Off To The Whites

I'm off to White Mountain National Forest later today to freeze my ass off for the weekend. Before I go, a little info about one of, if not the, most beautiful places in New England:White Mountain National Forest was established in 1918 and has a total of 784,505 acres. Most of WMNF is in New Hampshire, but a small portion (5.6%) lies in Maine. Most of the peaks above 4,000 feet call New Hampshire their home, and as you can see from my photo above, those mountains make for some nasty weather.There are five wilderness areas within the forest: the Presidential Range/Dry River Wilderness (27,380 acres), the Great Gulf Wilderness (5,552 acres), the Sandwich Range Wilderness (25,000 acres), the Caribou/Speckled Mountain Wilderness (12,000 acres), and the Pemigewasset Wilderness (45,000 acres). Wilderness means no logging and no commercial industries. Only recreation and scientific research.Have a great one.MP3: Vic Chesnutt - Flirted With You All My Life

Juniper Ridge

If you've ever had the pleasure of seeing a Piñon Pine growing off the side of a desert cliff, then lucky you. If you've ever had the even more pleasurable experience of smelling a piece of the that twisted wood roasting in a fire, then you know one of life's great pleasures. The other night, a friend of mine walked into my cold apartment with Juniper Ridge Piñon Pine incense, and much to my disbelief, the stuff smells just like the real thing. That's because it is the real thing, made only from sustainably wild-harvested leaves, wood and resins from the mountains and deserts of the West, vegetable-based gum and bamboo stick. And if burning incense near your bed before you fall asleep isn't enough, then bathe yourself in Piñon Pine soap in the morning.Piñon Pine not your thing? Juniper Ridge makes incense, rubs, teas and soaps in Coastal Sage, Bay Laurel, Sierra Cedar and Siskiyou Cedar. And to top it off, the company donates 10% of their profits to donate western wilderness.

The Mountains Are

"The secret of the mountains is that they simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day."- Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

Arizona State Parks in Trouble

A sad week for Arizona. Fewer than one third of Arizona's state parks and recreation areas will remain open after June 3 under staff recommendations released Monday. The recommendations call for the closure of 13 parks between February and June. If approved by the parks board, the state would close Fort Verde, Homolovi Ruins, Lyman Lake and Riordan Mansion state parks on Feb. 22. Roper Lake, Tombstone Courthouse, Tubac Presidio and Yuma Territorial Prison would follow on March 29. On June 3, Alamo Lake, Lost Dutchman, Picacho Peak, Red Rock and Tonto Natural Bridge state parks. The proposed cuts to State Parks would provide just 4 percent of Arizona's goal, while shutting down the Park's annual contribution to the Arizona economy of more than $266 million.The state parks selected to remain open are the ones that generate revenue: Buckskin Mountain, Catalina, Cattail Cove, Dead Horse Ranch, Fool Hollow Lake, Kartchner Caverns, Lake Havasu, Patagonia Lake, and Slide Rock. But even those will close unless the parks system gets a $3 million infusion of cash before the end of the fiscal year, said Renee Bahl, the parks director. (via)Arizona's state buildings including the Capitol, the governor's office, the state hospital and state prisons go on sale today as the financially pressed state tries to raise money to plug a $4.5 billion deficit. (via)To find out what you can do to help, visit the Arizona State Park Foundation.MP3: Jayhawks: Take Me With You (When You Go)

