Blast-Zone Hiking Raptor Viewing Wild Streaking

Home , Doll Parts (Defiance), Flat Top Mountain (Utah), Mount Adams (Washington), Mount Jefferson (Nevada), Mount Jefferson (Oregon)

March 6, 2017 | $5 | Vol. 49 No. 4 | www.hcn.org Blast-Zone Hiking Wild Streaking Raptor Viewing H igh igh C ountry N For peoplewhocare West aboutthe ews CONTENTS

High Country News Editor’s note Executive director/Publisher Paul Larmer MANAGING Editor There and back again Brian Calvert SENIOR EDITOR Many years ago, I traveled Jodi Peterson abroad for the first time, to Art director visit a high school friend from Cindy Wehling Deputy editor, digital Rock Springs, Wyoming, who Kate Schimel had been stationed by the U.S. Associate EDITORs Tay Wiles, Army in Germany. On that trip, Maya L. Kapoor I nearly froze to death in the Assistant EDITOR Paige Blankenbuehler Bavarian Alps, lost my passport D.C. Correspondent at a train station, and fell briefly in love with a Elizabeth Shogren woman I met in a Munich park. I spent the next WRITERS ON THE RANGE two decades traveling, as a student and journalist, editor Betsy Marston learning about other places and people in an effort Associate designer Brooke Warren to better understand myself. Copy editOR Every year, High Country News puts together Diane Sylvain a special travel issue. We do this because, in the Contributing editorS Cally Carswell, Sarah pages of a typical issue, we are primarily concerned Gilman, Ruxandra Guidi, with the facts and forces that shape the American Glenn Nelson, West: the landscapes, water, people and wildlife Michelle Nijhuis, that make this region unique. In most stories, we try Jonathan Thompson FEATURES CorrespondentS our best to serve as experienced guides, bringing Krista Langlois, Sarah our readers useful analysis and insight. In the travel Tory, Joshua Zaffos 12 issue, however, we take a different tack. We imagine Now You See Her Editorial Fellow Enduring relationships begin with encounters By Maya L. Kapoor Anna V. Smith the region as though we were new to it, and in Interns Emily Benson, doing so, we see it with fresh eyes. 28 The Moral of the Mountain Rebecca Worby To travel, as Bilbo Baggins will tell you, is to Development Director Backpacking through the Mount St. Helens blast zone Laurie Milford go there and back again, to venture forth and then By Eric Wagner Philo anthr py Advisor return to your Shire a changed person (or hobbit, Alyssa Pinkerton in Bilbo’s case). We pack our bags, tie our boots, Development Assistant and cross a threshold into the world. And on the INSIDE Christine List journey, we have experiences that no one can ever Subscriptions MARKETER 4 A Southerner discovers JoAnn Kalenak take away. This land is my land? the West’s public lands By Lyndsey Gilpin WEB DEVELOPER Eric Strebel In this issue, we have tried to push deep into Database/IT administrator the unexpected, or even uncomfortable, corners of 5 Go North, young woman In a place no one can Alan Wells the West, places not only beautiful but instructive. see you, you can see yourself more clearly By Sarah Gilman DIRECTOR OF ENGAGEMENT Associate Editor Maya Kapoor visits an Arizona Gretchen King 8 In timber country, a writer returns to FINANCE MANAGER raptor show, prompting questions about the human Growing pains Beckie Avera relationship with other creatures. Writer Eric Wagner the old-growth forest of her youth By Anna V. Smith Accounts Receivable hikes through the wastelands of the Mount St. 27 Cowboys with surfboards Parts of Hawaii are surprisingly like 16 Jan Hoffman Helens eruption, pondering poetry and devastation. Circulation Systems admin. the new rural West By Don Olsen Kathy Martinez Contributing Editor Sarah Gilman travels to remote 36 Circulation British Columbia with a group of like-minded An expedition through the Edgelands Kati Johnson, Pam Peters, women, all intent on being wild without judgment, By Diane Sylvain Doris Teel running a river in the process. Our deputy editor, Advertising Director 37 Yaak attack At home at the Dirty Shame By Kate Schimel David J. Anderson Kate Schimel, takes a thoughtful look at the lives of By Ana Maria Spagna GrantWriter Janet Reasoner people in Montana’s Yaak Valley, wondering what 38 Together we pause [email protected] draws them to it even as she feels repulsed. And [email protected] our editorial fellow, Anna V. Smith, returns to the [email protected] Oregon timber country of her youth, finding new DEPARTMENTS [email protected] [email protected] sympathy for logging communities that proved just as vulnerable as old-growth forests to a changing 3 FROM OUR WEBSITE: HCN.ORG FOUNDER Tom Bell Board of Directors world. 10 THE HCN COMMUNITY John Belkin, Colo. These are not vacation stories, necessarily. But Research Fund, Dear Friends Chad Brown, Ore. they are travel stories. They are tales of change Beth Conover, Colo. and growth and discovery. They are as much inner 20 TRAVEL MARKETPLACE AND GUIDE Jay Dean, Calif. Bob Fulkerson, Nev. journeys as outer, all prompted by the unique 33 MARKETPLACE Wayne Hare, Colo. features of our great region, places often forgotten 5 Laura Helmuth, Md. or ignored — but only if we fail to take the time to 40 HEARD AROUND THE WEST By Betsy Marston John Heyneman, Wyo. Osvel Hinojosa, Mexico appreciate the adventures that await us, outside our Samaria Jaffe, Calif. front door. On the cover Nicole Lampe, Ore. —Brian Calvert, managing editor Marla Painter, N.M. Hyla, a ferruginous hawk, up close during Raptor Free Flight Bryan Pollard, Ark. west of Tucson, Arizona. Don Sorensen photo courtesy Arizona-Sonora desert Museum Raynelle Rino, Calif. Estee Rivera Murdock, D.C. Dan Stonington, Wash. Rick Tallman, Colo. Luis Torres, N.M. High Country News is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) independent media Ave., Paonia, CO 81428. Periodicals, postage paid at Paonia, CO, and other Printed on Andy Wiessner, Colo. High organization that covers the issues that define the American West. post offices.P OSTMASTER: Send address changes to High Country News, recycled paper. Florence Williams, D.C. Its mission is to inform and inspire people to act on behalf of the Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. All rights to publication of articles in this Country region’s diverse natural and human communities. (ISSN/0191/5657) issue are reserved. See hcn.org for submission guidelines. Subscriptions to News is published bi-weekly, 22 times a year, by High Country News, 119 Grand HCN are $37 a year, $47 for institutions: 800-905-1155 | hcn.org 2 High Country News March 6, 2017 From our website: HCN.ORG t A red-tailed Sarah Gilman is an hawk gets a treat HCN contributing editor of raw meat from and writer based in Port- handler Daniel land, Oregon. Her work Trocola during will be anthologized in Raptor Free Flight The Best Women’s Travel at the Arizona- Writing, in May. Sonora Desert  @Sarah_Gilman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Museum. Jordan Glenn GILMAN R-Utah, on Lyndsey Gilpin writes Instagram Feb. 1, on climate, environmen- announcing he’d tal justice and the inter- withdrawn HR 621. section of people and “I’m a proud gun nature, and is the editor owner, hunter and of Southerly, a newsletter love our public for the American South. lands,” he wrote.  @lyndseygilpin Sportsmen on the public-lands GILPIN Don Olsen is a Colorado defensive rancher who spent much In a legislative season full of threats to public lands at of his life as a political the state and federal level, hook-and-bullet groups have reporter in Boulder, Colo- mobilized to fight for the landscapes they value. Having rado, and Washington, convinced Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, to withdraw D.C., writing about land- support for public lands transfer bill HR 621, opponents use policies that protect 12 36 Diane Sylvain of the legislation are working to oppose the companion farms and ranchlands. bill, HR 622, the Local Enforcement for Local Lands Act. FEATURES If passed, it would hand law enforcement responsibilities Maya L. Kapoor is an on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands 12 OLSEN associate editor with to local police. Hunters and anglers fear that would make Now You See Her federal lands more vulnerable to abuse — and set the stage Enduring relationships begin with encounters By Maya L. Kapoor HCN. She writes about science and the environ- for potential land transfers. Re becca Worby More: hcne.ws/sportsmen-unite 28 The Moral of the Mountain ment in the urbanizing Backpacking through the Mount St. Helens blast zone West. By Eric Wagner Kate Schimel writes from Paonia, Colorado, “The implication is on the order of INSIDE where she spends her time thinking about the a trillion dollars and close to 150 million KAPOOR 4 This land is my land? A Southerner discovers role of unpeopled places people displaced or adversely affected by the West’s public lands By Lyndsey Gilpin in modern society. She is a one-meter rise in sea level, which is not 5 Go North, young woman In a place no one can the deputy editor-digital for . see you, you can see yourself more clearly By Sarah Gilman HCN that unreasonable to expect in the coming  @kateschimel 8 Growing pains In timber country, a writer returns to 50 to 100 years.” the old-growth forest of her youth By Anna V. Smith Anna V. Smith has —Waleed Abdalati, director of the University of Colorado’s 27 Cowboys with surfboards Parts of Hawaii are surprisingly like spent most of her life in Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Oregon and Washington, Sciences (CIRES), a joint program with NOAA, explaining the new rural West By Don Olsen SCHIMEL where the evergreens NOAA’s work and how it impacts Westerners. 36 An expedition through the Edgelands p At the Mount meet the Pacific, and is Maya L. Kapoor More: hcne.ws/ask-noaa By Diane Sylvain St. Helens now an editorial fellow National Volcanic for HCN in Paonia. 37 Yaak attack At home at the Dirty Shame By Kate Schimel Monument,  @annavtoriasmith visitors compare 38 Together we pause By Ana Maria Spagna the cone to a

photo of it before Ana Maria Spagna number of California the eruption. lives and writes in 10residents million who were born outside of the United States DEPARTMENTS Jim Richardson Stehekin, Washington. Her most recent book is 3 FROM OUR WEBSITE: HCN.ORG t Loading SMITH Potluck: Community on 1 in 10 number of workers in the state canoes onto a the Edge of Wilderness. who don’t have documents needed to work legally 10 THE HCN COMMUNITY floatplane on  @amspagna Research Fund, Dear Friends Eddontenajon 65 percent of California adults polled who say the 20 TRAVEL MARKETPLACE AND GUIDE Lake in northern Diane Sylvain works state should have its own laws that protect the rights of British Columbia, as a copy editor at HCN. undocumented immigrants 33 MARKETPLACE during a 16-day She also writes essays, all-women canoe In early February, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforce- 40 HEARD AROUND THE WEST By Betsy Marston creates artwork and wor- trip. Krista Langlois. ries incessantly about the ment (ICE) officers arrested more than 160 people in Los Angeles during a sweep. The raid pre-empted legislation future of the apostrophe. SYLVAIN that would prevent California law enforcement from having to share information with ICE agents. The raids are Eric Wagner writes having a chilling effect on a burgeoning group of young about science and the activists: California’s Dreamers, unauthorized immigrant  @highcountrynews environment from Seattle, children and students protected under a tenuous Obama Washington, where he administration executive order. “I have such a huge sense Complete access to lives with his wife and of despair these days,” Karen Zapien, an activist, said. The subscriber-only content daughter. He’s currently sweep also signaled what was yet to come: an executive HCN’s website hcn.org writing a book about memo weeks later that has made all undocumented immigrants vulnerable to deportation. Ruxandra Guidi hcne.ws/digi-4904 Mount St. Helens. Digital edition More: hcne.ws/immigration-sweeps WAGNER www.hcn.org High Country News 3 Uncomfortable This land is my land? truths A Southerner discovers the West’s public lands

We asked readers: By Lyndsey Gilpin Where in the West have you traveled that helped you hrough my car window, I watched the 92 percent of that land lies in Western to find historic landmarks or places, and understand an T burnt orange blur of Utah rush by, states. Less than 5 percent of Kentucky a long trip to see them. Here, I hap- uncomfortable truth feeling dizzy as I tried to keep up with and several other Southeastern states is pily veered off-course for a spontaneous about the West? Here each new patch of sagebrush or tower- federally owned. The lack of immediate history lesson and a chance to wander is a sampling of their ing rock pile. I was on my first road trip access to nature inhibited my relation- through pockets of fire-scarred trees. answers. through the West, traveling from my ship with it. I adored exploring the At the Montezuma Valley overlook, I hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, to a outdoors, and yet I couldn’t help but feel waited until all the cars left, so I could new life in Los Angeles, and I’d already distant from it. So I was ill-prepared for stand alone at the edge. As I shivered in crossed hundreds of miles of big sky the sheer size of federal land Americans the chilly evening breeze, I focused on and open spaces. Suddenly, a blue-and- share — land that I had no idea existed the valley below, imagining it filled with green triangular signpost caught my eye, — and the cultural, political and econom- thousands of people bustling in villages identifying an agency I had never heard ic tangles in any given corner of it. and tending farmland. of: the Bureau of Land Management. About a week into the trip, outside In the last week of August, in the dead The next time I stopped, I pulled out of Durango, Colorado, a National Park of night, I pulled up at Chilao Camp- my phone and searched for it on Google, Service sign directed me toward Mesa ground in Angeles National Forest, just entering a rabbit hole of wikis and web- Verde, which preserves cliff dwellings outside Los Angeles — 4,300 miles from sites. I learned that the BLM manages from the Ancestral Puebloan communi- home. Angeles, the first national forest 264 million acres of public land, and that ties that lived there from about 600 to designated in California, covers about originally its holdings were considered 1300 A.D. It was only an hour out of the 700,000 acres and five designated wilder- “land nobody wanted.” way. Back East, visiting national parks ness areas. At 5,300 feet above sea level, Rian Laub For the next few days, I obsessively required deliberate planning, a search Chilao provided a respite from the smog scoured Utah for the perfect and traffic of the city below. Noisy truth at 14,000 feet remote, wild BLM camp- I did not know then Mount Sherman, site: cheap — or better yet, that the public lands and Colorado free — and secluded, silent the agencies that manage except for scurrying wildlife them would define the next My husband has been working on Colorado’s and howling wind. On a dirt two years of my life. I would Fourteeners since he road east of the Needles spend countless hours in the was about 14. We are District of Canyonlands national forest, in the Santa nearing 64. One year National Park, a few miles Monica Mountains and in I decided I needed to from the Hamburger Rock other nearby recreation ar- climb at least one so I Campground, I found my eas. By early 2016, the land- could experience what refuge: soft, flat red ground transfer movement dominat- he held so dear. So with one sprawling tree, ed the news; the first story we decided to climb miles of rocks to scramble, I remember reading — and Mount Sherman. As I slowly approached and a sunset that brought understanding — involved the summit, I started tears to my eyes. In the nar- the armed occupation of to hear the roar of a row beam of my headlamp, Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife motor. What was that I set up the tent, unrolled Refuge. Those militants were noise? I struggled my sleeping bag, and fought trespassing on my land. to reach the top to stay awake long enough But that night, a few and looked over to watch the stars appear in hundred yards from my tent, at the Henderson a sky clearer than I’d ever I just stood on a rock and molybdenum mine. seen before. I woke early to stared at the radiant lights My heart sank as I sit and sip coffee on one of of Greater Los Angeles. realized my effort to achieve what I those warm red rocks. A few Between my boots and my thought would be hundred yards away stood new home were thousands an enlightening that little BLM sign. of acres of protected land. experience just gave Back home in Kentucky, The glow of the full moon me a bird’s-eye view the whole concept of public sharpened the edges of of a giant machine lands — what they are, who chaparral and yucca — flora chewing up a protects them, why there I had never before encoun- mountain. It was then is an ongoing battle over tered. Though I was far from that I realized that the their management — rarely home, I felt more attached to quaint mines dotting the hills were really entered my consciousness. the land than ever, reveling just industrial sites in The wild spaces closest to in the fact that all of it — no the middle of pristine my hometown are privately matter where I was from or wilderness. It was owned or managed by the how long it took me to real- my first — and last — city or state. The federal ize it existed — was mine Fourteener. government owns 28 per- The drive through Angeles National Forest towards Big Tujunga Canyon. to discover, explore and — Kerry Coy cent of the U.S., and about Thomas Hawk/CC FLickr protect.

