“Yaa HOE Ya HOE!” The last “Hoe” really rang and echoed through the wide open old-growth and open understoried forests of the Northern Appalachians. It carried and wound its way through rhododendron-filled bottoms and over mountain laurel cloaked hillsides, both intoxicatingly fragrant with a riot of spring blooms in pink and white. It was only …
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Close Encounters of the Salmon River Kind
The bizarre and unexpected sometimes show up in our headlights as we track through the Idaho wilderness night on twisty 2 lane highways. Linnaea, alone in her Outback, was carefully traversing the loneliness of highway 21 at 1 AM on a midwinter night a few years back. Idaho 21 is the only road through this untracked and wild section of Idaho, …
From Hot Dish to Hat Creek
Dear Friends and Partners It was 1985, and it was raining. Hard. And spitting snow. Kneeling in the muck on a slope so steep that as I knelt, my feet began to lose purchase on the ground and I quickly reached into my near-frozen bag of trees for a Douglas-fir seedling. I put aside my hoedad, the trademark tree planting hoe that would become my …
The Lost Great Pyrenees
It was a cold mid-December day when Allie and her best friend and border collie, Clyde, made a run for it. They occasionally do, just exploring the river bottoms adjacent to the big pastures on the Alderspring prairie where our beeves run herd for the winter. They ran off like Mutt and Jeff, big, white, wolf sized dog and 30-pound border collie …
Regenerative Ranching: Tripling Organic Matter in 10 Years
The ground fairly shook with the rumble of 350 head of elk stampeding away as I made my approach to my sample area in our south meadow. To my chagrin, they had been dining on the rich green that still grew in fits and starts on this late October day in our high valley of the Pahsimeroi in the remote mountains of Central Idaho. They were …
Re-creating Recreation
“Hey you guys—make sure you check your shoelaces on this ice!” I looked up to my daughters, downclimbing along the 1400 foot vertical precipice, as they gingerly worked their way along the sandstone ledges covered with fresh snow and ice. My only saving grace was that they had a solid 3/8 inch log chain bolted to the rocks along their route to …
Working into the Ground
The kids and I worked outside much of the day. It was a little bitter. Although windless, the temp never got above the low teens and the sun was hidden behind thick clouds that spat snow on and off through the day. There was hay to fork, cattle to sort, wood to cut, and dog housing to build (for the border pups). Fences had fallen down with …
Coming Home for Christmas
It wasn’t Christmas yet, but it was dang close. The very next day would be Christmas Eve. My buddy Greg and I decided to grab Christmas trees for our families up on the Hat Creek Ranges this year because we both had little kids at home, and it was forecasted to be frigid cold. Normally, we bundle everyone up, drive as far as we can into the peaks, …