Black and White Sage

As mentioned below, Cold Splinters spent the last week in California with our friends/lovers/teachers/healers, Juniper Ridge, cleaning trail and learning about coastal plants and flowers. Long drives filled with endless discussions of power pop, the manager at a local Chevy's, and of course, coastal flowers and plants (I bet your grandma never started a sentence with, "If the Salvias were the Beatles, black sage would be..."), made for one of the most enjoyable adventures I've had in a long, long time.Next week is going to be the real recap (see: photos) of said trip, but for now, if you're going to be out in California camping, make sure you know your Salvia apiana and Salvia mellifera. Because I have truly found very few things in life better than rubbing a piece of black sage between your fingers on a hike to a backcountry sunset.MP3: The Beat - Rock N Roll GirlMP3: Brendan Benson - Tiny Spark

Off To California

Cold Splinters is off to California tomorrow. Lots of ground to cover in the week we'll be gone, but couldn't be more excited. We'll be with our very good friends at Juniper Ridge and a group of about 15 people, so lots of pictures and new friends to follow.If you're in San Francisco, drop me a line and let's grab a drink. In the meantime, take care of yourselves and see you soon.MP3: David Ackles - Oh, California!MP3: Ron Wood - I Can Feel The FireMP3: Beechwood Sparks - Confusion Is Nothing NewMP3: Harry James and Helen Forrest - I've Heard That Song Before (from Hannah and Her Sisters)

Bonnie Peterson

Hetch Hetchy Blueprint (54" H x 68" W): 1908 map on blueprint of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir site showing lands owned and to be acquired by the City of San Francisco.Muir Trail Lakes, Peaks, and Passes (72" H x 84" W): Heat transfers of Sierra maps, painted and embroidered with trail notes from backpacking trip, photographs on satin, silk, brocade and velvet, stitched.  The borders are embroidered with John Muir's descriptions of the high Sierra from the late 19th and early 20th century."Of Bogs and Benthos" (52" H x 72" W): Scientific graphs, limnology terms, lake chemistry concepts, demographics and climate change challenges are presented. The work is part of an artist/scientist project made possible by: The University of Wisconsin – Center for Limnology, the Trout Lake Research Station, the National Science Foundation, and the Long Term Ecological Research Program.++++++++++++**Much more here.

Ramblers Bone

If there is a heaven for hitchhikersthe road to angel falls in Zionis the road they dream of

Every morning I wake up to the sight of a lonely New Mexico desert, a landscape that's worlds away from the apartment I call home. Bummer. The photo is part of Mikael Kennedy's Odysseus and it's quite possibly my favorite thing that I own. (Brian Wilson, your 1 of only 100 signed copies of the hand-written sheet music to "Our Prayer" is a close second.)  Mikael and I have been buddies for a good while now, and two months ago, while spending the month living in Marfa, TX, Mikael flew down to visit and spend a few days in BBNP. It was our first time working together (I wrote an article for Garden and Gun while he took the photos), but certainly not the last.While Mikael was down south, he was all smiles, enjoying the nothingness of southwest Texas and getting his head straight for the adventure he's on now. And holy hell is it an adventure. The project, called Ramblers Bone, involves a sponsorship from Wolverine that allows both Mikael and Sean Sullivan to take a road trip through the western part of these United of States. Not bad.As promised, Mikael sent me a few pictures from the road (Zion to be exact) with the little ditty above he wrote to accompany them. If you're craving more - and I'm guessing you are - you can see more photos after the jump and follow the entire adventure here.

Faustino

I don't really know how Vice does it, but they do. And they do it well. For their newest episode of Far Out (remember Heimo?), Vice traveled down to Chilean Patagonia to meet Faustino Barrientos, who, since 1965, has lived alone on the shores Lake O'Higgins in a house built from the remains of a shipwrecked fishing vessel. More info below:

Lake O'Higgins comprises a portion of the border between Chile's Aysén region and Argentina's Santa Cruz province. Since 1965, Faustino Barrientos has lived alone on the shores the lake, in a house built from the remains of a shipwrecked fishing vessel. He's a pastoralist, living mostly off the land and his livestock, with few modern amenities. His nearest neighbors are in Villa O'Higgins, a small community of several hundred people, 25 miles away, accessible only by a two-day horseback ride through rugged mountain animal paths. Every few years, Faustino makes this ride to sell his cattle in town.Currently 81 years old, Faustino is reaching the end of his life, and his self-imposed isolation is being encroached upon by the forces of government, economy, and tourism. In December 2011, VICE went to document his lifestyle and speak with him about the changing face of Patagonia and the gaucho lifestyle.

Watch the video in four parts here.

The Wilderness Letter

Below is a portion of Wallace Stegner's Wilderness Letter, written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission in 1960. The letter was used to introduce the bill that established the National WildernessPreservation System in 1964.

Dear Mr. Pesonen:I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission's report. If I may, I should like to urge some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. Hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made imbalance. What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical minded--but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what the historians call the "American Dream" have to do with recreation. Nevertheless, since it is only in this recreation survey that the values of wilderness are being compiled, I hope you will permit me to insert this idea between the leaves, as it were, of the recreation report.Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea.We are a wild species, as Darwin pointed out. Nobody ever tamed or domesticated or scientifically bred us. But for at least three millennia we have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to domesticating ourselves. Not many people are likely, any more, to look upon what we call "progress" as an unmixed blessing. Just as surely as it has brought us increased comfort and more material goods, it has brought us spiritual losses, and it threatens now to become the Frankenstein that will destroy us. One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to remain, insofar as we can, good animals. Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples; for while we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless environment-busters in history, and slashing and burning and cutting our way through a wilderness continent, the wilderness was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the land. If the abstract dream of human liberty and human dignity became, in America, something more than an abstract dream, mark it down at least partially to the fact that we were in subdued ways subdued by what we conquered.

Read the rest here.

Larry The Quaker Guy

You know the iconic Quaker dude that looks you in the eye as you're making granola at home or eating a hot bowl of oats after waking up from a night under the stars? OF COURSE YOU DO. Well, Larry (That's what insiders know him as, which is just, well, weird) is about to lose a little weight and get a haircut. Read more about it at the WSJ.MP3: Amy Milan - Skinny Boy

NOTES FROM DEEP SPRINGS

** It is with great pleasure I introduce Bennet Bergman, a new guest contributor to Cold Splinters. Bergman attends Deep Springs College in California and will be writing about his life in the Sierras. Stay tuned for more "Notes from Deep Springs" in the coming weeks.**I live in a valley the size of Manhattan in the Eastern Sierras with fourty-four people and 300 head of cattle. The closest town is an hour away, and there’s not much out here: a small farm, a ranch, and an all-male liberal arts college called Deep Springs, which has been here for almost a century. Twenty-eight students attend. The college is free, so besides classwork each week we put in twenty hours of labor on the ranch as a way of earning our keep.For the most part this place is student-run. We cook for each other from the garden we keep, we choose all our professors, classmates and course offerings, we fix each other’s cars and cut our own hair. We work hard and eat well. Most of us are twenty-year-old boys and since we live on a ranch, it’s been easy for me to get caught up in playing cowboy. But we still like dancing to the sex-pop of Katy Perry and Ke$ha on Friday nights in the kitchen, and we ride horses when there’s time.