4 High Country News March 6, 2017 Anna Santo and Kate Lauth steer their canoe toward Red Goat Mountain on a calm stretch of the Spatsizi River. Krista Langlois

this,” we say in unison, and trot back to the group to throw down camp by a Go North, young woman mosquito-ridden stream. By 3 p.m. the next day, we’re battered, In a place no one can see you, you can see yourself more clearly smelly, smiling and back at the Spatsizi. “Mothah Rivah!” someone exclaims, as we Bay S rah Gilman shed clothes and plunge into the water. “Hey, check this out,” Krista yells, bending over some fireweed, then ambushes hink of your skin as a map. Roads are sparse here, so travel is Kate Lauth with a fistful of mud. Muck … Trust the Its marks inscribe a story of your by floatplane, boat, horse, and, for those T flies. Anna Santo paints a smiley face on road in your life. The raggedness of your fingertips who don’t mind shredding their flesh in her belly. Jen Crozier washes earth from from biting your nails. The lines in your thickets of grasping branches, by foot. name. Ride / Kate Greenberg’s hair. cheeks from laughing. The scar from sur- Which is why we’ve generally stuck with Your moon My scratches sting as I rinse the silt gery to help knit broken bone. The burn the canoes until now. But Krista Langlois hide through away, but I feel more comfortable in my you gave yourself when only pain would and Kate Greenberg, our navigators, had skin than I have in ages. There is no one the pitch calm you. The nick on your wrist that, consulted the topos and sparse guidebook here to see us, no one but ourselves to black. whenever you touch it, makes you think entries and identified the far end of Cold judge what we should do or what we are of the talus field where you stumbled and Fish Lake, which appeared to be about Gotsta be capable of doing. In a world that expects cut yourself, the mountain lake where a dozen miles off the Spatsizi, as a good your own women to look and act in certain ways, you washed the blood away. base to backpack into the high alpine for we’ve staked out territory where we can bride. On this August afternoon, the skin tarns and tundra. So we hauled out our move without thought for our bodies as — Angel Nafis, from on my calves is tanned dark, crisscrossed trusty boats and struck up a winding the poem “Ghazal for anything other than our native homes. with scratches, welted with bugbites, tributary called Mink Creek, where we Becoming Your Own We are making and remaking our maps, Country.” scummed over with beaver pond. On this would supposedly, eventually, find a trail. letting this place write itself on our arms August afternoon, my skin says that I’ve Three hours later, we’ve puzzled and legs — sketching where we’ve been, ventured into the boreal forest, and that through thatches of fallen logs and and where we might go, should we follow it’s kicking my ass. climbed in and out of the creek chan- these routes emerging below our feet, I’m a few days into a 16-day canoe nel dozens of times, but have traveled under our paddles, across our flesh. And trip with five girlfriends down the remote only a mile. Even when we find the first after dinner, Anna slides into a sassy red Spatsizi and Upper Stikine rivers — triangular trail-blaze nailed to a tree dress from the costume bag, grabs a fly joined threads in the high reaches of a and begin hoofing up a faint single track rod, and wades across the Mink to find a great system of braided, salmon-bearing through yet more tangled forest, Cold good spot to cast. waterways that originate in a swath of Fish hovers, mirage-like, beyond reach. northern British Columbia known as the At 8 p.m., Krista and I drop our packs he seeds of our excursion were planted Sacred Headwaters. It’s a place toothy and jog ahead through deepening blue in northern Minnesota, a place made with mountain ranges, broad-shouldered shadows until we can finally get a clear T as much of lake as of land. The Kates once with tundra plateaus, and furred with view of the lake’s placid waters. They’re attended a summer camp there that cul- endless forests of white and black spruce another decidedly unplacid mile away, minated in a 45-day wilderness canoe trip and bursts of poplar just turning gold. through a thickly vegetated bog. “Fuck

www.hcn.org High Country News 5 Uncomfortable and decided they wanted to carry that tra- alone in the middle of nowhere, alone in dition into their adult lives. In the summer the middle of everywhere. Then, we were truths of 2015, they reached out to like-minded in the water, swimming our first loaded women they’d met in college, through canoe to the portage that would put us on work, in Colorado mountain towns. the 135-mile stretch of river we’d waited Heartbreaking Krista had guided troubled teenagers so long to paddle. That night, as I climbed abstraction on backcountry excursions in Alaska. Jen into my tent on our first beach camp, becomes reality Tucson, Arizona and Kate L. had done the same in the mayflies glittered in my headlamp beam Southern Rockies. I’d spent a few sum- like animate stars. They reminded me of I lived two hours north mers building trails and studying birds in the constellation of bruises on my shins. of Tucson in 2011 and was in town the the high alpine. Kate G. had worked on They pointed the way. day Congresswoman restoring the Colorado River Delta across Gabby Giffords was the border in Mexico, and Anna had re- he trip spools out as languidly as shot. My husband searched beavers in Patagonia. All of us, T the river. We wake when we want, and I attended the now in our late 20s to mid-30s, loved the build morning campfires, stop when the vigil at the hospital idea of building a community of outdoors- impulse to explore strikes. Sometimes later that evening. women that we could keep coming back we float more than a dozen miles a day, The fact that someone to as we moved on into careers in writing, sometimes none. We fish for Arctic gray- could so easily get medicine, therapy and advocacy. ling and Dolly Varden trout that, cooked a gun and shoot a We weren’t aiming to make first in the coals, taste of snowmelt and salt. group of people in a Safeway parking descents of whitewater canyons. We just Not everyone has canoed whitewater lot — including a child wanted to be far out in the world together before, so on the calmer Spatsizi, Kate L. — had always felt like for the longest stretches we could muster. and Krista help us brush up on paddling an abstraction until I imagined us still at it in 30 years — strokes and practice swinging in and out that day. silver-edged women in the mold of Mardy of currents and eddies. Later, we mock — Anna Wilde Murie, a naturalist who raised her family up a pulley-assisted rope arrangement, in the wilds of Wyoming and Alaska and called a Z-drag, on a sapling. This would helped lead the charge to preserve the help us pull a canoe off a mid-river rock Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. should a mishap occur in one of the mel- We gave ourselves a name, Wild low but respectable rapids. Streak, and met by Skype on autumn eve- The boats become as beloved — and nings, researching the Northern rivers we irritating — as family members, and might float — the Noatak or Kluane, the we name them accordingly. There’s the Gataga and Kechika. We chose the Upper Sphincter, for the puckered passenger Stikine and its tributary Spatsizi for their openings in its ill-fitting brown canvas on- and off-water opportunities and the spray deck — a snap-on cover meant to fact that they fit our budget of $2,000 per keep the canoe from swamping. There’s person. We scoured trip reports, ordered the Pussy Rabbit, for the Russian femi- maps, marked out possible camps. Do- nist punk band and the pipe-smoking ing it just for ourselves didn’t seem like bunny emblazoned on the canoe’s red Mike Baird/CC Flickr enough, so we used the trip to raise sides. And there’s the sleek green 17-foot- money for nonprofits that give teen girls er that we vie for each day. That one we From paintings opportunities like the ones that helped us call Dan Brown. to “progress” in become confident in the wilderness — ul- Kate L. becomes my frequent pad- remote places timately bankrolling several scholarships dling partner, talking me through Santa Barbara, for canoe and glacier trips. maneuvers around submerged logs and California Finally, late last July, we rendez- whale-backed boulders, then pumping I live in Santa Barbara voused in Bellingham, Washington, her fist with me in triumph as I gain and don’t travel much, stuffed a minivan and sedan with gear, confidence steering Dan Brown from the but I have sailed and blew across the U.S. border and stern. In the wide valley where the Spats and backpacked the 1,000 miles of British Columbia to the pours into the broader, faster Stikine, we remote areas of this tiny backwater of Iskut. There, on the float over the hard line where the water county. The Chumash shore of Eddontenajon Lake, we piled shifts from opaque beige to a turquoise lived here for 15,000 into a floatplane. The unexpectedly so clear I can see river-bottom stones years and left a few handsome pilot, Dan Brown, flashed us a six feet below, our shadow slipping over rock paintings. The newcomers settled dimpled grin, then lifted us with Cana- them as if we’re still flying. here a little over 200 dian nonchalance into the sky. An old fire scar marks the shore with years ago and have Mountain ranges, then more moun- miles of skeletonized trunks, like a splat- nearly turned the area tain ranges, and then the Spatsizi ter of gray paint across the dark land- into a dead zone. uncoiled below us like a rope thrown scape. When it rains, which is often, the That’s progress. across the valley floor. Aprons of rust- drops bead brightly across the Stikine’s — Thomas Harper colored scree descended from high ridges surface before melting into its flow. We to oxbows that looped around pocket stay warm in skintight wetsuits and dub lakes. Our landing on one of them was so ourselves the Future Dolphin Trainers of smooth that I barely registered touch- America. In one spot, sheared-off earthen ing down until I saw spray jetting past banks rise 20 feet above our heads where my window. Standing on the gravel a landslide blocked the river earlier in the beach next to a fresh pile of bear scat, we summer. The Stikine still tears insistent- watched the floatplane rise again, drag its ly at the remains, dragging whole spruce reflection into the trees, vanish. We were trees free and pulling them along in the

6 High Country News March 6, 2017 pressed into the spongy forest floor. Odd Uncomfortable splashes ring from the river some nights, and groans and crashes haunt the bushes. truths Even one of the three moose that we actually see seems insubstantial as a ghost. The young bull clacks his teeth and rolls A camping trip turned more rugged his eyes, splashing down the center of the than planned channel, and then, when Krista and I turn Mesa, Arizona for a moment to navigate a riffle, vanishes I took my new son-in- without sound or trace. law for an overnight There are other mysteries, too. Along hike into the Supersti- one bar, the river’s high-water flows have tion Mountains, east left not-quite-cairns of clustered stones. of Phoenix. It was Oc- Delicate, almost deliberate, arrange- tober, and the weather ments of bone-white driftwood decorate in the Phoenix Valley high-water lines and former eddies. It’s was sublime. This was as if the country murmurs just beyond not a backpacking the edge of hearing, moves just beyond initiation, as I had the edge of vision, watches us as even we both a packhorse and a BLM-adopted wild watch it slip past. burro to pack the gear. But if the country keeps itself close, I put the “comforts of it steadily reveals us to one another. We home” (our tent and make decisions by consensus, move flu- two warm sleeping idly together on the water, support each bags) in a duffel and other taking risks, or choosing not to. securely — I thought On our last day, we come upon a — attached it to the significant rapid, one we’d failed to note horse’s pack saddle. on the map. Anna — one of our boldest With a late start, we could not reach the members, and one of the least expe- destination. It was rienced on whitewater — decides she pitch-dark. But some- wants to test her new steering skills. We where along the way, eddy out so she can replace Kate G. in the duffel fell off the the stern of the Sphincter, and all of us horse, and we had to rock-hop down the shore to scout routes set up camp huddled through midstream boulders that churn under sweat-saturated the Stikine into a froth. Then, we slide saddle blankets at back under our spray decks and push off, 4,100-foot elevation. one by one, into the current. — Tom Taylor Krista and Jen take the lead without incident, then Kate G. and Anna, who punches through a big hole, scoops in a fair amount of river, but does just fine. In p Anna Santo, Jen Crozier and Kate Lauth the rear, Kate L. steers the Pussy Rabbit use a map and GPS to try to ascertain the beautifully from the stern, while I paddle group’s location on the Spatsizi River. hard in the bow. Exposed rocks and pourovers slip by, waves splash across t During the bushwhack up to Cold Fish my arms and fill my lap. When the rapid Lake, amphibious footwear was necessary for spits us out into the slackwater of the the many stream, beaver pond and muddy tight canyon below, we lift our paddles to suckhole crossings. Krista Langlois the cloudy sky and cheer. Later, long after we’ve repacked our gear and driven hundreds of miles south, current beside our canoes. A thunder- we stop at a busy lakeside campground. I storm boils up over the confluence with cook dinner for the crew in silence, then the Pitman River as we’re eating dinner break away to sit at the water’s edge one evening. The towering clouds catch alone, feeling scraped out by the end of the last sun, send down a spark of rain- the journey, the sudden plunge into a bow, set the forest burning anew with frenetic world of strangers, cellphone light. We stand watching, ankle-deep in service, social media. Two loons paddle mud with our arms around each other, nearby, singing long and low from the our faces gold, our gnocchi forgotten. reeds. And then the full moon surprises Paul Asman and Jill Save for a man we glimpse a week me with its sudden appearance. Its first Lenoble/ CC FLickr into the trip, tending a remote riverside fingers of light fold over the ridges to the lodge, we meet nobody. Little wonder, east, slowly hoist its glare into the sky, then, that the landscape feels secretive. reach for my hands. I see my cracked We encounter few animals, but each sand- knuckles, the thick new calluses on my bar is brailled with tracks: Bears, both palms. Look where you’ve been, I whisper grizzly and black, wolves with paws larger to no one. Imagine where you’ll go. I wipe than my palms, bobcat, lynx, moose, bea- my eyes with the back of my wrist and ver, porcupine. We find skulls and antlers head back to my friends.

