Sun City

Heat.

I never grow tired of the desert, even though I am a daughter of the rain. I do not crave the heat, or love to lay out in the sun, but there is something about the desert calls out to me. Perhaps it is the contrast, that no trees obscure the view, no sinking into mud with every step, no dense clutches of vegetation or low-hanging clouds. Instead, there are coyote, saguaro, and scrappy stands of tiny trees that though smaller in stature are no less impressively old than even the tallest of Northwest Douglas firs. I enjoy the resilience of desert life, the necessary lengthening of timescales. In the desert, water will not come to you daily, or even by the month, best to savor thirst, celebrate it, and turn your mind from longing. The desert reminds me to accept the life I have been given, to make do. It illuminates the struggle of ordinary things and the value of simple things. There is great joy and beauty in the procurement of the necessities of life. It is, after all, a wonder. Try not to take it for granted.

The Great Wide Open III - Hot Stuff

Soak.

Some days go as planned, others, not so much. On this day, we decided to take the scenic route from our campsite in the foothills of the Jefferson Wilderness to the high lava lands east of the Cascades. The mission was to scout hikes for an upcoming field trip, most of which I had already seen. The only new hike looked and sounded from the description pretty easy. No big deal we thought. Yeah.

First, we decided to make an extra stop at an old-growth grove, which turned out to be neither a .25 mile loop nor particularly packed with old growth. A couple of miles later we emerge scratching our heads, wondering how such a nice trail got put in such a strange and remote place.

Two hours and one delicious roadside lunch later, we reach our real destination, get out, and start to hike. Uphill. Like really, really uphill. It's one of the few downsides to studying volcanoes, the hikes are almost always brutal climbs. So up we go to the beautiful viewpoint, planning to continue down and around the lake. But we miss the trail marker and an hour of hard hiking later, land right back at the car. 

Take two. We skip the cinder cone the second time instead walking through one of the largest and longest campgrounds either of us have ever seen. Eventually, we reach the juncture we should have been at almost two hours ago. We hike on past, towards the promise of an obsidian flow and hot springs. The sign at the trail head states that the hot springs will be about 1.25 miles past the flow, on a WELL MARKED spur trail (their emphasis, not mine). We find the flow. It is, in fact, obsidian. We hike on. And on. And on. We turn back at the halfway point, obviously having gone miles too far. Less than a mile beyond the flow, there is a side trail, entirely unlabeled, that leads to the hot springs.

Oh joy, oh rapture, hot springs! We are tired, dusty, and about four miles past what we were prepared to hike. We are ready for a soak. But. But the springs, being natural as they are, are blazing-lava hot. And also about five inches deep. Apparently, the winter snows and high lake levels are what locals use to fill the dug out tubs and cool the water. In midsummer, the best you can hope for is some dangerously hot splashing in muddy puddles. Which we do. For about four minutes. And then we start the long hike back.

Finally, after an accidental eight mile day, we load up and out, finding a cool place with a view to drink a somewhat cold beer dug from the bottom of our cooler. 

And so it goes.   

The Great Wide Open I - Hole In The Ground

Lake.

It has been at least five years since I have been to Crater Lake, and on that occasion I was so out of season that I was the only person at the one open lookout and didn't get to see the lake because of the dense clouds. Not so this weekend. This time, I took the opposite approach and joined the crowds on the park's busiest weekend of the year,the 4th of July. Used to the crush of the more than ten million visitors the Grand Canyon gets annually, I was bracing myself for long lines, tube socks, and RV's trying to see four parks in one week. 

But that wasn't the case. It turns out that due to its remote location Crater Lake only receives about 500,000 visitors a year so even their busiest weekends are mellow in comparison to many of the other National Parks. Sure, the lodge was busy with the usual assortment of tourists, mostly from West Indian,a fact for which I have no explanation, the trails and view points were fairly mellow. 

The odd thing about visiting Crater Lake is how inaccessible the lake itself actually is. The only access to the lake itself is via the Cleetwood trail, which loses more than 700 feet in elevation in just over a mile of trail. It's steep, packed, and on this weekend, stupid hot as well. But the best parts of the park, away from the spectacular blue of the lake, are in side canyons cut through great stacks of volcanic airfall where hoo doos stand as sentries and clear lake water runs its course out to the Klamath Basin. In these parts of the park there is solitude, spectacular views of Oregon country, and a true sense being squarely set in the middle of no where. It is a wonderful reminder of just how big the world really is. So, if you haven't made it out to Crater Lake in a while or ever, put it back on your list.

Picture:

www.RubyGoneWild.com

A Walk In The Woods

Saunterer.

***From a 2009 post that has become the basis for a new essay on walking and the wilderness***

A long weekend and the beginning of summer do a lot to remind us to go outside, breath the fresh air, listen to the birds, stretch our legs, and experience wildness. I think it’s important, amid the beer, fireworks, weenie roasts, and recreational vehicles that mark the American camping experience, to make sure that we do just that, stretch our legs and experience wildness. It’s not often anymore that the majority of us find ourselves away from the crush of noise, information, and development that comes with “civilized society”, and I think our distance from the wild plays a key role in our health and well-being, and our decision making as a people. Distancing ourselves from the wild is part of why we are able to devalue the environment, and that devaluation reveals itself in our politics, policies, and way of life. It allows us to waste resources, diminish habitat, allow entire species to go extinct, and engineer our bodies and our food.

I feel at my most engaged in the environment when walking through it. A walk in the wilderness does more to ease my mind, body, and soul than almost anything else. And it reminds me, in a tangible and profound way, that I am connected to this place, this world, this land, that it sustains me. Thoreau, in his 1862 essay, Walking, had this to say about the value of a walk in the woods, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainteterre" — to the holy land… They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”

We can make no progress in the improvement of our daily lives, in the fostering of health, community, sustainability, or peace, until we acknowledge and embrace our connection to the wilderness. Take a first step, take a walk.

To read the full text of Thoreau’s Walking:

http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html

To Read Emerson’s Nature:

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html#Chapter%20I

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

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

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!

A Walk In The Woods

saunterer.

A long weekend and the beginning of summer do a lot to remind us to go outside, breath the fresh air, listen to the birds, stretch our legs, and experience wildness. I think it’s important, amid the beer, fireworks, weenie roasts, and recreational vehicles that mark the American camping experience, to make sure that we do just that, stretch our legs and experience wildness. It’s not often anymore that the majority of us find ourselves away from the crush of noise, information, and development that comes with “civilized society”, and I think our distance from the wild plays a key role in our health and well-being, and our decision making as a people. Distancing ourselves from the wild is part of why we are able to devalue the environment, and that devaluation reveals itself in our politics, policies, and way of life. It allows us to waste resources, diminish habitat, allow entire species to go extinct, and engineer our bodies and our food.

I feel at my most engaged in the environment when walking through it. A walk in the wilderness does more to ease my mind, body, and soul than almost anything else. And it reminds me, in a tangible and profound way, that I am connected to this place, this world, this land, that it sustains me. Thoreau, in his 1862 essay, Walking, had this to say about the value of a walk in the woods, “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" — to the holy land… They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.”

We can make no progress in the improvement of our daily lives, in the fostering of health, community, sustainability, or peace, until we acknowledge and embrace our connection to the wilderness. Take a first step, take a walk.

To read the full text of Thoreau’s Walking:
http://thoreau.eserver.org/walking.html

To Read Emerson’s Nature:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html#Chapter%20I

Photo courtesy of:
http://dinabloomphoto.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/edith.jpg