Night Trails

NIGHT TRAILS

You never have seen, nor you never will see—The stars at their best and the moon hanging free—And you never will know what night ought to be—'Til you are out on the trail, all alone—With the call of the West ringing out like a shout—With the wide, spreading plains all around and about—And the smell of the sage where the trail's running out—And the breeze with a tang of its own.

You never have known and you never will know—The silence that speaks 'til your soul is aglow—With, maybe it's God, and you're whispering low—To your bronc, which is proper and right—For broncs understand, they're a part of the place—With stars and the moon and far open space—And the soft desert wind sort of kissing your face—The spell of the plains in the night.

You never have found, nor you never will find—The rest to a heart or the peace to a mind—Where men can forget and the world is behind—'Til you've stood on the trail that is dim—The breeze dies away and the dome of the sky—Hangs lower and lower 'til stars are close by—And earth fades away and the heavens are nigh—On the plains—in the night—just with Him.

- Griff Crawford, June 30, 1931, Amarillo Globe

 

Coors Light Joke

Last weekend, I spent a night at the Ten Mile River Lean-To, the first AT shelter in Connecticut if you're Northboundin'. We shared the campsite with two 50 year-old Southbounders who were instantly drawn to our lukewarm Coors Lights. I went to college in Colorado and haven't been able to shake the habit of taking the silver cans along when heading to the woods. After handing over a few as the sun was going down, they thanked us with a joke.Q: What do Coors Light and sex in a canoe have in common?A: They're both fucking near water.Thank you Carnivore and Purple.

The Fate of Heaven

"Yosemite: The Fate Of Heaven":

"Yosemite--The Fate Of Heaven" is a stunning film portrait of Yosemite National Park. Breathtaking cinematography graphically depicts the fragile wonder of the place naturalist John Muir once called "a great temple lighted from above." The film illustrates how our passion for Yosemite's beauty jeopardizes the very wilderness we love so much.Read by Robert Redford, the film's narration is taken from the diaries of Lafayette Bunnell, a doctor who accompanied the Mariposa Battalion in 1851 on a mission to "hunt down Indians." The campaign brought soldiers for the first time into the sacred valley home of the Ahwahnechee tribe in the Sierra Nevada. "My astonishment was overwhelming,'' wrote Bunnell of the valley's grandeur. "Here before me was the power and glory of the Supreme Being." Bunnell understood immediately that his small band would be the first and last white men to see the natural wonder of the valley unspoiled.More than 130 years later, tens of thousands trek to the park from all over the world to enjoy the valley's magnificent landscapes and wildlife. The film introduces us to hikers and campers for whom Yosemite is a true shrine, including a free-hand rock climber who "dances" up walls of sheer granite and a woman whose family survived the depression by camping at the park and fishing its rivers. Vintage photographs and observations from Bunnell's eloquent diary remind us that America's love affair with Yosemite is well over a century old.Wrote Bunnell on leaving Yosemite. "Those scenes of beauteous enchantment I leave to those who remain to enjoy them.'' Today Yosemite is a protected national park, but that may not be enough to guarantee its future. The continual onslaught of nature lovers--over 1,000 cars a day--only intensifies the conflict between preservation and public enjoyment. Sanitation workers remove 25,000 pounds of trash a day. Work crews toil to repair natural trails damaged by wear. Park rangers protect tourists from roaming bears, and curious deer from potato chip hand-outs. Nature rules here, but human beings, we learn, are both the biggest threat to the park's future and its best hope.

Watch the entire thing, just like I'm doing now, over at The Creak of Boots.

Don and Myrtle Holm

Published in 1972, The Complete Sourdough Cookbook is a little bit more story-telling than biscuit-making, but with tales like the one above, that's doesn't matter much. And if you actually read "Bannock Bill the Biscuit Maker" and are wondering what a bannock is, well, it's a type of quick bread - bread that doesn't utilize yeast - similar to a scone.Don Holm and his wife, Myrtle, also wrote the Old Fashioned Dutch Oven Cookbook, Don Holm's Book of Food Drying, Pickling and Smoke Curing (which are both just as fine and just as available on Google Books), and Wholesome Country Living (not available on Google Books.) It is no easy task to read about sourdough biscuits being made over an open fire while sitting on a laptop.MP3: John Jacob Niles - Go 'Way From My Window

John Gierach

John Gierach is an American author and freelance writer living and working in Larimer County, Colorado. He has to date written over 20 books on fly-fishing, and is a regular contributor to Field & Stream, as well as having a monthly column in the NY Times. Watch that video above and chew on it for a bit.This is a great life we live.