Cold Splinters Interview: Ken Sanders

Ken Sanders has been in the rare book business in Utah since the 1970s, founding Dream Garden Press in 1980 and Ken Sanders Rare Books in 1990. Dream Garden is responsible for the 10th Anniversary R. Crumb-illustrated version of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, which can be purchased in book form and/or t-shirt form here. (Hayduke's my favorite.) If you're around these parts often enough, you'll know I'm a huge Abbey fan, and with the MWG movie coming out soonish, Sanders was kind enough to answer a few questions about the making of the book and the 1987 Monkey Wrench Gang calendar. Where did the idea to have R. Crumb illustrate The Monkey Wrench Gang come from?I had been familiar with Crumb's work since Zap Comix and the 60s. In my mind's eye, I could just see the Crumb caricatures of Abbey's characters. His artwork was perfect for the exaggerated comedic style of the novel. Crumb originally turned me down. He had never heard of Ed Abbey or The Monkey Wrench Gang. I went through two years worth of other artists that didn't work out until I returned to Crumb. This time around I was smart enough to send him a paperback of the book and offer him pretty good money to do the project. Once he had actually read the novel, he was eager to proceed.What was the process like? Was Abbey happy with the results? There was some tension over the artwork between Abbey and Crumb; particularly over the rendering of Bonnie Abbzug! I had to intervene and get Mr. Crumb to redraw her portrait. But mostly Abbey was pleased. Something Mr. Crumb said down at Arches still haunts me to this day. While taking him hiking in the park, Delicate Arch, the Fiery Furnace, Devils Garden, Courthouse Wash, etc. he remarked that he wished that he had seen the country itself before he drew the artwork for the book; he would have drawn it differently! After Abbey's death in 1989 I attempted to get Crumb interested in doing some additional artwork but he turned me down. He was living in France by that time and was only interested in working on his own projects.We held a series of publication parties in Moab, Utah and Salt Lake City in the spring of 1985 when the R. Crumb illustrated edition of Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang came out. At the Moab event over 1000 people showed up for a cookout by Ken and Jane Sleight at Arches, overwhelming the park and gridlocking the only road in. Despite their enormous differences, Abbey & Crumb hit it off. Signed copies of that edition now routinely sell for hundreds of dollars. I wish I'd had the foresight to stash a few cases of signed books!As you know, I recently bought a copy of the 1987 Monkey Wrench Gang calendar on Ebay. Do you have a lot of Abbey fans like myself emailing and calling to ask where they can find one?The Ed Abbey/R. Crumb Monkey Wrench Gang calendar came out two years later. It was a financial disaster at the time. It didn't sell and the vast majority of the print run was pulped! I saved a carton or two of those and still have a few left.

Black Elk: The Sacred Pipe

15 years after John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks was published in 1932, American scholar, Joseph Epes Brown, went looking for Black Elk, even after Neihardt had advised him not to. Neihardt told Brown that the Oglala Sioux holy man would not speak to him.After much traveling, Brown found Black Elk in an old canvas wall tent in Nebraska, where his extended family was digging for potatoes. The two men smoked a pipe in silence, and when the ritual smoking was over, Heȟáka Sápa asked Brown what had taken so long in getting there, for he had been expecting his coming. He then invited Brown to his house at Wounded Knee Creek, Pine Creek Reservation in South Dakota for the winter, where over the next few years, Black Elk would tell the history and meaning of the seven sacred rites of his people.I found an audio cassette version of The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux while out west, and have posted two tracks below. The first is Black Elk's Foreword and the second is a section of Chapter III, Inipi: The Rite Of Purification where Black Elk speaks of the sweat lodge. Enjoy.MP3: Black Elk's Foreword MP3: Chapter III - Inipi: The Rite Of Purification

Salt Stained Eyes

Salt Stained Eyes is the brainchild of Jack Brull, a surfer from Long Island who chronicles his life at the great beaches of New England through the lenses of multiple analog cameras. He's usually surfing at Long Beach, and his photographs perfectly capture the ghostly feel of the empty New York ocean during the early morning hours.

Yellowstone Has Record Tourism in 2009

It's no surprise, with the economy in the pits, that a trip to one of our country's national parks would be a great alternative for a family vacation. The National Park Service announced Tuesday that 3.3 million people visited the world's first national park last year, up 7.5 percent from 2008 and almost 5 percent more than the previous record set in 2007. Park officials say Yellowstone's West Entrance is the busiest with more than 1.3 million visitors. (via ABC)MP3: J Tillman - Year In The Kingdom