www.hcn.org High Country News 7 Uncomfortable when Willamette Industries added the plywood mill, 440 people worked there. truths Growing pains In 2002, it endured a hostile takeover by Weyerhaeuser, and by the fall of 2008, it In timber country, a writer returns had already gone through several rounds Fitting in a little of layoffs. The mill would close altogether too well to the old-growth forest of her youth a few months after Obama’s inaugura- post-election tion, firing its last 78 employees amid a Farmington, Utah Bay Ann V. Smith recession that fueled anger and resent- The day after the ment in my town — towards regulation, 2016 presidential election, my friends and I his winter, at home for the holidays, basically what created this,” he said, as sagging markets, joblessness, and, in needed some recupera- T I talked an old high school friend he walked down the path ahead of me. general, a changing world. tion time in the desert. into visiting one of our favorite stomp- After a few twists and turns in the I was part of a small group that saw We packed food, beer, ing grounds. The Valley of the Giants trail, we encountered our first giant, many of our peers as small-minded, or whiskey and guns. A is a small public-land inholding hidden one of the huge trees for which the place backwards. My friends and I wanted up couple of us stopped amid the carved-up timber country of is named: a Douglas fir, so tall that we and out. We’d read Ginsberg and Ker- at Cabela’s on the way western Oregon, a patch of old-growth couldn’t even see its first branch and so ouac, Thoreau and Emerson, and thought to get ammunition forest that offered an escape from my wide it would take at least five people to we knew all about howling at the moon, and propane. During home just outside of Dallas, Oregon. An wrap their arms around it. Its furrowed about transcendent self-reliance. We took checkout the employee awkwardly sized town, big enough for a bark, thick and old, was filled with moss, to exploring the network of logging roads scanned our propane too many times, and Wal-Mart but surrounded by farmland, its base covered in a mound of its own that wound through the hills and val- when we pointed Dallas lies 15 miles west of Salem and dead needles. leys of the Coast Range, west and north it out, his response doesn’t offer many reasons to visit. I had of town — short drives to wild places. was, “Oh, whoops, not seen the giants in eight years, but I n my first visit to Valley of the Sometimes we took day trips, sometimes you don’t need that had thought about the area often over the O Giants, I was a junior at Dallas High we went camping, but it was always just much propane. We last few months. So I asked CJ Drake, a School. That year, 2008, Barack Obama us — me, CJ, a few others — suspicious won the election; no friend who was also in town, to come with was elected president on a wave of hope, of any other cars we saw that far out need to head to the me, because it was tricky getting around even as the countdown began on the in nowhere. Some roads we followed to hills now.” Little did out there, and because he, too, loved the lumber mill in town. The mill, which was dead ends; on others, we’d drive through he know, that was exactly what we were valley. We had gone to high school and founded in 1905, had survived the Great a sylvan spiral, up and down logged-over doing — because we college together in Oregon, and he was Depression and two world wars. By 1955, mountains, until we got bored, or tired. had lost. But we were now in forestry school. And we both had diesel-truck-driving, begun to understand our roots in timber gun-toting, public- country in a different way, pushing past land-visiting Utahns, the teenage angst of small-town living so how could we be and coming to see our hometown as part disappointed with a of a much larger picture. Trump presidency? The The day was already getting on by assumption we shared the time we arrived at the trailhead. The his views was unnerving and uncomfort- winter sun had finally started to shine able. We left the store through the fog, and the thick trees on shaking our heads, either side of the road cast deep shadows. bound for The Swell. It was chillier than I thought it would be, — Erin Bragg and my fingers began to turn red as we stood there on the gravel, the only noise the distant rumble of the North Fork of the Siletz River. Fortified with a pre-hike snack of homemade Christmas cookies and fruit leather, we started down the narrow path, heading toward the river. On the drive to the trailhead, we had passed the signs of Oregon’s timber industry — semis filled with long logs and machines moving felled Douglas firs with giant claws, arched necks swiveling, wind- shields reflecting the cold sky. But here the woods were different. Life thrust through the soft forest floor. Fir saplings sprouted from downed logs, joined by the odd oily mushroom or bracket fungus. Lichen crept along the branches of hem- locks and firs above our heads. The 51- acre protected area, an island of Bureau of Land Management territory surrounded by timber companies, gets more than 180 inches of rain a year. The result is constant growth. CJ, the pragmatic one in our group of friends, had his own take. Rachel Zurer/CC Flickr “A lot of death and a lot of time, that’s

8 High Country News March 6, 2017 These gravel roads were nothing special, the tangle, I thought how easily you could but the rumble of the river on the rocks. Uncomfortable but sometimes they led us to a stream or get lost in here, without the river as a I gleefully skated over ice patches on the a river or a scenic vantage point, and al- reference point. The area is only lightly bridge to catch up with my friend. truths ways they took us toward a kind of peace: maintained, and the path winds around About halfway through the loop, we an absence of other people, a quietude and over downed trees, creating a ver- came upon Big Guy, a fallen 600-year- that we filled with a campfire, whiskey, dant labyrinth. old-plus Douglas fir that was once fa- and a bit of music, laughter and teenage Hidden throughout, I knew, were mous for being the second-tallest tree in ruckus. the various flora and fauna that rely on Oregon. Big Guy fell in 1981, at 230 feet The Valley of the Giants gave us the this mysterious ecosystem. In June, for tall, and was eventually sawed in half chance to explore a realm that seemed example, threatened marbled murrelets for the trail, so that visitors could walk mostly untouched, saved from the vora- fly in from the Pacific Ocean to roost in through the narrow passage made by the ciousness of industry. But in those days, I the high branches of the giants, one of cut. I stood in the trail between the two didn’t connect the giants to their sur- the dwindled old-growth stands left in massive halves of the tree, as though in roundings. I was simply in awe of the size the Coast Range. Creamy white trillium a corridor. The first time I came here, of the trees left standing, some nearly flowers open up along the forest floor, standing in that spot felt impressive. But 200 feet high and up to 450 years old. and wood sorrel runs rampant. it didn’t feel the same today. It felt better I imagined what the forest might have After the first big trees, we crossed to stand next to the living giants, not looked like centuries ago, but back then a steel footbridge over the Siletz River, one that had been cut in half, and with Scott Dietz I never really thought about its place in wide and shallow in this section, with clumsy initials carved into its rotting the modern world. white rapids crashing against smooth heart. boulders. I paused in the center of the As we made the loop and circled back Deep divides J and I continued down the path, bridge to watch the cold water run to the car, we passed a soaked wooden Central Oregon C where on both sides of the trail trees toward the ocean. Downriver, I caught picnic bench, a manmade anomaly in a Seeking solace from had fallen and were fading into the duff- a glimpse of two small creatures pulling damp silence. We took our time, stopping the cacophony of the covered ground, as new growth reached themselves out of the water, gray coats to watch moisture drip from lichen that presidential election, my family traveled for sunlight. Snapped-off snags jutted against gray rocks, sleek and silent river hung like tinsel from the firs, or the fog to our favorite place skyward, and tall firs that had tipped otters that had made this place their as it drifted through the woods, or the in our beloved state: over were caught in the canopy. Some home. I looked back to tell CJ, but he had sunlight that backlit the trees, giving the central Oregon, with trees had crashed to the ground long ago, gone on ahead, across the bridge and into whole forest a sense of holiness. its striking volcanic leaving craters where massive root balls the tree cover. The otters disappeared Driving back, we stopped at the site edifices, ponderosa hung suspended. As we walked through behind a boulder, leaving nothing behind of the abandoned town of Valsetz, look- pine forests and ing for remnants of the former logging sagebrush steppes. We community owned and operated by Boise stayed at our usual Cascade, a company that still exists cabin in LaPine State today. Established in 1920, the town once Park and explored the Deschutes River with had a school, a store and its own news- our 3-year-old son, paper (run by a 9-year-old, who proudly nourishing ourselves proclaimed, “We believe in hemlock, fir, in nature. We took a kindness and Republicans”). In 1984, the day trip to Christmas corporation drained the millpond, and Valley, passing myriad pushed out the residents. Finally, as if election signs en route, for metaphorical effect, the old mill was predominantly reading burned down. All that was left today was “TRUMP / PENCE.” a swamp filled with skinny alders. It Our new president- elect, and all the moral felt ghostly, haunted by the memory of and ethical bankruptcy the loggers who toiled away here, whose he represented, was work slowly ate away at the old-growth inescapable. These stands, nearly destroying them — before thoughts lingered as the town itself disappeared. I used to we visited Crack-in-the- think it was backwards for people to cling Ground, a remarkable to a known way of life, to what feels safe. 1,000-year-old fissure But in the end, the people here were as deep in the earth with exploited by outside forces as the trees jumbles of intimidating themselves. boulders and grassy, intimate paths between When I first explored the Valley of the them. It occurred to us Giants, it felt apart from everything — a that in descending this hidden place to be discovered, an escape cleft we were also navi- unconnected to the mill closures, the gating a metaphorical recession and the anger of my town. It divide among our own seemed like a place untouched by time or fellow citizens, one en- politics, an old-growth sanctum of murre- trenched in the history lets and otters. But seeing it again, years of this country but now later, I understood the forest as one small painfully pushed to the foreground. Moss and lichen piece of a confusing whole, as vulnerable — Matthew P. ornament the to human foibles as any other part. From living branches and decomposing trunks the West’s economically depressed towns, of trees in the Valley to the shining halls of its state capitols, of the Giants in the Valley of the Giants rests somewhere Oregon. in there, too, an ancient patch of land Mike Scofield that has somehow kept its secrets.

www.hcn.org High Country News 9 THE HCN COMMUNITY

RESEARCH FUND Thank you, Research Fund donors, from Montana and beyond

What They Left Behind By Richard S. Buswell 88 pages, hardcover: $29.95. Young poets, and a visit from University of New Mexico Press, 2017. our Bulgarian bureau chief In What They Left Behind, Richard Buswell takes ordinary bits of Montana’s past and renders them abstract and What promised to be a snowy from the Roaring Fork Valley. haunting in black-and-white photographs. Rather than white winter has quickly de- Twenty-three students from simply collect and arrange artifacts, he seeks to expose the volved into rain and mud here around the valley competed, unexpected beauty in their patterns and shapes. Divorced in Paonia, Colorado, where from context and cast in sharp light and shadow, antlers sharing work that ranged from and spokes, hip sockets and bulb sockets reveal their com- High Country News is head- angry, fearful anti-Trump verse mon geometries. quartered. The trails above to heartfelt expressions of teen Buswell had a long career as a physician, and the town are a sloppy mess, and angst and poems about love and photos in this book reflect the sensibilities of both a the mountains themselves are empowerment. “It was really medical professional and a deeply observant artist. already showing patches of inspiring to see young poets His subjects, from doll parts to bones, insistently evoke dirt and mud. The days have courageously take the stage and mortality. These images capture each object in an switched from rainy and gray to bare their souls,” says Brian, unsentimental state of “after”: after decay, after a lifetime balmy and bewildering, given who is currently working on of use, after abandonment, after death. But they also invite that it’s only February. The an MFA in poetry from nearby us to notice the beauty concealed in everyday details, and in the forgotten fragments of our own lives. deer are happily sharing hay Western State Colorado Univer- R EBecca Worby meadows and cornfields with sity. “I asked to be invited back the cattle, and there are reports next year.” Church Window, 2014. Richard S. Buswell of sandhill cranes already pass- Our farthest-flung ing through — way early. contributing editor, Jonathan Of human migratory Thompson, who is currently visitors, we’ve seen but a few in living in Bulgaria, stopped by recent weeks. Readers Vern and for a rare visit. Jonathan was in Melinda Hill from Grand Junc- Denver as a featured guest for Donna K. Flynn | Nederland, CO Ken & Sandra Nelson | Grand Junction, CO tion, Colorado, dropped in to the premiere of Beyond Stand- Rick Fornelius | Cottonwood Heights, UT Richard Nelson | Tucson, AZ see the office in mid-February. ing Rock, a documentary on B. Frank | Hesperus, CO Paul Olson | Wise River, MT The two retired teachers came tribal sovereignty, where he dis- Jolyn Ortega | Missoula, MT Beverley Frieday | Albuquerque, NM out for a drive on a sunny day, cussed the recently designated Kate Parker | Evanston, IL James Geier | Denver, CO visiting Hotchkiss and Domin- Bears Ears National Monument Jessica Gibbs | San Francisco, CA Tom & Ramona Parry | Dove Creek, CO guez Canyon before winding up in Utah — the subject of his Daniel A. Gillenwater | Park City, UT Haley & Andrew Jones | Phoenix, AZ in Paonia. Jim Matusoff, a new feature story “A Monumental Larry Glickfeld | Wenatchee, WA Annalisa Peace | San Antonio, TX reader, also came by in Febru- Divide” in HCN’s Oct. 31, 2016, Warren Gold & Roberta Newman | William & Judit Perry | Carbondale, CO ary. Jim made the move to the issue. From Paonia, Jonathan Mill Valley, CA Susan B. Peterson | Salt Lake City, UT Western Slope of Colorado just headed west to Utah to say Paul Gordon | Helena, MT Joanna Picchi | Dallas, OR last year after working in com- hello to some red rock before Barbara Gorges | Cheyenne, WY Ken & Linda Pierce | Bozeman, MT munications in Tucson, Arizona, returning to Bulgaria. Always Richard Guinchard | Boulder, CO Betty Pingel | Westminster, CO and is now enjoying the retired good to see you, Jonathan! Greg Heiden | Bertrand, NE Janelle Plattenberger | Sun City, AZ life in Paonia. Thanks for sub- We also have an update on Robert Heinzman | Lee, MA Verna Pottorff | Grand Junction, CO scribing and coming by, Jim! Lisa Song, former HCN intern John Hermanson | Boise, ID Mayre Press | Evanston, IL As busy as we are with our from the 2010 cycle. Lisa, who Gail Heylmun & Gary Sandusky | Boise, ID Trudy Robideau | San Diego, CA normal biweekly publishing won a Pulitzer Prize for Na- Ann Hinckley | Powell, WY Anthony Roybal | Berkeley, CA schedule, HCN staffers some- tional Reporting in 2013, will be Hollie S. Hohlfelder | Albuquerque, NM Meg Ruby & Jonathan Lindgren | Portland, OR how find time for other projects moving on from InsideClimate Candace Hyde-Wang | Berkeley, CA Loren C. Sackett | Tampa, FL and community efforts. News to ProPublica, to work as Michelle Inama, The Nature Conservancy | Mark Saurer | Park City, UT Managing Editor Brian a reporter covering the envi- Kirkland, WA Nick Sayen | Des Moines, IA Calvert was recently a judge ronment, energy and climate Jack Jensen | Kenmore, WA Les Schaub | Glenwood Springs, CO at the Aspen Words Fourth change. And to think she started Robert & Betty Johnson | Minnetonka, MN Barbara Schmaltz | Highlands Ranch, CO Annual Youth Poetry Slam in off in Paonia! Good luck to you, Stephen M. Jones | Scottsdale, AZ Dougald Scott | Santa Cruz, CA Carbondale, Colorado, which Lisa, you make us proud. Kenneth Kelly | Columbia, SC Sally Ann Sims | West Chester, PA featured the original poetry of John Kindel | Elizabeth, CO Liz & Mark Spidell | Glenwood Springs, CO middle and high school students —Anna V. Smith for the staff Allen King | McCall, ID Shelley Stallings | Ketchikan, AK Charles & Anita King | Santa Fe, NM Calvin & Mary Strom | Fort Collins, CO Vern and Melinda Naomi & Ward Kroencke | Madison, WI Chuck Sugent | Denver, CO Hill stopped by Abby Krumel | Santa Rosa, CA Steve & Darlene Thompson | Scottsdale, AZ our offices on an Maya ter Kuile-Miller | La Jara, CO Donni Toth | Pinedale, WY afternoon roadtrip Severt & Mary Kvamme | Arvada, CO around the Western Ann & Ermanno Vanino | Piñon Hills, CA Vickie Laughlin | Colorado Springs, CO Slope. Tim Voskuil | Albuquerque, NM John LeVine | Los Angeles, CA Brooke Warren Doris Wehrmacher | Crawford, CO Abigail Lute | Boise, ID Jon Weimer | Denver, CO David J. MacDonald | Reno, NV Daniel Wetmore | Littleton, CO Tom & Barb MacGillivray | Windsor, CO Sara Leigh Wilson & Marty Wilson | James T. Martin | Thousand Oaks, CA Crooked River Ranch, OR John & Lynn Matte | Albuquerque, NM Julice A. Winter | Livermore, CA Joan McCarter | Boise, ID Jan Wright & A. Christopher James | Sean & Lori McConnor | New Meadows, ID Sandia Park, NM Wayne Miller | Newark, CA Lawrence Wysocki | Denver, CO Steve Neff | El Cerrito, CA Richard & Frances Zweifel | Kanab, UT

