Tag: Camping
-
Choose your own adventure.
Sunday mornings I start coffee. I top up the bird feeders, and jot down what visits. I journal. I listen to ragtime on the local radio station, figure out what needs done for the next twelve or sixteen hours. I try to carve out an hour or two to hop on here and see what…
-
Beer. Bonfire. Bowl of hoppin’ john.
-
…glamping on the Gallatin.
I remember living along a western river, elk coming down from the mountains, occasional reports of lions and bears in parks and backyards. A paved walking trail ran down a brushy draw from my apartment to downtown, more than a little sketchy after a late night at the bar. Western river corridors are critical for…
-
Last Best Streams- #1522.
Still at it. This one gathers headwaters from Mississippian limestone on the Ozark Plateau, finding its way through a hundred million years of sea floor. A lot of it is underground, working through cracks and crevices, caves and solution channels, before joining one of the region’s largest rivers. That so much rainwater is shunted into…
-
The Montana slide.
Two news items caught my attention this week- both out of Montana, neither great for outdoor enthusiasts. The first: For generations, Montanans have have benefited from the sort of restrictive easements that allow anglers to use bridge crossings as fishing accesses. The same prescriptive easements allow hunters and hikers to use long-standing roads and trails…
-
It’s time to check in with your local legislature.
It’s a new year, when state legislatures convene and roll out their retinue of initiatives- some good, some bad, some ugly. Some worth supporting, some worth fighting against. Tennessee legislators are mulling a “Cleaner Landscapes for the Economy, Agriculture, and Nature” Act. Colorado’s updating its list of eligible water projects. Arizona’s tackling legislation that would…
-
I’m damn lucky.
It’s a shame we measure time by our accomplishments, instead of lessons learned. Back in January, I picked up A Really Big Lunch, a posthumous look at Jim Harrison’s food writing. I liked it. A vein of American consciousness would gleefully shit all over the book- hedonism, conspicuous consumption, the carbon footprint, the objectification of…
-
Trump administration sandbags Land and Water Conservation Fund
The secretarial order from Interior Secretary David Bernhardt adds a litany of new rules governing deployment of LWCF funds, including eliminating outright funds for projects enabling land acquisition by the Bureau of Land Management and infringing on private landowner rights by stipulating that state and local officials can veto LWCF-funded land acquisitions from willing sellers who are…
-
Last Best Streams: #1063.
Just a quick trip off the highway at 10,800 feet, through the spruce and riparian grasses, to a creek only a couple yards across. I have a soft spot for small, high-altitude creeks like this, places where water was ice and snow maybe only a few days before. The fishing isn’t great, there’s often winterkill,…
-
The outside bend. 