Getting It Done

Write.

Sometimes we take on tasks that bog us down, taking far longer or far more energy and resources than we could eve have imagined. They drag. It begins to feel like you are treading water. Then it feels like drowning. And then, like magic, it starts to get done. This week, I am in go-mode. There is no room for distraction or laundry or the Ukraine or pretty much anything else. I have things to get done. I love these times of fierce productivity, far removed from the stress of working under deadline, these times that seem to stem from an internal impetus. I have things I want to get done. I can see the path. There is no procrastination, no sorting of the mail or house work that seems pressing, because, you see, I am getting things done.

From the newly completed Girl Gone Wild, on safety:

I feel safe outside. But, I know that a lot of women do not. And to be fair, I have not and do not always feel safe. I can sometimes get spooked when I am hiking by myself and a man is a little too friendly or hiking too closely to me. Sometimes I worry for a moment if I feel turned around or feel like I have been too long to not be able to see the car on the way back. Sometimes I get terrible vertigo, a lasting present from my days in Grand Canyon. These all seem to me like reasonable fears to have, but not reasons to not be outside.


Most of the things that make us fearful about being outside have to do with preparation. Fear of getting lost subsides with gaining navigational skills and choosing well-marked trails. Fear of dirt and bugs and small injuries start to disappear with experience and time. Other fear though, fear of the dark, fear of animals, fear of aloneness, these are the challenges and opportunities that the wilderness presents us. Ultimately, there is no way to eliminate all risk, either in the wilderness or in our day to day lives. What is important is the choice. Do you let your fears hold you back, inside and away from the world, or do you step out? 

***Girl Gone Wild is seeking representation and publication! You can help by sharing this blog on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and all kinds of social media. Thanks for your support!

Picture:
www.rubygonewild.com

Lost In Space- An Excerpt From Girl Gone Wild

Found.

So at some point, it just went wrong.  My folks either made a bad choice at diverging trails, or got turned around, or just walked right passed a juncture, but their demeanor changed.  They slowed.  The tone of their voices got more serious.  My sister and I were hot and tired and getting crabby in a sustained way.  My parents probably were too.  We should have been back to the car by now, it was getting on towards dinner time.  We came to a stop.  And there they were,  lost, with darkness falling and two very very tired girls with them.   They started to discuss.  They could not be that far offtrack, we had not walked very far.  They could still see the ridge we had descended, and the sun was setting in the west, they had a sense of where they were.  They were young and resourceful and figured worst case scenario they would be fine overnight with us if we got caught in the dark, everyone had a warm layer tied around their waste.  It would be an adventure, a story to to tell.  And also quite likely entirely unpleasant.  My Dad thought we could backtrack and either discover where we had gone wrong or return the full length of the way we came before it got too dark.  There was also the possibility that we were only a short distance from a connecting trail, or even the trail head itself, the trail simply being longer than we anticipated.  But we knew how to get back the way we came.  We turned around.

This terrified me.  I was little, I had no sense of time or distance with which to put the problem into perspective.  I was still afraid of the dark and I remembered the view from the top of the trail, it seemed like a really really big place to be lost in.  I was imagining lions and tigers and bears and Yeti and rodents of unusual size.  I was thinking that this very kind of thing was what had happened to those Hobbits.  My sister was fixated on talking about spending the night out there; she may have said something about having to eat me first.   In all, this probably only happened over the course of a couple of hours, but in my memory it feels like we wandered forever, like Lawrence of Arabia, parched for water and slowly weakening with hunger.  Walking with my Dad holding my hand, I started to cry.

Picture:
www.rubygonewild.com

The Beginnings Of A Bat Thing- An Excerpt From Girl Gone Wild

Wings.

We spent the evening watching the sun go down behind the high rocks on the far side of the lake. As dusk sank in around us swarms of bugs appeared above the water, and then, bats. Bats are a threshold animal, somewhere between something harmless like a chipmunk or a bird, but just creepy enough and with enough pop-culture stigma to make us skittish. Bats are mammals; like us, they are warm blooded and have hair, but they also have featherless, skin-covered wings and are mostly blind, instead using echo-location to navigate and hunt. There are thousands of species of bats, and it is estimated that bats make up one-quarter of all mammal species in the world. In the evening, if you see something flying, especially if it seems extra maneuverable or is near open water or a field, it is usually a bat. Bats love insects, and they are a social animal, often living in giant colonies that go out to hunt together in the evenings. On this evening, is seemed we were being visited by a large colony. Far from being scary or gross, these bats were magnificent. They were about the size of a swallow, fast, and fearless. They zipped past our heads diving low to skim across the surface of the water. They twisted and cavorted midair to snatch up dinner and avoid running into one another at the same time. They were acrobatic and mesmerizing and they entirely released me from my worry over sleeping out.

Backpacks, Rocks And Nuts - A Girl Gone Wild Excerpt

Weight.

It is 6 am and I am sitting on the front stoop of my apartment with my hiking boots on waiting for a a guy I met at a bicycle event in a local brewery two days earlier. I am newly single, in my late twenties, and living in Portland, This means that I am accustomed to brew pubs, bicycle boys, and first dates that involve hiking. The six am is new. But this man seems nice, and has a long history of mountaineering and rock climbing, and wants to get an early start. In my mind I have chalked this up to being “hard core”. I also want to be “hard core” and also prove to my ex that I can still have outdoor adventures without him. Especially with men more hard core than himself. I figured that mountain climber beat kayaker and hiker any day. Besides, its going to be a beautiful sunny Saturday in late summer, the trails will be packed if we don’t get an early start, I quietly reason with myself, he’s just being practical. 

