When is the moon not super? I mean… really. A beautiful, glowing rock that appears in our sky in a variety of shapes at different times of day. It affects tides as it orbits the earth, lights up a dark desert night, keeps you company on a road trip, illuminates the trail on a nighttime MTB ride. It is the star of more than one children’s book, and the destination for a cheese vacation in my favorite Wallace & Gromit …
Tag: solitude
I pulled into the parking lot at the trailhead a little before 6:30 on Thursday morning. The nearby houses were dark. There was one other car, a gold SUV, in the parking lot but no sign of the driver or anyone else. The trail disappeared into darkness until I clicked on my headlamp, creating my little circle of visibility. A half mile in, I perched on the edge of the meadow that sits like a shallow bowl below the hills. …
I don’t think I know anyone who isn’t see-sawing between despair, rage, frustration, and helplessness these days. On all things political, environmental, and social, it really is a heaping pile of bad news. How to manage heartache in crazy times? When even our carefully constructed social bubbles are collapsing in? When natural and political disasters compete for the headlines? I listen to music more than the news. I read headlines but only go deep on stories of unexpected awesomeness, such …
If you are looking for solitude during Thanksgiving, let me recommend Great Basin National Park. We used it as a halfway point on our drive from SLC to Bishop, CA. After a short-ish hike to a very cool arch tucked away in the bottom corner of the park, we found a sweet and compact camp site in a parallel canyon. It dead-ends at a trailhead a few miles up, and we verified that we were the only people in the canyon. …
RK just told me that studies show that certain birds sounds (magpies, jays, crows) are not calming to humans. I wonder if that is that because we have pre-judged those sounds. I love the sound of jays — raspy, bossy, and confident. Often they are the only bird sounds that can amplify over the noise of the city. Jays can put a cat in its place. Birds are unfairly separated into good and bad. Why do some people call a …
You can’t trust your senses in these dark autumn mornings. The wind blows naked trees branches together and they sing like ghosts or maybe a small child in a place where there is no trail and should be no children. Dry leaves chase me down the trail like the sound of quick footsteps, piles of branches look like suspicious structures in the woods. A post with a box on it looks like a person standing very, very still and the …
The other morning I was out for a walk with the dogs, it was just barely not dark. Two or three coyotes were barking and howling very close by, maybe right above us. Mack and I instantly slowed down to keep pace with the slower, older and smaller dog. Emma barely noticed them, just kept moving her snout around the bushes and bits of grass while she slowly sniffed and sauntered along the trail. Mindfulness, meditation, being present… all of …
There is a system of trails in the foothills near where I live. Really, I’m pretty sure there is just one official trail, but there are countless spurs, social trails, old double-tracks and jeep roads that lead up and over ridges, down steep gullies, traverse rocky hillsides and lead up and down the various peaks. Most of these are the most direct route, very steep, often loose and, if they get well used, sometimes closer to trenches than trails. The …
Stopping in at the local fly or bike shop and asking for advice is a well established ritual, especially if you are in a new area. What river is fishing well? What flies are working? What are the trail conditions? What’s the local fave ride? Is there good camping somewhere? At the bike shop, I might buy a map or a pair of socks. At the fly shop, I will get some dry flies. But how do you know when …
You will be happy to know that I have taken up the ukulele! Are you asking why? I could answer that it has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time (which is true), but really it was just a notion of something I would like to do someday. I can’t say why, exactly, my brain decided that last Friday was THE DAY. I asked my co-worker, casually, what sort of ukulele a beginner might buy that they …
We all know the joy in finding a new, amazing place to ride/camp/fish, especially if that place is one that you discovered on your own, that is only marginally mentioned on the internet, that the shop guys don’t have the info on, that isn’t on any app. My first instinct is to tell all my favorite friends about this most awesome place we found!! Because, really, when you are bursting with excitement, it is natural to want to share. Recently …
If you are a fan of gin and tonics, you might want to read this book. It’s a very entertaining history of tonic water, which has quinine as a main ingredient, which was used to treat malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes. “Malaria is not the mosquito’s fault, but mosquitoes suck anyway.” I happened to be reading it in the tent last weekend, with a line of fresh mosquito bites on my forehead, exactly following the bottom edge of my …
We usually stay home on 3-day weekends to avoid the crowds, but this Memorial Day we were jonesing to sleep outside and figured we have a whole lot of experience finding solitude in Utah… How to Avoid Crowds on a Holiday Weekend Take a leisurely departure on Saturday morning. Most people funnel out of town on Friday afternoon, and where we live, this includes not just cars, but also RVs, trucks, and really big trucks pulling trailers, really big trailers, …