www.hcn.org High Country News 11 12 High Country News March 6, 2017 Now You See Her Enduring relationships begin with encounters FEATURE By Maya L. Kapoor

yla is done for the morning. Amanda, crouching behind a snag, waves at her through the ocotillo and mesquite, but Hyla is not coming over, not in this wind. Not for all Hthe glistening raw rodent flesh in the world. She’s down a hill, almost out of sight. She stays there. Gliding near the ground, maneuvering between saguaros, braking precisely — this is difficult for Hyla to do on any day. Ferruginous hawks are the largest soaring hawks, or buteos, in the United States; they stand almost two feet tall, and their wings can reach four feet from tip to tip. Because of their size, buteos are slow to lift off. It takes them several broad flaps to clear grass clumps and junipers and ascend to where thermals can carry their weight for miles, sometimes thousands of feet above the ground. On especially windy days, short demonstra- tion jumps are difficult for Hyla to navigate, and if she gets up a little too high, she soars like a kite. “Wheeeeeeee!” Amanda, Hyla’s handler, says by way of explanation. Hyla’s handlers don’t press her on days when she demurs. On the blustery morning I attend Raptor Free Flight at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Muse- um outside of Tucson, hoping for a glimpse of Hyla on the wing, all I see of her is a distant blur of white and rust-red, hopping once from a human’s glove-covered arm to a nearby tree branch and back. Carroll, the docent, a charmer with chin-length gray hair who is mic’ed over a loudspeaker, maintains a calm, engag- ing monologue about Hyla’s species, while making dramatic decapitation motions at Amanda — Should I cut Hyla’s part of the show? Amanda, in the creosote, gives a quick nod. During Raptor Free Flight, birds of prey such as Hyla are handled without jesses or hoods, the leashes and eye-covers falconers use. They are tethered to their handlers by the draw of fresh, uncooked animal protein — rabbit chunks, mouse heads, quail eggs. A crowd of Desert Museum visitors jostles behind metal gates, gasping and shooting video as one bird after another flits up from the shrubs. “Notice the top of your head and the bottom of your feet,” Carroll says. “That is your space.” Everything else belongs to the birds. “Are our eyes the top of our heads?” a woman asks tremu- lously. Corralled with other humans while predators glide just overhead, it’s easy to feel like prey. Pick me, I think, envious each time a raptor swoops within inches of another person’s head. Hawks, primates: We must be equally inscrutable to one another. And it’s so easy to confuse

Hyla, a ferruginous hawk, swoops low during Raptor Free Flight at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Don Sorensen, courtesy ASDM www.hcn.org High Country News 13 that hoods her head and cascades across her shoulders and wings, a watered-down tea color staining her chest and muscu- lar legs. It’s these rusty markings that give her species the name “ferruginous” — from ferrum, Latin for iron. Hyla’s scientific name is Buteo regalis, the regal hawk. Ferruginous hawks resemble eagles, with deeply set eyes under dramatic eye ridges, severely hooked beaks, and legs feathered all the way to their feet. Arthur Cleveland Bent, an early 20th century ornithologist, approved of the name — he may even have nursed some eagle envy. “This latest name, regalis, is a very appropriate one for this splendid hawk, the largest, most powerful, and grandest of our Buteos, a truly regal bird,” he writes in the 21-volume Life Histories of North American Birds. “One who knows it in life cannot help being impressed with its close relationship to the golden eagle, which is not much more than a glorified Buteo.” Hyla’s call is the thin, high note of an eagle: A fluted sound so delicate that it’s replaced with the cry of a red-tailed hawk in old Westerns. It’s a piercing piccolo I’ve always found too fragile for an eagle’s powerful form, revealing in sound a vulnerability not obvious by sight. This is all I know about Hyla’s history: Twelve years ago, she and her brother tumbled too early from their nest in Mon- tana. A falconer kept the pair alive. Ferruginous hawks nest in sun-struck places — sagebrush and native grassland, generally. In the nest, a chick’s body temperature can fluctuate from 104 to 109 degrees Fahrenheit in a few hours. Nest- lings huddle under each other for shade while their parents forage. Left alone, they sometimes find relief from the heat by seeking a breeze at the windward side of the nest. In his memoir of studying ferruginous hawks for three years as a gradu- ate student, wildlife biologist Leon Powers describes babies sitting on the edge of the nest, legs sticking out in front of them, feet Visitors watch as a great horned owl, LB, skims past cholla during Raptor Free Flight at the Arizona-Sonora Desert to the wind, mouths gaping open, catch- Museum. Jordan Glenn ing the breeze on hot prairie afternoons. (“They have huge gapes,” Carroll tells me. I attend inscrutability with wildness, instincts cartoonish, the birds’ lives cynically Hyla, in fact, was named for a genus of with secrets. I long for a raptor to fly circumscribed for money. How could birds cavernously mouthed tree frogs.) shows like close enough to ruffle my hair with the preening on saguaros matter to tropical Sometimes accidents happen. Even movement of its wings, as if proximity deforestation or climate change? when chicks are safely ensconced within Raptor would mean that a wild animal chose to I stopped feeling snobby about the a nest, the nest itself may be unwieldy — Free Flight collapse that other distance between us, right way to connect with nature once I less construction project than hormonally letting me into its world, acknowledging realized what nourished my own pas- driven nest Jenga, a prolonged bonding believing me as one of the wild ones, too. But the sion and curiosity about science and the ritual for the parent ferruginous hawks. birds keep their distance. outdoors. What stood out were visceral The whole thing may topple in a strong a moment In my 20s, Raptor Free Flight would moments of connection that could happen wind. I imagine a storm blew baby Hyla have upset me. In college, two decades anywhere — on coastlines, under trees, in and her fuzzy, awkward brother over the under wing ago, I spent four years learning about the creeks, beside microscopes, in classrooms rim of their nest, built in a low-growing might change environmental catastrophes my genera- — moments that seemed, in some quiet juniper tree or on a mound of earth. I tion faced. Later, I collected biological way, to stop time. Now, with a bit more imagine that a recreationist or rancher a person field data in locations popular with tour- life experience — and, perhaps, humility found them on the ground, tangled in ists, from San Francisco to Yellowstone — I attend shows like Raptor Free Flight grass or struggling on sun-beaten soil, profoundly, National Park. I came to comport myself believing a moment under wing might and called the falconer because he was an including me. as a weary insider to environmental change a person profoundly, including me. expert in raptor care. heartache, detached from the naiveté of Ferruginous hawks, however, are not less well-informed visitors. Back then, rom below, Hyla glows pale white popular pets among falconers. “Prospec- I would have considered Raptor Free against the sky. Closer up, she ap- tive owners of this bird of prey should Flight’s treatment of wild animals F pears to wear a deep reddish cape consider their level of experience with 14 High Country News March 6, 2017 raptor birds very carefully before buying Being at the center was very stress- oes rescue do nothing for the birds? ferruginous hawks, as these birds can be ful for many of the birds. My supervisor The summer I worked at the reha- extremely temperamental and require understood this. The discomfort and fear Dbilitation center, people brought in expert handling,” warns the British web- these wild animals felt interacting with clutches of featherless, blind birds to be site Birdtrader.co.uk. “Some ferry hawks humans, no matter how soft our voices or fostered and released. Every half-hour can be exceptionally difficult to train, steady our hands, sometimes outweighed in the nursery, a chorus of tiny screams so amateur falconry enthusiasts should the prospect of their eventual release. crescendoed and then subsided as we perhaps consider alternative birds.” Hyla, Captivity could result in injuries stuffed moist puppy chow into beaks with though not the most social of creatures, despite careful veterinary work. Bumble- long silvery feeding tools. After every made the cut for Raptor Free Flight. Her foot, for example, begins as lesions on a feeding, we cleaned out the strawberry more aggressive brother was “sent to live at some zoo,” Carroll says vaguely.

escuing does nothing for the birds,” my supervisor at a wild “Rbird rehabilitation center told me, after neither of us worked there anymore. I worked at the center the summer after I graduated from college. It was a converted home (previously a barn) in north-central New Jersey, full of wiped- down surfaces, bright lights and piles of towels. The center’s founders lived there in the 1960s, before shooting raptors was illegal. Eventually, they moved into the house next door. Now, hand-built walk-in aviaries, connected by trails, dotted the center’s wooded property, and waterfowl swam in a large walk-in cage with a pool. A gift shop in a squat wooden building across the gravel from the house sold T-shirts. The littlest songbirds had sunken shoulders and yellow beaks closed in exaggerated frowns. I cupped them under my shirt, against my skin, until their icy bodies became warm or terribly still. Older songbirds lived in outdoor aviaries until they were ready for release. The center specialized in caring for injured or orphaned raptors, which stayed in rows of individual cages up a flight of stairs in an area generally off-limits to volunteers. Evolved to eat squeaking meals, wielding sharp beaks and claws, raptors require special handling, sanguineous food. We taught them to hunt in a hacking cage, an outdoor aviary large enough for young birds to glide and dive. We “taught” a young hawk or falcon by waiting until the Ferruginous hawk chicks in an eye-level nest atop a stunted tree in Montana. Ron Dudley bird was hungry, then letting it perch up high and releasing a live mouse. At the sight of the tentative mouse exploring the bird’s foot soles and can cause crippling pint containers in which the chicks lived, edges of the cage, the raptor’s instincts or life-threatening infections. Rather than moving on to the next box until everyone took over, its aim improving with prac- being euthanized, raptors whose injuries was asleep again. The nursery was the tice. On occasion, while cleaning songbird left them unreleasable were kept in cages building’s kitchen when the center was aviaries elsewhere on the property, I on-site for the duration of their lives, a a home. The baby boxes sat along the old pretended not to see a refugee mouse nib- practice that my supervisor questioned. island countertop. Between feedings, I’d bling fallen birdseed. To my mind, it had Even the fostering of birds that seem clean the sink, pulling out mealworms, earned its freedom. completely unbothered by temporary cap- fetal mice, seeds and whatever else hap- The center had an educational com- tivity — the glossy dark starlings greedy pened to gather over the drain, and toss ponent as well: Many visitors walked enough to yank feeding tools right out it all into the trash. When the trash filled through the grounds to see birds in aviar- of my fingers; the inquisitive, awkward up, I lugged it away. I walked the trails ies. Staff carried raptors into schools to young crows we had to feed wearing hand between scattered outdoor aviaries with teach children about conservation. The puppets so that they didn’t, in the end, cleaning supplies, removing droppings winter of my sophomore year of college, crave human company — had question- from floors, changing water, checking when I volunteered at the center, I some- able value as a conservation strategy. feed. I did this endless physical work be- times carried a kestrel on my wrist, train- People were unlikely to encounter and lieving it mattered. With our care, many ing him for teaching programs, training bring us rare species. And wild bird reha- small birds grew their flight feathers and myself to act detached while my heart bilitation — one concussed woodpecker, flew away; many older birds recuperated raced, trying not to love the complicated poisoned vulture, or bullet-torn owl at a from human-caused injuries and swam, feelings that came with tying something time — hardly seemed to connect with flew, or waddled off. We did not differenti- wild, and beautiful, and self-contained, to larger-scale conservation issues, such as ate between native or non-native species, my arm. habitat destruction or climate change. between common or rare; we took all

www.hcn.org High Country News 15 birds, from eagles to show chickens, doing chooses to feel, and act upon, compas- treat, and the staff will remove the scale. our best to keep them comfortable and sion for a vulnerable animal — matters. Weighing Hyla after every Free Flight is calm until the eagles could be released or Whether you pull over your car to round a way to keep track of how much food she the show chickens found a new home. up the gawky yellow goslings whose eats during the show so she isn’t over-fed My supervisor did work that I wasn’t Canada goose mother lies smashed on later. trained for: surgeries, disentanglements, the road, or gently close a shoebox lid on Hyla does not want anyone invading euthanasia. Perhaps it curdled her heart. a window-fractured woodpecker, or help her territory. Her neighbor, a prairie fal- an awkward young falcon master hunt- con named Franklin, is a personable bird ing, your choice has symbolic and actual amenable to primate friendliness. Hyla significance. Such a small yet active way is not friendly. She glints and screams. of caring unselfishly, of affirming or dis- Ferruginous hawks rarely participate in covering where things stand between you free flight programs because of their be- and other living beings, matters. I decid- havior. It would be unfair to blame their ed long ago that rescuing wild birds was personalities; that would deny the role of meaningful, most of all, for the people do- evolution in shaping a ferruginous hawk’s ing the rescuing — profoundly so. There temperament, perception of threat, re- may be a limited number of ways for a sponse to other living beings. person to acknowledge that her choices One of Amanda’s coworkers gives me directly impact the lives of other, wilder my own treat, the chance to toss Hyla a organisms. Some of us choose to gather hard-boiled quail egg. The small egg is up an orphaned infant hawk, fluffy and rubbery and sticks to my palm, and for ungainly and really pissed off, settle it a moment I have a terrible premonition into the quiet darkness of a cardboard that it will stay stuck, and that Hyla will box, and drive it to people who know get very angry. I have no idea what hap- what to do next. The idea we’ve heard pens to the egg, because after it hurtles so often — that our choices, our actions, toward Hyla, I slip behind the aviary produce ripples — suddenly rustles its door, hiding from those sharp yellow feathers in the car seat next to us. eyes. My fear surprises me. Then again, Almost all of the birds skimming past the staff has cautioned me that Hyla is during Raptor Free Flight are alive be- a human imprint. Had she stayed in her cause of such an impulse, including Hyla. birth nest and grown up in the wild, Hyla would flee from humans — those strange, fter Free Flight, I say hello to Hy- noisy, featherless, bipedal predators — la’s handler, Amanda, who has been as well as from their lights, machinery A rewarding the raptors throughout and vehicles. Instead, hand-raised since this morning’s flights with food. Like the before her first feathers grew in, Hyla other staff and volunteers I have seen, believes humans are what she looks Amanda wears bland desert colors. Un- like; she thinks she is human, insofar as folded from her position behind nearby she conceives of herself. As a result, she foliage, she is lanky, taller than I’d real- considers humans to be competitors for ized. Her dark hair skims the top of her resources in her territory. And as far as sunglasses and covers her ears. She holds Hyla is concerned, the Desert Museum is out her hand. I grasp it eagerly, realizing her territory — though the great horned belatedly that it’s covered in blood. owl believes it’s hers, and the red-tailed Hyla and the other raptors return to hawk is convinced that it’s his. This is their aviaries in hand-carried animal car- why visitors at Free Flight must stay riers, which the birds find less stressful in their spaces and why no one enters than being carried in the open the whole Hyla’s aviary while she is in it. Just as a way. Amanda and her coworkers make wild ferruginous hawk would dive, crying the carriers by putting perches inside out, all wings and talons, at an interlop- small dog crates and modifying their ing hawk in its territory, Hyla would doors to slide open more smoothly. chase a human from hers. The mews is in a secluded place, so After Hyla is back in her carrier, I pop the raptors can relax when they are not my head into her aviary to look around. A earning their keep. Mews — the word long, clean space, with a few perches and comes from meur, French for to change — a sandy floor. Lots of light from the mesh were developed by falconers to hold birds wall. “She likes to watch bird TV,” Aman- p Amanda For years, she witnessed the worst of bird of prey while they molt. At the Desert da says, meaning, the world. Amanda in- Timmerman, lead suffering, and by extension the worst of Museum mews, each bird has its own vites me to open Hyla’s carrier so she can trainer at the Desert humanity. The worst I saw balanced out aviary, blocked off so the birds can’t see settle in her aviary, now that the scale is Museum, prepares a breakfast of small against the rhythm of everyday feeding each other. But the walls facing the des- removed. I stand behind her carrier while birds and organs for and cleaning. Helping with surgery was a ert are fine mesh, so the birds can watch doing this, so that if Hyla turns on me, I’ll the raptors. treat. And I had to believe that rehabili- the world go by. Occasionally, a snake or have somewhere to cower. u Timmerman tation mattered for the birds, because the mouse slips through her aviary’s window I reach over the front of the car- weighs the good Samaritans who’d brought in naked frame, and Hyla, a veteran hunter, kills rier and carefully slide the door open. ferruginous hawk, nestlings, handling them with quiet it. But I’m not quick enough; Hyla bursts Hyla, during feeding tenderness, sometimes went right back Tension pervades the mews, mainly through, bashing her shoulders against time. to doing whatever it was that had caused because of Hyla’s unsociability. She is still the doorframe before she erupts into her Jordan Glenn the nest to fall. in her carrier while the staff prepares aviary. Ohjesuschrist, I exclaim, jumping Does wild bird rescuing do nothing to weigh her. This requires using a treat back. Amanda and her coworkers laugh. for the humans? I believed then, and to entice Hyla to dash from the carrier We shut the door to the aviary. Hyla is no still believe, that the moment when a to the aviary. In the aviary, she will sit longer a white-and-brown blur to me; now person narrates herself into the story of a on a perch scale for a moment. Then she she is a sound and sensation of power, distressed animal’s life — when a person will dash back to her carrier for another a bang reverberating through plastic

