Here, you’ll find unfortunately true tales of an accidental naturalist’s misadventures in the wild, as well as shorter, inspirational reflections of nature
Needful Things
Canyonlands NP, Needles District:
I decided on a day hike from Elephant Hill trailhead. The trail ends about seven miles – or three to four hours later – at Druid’s Arch.
I passed by sandstone domes and open canyon, representative of much of southeastern Utah. The sandstone smoothed into blunted heads, stained with desert […]
Great Sand Dunes National Park, San Luis Valley, CO.
The San Luis Valley is a land of superlatives. It’s the size of Connecticut. It’s a vast bowl surrounded on all sides by high mountains—the Sangre de Cristo on the east and the San Juans to the west. Yet it’s as flat as the Great Plains. There’s […]
A Maddeningly baaa-aad path
Off the westbound lane of highway 160, smack dab on the La Plata-Montezuma County line at the summit of a grade locally called Mancos Hill, you can turn right into National Forest. Just take Madden Peak Road.
If you’re in a pint-sized Toyota Yaris with about an inch of ground clearance […]
Not a Mountain in England
I had hiked mountains in England’s Lake District a couple years before, and again yesterday. Today I decided to get adventurous. I took a ferry from the resort town of Windemere across the eponymous lake, largest in England, to the tea-cozy village of Ambleside with its farms hemmed in […]
Sand Canyon
I imagine that the farmers which lived on the outskirts of the first known city, Ur, in Mesopotamia, formed a committee to oppose its development. They appeared before the first Planning and Zoning Commission and pointed out the ordinance against subdivision in lots smaller than three acres. And lost. It’s been the […]
I went out for a hike with my good friend, Ben. Before the pandemic, we’d go out every Sunday up Horse Gulch or down the Animas River or even just stroll through Durango, addressing and solving the problems of the world. Today’s hike was a little more significant for me. I was hiking, sans mask, […]
It’d been a depressing start to the day. More bad news on the virus, on riots, on another type of depression we were all going through, only they spelled that one with a capital ‘D.’ I’d spoken via phone with my normally ebullient mother back in Chicago, but she was depressed, too. Everybody seemed to […]
Bliss
I was hiking in a canyon off the beaten path just after dawn when I decided to reach a ridge and see if I could spy Monument Valley from it. I waded and zigzagged through the sage and Mormon tea, finally using a box-shaped juniper as my guidepost. Out here in southeast Utah, […]
There are over 3 trillion trees on planet earth. No, I haven’t counted them. I might’ve missed one or two that way.
I’m surrounded by pinyon, juniper and ponderosa, with an understory of angry oakbrush that’s like a crowd at Wal-Mart on Black Friday to get through. A lot of the trees are dying. The pinyon, […]
I live in an area forested with pinyon-juniper trees. Groves of ponderosa and underlying oak brush take up the higher ground. In spring, draws carry the mountain runoff from the La Plata Mountains, about 13 miles away. The stems of the oak snap back across the face of the hiker like angry plastic plants. He […]