Organ Pipe Cactus

I suppose I should probably conclude all this desert talk by mentioning the supreme being in Organ Pipe National Monument, the park's namesake, the organ pipe cactus (Stenocereus thurberi). The organ pipe is a species of cactus native to Mexico and the southwestern United States and is much rarer in the U.S., with the exception being, of course, Organ Pipes National Monument, where a major bulk of the American organ pipes live. The organ pipe has several narrow stems that grow up to the sky from a short trunk that peaks above ground level. The plant originated in the warm, dry tropics, and when the global climate warmed at the end of the last Ice Age, the cactus slowly began migrating further north. It arrived in the Sonoran Desert only about 3500 years ago.It takes 150 years for the cactus reach maturity, and at around 35 years old, it begins to produce white flowers that are open at night and closed by the morning. The species is predominately found on rocky hillsides up to 3000 feet in elevation, as it is sensitive to frost and is rare in low desert areas. She's quite a lady.

Vasque Sundowners

I've talked about these boots several times before, but after almost two weeks of wearing nothing else on my feet (Nike Lunar Glides for 40 minutes a day don't count, but good lord those shoes. For another day I suppose.), I have to make mention of them one more time.Some people have problems with the Sundowners. They complain that they're too wide and/or pinch the toe. For me, they fit perfectly - a half size down from what I usually wear - and have enough support for a ten mile hike in the desert or a walk through the snow in Brooklyn to Boulder to Birmingham. It makes no difference to me what the hell my boots look like while I'm hiking, because, well, who the fuck cares? As long as they get you from the trailhead to where you have to set up your tent. But there aren't many boots that I would feel completely comfortable with leaving on for the rest of the day after a hike. Again, you're probably thinking, who the fuck cares? Well, stick a pair of red laces on a pair of Vasque Sundowners and you'll know what I'm talking about. No, they're not made in Italy anymore, and no, they're not exactly the same boot that my brother wore in high school, but there aren't not too many out there that work so well and look that fine.What do y'all wear?

Cactus Wren

I suppose this week will be somewhat dedicated to the desert of southern Arizona. For better or worse. That being said, it was pretty darn hard to ignore the cactus wrens in Organ Pipes. They scream a pretty song and nest inside cactus plants, flying from saguaro to cholla and back again - a rather remarkable adaptation that's even more alarming than it's voice. If you've ever had a jumping cholla grab hold of you, you know how bad that can hurt. (For more traveled destinations, beware of the cholla garden in Joshua Tree.) The cactus wren is the largest of North American wrens and is native to the southwestern United States on down to central Mexico.MP3: Joni Mitchell - Cactus Tree