16 High Country News March 6, 2017 and metal into my hands and up to my shoulders. I had not expected so much force out of a 4-pound bird. Soft feathers and hollow bones are deceptive; it’s easy to forget this beast can land hard enough to drive her talons deep into the muscles of a thrashing rabbit and then take off again. After Carroll and I leave the mews, I ask if Hyla will likely ever come across a male of her species. I imagine her out in the wild, weaving creosote branches into a nest so big I could curl up inside it. Fer- ruginous hawks are monogamous, Carroll tells me, to the extent that humans are. Mated ferruginous hawk pairs main- tain breeding territories in the northern shrub-steppe and grasslands of the Great Basin Desert and Great Plains of Idaho, Montana, Wisconsin and Canada. Ferru- ginous hawks do not engage in the showy mating behaviors of some birds — elabo- rate winged dances, complex singing or aggressive aerial displays. Instead, they bond over their homes. Some humans pick out bath towels together; ferruginous hawks pick out twigs and branches. They build up to four or five nests together scattered throughout their territory. On succeeding years, they return to their territory and visit their nests, renovat- ing them, adding twigs and soft lining — perhaps the inner fibers of juniper bark or bits of vegetation — before finally choosing where to lay eggs for the season. Nests can be several feet high and four to five feet across. Unlike other raptors, ferruginous hawks will build nests in trees, on cliffs, or directly on the ground, messy piles that grow larger and larger over the years. Sometimes songbirds build nests within the sides of ferruginous hawk nests. In the early 1900s, biologists found hawk nests made of interwoven antelope Caption. Credit ribs and bison bones, lined with soft bison fur. When wildfires passed through, the circles of bones were left behind. In 1995, the Journal of Raptor Research described a nest in Saskatchewan that was in use for 32 years consecutively, with baby ferruginous hawks hatching there every year. Ferruginous hawks don’t live much longer than 20 years at the most, but they do migrate back to their regions of birth, so it may have been an old family residence. In answer to my question about Hyla’s mating prospects, Carroll shakes her head — the Sonoran Desert is not the normal haunt of wild ferruginous hawks. Hyla would have to go about 70 miles east to the agricultural fields of Sulphur Springs Valley, where rodent populations support some wintering birds. “But even if she did,” Carroll said, “I don’t know if she would recognize the other hawk as the same thing as her.” I wonder about this later. Wasn’t there anything a male ferruginous hawk could do, a soft whistle, a hurtling dive, a gift of fresh cottontail, something unassailable by human fostering, that would trigger pair-bonding in Hyla? Once in a while, on a flight, Hyla takes off on the kind of long

www.hcn.org High Country News 17 Caption. Credit

Amanda soar her body was built for. She wings it herds of bison or haunted by hungry bad- all driven through seemingly unend- Timmerman, to a nearby hill, Brown Mountain. When gers and coyotes, the hawks’ willingness ing, monotonous stretches of sagebrush. lead trainer at the she gets there, she perches on a familiar to abandon their low-lying nests at the How could all that gray-green vegetation Arizona-Sonora cliff and waits for a handler to come get first hint of danger may have made them possibly disappear?” He attributes this Desert Museum, her in a truck. more likely to survive to nest again. Skit- loss of habitat to a combination of fire displays Solo, If Hyla did somehow mate, it would tishness combined with site loyalty: It’s a and invasive cheatgrass, Bromus tecto- a Chihuahuan raven, to the crowd pose some interesting logistical chal- bad combination for a species that nests rum. Cheatgrass — an annual that turns gathered for Raptor lenges at the Desert Museum. Often, where North Americans dig, bulldoze and brown and inedible in the spring and Free Flight. nesting ferruginous hawks do not take frack. summer when other plants are just wak- Jordan Glenn well to humans handling, tagging, or even Wild ferruginous hawks live in the ing up — cheats farmers of their wheat simply approaching them. Leon Powers, open spaces of Western North America: crops by invading fields. Introduced from the wildlife biologist and author, learned shrublands and native grasslands rang- Europe in the 1800s via shipping ballast, this the hard way at the beginning of his ing from Canada to Texas, where a nest agricultural products and livestock feed, study, when he tried to hang a camera just eight feet up in a juniper provides cheatgrass has become a dominant grass over a ferruginous nest and scared the a good view. These plant communities in the Intermountain West. Cheatgrass parents away from their three chicks. are not as vast as they once were. “How burns intensely, wiping out native grass- The adults stayed away overnight. One is it possible that something as domi- es and shrubland, erasing ferruginous chick died of exposure; Powers took home nating and widespread as sagebrush in hawk habitat. Then it’s the first plant to the other two for emergency feeding and Western North America could be threat- grow back once the ashes have settled, warming. This shyness must have served ened?” Powers asks in the epilogue to sucking moisture so quickly from the soil Hyla’s fore-hawks well. When their wide- his memoir, Hawk in the Sun. “After all, that other plants have nothing to drink. open territories were filled with musky even in our lifetime, we Westerners have Paradoxically, in the American South-

18 High Country News March 6, 2017 west, fire suppression also has whittled Artificial nests, such as those created decisions believing their own actions mat- away at hawk habitat, letting woodlands by the BLM, pose a different question ter. Because of that, their actions will. grow over native grasslands. “Ferrugi- than wild animal rehabilitation. This is If it’s developers or resource extraction nous hawks hunt in a catlike manner,” the dependency — or the salvation — of companies who erect nesting platforms hawk expert Joe Schmutz explained. entire populations, and as now imple- only because their contracts to use fed- “Very arid grassland is their primary mented, might not even work. In 2011, re- eral lands require that they do, then no. home. Wherever forest encroaches, fer- searchers in New Mexico walked toward But in those cases, the way things stand, ruginous hawks tend to avoid.” nesting ferruginous hawks and measured I don’t think anything would matter for Journalist Paul Tolmé points a finger how close they could get before the birds the birds. at resource extraction as well, attribut- flushed — and often attacked. The re- ing habitat loss to the George W. Bush searchers calculated the buffer distance fter my visit to the Desert Mu- administration’s pro-development the hawks needed in order to not aban- seum, I visit the Raptor Free Flight approach to public lands. Under Bush, don their nests, waste energy or expose A website. There’s a gorgeous photo energy-development restrictions by their young by freaking out: 650 meters, of Hyla perching on a thick dead branch. federal agencies such as the Bureau of or approximately 2,133 feet. That’s seven Against the gray, her orange digits, taper- Land Management became more difficult football fields, almost twice the BLM’s ing to black claws, appear long and sharp to justify. Oil and gas companies paid the currently used quarter-mile buffer. When to me, but the caption tells me her spe- salaries of temporary BLM employees it came to more intense disturbances, like cies’ feet are small in comparison to those who processed permit requests. To meet mining or construction, the researchers of other hawks. I read that ferruginous the requirements of the Migratory Bird recommended a buffer of one kilometer hawks can form fists with their feet and Treaty Act, the BLM built artificial nest- during nesting season. These buffers punch through burrows, yanking prey ing platforms with buffer zones where would protect ferruginous hawks — out of the dirt. Carroll has seen wintering ferruginous hawks could breed away which are listed as sensitive species by hawks in southern Arizona stalking along from wells. But the zones applied only to the BLM and the Forest Service — and fallow fields and plucking grasshop- During new wells. Workers approached old wells also, perhaps more to the interest of pers with their claws in a manner more Free Flight, within buffer zones even when adult developers, follow the federal Migratory reminiscent of dinosaurs than modern hawks had chicks nearby to protect. Oth- Bird Treaty Act, which makes killing birds. These hawks dwell in the liminal visitors come ers have blamed the intentional shooting migratory birds or destroying their nests zone of earth and sky, a shoreline I rarely and poisoning of ferruginous hawk prey or eggs illegal. But these larger buffer consider. close to bird — prairie dogs and rabbits — along with distances have not been adopted. During Free Flight, visitors come species they urban sprawl and outdoor recreation for Developers, biologists and consultants close to bird species they otherwise might reducing ferruginous hawk populations. may argue about the size of buffer areas never notice, much less approach. The otherwise Ferruginous hawks have been pro- during nesting season. I have worked in birds of Free Flight who brush a soft posed for listing under the Endangered environmental consulting and have seen downdraft along faces and cameras, who might never Species Act more than once, and rejected how an environmental law may be both land powerfully on handlers’ arms to each time. Some states list them on their the last hope and a great sellout when quietly tug at meat curled inside fists, notice, endangered species lists, and Canada has it comes to environmental protection include species I have not seen in the much less bumped ferruginous hawk status up and — how the same codified words can at wild. I am not a birder. Sometimes birds down more than once on its version of the different times be the best and the worst catch my eye, and I name the familiar approach. Endangered Species Act. this country has, depending on who reads ones, the ones attracted to the edges that When it comes to rare animals, it’s them. humans make between cities and wild easier to focus on direct threats with The most prolific ferruginous hawk places: raven, red-tailed hawk, woodpeck- obvious solutions: overhunting, DDT researcher, Joe Schmutz, describes artifi- er, jay. From working long ago at the wild spraying, prey poisoning. But the des- cial nests as a necessary but insufficient bird rehabilitation center, I know that tinies of ferruginous hawks are largely tool for ferruginous hawk conservation. a breathtaking diversity of bird species determined by broad ideas: changing “People are naturally fond of artificial lives in North America at least part of the land use in the West and the impacts of nest programs,” he writes, “because it ap- year. This avian diversity makes me un- climate change on prey. pears as something one can actually do to expectedly proud. But I answered phones Ferruginous hawks need wide-open help the hawks.” What ferruginous hawks and the door and focused on shelters, spaces, and they eat animals that need really need, he continues, are healthy towels, food, water. I have spent few cre- wide-open spaces. Best of all, from a fer- grassland ecosystems. Schmutz suggests puscular hours hunkered outside, care- ruginous hawk’s perspective, is jack- protecting ferruginous hawks by support- fully watching and listening, immersed in rabbit, and in parts of the West where ing a sustainable ranching economy in avian acquaintance-making. Like almost jackrabbits, well, abound, a ferruginous the Northern Great Plains. every other visitor to a raptor show, I hawk can capture a good-sized meal in “In my neck of the woods, we have could stand to learn more about North one snatch. In places without jackrabbits, ranching on expansive rangeland,” America’s birds of prey. ferruginous hawks eat ground squirrels. Schmutz told me, speaking from his home On days when Hyla declines to fly, I Jackrabbits and ground squirrels are not in Saskatoon. “It’s too arid for anything wonder how long visitors take to forget small animals; they attest to the size and else. We have ferruginous hawk protec- that she exists, that ferruginous hawks strength of these hawks. tion via public ownership of rangeland. exist. I worry that this kind of forget- Like many top predators, ferruginous We’ll have ferruginous hawks as long as ting makes it easier to tear up native hawks cycle according to the boom-bust we have that kind of land here.” shrubland and grassland and weaken the of their prey populations. When those Boy Scout troops build artificial nest- Endangered Species Act. But I am trying populations have bad years, the hawks do ing platforms for ferruginous hawks: Of to take the long view. I am trying to re- not raise young. When roads divide sage- course this feels effective, proactive, posi- member that all meaningful relationships brush ecosystems, when transmission tive. I can hear my old boss asking: Does begin with encounters. Perhaps it does lines slice through them, when extraction this do anything for the birds? I think not matter whether the visitors recall all projects fragment them, when fires, inva- it depends on the builder. If it’s the Boy the Free Flight bird species, where they sive species and climate change together Scouts or any number of local community live, what they eat. Perhaps shows like eradicate their preferred prey, the hawks groups, then I want to believe that by this serve as introductions for people, leave or simply die out. Ravens and red- building birds artificial nesting plat- useful ways of meeting the neighbors. If tailed hawks — generalists capable of forms, and making other decisions about each visitor recalls only one bird flying thriving in disturbed habitat and close to the other lives around their own, they from snag to desert sky, perhaps for today urbanized areas — move in. will become men and women who make — just for today — that’s enough. n

www.hcn.org High Country News 19

2017 Travel Marketplace and Guide

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20 High Country News March 6, 2017

2017 Travel Marketplace and Guide

Escalante Canyons Art Festival – Sept. of water in arid lands. Beer tasting, BBQ, River house vacation rental and fishing 圀栀攀爀攀琀栀攀䌀漀氀甀洀戀椀愀 22 to Oct. 1, 2017 – Calling all landscape auction, parade. www.protectsnakevalley. Lovely five-bedroom house on the Yampa painters and art lovers: Make plans now org/festival. River, three miles west of Steamboat Springs, 刀椀瘀攀爀䜀漀爀最攀洀攀攀琀猀 to participate in or attend the premier art Colo. Special rates until June 1. Excellent 伀爀攀最漀渀ᤠ猀䠀椀最栀䐀攀猀攀爀琀 event of the Colorado Plateau — the 14th Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat views of valley and mountains. Great kitchen Annual Escalante Canyons Art Festival — and deck. 307-231-1326. vrbo.com/240184. Center The landscape of Ghost Ranch in Everett Ruess Days! Events include a plein [email protected]. northern New Mexico — made famous by air painting competition and sale, an arts and artist Georgia O’Keeffe — encompasses crafts sale, speaker series, exhibits, workshops, 21,000 acres of towering rock walls, vivid demonstrations, hands-on art activities and colors and vast skies. Within this setting, live music. escalantecanyonsartfestival.org. Fresh Trails, Fresh Food, Fresh guests enjoy over 250 course offerings along Perspective – Delta County, Colo. with O’Keeffe landscape tours, archaeology Sculpted by three rivers, surrounded by two and paleontology museums and tours, hiking canyons and the highest flat-top mountain in trails, horseback riding, massage therapy, the world, you can expect world-class views. kayaking on Abiquiu Lake and more. Outdoor recreation abounds here with 505-685-1000. [email protected]. www. untouched trails, rivers, canyons, mountains GhostRanch.org. and lakes. If you are looking for some fresh 䈀愀氀挀栀䠀漀琀攀氀⸀挀漀洀簀㔀㐀㄀ⴀ㐀㘀㜀ⴀ㈀㈀㜀㜀 trails, fresh water and fresh food to make the best memories, Delta County is the place for 11th ANNUAL AMAZING EARTHFEST! you. It all starts in a moment when you realize May 14-20: Kanab, Utah’s festival of discovery, that you have found a place that fits you. arts and adventure! www.amazingearthfest. 970-874-2115. kelli@deltacountycolorado. com. com www.deltacountycolorado.com.

