Thoughts and musings longer than notes.
Where do you go after winning the Miss Outdoors beauty contest? If you’re Dakota Abbot, the 2008 winner of the Miss Outdoors crown, you go back to your first love – skinning muskrats. “The first cut is crucial – you have to pinch the fur at the hind legs and cut straight into that meaty…
Alright kirby, you win this time. I completely wimped out on the DIY ultralight backpacking stove challenge. I sawed a clean hole in the bottom of a Diet Coke can and used my Dremel to drill 24 pinholes around the shoulder using the super-useful templates at Zen Stoves. But then something happened. While I was out…
How do you treat raw skin and build calluses after a weekend of rock climbing? My new challenge started a couple of weeks ago after I joined the local climbing gym. A few hours on the artificial walls and I’d peeled the skin off the palms of my hands in seven places. Three of the…
When photographer and writer Shreve Stockton found herself the guardian of a two-week old coyote pup she began taking pictures every day and mailing them to her friends. This grew to a sizable mailing list to which you can subscribe, therby getting your own daily coyote. Aside from being too cute to be legal, these…
It’s been a busy weekend. As some of you know, my daughter is getting married next Saturday. But you’re never too busy when you’ve got a dead blue whale in your backyard. In between trips to Smart and Final for Ginger Ale and phony champagne glasses I joined the human carnival that was keeping vigil…
“Leaves of three, beware of me” is a useful rule of thumb for avoiding poison-oak. On the other hand this ditty applies quite well to wild raspberry. You could easily find yourself in a bushwhacking situation where you have to make a choice between galloping through one thicket or the other. Tipping-toe through raspberries is…
People sometimes say there are no more unexplored frontiers. Orion Magazine’s April/May issue puts that fable to rest with an amazing story of two botanists who, in 1998, stumbled upon an unmapped grove of redwoods…some of the largest redwoods alive today.The USGS topo map below shows what I assume is roughly the area where Sillet…