The Devil's Walking Stick

Arizona State Route 85 runs 130 miles from Buckeye to the Mexico border near Lukeville. There's not much there for those 130 miles - a large (very large) military base and a few small towns dedicated to the sales of Mexican Auto Insurance - and that's the whole damn point. I spent two hours on that road, speedometer hugging 75 and the radio tuned to anything that would reach my antenna. As I finally rolled in to my campsite at the 330,000 acre Organ Pipes National Monument, the headlights of my rented sky blue compact caught the eyes of a young coyote, who would, over the course of my stay, take three shits on my stove, angry that I wasn't leaving any food out for him. The saguaros stood proud under the moon and the cactus wrens yelled from atop their chollas while I put up my tent and made black bean soup with a can of green chiles. When done with dinner, I put some hot water and whiskey into a small tin cup, walked a few hundred yards into the desert, sat down and started humming a song I had written a few years ago after reading Edward Abbey's "Winter In The Organ Pipes," a chapter from the Cactus Country edition of Time-Life's Wilderness Series:I'll meet you in the Organ PipesAll alone on a winter's nightYou'll say,"Come home."I'll stayYou won't.The next morning, after driving into Lukeville and buying a plastic gallon of water and a few lemons to join my evening hot water and whiskey, I hiked to the top of Arch Canyon, a short trail that leads to a difficult scramble up to a small red arch. The views from the top of the arch, and from almost anywhere in the desert, are endless. Organ pipes, saguaros and ocotillos run for miles and miles in the dry winter wind, perfectly placed in the sand, soaking in the sun all day. I had wanted to come to this place for a long time, and now that I was there, sitting on a rocky, red throne a few thousand feet above sea level, king of all the desert life that was hiding from the cold, I felt the way I always hope to feel when I go camping: small and insignificant. I walked back down the trail as a young couple from Tucson were slowly walking up. We gave each other a quick hello and a series of forced smiles before I got back to my car.There's no backcountry camping in Organ Pipes. Too many drug smugglers and illegal immigrants crossing the border. The monument's visitor center is named after Kris Eggle, a ranger who was shot in killed a few years ago while tracking a Mexican drug cartel that was fleeing Mexico after a string of murders. Sure, staying at a group campsite is a bummer, but this place isn't Yosemite. The campsite is small, in the middle of nowhere and dead silent for most of the day. You can hear the pack rats scattering around your tent at night and the coyotes howling from the hills. And hell, without that campsite I wouldn't have met Richard.Before my second hike that same day, I was standing at the trailhead, eating an apple smeared in almond butter, trying to figure out how far I should go before the sun was going to go down. I decided on a short hike, an easy 4.6 round trip to Victoria Mines, an old silver mine located in the southern part of the park. I heard a deep voice call out "HI THERE!" behind me, and turned to find an old, skinny, bearded Pete Seeger looking man, wearing a beige baseball cap to cover up his bald head."Going to the mines?" he asked."I am, yes.""Ah great, so am I!"FUCK.The hike to Victoria mines was beautiful. Sure, the shape of a saguaro can leave a little less to the imagination than a cloud, but some of those things look so funny, so distorted, that you have to stop to admire them, to think of what went right and what went wrong on their journey towards the Arizona sky. Richard and I hiked the entire way together, talking non-stop for several hours (he's in his 70s and walked painfully slow) while kicking around quartz and naming plants. When we got to the mines, we drank water and ate a bag of pepitas, then took pictures of each other with the Sonoran Desert at our backs. Ravens flew above as the sky started turning crimson, and as we headed back to camp, Richard stopped, pointed to a large ocotillo and quietly whispered to himself, "The Devil's Walking Stick."For the last seven years, Richard had been living in his van, chasing the sunny weather while admiring our country's great public lands. He was one of the nicest men I had ever met and I would spend the rest of my trip with him, eating meals together, going on more hikes, and telling each other who the hell we were and why the hell we were both sleeping in the desert. We agreed that anyone who came so far out of their way to spend time in such a barren and unforgiving land, a land that most have never heard of, would surely share some type of bond, some type of understanding.When it was time for me to leave Arizona and fly up to San Francisco, Richard and I exchanged email addresses. He would be staying at Organ Pipes for another two weeks, then making his way to east to Big Bend National Park, his favorite place to go camping. We shook hands and agreed we'd someday meet in the Middle Of Nowhere again, but this time in Texas.

National Geographic Archive

You can buy the whole National Geographic archive, all the way back to 1888, on a 160 GB hard drive for $200. The hard drive is only 60 GB full, leaving 100 GB for your personal files. The archive includes all of the magazines' advertisements, which are sometimes just as interesting as the stories themselves.Sounds like a pretty fabulous thing to have at your fingertips, although something about it seems a little off to me. What about the fold outs? The posters? Goodbye forever, print. (via GJ)MP3: Mos Def - Quiet Dog Bite Hard

Welcome Home

I hope everyone had a great holiday break, full of some exciting adventures that'll make for some long stories. I was all over the place for the last few weeks, and for the stretches of being alone and having nothing to do in the cold of a desert night but read under my Petzl, I found some comfort in Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. My father had given me the book many years ago, and I quickly became bored within the first 50 pages, too young to take in all that Buddhism. Last week, those same fifty pages included a quote from Jung that I must have read a hundred times, because as I'm sure you know, time alone makes you a little more dramatic. I miss the West.

The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing....He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths....There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. 'You are no different from anybody else,' they will chorus, or, 'there's no such thing,'and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as morbid.' He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. 'His own law!' everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law....The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization-absolute and unconditional-of its own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has failed to realize his life's meaning.The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names the interior way 'Tao,' and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly toward its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things.