Dear Friends On a July day in 2019, I navigated my pickup truck up the endless logging road switchbacks that wound their way upward and across the North Fork of Hat Creek drainage in the Salmon River Mountains. With me were four scientists from all over the US; specialists in fields somehow related to these […]
Lessons from These Times
Dear Friends and Partners. Interesting times, these. It seems just several weeks ago all that we heard about on the media was concerning the health of the planet; climate change dominated conversations then. Now, the focus has changed to something quite close: the health of us. And it has got all of our attention. Most […]
When You Might Need a Rock
It was one of those subzero days, back in early Alderspring history before hired help. With frozen wooden hands, I finished the feeding of 6 tons of grassy alfalfa hay, and jumped down off the 4 foot high bed on the back of the rusting 1959 Chevy Viking ranch truck. It was good that I […]
When Cows Climb Cars
On the wind-swept high plains prairie outback of North Dakota, underneath a rusting vertical heap of green John Deere wheat combines, I discovered a Volkswagen beetle. It looked like a late 60s model in robin-egg blue and was partly crushed by the tons of rotting steel on top of it. I stopped, struck by the […]
An Irish Blessing
A five hundred-foot pillar of cloud marked our progress on the otherwise monochrome of rolling sage that cloaked the expansive flats at the base of the mountains. The Pahsimeroi is sometimes called the “Big Valley” by local residents with good reason; it is a gently tilted valley up to 15 miles wide and over fifty […]
The Sign of the Beaver
It looks like snow today, this Christmas Eve. The sun has not yet risen over our big valley, and as I look up to the distant head of our valley, there is a warm glow that fills the notches between the peaks. The rose of dawn is attempting to fill that high country. But that […]