We have chosen a hike called Angels Rest, aptly named for the spectacular view of the Columbia River Gorge from the rocky crag at the top of the trail. It is a moderate day hike, five miles with a steep climb over the loose rock of a crumbling basalt flow. When we arrive at the trail head we grab our mostly empty backpacks, containing little more than water and a light lunch and head out of the parking area. At the trail head he stops saying, “Hold on, I need to grab some weight.” And he reaches down and starts loading softball sized chunks of basalt into his pack. “I really want to stay in shape for my next ascent.” He says, barely looking up as he continues to shove rocks into his pack. Great, I think. This guy is nuts.

www.RubyGoneWild.com

Girl Gone Wild On Air

Live.

HuffPost Live held a discussion with for outdoors women about being in the wild and featured Girl Gone Wild. It was an exciting opportunity for us to celebrate and promote the participation of women in outdoor pursuits. Check out the discussion here: http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/women-hiking-wild/5266813ffe344421b900002f

Hot Stuff

Origins.

An Excerpt from Girl Gone Wild

The heat from the hot springs comes from the volcanoes that make up the Cascade Range. The Earth is really just a cooling blob of magma floating in space. We live on the cooled outer crust of that blob on large cracked chucks of cooled rock we call tectonic plates. Every continent is a plate and every ocean has plates making up the seafloor. Where these plates meet, ocean plate to continent, is a subduction zone, a place where the heavy ocean plate meets and then plunges underneath the lighter continental plate. When this happens the oceanic plate melts sending up plumes of magma to the surface much like the rising blobs in a lava lamp. Eventually these blobs melt the continental crust above them and break through, erupting lava and ash and pumice and building volcanoes. A lot of the magma doesn't make it all the way to the surface, this magma fills in cracks and holes and faults and cools slowly over thousands of years. When it rains the water flows through the ground and encounters the heat from this leftover magma, it warms up and rises back up to the surface picking up dissolved minerals from the rock along the way, the closer the magma is to the surface, the hotter the water in the springs.

Photograph Courtesy of the USGS

High and Dry

Bear.

***An Excerpt From Girl Gone Wild***

A dirty little secret of the outdoor world is just how rarely people abide by the rule of hanging their food or even storing it at some distance from their camp. More often than not they store in in coolers, trailers, vehicles, tents, or backpacks. In brown bear country, this is stupid and dangerous. In black bear and cougar country, which is most of everywhere else, it is only slightly less stupid and dangerous. But here’s how it happens. First, you do not see any bear or any other animals for that matter which makes choosing not to hang your food seem reasonable. But the lack of apparent wildlife is probably because humans are big and noisy and smelly even if we are trying not to be, not because they are not there. There is plenty of wildlife watching your progress down a trail that you will never know are there, and unless they are hungry or you manage to stumble into their young, they will probably go out of their way to avoid you. Unless they are hungry. And something is always hungry.

The second thing that happens is that you find yourself in a place with nothing to hang something from, this is a peculiar irony of the tundra areas of Alaska. There are vast u-shaped valleys carved by the slow progression of glaciers over thousands of years that, now exposed thanks to global warming are covered in bright fields of dense, soft tundra. Beautiful, but not a tree in sight. With no place to hang food the best you can hope for is good storage someplace down wind of your camp, you have to let the hanging thing go. Alternately, you can find yourself camped in such large trees that even the lowest branches are far too high to reach with even a weighted line, or you do not have enough line to make the pitch. Again, out of luck, and not entirely ones own fault.

The last thing that happens, and it is this kind of experience that can cause people to give it up entirely, is that it can take an entire evening to get the food bag hung. Food is heavy and oddly shaped, which means that you need something relatively accessible and sturdy to hang it from. I can spend a good half and hour looking for the right kind of branch an appropriate distance from camp and then another half an hour or more trying to toss a line, often with one end tied around a rock or shoe, over the branch. Have you ever tried to send a pair of shoes over a telephone line? Sometimes you get it in one shot, sometimes it seems impossible.

Photograph:

www.rubygonewild.com

Girl Gone Wild

Kickstart.

Two years ago I started looking for a well-written book about women in the wilderness.  I was looking for something both inspirational and practical, written from the standpoint of a woman that actually spends time in the outdoors.  What I found were gimmick books on glamping and diaries of pioneer wives, nothing written from a naturalists perspective and nothing that seemed instructive or addressed women-specific issues.  I thought that I couldn't possibly be the only woman that was interested in hearing about other women's outdoor experiences and I knew that I wasn't the only woman that could have used some guidance regarding safety, navigation, and any number of other things that come up when hiking and camping.  These books exist for men, I thought, why not women?  Is it possible that gender differences disappear in the wilderness?  Unlikely.  More likely, I thought, was that the male-dominated outdoor industry just hadn't figured out that there was a demand for women's outdoor narrative and some really good instructions for how not to pee on our shoes.

So, I wrote it.  Or most of it, really.  With thirty some-odd years of outdoor experience, a graduate degree in volcanology, and teaching and writing experience, I felt uniquely qualified for the task.  The only problem, how to find the time to finish the text and prepare to submit it for publication without quitting my day job.  The answer, quit your day job anyway.  So I did, well, one of them. And now I need your help.

I am running a Kickstarter to raise enough money to finish the text, edit it, format the images and figures, and get it out to publishers.  If you are can support me, please do.  I am offering some great rewards for my donors from wall calendars to day hikes in the hopes of enticing you to contribute financially.  If you can't contribute, and even if you can and do, you can help by spreading the word.  Anyone can support a Kickstarter project and I am going to need a lot of people to meet my (modest) goal so every repost, tweet, and link you can send out to your own network is invaluable to me.  I really appreciate your support!

To view the Kickstarter video, read excerpts from the book and other examples of my writing click here:
Girl Gone Wild

Keep checking back for updates, we have thirty days to make this happen, starting...now!