Canyon Country Discovery Center Wilderness Volunteers – Give something Experience the natural and cultural treasures Seeds Trust – Heirloom, OP, vegetable, back to our nation’s public lands on a week- of the Colorado Plateau through exploration wildflower, native grass and herb seed. Highly long adventure service project. 928-255-1128 and adventure. www.fourcornersschool.org. adapted and resilient, perfect for mountain [email protected]. www. growing. Dedicated to teaching you to save wildernessvolunteers.org. Climate Ride – The planet can’t wait. Join seed and combat disappearing biodiversity. the rides and hikes that invest in nature. See 720-335-3436. www.seedstrust.com. Navajo Mountain Archaeology Trekking our 2017 events at www.climateride.org. Join Canyonlands Field Institute with Lowell Observatory – Enjoy daily guided archaeologist Sally Cole and investigate a Snake Valley Water Festival, Baker, tours of the historic campus, telescope wide range of archaeological sites in this viewing and interactive exhibits. www.lowell. Nev., June 16-18. Visit Great Basin National remote landscape over five days. 800-860- Park’s gateway and community celebration edu. 5262. [email protected]. www.cfimoab.org.

www.hcn.org High Country News 21 2017 Travel Marketplace and Guide

22 High Country News March 6, 2017 www.hcn.org High Country News 23 2017 Travel Marketplace and Guide

24 High Country News March 6, 2017 www.hcn.org High Country News 25 2017 Travel Marketplace and Guide

An Expedition Through Bears Ears National Monument, Utah June 9 - 13, 2017

With Ernie Atencio of Land and Culture Consulting. Ernie is a cultural anthropologist, conservationist, writer and frequent contributor to High Country News.

Join us for four days in the field to visit our newest national monument and some of the sites that make Bears Ears a special place deserving of this designation.

» Learn about the Antiquities Act and an innovative new model for tribal involvement in public lands protection. » Find out about some of the management challenges facing the region, including protecting cultural resources and wildlife habitat; oil and gas and fracking; haze and air quality and river issues. » And see some of the most unique archaeological sites and natural landscapes in the West.

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26 High Country News March 6, 2017 Essay | By Don Olsen Cowboys with surfboards Parts of Hawaii are surprisingly like the new rural West

live in Hotchkiss, a cowboy town on the Western Slope of Colorado, where I raise hay in the summers and marvel at the mountain-and- desert landscapes that surround our hardscrabble little valley. INobody makes much money ranching anymore. We just tell ourselves we do it “for the lifestyle.” But every winter, while my mostly graying cattlemen buddies hunker down over coffee at the Short Stop to tell tall tales and talk politics, my wife and I head off to another hardscrabble little town — Hanalei, on the North Shore of Kauai. How can a place where Julia Roberts recently sold her beach cottage for $16 million and where Mark Zucker- berg owns a $100 million coastal ranch be hardscrabble? Hanalei is a tiny town, with a popula- tion of about 500 and a world-class beach. Instead of the glistening snow-capped Rockies, it is surrounded by the mountains of the Na Pali Coast, with puffs of dragon mist floating through their summits. The scenery is spectacular, but 25 percent of Hanalei’s residents live below the poverty level. They get by working part-time at restaurants or landscape companies, maybe selling a little Maui Wowie on the side. Not all that different from rural Colorado: You make ends meet any way you can. What has saved this Hawaiian town less sprawl of suburbia and commercial The one-lane bridge We stay with a working-class so far, I think, is the creaky one-lane tourism — eventually overrunning the to Hanalei, Kauai, Hawaiian family on the west side of town. wooden bridge that is the only way into working neighborhoods and locally owned with its 15-ton It’s probably the last ungentrified neigh- the Hanalei Valley. Surrounded by classic businesses of small-town America. capacity, helps keep big development borhood on the North Shore, full of laugh- Polynesian taro fields, which replaced the I’m worried about Hanalei. It reminds out. Edmunds Dana/ ing and crying children, barking dogs sugarcane of the old colonial plantations, me a bit of Carbondale, a small mountain Getty Images and the clattering sound of dishes being the bridge prevents big trucks and heavy town near me once known for its Hereford washed after supper. Before doing their equipment from invading Hanalei to cattle and annual Potato Festival. Now it’s homework, kids dart and swoop through build Trump Towers and Hilton resorts. known as the posh Mount Sopris village the nearby 10-foot turquoise waves as if I’ve heard the locals are very protective of where the millionaires landed after being they were born on surfboards. that little bridge. pushed out of Aspen by the billionaires. Brydan, our host, is a small com- Kauai’s south shore has been taken It’s one thing to scrape by on a daily mercial fisherman, and his wife, Jana, over by vacation homes and golf courses, fish catch and occasional landscaping works at the nearby school. Brydan its western shore by a missile base and jobs, but when your beach shack is sud- comes home with big ice chests full of fish large test plots of corn raised by multi- denly worth a couple of million dollars, for the Kauai markets. Jana’s extended national companies experimenting with it’s hard to resist gentrification. I’m from family lives in the neighborhood, a rustic GMOs and new herbicides. Monsanto is the New West, and I know what happens collection of funky old houses with badly a dirty word to many locals concerned to peaceful, friendly little towns with corroded tin roofs. When not in school, about their children’s health. When the spectacular landscapes. their kids, Brock and Jordyn, roam the Kauaians attempted to regulate the I finally find some cowboy-style old beach or buzz around on their little herbicide industry — much as my own codgers complete with tall tales on this moped. They’re not much different than county tried to regulate coalbed meth- visit. They’re 60-something surfers — the the ranch kids back in my valley — just ane — the state and the courts swept in kings of the wild waves back in the ’70s replace the surfboards with .22 rifles and to nullify the regulations. So far, only the and ’80s — and they congregate every the mopeds with four-wheelers. North Shore and Hanalei have avoided day at the end of my street to watch the Hanalei, like Hotchkiss, is facing lots the power of big-money corporations and younger surfers and to try to convince a of problems, both cultural and environ- Honolulu-style tourism. dubious Coloradan that they’ve conquered mental. This Hawaiian village reminds Can these small-town Hawaiians 100-foot waves on the Na Pali Coast and me of Aspen in the ’50s or Telluride in save their little piece of Jurassic Park survived 50-foot tiger-shark attacks. the ’70s — rustic mining towns where paradise from the giant corporate waste- It’s all bluster, I’m sure. But I love the locals scraped by before ski resorts lands that James Howard Kunstler so these guys, as I love all of America’s small and industrial tourism transformed them eloquently described in The Geography Western towns and the magic journeys on into the enclaves of the millionaires and of Nowhere? He foresaw the cars, strip which they’ve embarked. I just hope they billionaires. malls and fast-food shacks — the end- can survive the trip.

www.hcn.org High Country News 27 Backpacking through the Mount St. Helens blast zone FEATURE By Eric wagner

orest Road 99 starts about 18 Carson, and I was late. The scenery miles from Mount St. Helens, ap- blurred past. When I finally swerved into proaching from the northeast. If the parking lot, it was almost 8 p.m. There The F the volcano no longer commands was one other car. A bearded and rather the southwest Washington skyline like it burly fellow perched on its hood, reading a once did, having shed 1,314 feet of itself book. He slid off and ambled over. in the 1980 eruption, the 99 has a way “Sorry I took forever,” I said. “Seattle. of making you appreciate the landscape. Traffic.” Moral Narrow and precipitous, it slows you “No problem!” said Carson, for he is down to speeds more conducive to obser- inveterately good-natured. vation, all the better for you to dwell on “How long have you been here?” the spectacle of St. Helens whenever it “I dunno,” Carson shrugged. “Maybe of the appears around the bend. two hours?” I had eyes only for pavement. I still Oof. I set to packing. We planned to go had nine miles to go to the Norway Pass for a three-day hike through the Mount Mountain trailhead, where I was to meet my friend Margaret Backcountry, which sits in the 28 High Country News March 6, 2017 The setting sun illuminates dust rising from the crater on Mount St. Helens, about 20 years after its initial eruption. Jim Richardson

versary, and Danger on Peaks, a collection 1980: Letting Go of poems by Gary Snyder. I grabbed the Snyder and wedged it between my long underwear and sleeping bag. I tugged my pack zipper shut. The seams strained, Centuries, years and months of — but held. Good for them. You can always make room for a little poetry. let off a little steam f Mount St. Helens has a literary cloud up and sizzle celebrant, it is Gary Snyder. He grew growl stamp-dance I up nearby, and was just 15 the first quiver swell, glow time he climbed it, on August 13, 1945. The mountain was 9,677 feet tall then, glare bulge with a near-perfect cone, and foothills cloaked in dark evergreen forests. Spirit swarms of earthquakes, tremors, rumbles Lake, deep and clear, lay before it like a vanity mirror. Snyder started his ascent she goes with a group before dawn, crept over the mountain’s glaciers, around its crevasses. When he reached the summit, he was 8.32 AM 18 May 1980 elated. He sat for a while, watched the sky, did a little dance. “To be immersed in superheated steams and gasses ice and rock and cold and upper space,” he later wrote, “is to undergo an eerie, white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a rigorous initiation and transformation.” burning sky-river wind of The next morning, having come down searing lava droplet hail, from the mountain so transformed, he huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud, dropped by the old lodge at Spirit Lake to check the bulletin boards, where the own- shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing ers would pin the day’s news. It was then cloud of rock bits, he learned of the atomic bombs American crystals, pumice, shards of glass pilots had dropped on Hiroshima and dead ahead blasting away — Nagasaki a few days before. “Horrified,” he wrote in his poem, “Atomic Dawn,” a heavenly host of tall trees goes flat down lightning dances through the giant smoke blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, “By the a calm voice on the two-way purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. ex-navy radioman and volunteer St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel describes the spectacle — then destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.” says, the hot black cloud is rolling toward him — no way “Atomic Dawn” is from “Mount St. but wait his fate Helens,” a cycle of nine poems that opens Danger on Peaks. The first four are Sny- FEATURE By Eric wagner der’s recollections of his early years with Backpacking through the Mount St. Helens blast zone the mountain, before it reminded every- a photographer’s burnt camera one it was still a volcano. The fifth, “1980: full of half melted pictures, north-central portion of the Mount St. Letting Go,” marks that abrupt trans- Helens National Volcanic Monument. Our formation, on May 18, when the entire three fallers and their trucks loop was only 25 or 30 miles, and the fore- north face collapsed, killing 57 people and chainsaws in black, tumbled gray and still, cast called for sun, so I wanted to travel leaving a mile-wide crater. The final four two horses swept off struggling in hot mud light. Thus began a series of hard choices. poems tell of Snyder’s return to the blast a motionless child laid back in a stranded ashy pickup Out went the tent, save for the ground zone 20 years later. Taken together, they cloth to sleep on. Out went my down coat. follow an arc of reconciliation, as Snyder Out went a third of my bagels, the block weighs the idyllic mountain from his roiling earth-gut-trash cloud tephra twelve miles high of cheese, some extra socks. youth against the radically revised form ash falls like snow on wheatfields and orchards to the east “You’re sure you’ve got enough?” Car- he found as an older man. five hundred Hiroshima bombs son asked, hefting his own pack. “Atomic Dawn” is the third poem in the “Almost,” I said. I opened the passen- cycle, but it was the first I had seen after ger door and considered two books in the I came across it excerpted somewhere. By in Yakima, darkness at noon front seat: In the Blast Zone, a volume the time I read the cycle in its entirety, of pieces by scientists, writers, and poets “Atomic Dawn” had acquired its own reso- Copyright c 2004 by Gary Snyder, from Danger on Peaks. commemorating the eruption’s 25th anni- nance for me, having come dreadfully to Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

www.hcn.org High Country News 29 The trail all but mind in April 2010, when I climbed Mount I listened to our footfalls: not the usual way Pass trailhead. “Want to see some- disappears on St. Helens and learned on the drive home soft pad on rich Cascade humus, but thing cool?” Charlie asked, before loping Whittier Ridge on about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the light crunch of pumice. We reached off into the bushes. I scrambled after him Mount St. Helens. the Gulf of Mexico. I felt similarly enraged Norway Pass after a couple of miles, and to the lakeshore. I saw fallen logs (always P HOTO BY Outdoor Project Contributor and helpless, and the irony of Snyder’s stopped to catch our breath, put on a layer the logs), the quiet lapping lake, brown Andrew Stohner invocation to the purity, beauty and per- and take in Mount St. Helens. The volcano earth. What was the big deal? Then I manence of Mount St. Helens was doubly was lit in wan rose, with a few gray snow- looked more closely: the earth was mov- painful, amplified as it was in a world fields left on its upper slopes. We could just ing. More than moving — it was seething, twice broken. But Snyder, just deeply make out the hazy chaos of its crater, ash writhing. What I had thought was earth changed himself, had been in desperate and dust wafting from the wide, serrated was actually thousands of western toad- need of something stable and certain, and rim. Beneath was Spirit Lake, a dense lets, each tiny and delicate, clambering what seems more stable and certain than white mat of logs obscuring its surface. over one another, filling all space. a mountain? What else, in the face of un- I would have liked to stay longer, to “Pretty neat, huh?” Charlie said. foreseen catastrophe, are we to swear by? watch the mountain move from shadow “Amazing!” I said. “Kind of gross, to void, but Carson and I had four or five though.” rom the parking lot, the trail climbed miles to go to our first camp. Stars were Charlie laughed. I got the sense the quickly. Carson and I could see the massing when we crested the hill higher toadlet swarm was one of his favorite F beveled prominence of Mount Adams up the trail and began the steady drop to Mount St. Helens party tricks. He was in the distance, but our immediate sur- the lakes that sit in the heart of the back- among the first scientists to visit the roundings were equally arresting. We country. As we made our way by headlamp, blast zone after the eruption, and he walked through evidence of earlier dev- the slope came alive with the buzzings, guesses he has since spent more than astations, both human and geological: the chirpings and rustlings of night creatures. 3,000 nights on the mountain. Nothing clipped stumps from old clear-cuts, and Western toads had moved into the middle goes on here that he doesn’t know about, the weathered trunks of trees knocked of the trail, and we had to take care not to isn’t somehow involved in. flat after superheated clouds of ash, rock, step on them. They struggled in an anima- The strange story of the western toad, and steam roared over them at more than tronic way when I picked them up. Some of he said, was one of many from the erup- 300 miles per hour. The trunks lay in them were bigger than my fist. tion. The species is declining over much ordered patterns, like iron filings aligned of its range, but not at Mount St. Helens. to a magnet. A few remained upright he summer before, I went with a Toads like open habitats, which were rare as snags. Younger, living trees filled the biologist from the U.S. Forest Service here when forests were thick. Then the patches between, having had the past 36 T named Charlie Crisafulli to Meta blast knocked down almost every tree years to grow substantially unimpeded. Lake, a mile down the road from the Nor- over a 143-square-mile area. Algae thrive