New Section of CDT

Thank you to Rocky for alerting us of the new section of the Continental Divide Trail, important to the few of us that thru hike it each year. The trail has long threaded through the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, following a big old concrete road for some of the way. After months of work, the NPS has now dedicated a new 1-mile section of the CDT called the Bowen Connector, which pulls off the trail away from the road as it connects RoMo with Arapaho National Forest north of Grand Lake.Read more about it at The Coloradoan.

The Pine Barrens

"The pork was delicious and almost crisp. Fred gave me a potato with it, and a pitcher of melted grease from the frying pan to pour over the potato. He also handed me a loaf of bread and a dish of margarine, saying, "Here's your bread. You can have one piece or two. Whatever you want."Fred apologized for not having a phone, after I asked where I would have to go make a call, later on. He said, "I don't have no phone because I don't have no electric. If I had electric, I would have had a phone in here a long time ago." He uses a kerosene lamp, a propane lamp, and two flashlights.He asked where I was going, and I said that I had no particular destination, explaining that I was in the pines because I found it hard to believe that so much unbroken forest could still exist so near the big Eastern cities, and I wanted to see while it was still there."

- John McPhee, The Pine Barrens

MP3: Johnny Horton - Whispering Pines

From Ashes to Forest

From Ashes to Forest is a feature length film archived on the goldmine that is the National Film Board of Canada. Shot in Banff and Wood Buffalo National Parks, this film released in 1984 surfaces the need for fire to promote the renewal and health of the forest. Also called into question are the risks involved with the Smokey Bear campaign and brand of fire management.Mostly, the film is beautiful, the soundtrack is majorly feel-good era specific, and it's educational as can. Maybe you'll learn a thing or two.Watch it here.

OREGON RAINBOW

If anyone knows more about OREGON RAINBOW, the magazine/art project whose Summer 1976 issue I found while out west last week, please speak up. I can't find too much on the world wide web about this beauty, and that's a goddamn dirty rotten shame. This thing is filled with poetry, photos, history and more, all of which celebrate the handsome Pacific Northwest. More pics after the jump..

Mountain Fresh To Go


"Looked amazingly simple, but of course there was much going on behind the scene. Building the soundtrack, for example, we found that we could not stretch the words out over the full 30 seconds, had to settle for 20-plus to be understandable--which meant the visuals had to not show any bike at first. Then trying to capture the actual motorcycle shot we found that we could not pan fast enough as the bike passed, so we had to make a hidden cut during the pan. And neither the weather nor the motorcycle itself cooperated at first--we had to go out filming on three different days to get the bike actually operating properly, at a time when Mount Rainier was also visible!"

HERE + HERE

Rabbit Island

In February of 2010, Rob Gorski (NYC) and Andrew Ranville (UK) purchased a 90 acre island on Craigslist (seriously), 3 miles off the coast of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula. They recently ran a Kickstarter which was funded to facilitate their plan to build an Artist Residency on the island. This island is virtually untouched as it stands. Rob and Andrew are breaking ground this summer to build a single small cabin which will house resident visual artists, musicians, and writers. Best Made Co. threw 'em some gear too.Dip over to their site to find out more on the project, and see some amazing photos of the island. Such a good looking, good-feeling project.Check out their site here, photos here, Facebook here.

The Burning House

I'm assuming that The Burning House needs very little introduction, but in case you're not hip to it just yet, here's your chance. Foster Huntington, the man behind the "shoe throwing" blog as a friend once called it, A Restless Transplant, asks that million dollar question, "What would you grab from your house if it was burning down?" Readers send in photos and he posts them. And there you have it.The Anthropologist, Anthropology's site that, from what I can tell is dedicated to art projects of sorts, is running a feature on The Burning House that Foster was responsible for photographing. He came on over to CS headquarters a couple of weeks ago and shot the photo above. Read the feature here.