Here, you’ll find unfortunately true tales of an accidental naturalist’s misadventures in the wild, as well as shorter, inspirational reflections of nature
I dropped down a gravel road from the western scarp wall of Hart Mountain, a gigantic fault block that, like a keep with retaining walls 3,600 feet high, dominates the surrounding terrain of Warner Valley. The road almost in freefall. The cliffs impose heavy shadows upon the floor of Warner Valley near the town of […]
I’m perched on top of a knife edge, a volcanic dike. I’m completely enswathed in solitude for miles in every direction except for the far off, silent glints of the pickups on the highway rattling toward Newcomb, NM. I hiked up toward the Shiprock monolith, its Anglo name, of course. To the Dine’, it has […]
Today stands as the last day of the year, 2004, and I suppose it is a miracle that the mercury cloys out of its winter torpor to stretch up into the cloudless blue of 59 degrees F and counting. I claw my away out of my own Chicago torpor.
You need to send out your work, […]
You ever feel like running your car over someone’s face? Maybe it’s just me.
This particular Saturday felt with its cold gray clipper blowing in off Lake Michigan like the first real day of winter, even though a month of days stood between now and its official start. In the Windy City, this weekend before Thanksgiving, […]
“The greatest joy in nature is the absence of man.”
-William Bliss Carman-
Every time I hike along the shoulder of a mountain or even just walk in a local forest preserve outside Chicago, I recover a part of myself. I gain a fragment of my self that I had lost to civilization. In the world made […]
It was late summer, Y2K. A shabby B & W female, a stray, loitered in my back yard. Sometimes I feed the strays, especially in winter. More often, my neighbor Jill, a lusty, wig-toting woman with a feline way, nourishes them. She harbors five cats in her carpetless home, kind of like a cat half-way […]
Deadlier Than It Looks
Know what a ringtail is? I didn’t either, until New Year’s Eve, 1998. That’s when one checked in to my pitch black hotel room on the floor of Zion Canyon in Zion National Park. A ringtail is a southwestern relative of the raccoon, though the only resemblance in my book […]
I’d just finished a day hike down Thunder River Trail and was looking for a place to park my truck and camp. Drift smoke from a few fires farther east along the rim swaddled the lower reaches below Steamboat Mountain. I decided to camp randomly. Whatever the next road was, I’d take it. The next […]
Water falls over the cliffs, bashing itself against the granite again and again, dropping down into plunge pools dozens of feet below. It does not die.
Water drops from the highest sky, yet doesn’t shatter.
Not imprisoned in a skeletal shape, water sculpts the bones.
Water assumes no form, and so it’s every form. Unborn, it dies not.
Ice […]
It was so hot…
‘96’ upside down is . . . 96. Put down that dirty mind! 96 is also the designation of a BLM road a few miles east of Hall’s Crossing at Lake Powell. You access 96 off of Utah Highway 276.
You’ll drive down to Hall’s Crossing on July 4th, and find […]