30 High Country News March 6, 2017 in newly exposed lakes and ponds, and loss. “Dynamism is a pervasive theme in round, and near that the rumpled Goat the toads gorged. The blast also killed nature,” he wrote in an essay in In the Rocks, and to the east Mount Adams. many of their predators, like snakes. Blast Zone. Like Snyder, he had his own South of us was the sharper, hooked pro- “But it didn’t get the toads, too?” I three terms to define what he saw, and file of Mount Hood, with Mount Jefferson asked. he used them in his piece’s title: “Change, dimly visible over 100 miles away. Mount “Nope,” Charlie said. It was one of Survival, and Revival.” St. Helens loomed, of course, dominant the blast’s several quirks. In mid-May, because of its proximity, but still the the snowpack was still deep in places, he next morning, Carson and I smallest of the bunch. and the toads were snug in underground awoke in damp sleeping bags. “These views!” Carson said, exulting dens. They hopped out into a transformed T While we waited for them to dry, in this excerpt of the Cascades Ring of world, where debris blocked creeks and we climbed a hill near small, convoluted Fire. “The trees are so short it’s like being streams to create more than 100 new Panhandle Lake, where we camped. in the high alpine, and we aren’t even at lakes and ponds to explore. Other organ- Carson, who gets up exceptionally early, 6,000 feet.” Carson likes to play outside isms survived, too: young conifers pressed flat under the snow, ants sheltered under logs, Pacific jumping mice hibernating in subterranean dens, trout idling in lakes shielded under a foot of ice. Charlie and his many colleagues would spend the next three decades puz- zling out the dynamics of who survived, who didn’t, who returned, how and why, and what it all meant for the shattered ecological community. “Mount St. Helens upended a lot of our thinking,” he said. Earlier, he had told of another surpris- ing character, the prairie lupine. In June of 1982, while surveying the Pumice Plains from a helicopter, he spotted one on the ground. The Pumice Plains are a 6-square-mile stretch directly north of the volcano that was buried under a layer of pumice up to 600 feet thick, which had poured from the crater in wave after scorching wave. The plains were abso- lutely sterile, and biologists thought it might be decades before life returned. But two years later, here was a single purple flower, surrounded by a ring of tiny seedlings. Charlie was shocked. The prairie lupine lacks the usual traits of a species quick to claim open ground. It produces a had found a garbage can buried under more than anyone I know, but he hasn’t Thousands of dead few big, heavy seeds, rather than hun- a tree during his dawn explorations. spent much time at Mount St. Helens, trees still float on dreds that float away like dandelion tufts. We pried off its lid to reveal a scientific even though he lives a couple of hours Spirit Lake in this Also, the site was higher in elevation cache: a musty old Forest Service shirt away. I asked why. “Oh, no good reason,” 2009 photograph, taken in Mount St. than lupines were thought to prefer. Yet (Charlie’s?), a fishing pole, a clipboard of he said. “Part of it is it’s easy to feel like Helens National somehow one had found its way to these tattered datasheets, a few unopened bags you know the place well enough already.” Volcanic Monument, bare expanses. Thereafter, the wildflow- of dried fruit. The volcano’s history is so thoroughly Washington. ers spread. They helped the ground retain “Think the fruit is still good?” I asked. commemorated, from roadside placards Diane Cook And Len Jenshel/National water, and they enriched the soil with Carson made a face. to jars of ash for sale on Craigslist, that Geographic/ key nutrients like carbon and nitrogen. After breakfast, we made our way up it sits at a peculiar intersection between Getty Images All of this made the Pumice Plains more to Whittier Ridge. I had been anticipating recreation and tourism, the familiar and hospitable for other animals and plants. this part of our trip in a not terribly eager the strange. “Also,” he said, “you aren’t Now, during the summers, the plains are way. It’s a two-mile scramble, with steep allowed to do as much here as you can at awash in color — not just the light purple drops-offs to either side of a long knife- other mountains.” The Mount Margaret of lupine, but the richer purple of penste- edge, and the Washington Trails Associa- Backcountry is the only place anyone mon, the yellow of hairy cat’s ear, the red tion calls it “The Scariest Hike in South- can legally camp in the blast zone, and of paintbrush. west Washington.” Carson and I spent just 32 people are allowed at a time at A plaque marks the site of the found- more than two hours on the traverse. At designated sites. ing lupine, but the story would repeat one point, as we plotted a course around a Save for the scientists like Charlie with other species, many showing traits hulk of rock, we heard an ominous clatter who work here, it is hard for anyone to no one suspected they had: the ability to of stones. We risked a peek over a cliff, and have a casual, intimate relationship with grow in a blanket of ash so dense it was saw a female mountain goat and her kid Mount St. Helens, the way people did like concrete (fireweed), the ability to skip lightly away on impossible hoof-holds. before all the recreational infrastructure scurry over miles of hot open desert even “Look at them go,” Carson said. — lodges, cabins, other camps — was though you weigh less than a quarter “They’re so quick!” obliterated. The event that makes the of an ounce (shrews), the ability to dig “Bastards,” I muttered. My ankles landscape so singularly compelling is through the ash and mix it with soil to ached from the torque. what keeps the public from getting close make the ground more amenable for Still, we were richly rewarded. With to it again. The monument has unprec- plants (pocket gophers). nary a cloud in the hemisphere, we edented ecological value as an outdoor The time Charlie spent in the blast watched snow peaks pop up and down laboratory, and by unspoken implication zone changed his feelings about how we from behind nearby ridges like gophers. its delicacy requires strict provisions to should think about disturbance, about There was Mount Rainier, grand and protect it. But this does not seem like

www.hcn.org High Country News 31 particularly delicate land. For all the campaign trail, each with its own cast of charming anecdotes about individual outsized characters. I hit “seek” until I species and their pluck, the message found a station playing classical music. from the blast zone’s wider community Forest Road 99 wound out of the mon- is less heartwarming. Before the erup- ument. I rolled down the window, let the tion, for instance, biologists thought the scents of younger forest whip around the process of ecological succession was an car. In the Blast Zone bounced around the Pearly Everlasting orderly one. Some species were innately front seat next to my pack. The book has better suited to the conditions created five sections, most with a few essays and by a massive disturbance. They would do poems, but the last section is devoted to well for a while, and then another suite of a single poem, Snyder’s “Pearly Everlast- Walk a trail down to the lake species would move in and displace them, ing.” Reprinted from Danger on Peaks, it mountain ash and elderberries red and then another, until the community gives the collection a welcome summary old-growth log bodies blown about, stabilized. air. Likewise, as the penultimate poem in whacked down, tumbled in the new ash wadis. The theory was old and well-estab- “Mount St. Helens,” it is where Snyder, lished, until Mount St. Helens showed during his visit to the backcountry, at last Root-mats tipped up, veiled in tall straight fireweed, that all those rules might not be rules reconciles himself to the eruption and fields of prone logs laid by blast at all. One of the most important find- its transformation of the places he knew. in-line north-south down and silvery ings to come from the eruption was that Midway through, he harkens back to his limbless barkless poles — survivors, whether plant or animal, could first ascent: have a tremendous clear to the alpine ridgetop all you see influence on a system is toothpicks of dead trees as it reassembled. thousands of summers There was noth- at detritus-cycle rest ing special about — hard and dry in the sun — the long life of the down tree yet to go them other than the fact that they bedded in bushes of pearly everlasting were there, yet they dense white flowers helped rebuild the saplings of bushy vibrant silver fir landscape we were the creek here once was “Harmony Falls” hiking through. Their success isn’t a dark The pristine mountain side to the Mount St. just a little battered now Helens story, but it the smooth dome gone is more complicated ragged crown than the sunnier tales of resilience I often hear. Biolo- the lake was shady yin— gists use words like New growth in 2005, the 25th anniversary of the eruption. now blinding water mirror of the sky “chaos” and “lottery” Ken Lambert/The associated Press remembering days of fir and hemlock — to describe what they saw in the blast zone, no blame to magma or the mountain and Charlie never, ever says “recovery.” & sit on a clean down log at the lake’s edge, I had asked Mt. St. Helens for help Once the ash settled, there would be no the day I climbed it, so seems she did the water dark as tea. long arc bending towards the restoration of everything that had been killed. The Decades later, he has understood her I had asked Mt. St. Helens for help whole event was defined by chance, its response. outcomes largely haphazard and contin- the day I climbed it, so seems she did If you ask for help it comes. gent. To walk near the volcano was to But not in any way you’d ever know walk through a naive landscape, with a The trees all lying flat like, after that big party host of creatures that just saw their open- I’ve always liked Snyder’s lesson, but Siddhartha went to on the night he left the house for good, ing and took it. I also never thought it was meant for me. I was 2 when Mount St. Helens erupted. crowd of young friends whipped from sexy dancing arson and I reached Coldwater I have no memory of its older beauty, dozens crashed out on the floor Lake by late afternoon. We were knowing it only as it is today, in these C tired from the long day, and after times. I suppose I am also less interested angelic boys and girls, sleeping it off. dinner it was a relief to spread sleeping in drawing a moral from the mountain, bags under a cold, depthless sky. When the cause of so massive a disturbance. In- A palace orgy of the gods but what we woke the next morning, we were sur- stead, I wanted to hear from the animals “we” see is “Blast Zone” sprinkled with rounded by thick fog, unable to see more and plants that endured the aftermath, clustered white flowers than a few feet in front of our faces. We who went to sleep in one world and woke ate quickly, packed, and began the long in another. The flowers shivering in the hike back to our cars, returning the way wind, the chipmunks scuttling over logs, “Do not be tricked by human-centered views,” says Dogen, we came. The day warmed and the fog the mountain goats dancing down cliffs. And Siddhartha looks it over, slips away — for another forest — lifted. Soon, we were retracing sections of What do they say? There will be up- — to really get right down on life and death. trail we had walked earlier, with Mount heaval. The things of which you felt most St. Helens presiding over us. I felt like we sure can fail. Many will suffer. Many will were being ushered out. die. Perhaps you will not. If somehow you If you ask for help it comes. We made it to the parking lot a few are spared the worst, do not think it is But not in any way you’d ever know hours later, washed the dust off, said our due to any special virtue. It was nothing — thank you Loowit, lawilayt-lá, Smoky Má goodbyes. As I drove away, I switched on more than luck or circumstance. Accept- gracias xiexie grace the radio. There were no catastrophes, no ing that, what will you do to help make disasters, thank heavens, just a relentless the world that is to come? Now, prepare Copyright c 2004 by Gary Snyder, from Danger on Peaks. series of bulletins from the presidential yourself. You are about to be tested. n Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint.

32 High Country News March 6, 2017 MARKETPLACE

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www.hcn.org High Country News 33 MARKETPLACE

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LISTEN ON

34 High Country News March 6, 2017 DIVERSE WESTERN

AWARD High Country News, in partnership with PLAYA, is accepting applications for the Diverse Western Voices Award, which seeks to expand national understanding of the American West’s ecological, social and political issues. The award will give a journalist of color the funding and space to work on a project of deep reporting and narrative journalism that covers an under-represented community in the American West.

The recipient will work closely with HCN 's editorial department on an in-depth feature story that will be published in the magazine and online. The winner will receive payment for the story, a $1,000 stipend for travel and a four-week residency at PLAYA in eastern Oregon.

Submit your story pitch by March 15. More information: hcn.org/diverse-voices High Country News

www.hcn.org High Country News 35 Essay | By Diane Sylvain

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded An expedition through to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” — John Muir

“I have traveled a good deal in Concord.” the Edgelands — Henry David Thoreau ery early one morning on the hawk lands nonchalantly in a tree, and cold cusp of February, I leave the geese go back to work. It is not as my house in Paonia, Colorado, cold this winter as it should be. Still, the to tromp 10 miles to the next longer I sit, the colder I feel. I stand up, town,V Hotchkiss. I do this maybe once a creaking, nose running. month, weather and health permitting: The road squiggles up to the top of a Walking for hours, then collapsing for the mesa, past barns and the unlit torches of night at a motel. Next morning, I leave tall bare poplars. Below, the valley is a before sunrise, loving that long slow morn- tattered quilt, sewn together by the river. ing twilight, the way the light fills up the Before me, open land rolls and rises to sky, like pale wine in a deep blue chalice. the base of the two nearest mountains. My walkabout takes me some time; The fields are covered with old frozen I’m not as young as I used to be, and snow, sparkling like pinpoint diamonds I bear old injuries in my bones. I use where the sun catches crystals. crutches and sometimes need a lift. But Up a long straight hill, and I’m on mostly I just clomp along, one foot after another mesa, looking north. It’s a won- another. I trudge through what I call the derfully geometrical landscape, the blue Edgelands: the scrubby, rumpled, ragged sweep of Grand Mesa lapped by angled places that border the back roads of small lower mesas and round adobe hills. I rest rural towns. It is a landscape caught again by a row of huge old cottonwoods. between the human and the wild — al- Their stillness today seems oddly delib- Illustrations: DIANE SYLVAIN pine and desert, farmland and town, with erate, as if the trees are holding their mesas rising into snow-capped moun- breath and watching. Every sound is tains and a river wandering through it. sharp and distinct; the crunch of my teeth Old gnarled cottonwoods and dry yellow in an apple like an ax splitting wood. The grasses, bare fields enlivened by the red- occasional thin dry stirring of grass seems dish brushstrokes of low-growing willows. portentous, almost too much to bear. The sky this morning is a high pale I pass a pod of horses and mules, who blue feathered with wispy clouds. In a regard me thoughtfully. The cows seem downtown window, my reflection looks about as alive and alert as a field of rocks. unnervingly like R2-D2: Short and squat- Then one lifts great tragic eyes to you, ty, two canes swinging like a droid’s long like Desdemona pleading with Othello, arms, woolen hat like a round little head. and you feel guilty. My back and legs are I beep cheerfully and trundle onward, in starting to hurt. Time for another novena love with the world, entranced by the solid to St. Ibuprofen. Why did I think this walk connection my boots make with it. was a good idea? Are we there yet? I walk the Back River Road, past The road tumbles on down to my century-old houses and modular homes least-favorite section, flat square pastures separated by small orchards. Ravens tilt like old carpet remnants. In rainy springs, and twirl overhead, introducing them- the view is lovely, as green and glad as selves in Latin: “Corvus?” “Corvax.” A Ireland. But now it’s bleached in tans and rooster crows; some chickens squabble; brown and the yellow of old chipped paint, dogs bark officiously at me. People I know blotched with patchy snow like lingering drive past, waving. mange. Trees are fewer, trucks are faster, Time for a sit-down stop on a handy and the dogs sound meaner. roadside boulder. I love the distinctive But that’s the thing about the Edge- shapes of the bare winter trees. Mole, in lands: They aren’t always beautiful. They The Wind in the Willows, would agree: can be sloppy and scabby and ragged and The country lay bare and entirely leafless weedy, littered with fast-food wrappers around him, and he thought that he had and broken liquor bottles. This is not a never seen so far and so intimately into landscape that cares about pleasing peo- the insides of things as on that winter ple. I wonder if I can keep going; everyday when Nature was deep in her an- thing hurts. But I flourish my crutches in nual slumber and seemed to have kicked joyous defiance and echo Gerard Manley the clothes off. … He was glad that he Hopkins, declaiming at the top of my liked the country undecorated, hard, and lungs to an uncaring quorum of cows: stripped of its finery. He had got down to These things, these things were here/ the bare bones of it, and they were fine and but the beholder and strong and simple. Wanting; which two when/ Wild geese unfurl overhead, honking they once meet, in hoarse prehistoric voices, and settle The heart rears wings bold and bolder on the fields. When a hawk swoops over, And hurls for him, O half hurls/ they scatter away from its shadow. The earth for him off under his feet.

