Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss. The language of hunting has a word for such mark-making: ‘foil’. A creature’s ‘foil’ is its track. The path’s sediment comprised sentiment, and to follow a path might therefore […]
Tag Archives: Colorado
At the end of our street, where the pavement ends, an orange plastic fence stretched across the trail leading into an undeveloped area. A small sign noted that the trail was closed. Knowing it was just a few hundred yards to the regional bike trail — and following in the footprints of many others — […]
To me, it is a landscape of scary places, the geography of nowhere, that has simply ceased to be a credible human habitat. ~ James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere Some would say that urban sprawl is the major quality of life issue of our times. We see it every day, driving from our […]
“..the comfortable walk has to do with the fact that all animals seek, simultaneously, prospect and refuge. We want to be able to see our predators, but we also want to feel that our flanks are covered. And so we’re drawn to places that have good edges, and if you don’t supply the edges, people […]
“With climate change increasing, drought increasing, and more high rainfall events, I think there’s more of a need to incorporate permanent vegetation into agriculture systems.” Susan Stein, Director of USDA National Agroforestry Center In the movie Interstellar, the near-future world is being consumed by climate change, and one-by-one the monocultural crops that feed the world […]
I grew up in a family that hunted and fished and valued the natural world. My father was an amateur naturalist and passed those tendencies on to us kids. As an attorney, he had a close relationship with many of his clients who were ranchers and farmers, and he shared with us what he understood […]
I caught a wasp in the kitchen window with a glass and piece of cardboard, then let it go outside. I’m not much troubled by wasps and bees these days, although when I was a kid we used to be pretty terrified by yellow jackets. They were aggressive, could sting you repeatedly, and were pretty […]
The sound sent a chill down my spine, and I froze. Did it echo around the valley or was that just my adrenaline-riddled imagination? I became conscious of the trout hanging from my belt and the blood dripping down my leg. We were backpacking in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness area, and had camped about halfway […]
