a craggy mountain range to stun with the same force as a fjord-coastline. I have found much subtle and profound beauty in the desert and many things of interest in the great basin. The places that I passed through were, as Katie and I said so often, "nice to visit, but not to live."

However, the parts of Nevada that I visited were not even a nice place to visit, unless by moonlight;

Nevada by Moonlight

The landscape of Nevada is moonlit, quiet, cold,
salted by snow and peppered by starlight.
Our car follows the highway which cuts a straight
line through the sagebrush moors.

Years ago, I passed along I-80 and saw Nevada
in the sun...dirty grey, garish and dingy...hot and hostile,
littered with high security prisons, casino-run towns,
weapons test sites, toxic waste dumps and too much of not enough.

But tonight, in the moonlight, the light of the full
moon, under a curtain of stars, Nevada's wasteland
looks like a wonderland. The highway is lined
by haunting craggy mountain silhouettes, casting
moon shadows on valleys blanketed with silvery
sagebrush and dotted by lonely dark towns.

See Nevada by moonlight. See Nevada painted
by a pallet of shades of grey and violet, shadows
and stars, cool satin moonshine. See Nevada
as an outline, a hint or clue, a mystery
to be left unsolved under the falling snow.

Katie and I make camp in in Nevada

Old Crow Medicine Show

Busking for tickets
Bread from spent grains
Dunkleweizen

FOD steam roller print

Carving pumkins

Camel on my bikeride

Fishing on Flathead Lake with Dad and Isabella

Fall in Missoula is about to wind down. But it has been nothing but sunshine for the past month...glorious. I attempted fishing Montana style with my dad and half-sister. We got skunked but Isabella and I got in a good skinny dip and we feasted on smoked salmon that I caught in Ak.

I made my way to Seattle to visit Sarah Patrick and went on several really cool and really long bike rides. I saw a couple of camels, yes camels and figured that they must be rotting away in the wet and rainy pacific northwest climate. I spent Halloween there and had several different pumpkin ales from several different local breweries and found them all to be wonderful. My favorite was the Great Pumpkin, an imperial pumpkin ale for the Elysian. Sarah and I carved pumpkins and then later carved them up again for a pumpkin soup. It may or may not have been a hit with her family.

When I got back to Missoula, I jumped into the Festival of the Dead activities and stayed dry in the pouring rain with my new rain jacket. Some friends of mine got so cold during the pre parade performance and the parade that they ducked out before the dancing in Caras park. I stayed warm and dry in my jacket!!!! If you know me at all, you know that this is quite the anomaly. I am the "reptile," the one who is always cold. On another note, for the first time, I was a spectator instead of a dancer in the FOD. It was fun but a bit sad. Later, I won my first silent auction bid and I won about 12 postcard size skeleton steam roller prints. I was more than happy to win them as well as support next year's FOD.

I brewed a dunkleweizen with a recipe that I formulated myself!!! I put a lot of stress and worry into the concoction. There is a lot to think about such as water pH and mineral content, types of grains used and at what temperature you mash them and what hops to use and when to add them as well as what yeast to use as whether or not you should prime them...and the list goes on and on. I finally settled on

Diabolical Dunkleweizen

7 lbs dark wheat malt extract

1lb Chocolate malt

1lb Belgian Pale

1lb Munich Malt

2 oz Hallertaur hops

wheat beer yeast

Then I made bread, flour and granola from the spent grains. The bread with spent grains and spent grains flour was awful. The bread with white flour and spent grains was great as was the granola. A friend of mine brought over about 25 lbs of spent grains from his wee heavy Scottish ale and I made three more batches of granola: Cinnamon, chai and pumpkin.

Perhaps the most notable occurence in the past couple of weeks was last Saturday when the Old Crow Medicine Show came to town. Their tickets sold out months and months ago and second hand tickets have been impossible to find. So Crazy Lisa and I spent half the day with signs around our necks that said "will pay and sing for OCMS tickets." We planned to camp out in front of the Wilma two hours before the show and play Wagon Wheel with her mandolin and my guitar until someone sold us a ticket. We started the evening at the Top Hat, however, because a friend had tipped me off that the band had hung out there before their previous show in Missoula. We sat around the Top Hat with our signs and instruments and had a lot of sympathizers, some looking for tickets others who had tickets and still others who thought we were brave as can be to offer to play for a ticket. They bought us beer. No tickets though. At around 5:30 we went to a friend's bon fire to practice and while there Joy's roommate sold us two tickets. We were so happy and relieved to have tickets. However, I still wanted to follow through with our plan just for memories and perhaps to get a tickets for friends who were still looking for them. It was really cold but we set up in front of the Wilma and played Wagon Wheel over and over. The folks lining up to enter had a grand time listening to us and singing along. No one seemed to catch on to the fact that we were looking for tickets and we saw many tickets exchange hands but no one approached us, the cute girls actually showing what big of fans we really were. Finally, we were overcome with cold and excitement and we entered the show. We missed a couple of songs but had a great time nonetheless. They only played for about 2 and half hours and so we had a lot of evening to kill after the show. While filling up our water glasses at the Old Post, I spotted two members of the band having dinner. I grabbed Crazy and we thanked them for coming to Missoula. They thanked us without even looking up. Wow, way to foster good fan relations. While on the way back to our table we ran into a third member and we thanked him as well. He greeted us with sarcasm and then ducked into the bathroom. But no matter, I still love them!!

Concord grapes, swiss chard and garlic and squash and carrot soup with cilantro...all missoula grown!

K.C, my cat
enough pears to produce a gallon of juice
from left to right: pear, apple, grape

one of the PEAS farm pigs, my dad's pigs' sibling


My cats, K.C. and Tunes

I have been home for a week or so now and have collected quite a bit of fruit and veggies from my various and sundry hot spots. I spent and evening canning pickled beets and salsa. I have been experimenting with different grape jellys. I pressed 3 gallons of apple juice, one gallon of grape juice and one gallon of pear juice. I made cyser, a sweet apple honey wine, with some of the apple juice.

We brave the wind...

My sign with a plea for a ride
Kimberly, who met everyone on the ferry!