36 High Country News March 6, 2017 Essay | By Kate Schimel

Yaak attack At home at the Dirty Shame

n the night after Thanksgiv- friends with stories of the Yaak’s wild Southern California transplant wearing ing, I wander into the Dirty woods and bars, of the reality TV show flame-covered surf trunks, seems the Shame Saloon, in Yaak, Mon- producers who come to document both. most at home. Once a real estate broker tana, with a few friends. A My neighbor, Andrew, a heavily with offices in seven states, he says he Ohalf-dozen people congregate around the bearded man in a ball cap, hunched was driving one day, talking on the phone pool table, not playing pool. Camo and over his beer, tells me a different kind with a business associate, when he ran hunter’s orange are on abundant display. of story: He says his cousins are Cheyne out of patience with the conversation, A Confederate flag hangs behind the bar; and Chevie Kehoe, white supremacist with the lifestyle, with the phone. He shotguns are embedded in the counter. brothers who went on a murder, bombing threw the phone out the window, quit We’ve stopped here out of curiosity and robbery spree in the ’90s. They holed his job and escaped to the Yaak. Some about the Yaak Valley, and the people, up for a time in the Yaak, where their longtime residents, resentful over past all 250 of them, who make it home. The mother lived. He describes an infamous squabbles, avoid the bar since he bought valley is known, in its small way, for a cop car dashcam video of the two, getting it. That doesn’t faze him. Wet T-shirt few things: the writings of Rick Bass, a pulled over in Ohio. “You can see one of contests, hats screaming “Yaak Attack” former petroleum geologist who has long them pull on a bulletproof vest,” he says; and an on-again, off-again employee who and ferociously defended it; the haven it the traffic stop, caught on camera, turned accidentally shot out the fridge: Those are has provided to some of the West’s darker elements — doomsday preppers, hermits and a few white supremacists — and the “World Famous Dirty Shame Saloon,” with its reputation for rowdy drunken- ness. The valley, wedged up against Canada, is a funnel for wildlife to travel south and then out across the West. In its dripping woods, species from the Pacific Northwest forests and the Rocky Moun- tains live side by side. It’s a small valley, Bass, a Texas transplant, writes in The Book of Yaak: “Everything is all crammed in on top of everything else.” But only around the Dirty Shame do the human inhabitants live close enough together to put on any appearance of a town. Still, they’ve left their mark in the form of the logging roads stitched across the valley, hemming in the grizzlies, the caribou, the wolves. Bass and a few others chose this place to settle in, for reasons that elude me. I find its stands of ash, hemlock, pine and cedar — the way they form dense green walls that block the horizon — claustro- phobic. I live in scrubby piñon-juniper, and, like a jackrabbit, prefer the open spaces. The Yaak “is not so much a place to come to,” Bass says. Rather, it’s a “biological refuge like the Great Dismal Swamp. There’s nothing to see and no one to see.” But I’m curious, too, about what draws people to these dark, into a shootout. Andrew, whose last name concerns he can devote some passion to. The only unappealing corners of the West, about I never catch, says he grew up in Florida I finish my drink, and we drive the functioning gas why some of them devote themselves to and sometimes spent family vacations in windy road back to our rented cabin. A pump in Yaak, defending close woods and ugly vistas. the Yaak. He doesn’t associate with his great gray owl perches on the eaves, and Montana, sits across “Reattachment,” Bass calls it, even as the relatives, he says, but he settled here just calls. Behind the cabin, in the darkness, from the Dirty West splinters biologically and cultur- the same. the Yaak River rounds a corner, rustling Shame. Julia Moss/ Great Falls Tribune ally; in The Book of Yaak, he writes, “I He and everyone else I meet here have against the grassy banks. I walk across a see more and more the human stories in made an uneasy home in the Yaak, aware meadow, softly lit by the cabin’s windows, the West becoming those not of passing of its marginal location on the map of to the river. Although meeting a griz- through and drifting on, but of settling in America but loyal nonetheless. “There is zly or other large predator is unlikely so and making a stand.” a certain undeniable raggedness of spirit close to the highway, I find the darkness I sit at the counter’s dimly lit cor- — a newness, a roughness,” Bass writes unnerving. I walk closer, listening. Only ner as the bartender and owner, a man of the valley. “It’s not a place filled with silence, and the run of the river, rises named John Runkle, entertains my easy certainties.” Runkle, a boisterous from the shadows.

www.hcn.org High Country News 37 Together we pause Essay By Ana Maria Spagna

www.WildAnimalSanctuary.org The Largest Carnivore Sanctuary In The World

Visit our new 48,000 sq. ft. Welcome Center, and now, The World’s Longest Elevated Footbridge!

crowd gathered by the window, staring out: Our plane to see another soul, despite all the cars. Where had everyone had arrived. Early summer on a budget carrier, there gone? Suddenly, I came around the corner. A very large crowd were fewer wing-tipped passengers waiting than usu- of people was leaning against a chain-link fence, in absolute al, more families in flip-flops, plenty of kids dragging silence, looking out. miniA roller bags. There’d be no empty seats on this plane. We’d “What’s going on?” I whispered. take a short hop to Oakland then transfer to Seattle, Denver, No one replied. Minneapolis, and beyond. With the boarding call expected any A man pointed toward the sea, and I gazed out for a silent minute, the waiting area should have been loud and lively, but I minute until a gray whale surfaced, then another, then another, emerged from the bathroom to utter silence. more whales than I’d ever seen in my life, and the people oooohed I stood on tiptoes to try to see over the crowd, three rows and aaaahed, fireworks-style, but did not otherwise speak. When deep, but I could not. the whales submerged, we stood in silence until they surfaced “What’s going on?” I whispered. again. This lasted three-quarters of an hour. Only when the No one replied. whales moved north and the sun began to set and we dispersed I’d seen a cop earlier, fully uniformed, not TSA, so I won- did I realize several people in the group did not speak English. dered if there was some kind of high-speed chase in progress Iraqandafghanistan. Are these wars — is any war — right on the tarmac — we weren’t that far from Los Angeles, after or wrong? Are migrating gray whales wonders of creation or all — or maybe a medical emergency. I knelt down to try to see the last of their species in this age of extinction? We can stop to between people’s legs. As I did, I noticed that several men had analyze — we should, always, pause to think — about the ways removed their ball caps. we’re complicit, how the choices we make, deliberate or not, Then I saw. A casket had descended the baggage chute, flag- wreak havoc in the world. draped, secured in a frame of two-by-fours. Soldiers marched But sometimes we just need to stop. Together. Like a shared forward, five men and one woman, in full-dress uniform. They reflex. We don’t even have to think about it. lifted the casket — the body — in unison and moved it to a roll- On the tarmac, family members bowed their heads, fingered ing gurney. Then they stepped aside. Heat rose in waves from the edge of the flag, and wrapped themselves around each other the asphalt. Nearby mountains stood barely visible, shrouded as their hair and clothes grew disheveled in the heat and wind. in wildfire smoke and ocean haze. All planes and vehicles and Then, at last, they backed away. The soldiers marched to the orange-vested employees stopped. gurney and lifted the casket into a hearse, which drove away The family stepped from station wagons, a large family, followed by the family cars. mixed race, arm-in-arm, well-dressed. They approached the Inside the terminal, no one dared move. Kids fidgeted and casket to have a moment to themselves. were shushed. I’d been kneeling longer than I liked to, but I With all of us. stayed kneeling. We felt the guilt of voyeurism, the intrusion of privacy, but Not long afterward, bags began to drop from the chute we couldn’t turn away. This was, as they say, one of ours. Less and we lined up to board, no longer silent, but not loud either. than a month since Memorial Day, and what did we remember, Once we sat and buckled ourselves in, the pilot spoke over the Over 450 Lions, Tigers, Bears, Wolves and really, besides picnics? intercom, voice wavering, to say what an honor it was to have Rescued Animals Are p Ground crew This. We would remember this. brought a soldier home to a final resting place. Meanwhile, the other rescued animals live on a 720 Acre remove a casket Once before, I had a similar experience in very different rest of us were on the move to Oakland, Seattle, Denver, Minne- Rehabilitated & Roam from a Delta flight circumstances. I’d driven the long winding road at Point Reyes apolis and beyond. We taxied fast and lifted into the air, higher Refuge located only 35 miles as members of the National Seashore. Near sunset, I reached a packed parking and higher, above the tarmac, then the mountains, strangers Freely In Large Acreage U.S. Navy salute. lot at the road’s end. But as I walked the last half-mile to the bound together, the binds loosening as smoke settled thick in BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/ Habitats Northeast of Denver Getty Images dramatic lighthouse surrounded by sea, I realized that I had yet the canyons below.

38 High Country News March 6, 2017 Essay By Ana Maria Spagna

www.WildAnimalSanctuary.org The Largest Carnivore Sanctuary In The World

Visit our new 48,000 sq. ft. Welcome Center, and now, The World’s Longest Elevated Footbridge!

Rescued Animals Are Over 450 Lions, Tigers, Bears, Wolves and Rehabilitated & Roam other rescued animals live on a 720 Acre Freely In Large Acreage Refuge located only 35 miles Habitats Northeast of Denver U.S. $5 | Canada $6

HEARD AROUND THE WEST | BY Betsy Marston

ARIZONA of flying for eight or nine hours, and it just kept The earth’s skin is so parched in parts of Arizona on trucking. The rogue drone was found stuck that the land is literally splitting in two, with in a tree in the mountains west of Evergreen, no ChapStick large enough to help. The new- Colorado, nine days after it was launched from est fissure, 10 miles southwest of Picacho Peak Fort Huachuca, AP reports. State Park on Arizona state trust land, formed over the past few years and varies dramati- UTAH cally in size, state geologist Lee Allison reports Should you find yourself skiing off a 150-foot in his blog, arizonageologist.blogspot.com. At cliff somewhere in the Wasatch Range of Utah, 1.8 miles in length, it meanders from a narrow, better hope you’re wearing your backpack. inch-wide crack to a split as wide as 10 feet and Devin Stratton told the Washington Post that 25 to 30 feet deep. Blame extensive groundwater his unexpected backcountry plunge felt like a withdrawal in the Sonoran Desert, which has “near-death experience,” until he realized that already caused subsidence in Cochise, La Paz, his landing had been cushioned by his backpack Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties. and two and a half feet of soft snow. When he first hit the ground, Stratton said it took him ALASKA Lest you get confused. Krista Langlois UTAH a few seconds to realize he was still alive; even If it’s true, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, more amazingly, he didn’t suffer “a scratch or “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability of Utah’s largest newspapers, the group brags a bruise.” And thanks to his decision to wear a to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same that Colorado has “stronger beer. We have taller GoPro camera that day, an edited video of his time and still retain the ability to function,” then peaks. … But most of all, we love our public descent has gone viral. the state of Utah is juggling reality in an in- lands.” creasingly rickety manner. Almost every elected THE WEST official — from Republican Gov. Gary Herbert to THE WEST Master gardener Peter Heffelfinger, writing in the state Legislature and the congressional del- The über-urban and noir novelist Paul Auster the Whatcom Watch of Washington, assures egation — has asked President Donald Trump told The New York Times Book Review recently his fellow gardening fanatics that spring is to rescind former President Barack Obama’s that his favorite book was a 628-page tome coming soon, and not just because those gaudy designation of the Bears Ears National Monu- that nobody else had ever heard of: Weeds of seed catalogs are sprouting up in mailboxes. ment. State leaders say this would free up the the West, written by a team of 40 plant gurus But he had advice for folks itching to get their monument’s public land for extractive industries and published by the Western Society of Weed hands into the ground right now: “Be mindful of such as mining and drilling. Yet at the same Science. Though the color photos were splendid, change. The weather will always be unexpected. time, Utah tourism officials enthusiastically pro- he allowed, what really delighted him were the It is best to remain flexible: re-sow when seeds mote Bears Ears on the state’s website, devoting plants’ names: “Spreading dogbane. Skeleton- rot out or plants go to seed early; plant a variety several pages to the new monument’s scenic and leaf bursage. Nodding beggarticks. Bristly of vegetables, since what worked last year may recreational attractions, reports the Associated hawksbeard. Tansy ragwort. Blessed milkthistle. fizzle this year. Try a few new things on the Press. The state’s bipolar, but mostly hostile, Poverty sumpweed. Prostrate spurge. Everlast- off chance they might work out well. Have lots approach to public lands infuriated many in the ing peavine. Panicle willowweed. Ripgut brome.” of options. And be thankful for those tempting outdoor recreation industry, with Patagonia and Reading about weeds never fails to lift his seed packets in February, as well as the cornu- other companies “vowing to boycott” the semian- spirits, he said, calling their names “the poetry copia of vegetables starts in the nurseries when nual Outdoor Retailer show, which brings about of the American earth.” spring finally arrives. Seeds and starts are the $45 million in annual spending to the state. A gifts that last.” conference call between the governor and gear THE WEST industry executives in February attempted to A runaway drone launched in southern Arizona WEB EXTRA For more from Heard around the West, see heal the breach, but neither side budged, and was finally found hundreds of miles away in hcn.org. now, after two decades in Utah, the show is Colorado, and now “the military is trying to Tips and photos of Western oddities are appreciated and leaving Salt Lake City. A Colorado nonprofit, figure out how it got there.” One theory: The often shared in this column. Write [email protected] or tag Conservation Colorado, would love to be the $1.5 million Shadow drone, which weighs 450 photos #heardaroundthewest on Instagram. retailers’ new venue: In half-page ads in two pounds and has a wingspan of 20 feet, is capable

High I walk away. I leave her there to die. Nobody will be Country back through until spring. Without her flock, this News “ For people who care about the West. sheep is as hopeless as I am helpless. High Country News covers the important issues and Beth Raboin, in her essay “Life lessons from sheep,” stories that are unique to the American West with a from Writers on the Range, hcn.org/wotr” magazine, a weekly column service, books and a website, hcn.org. For editorial comments or questions, write High Country News, P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428 or [email protected], or call 970-527-4898.

40 High Country News March 6, 2017