New Mexico, Arizona

After our time with Sharman, we went South and back toward the border for a quick ecology survey on the El Coronado Ranch. This ranch, owned by the Austin family, has been working toward a goal of sediment deposit in their arroyos through the construction of trincheras, or small rock dams. Our project was to measure the height of these dams, the amount of sediment deposited behind them, and any hydrophilic vegetation that has grown in the channel. This project was our way to thank the Austins for letting us stay on their ranches in Mexico, though this time too felt beneficial to us as well. Their ranches may be some of the most beautiful parts of New Mexico and Mexico, and the work they are doing on these ranches is admirable. Our hope is that our survey will turn into a way they can help educate and encourage the public toward similar work.

We said goodbye to New Mexico and headed west to Arizona. We spent one brief night at the remote desert camp of No Mas Muertes, a humanitarian aid organization dedicated to the efforts of providing water, food and emergency medical care to migrants crossing over the Mexican border. We visited the border station at Sasabe, AZ and spoke briefly with the Customs agents at the border about the challenges of their job. We also visited the grave of a man found dead on his journey to a job in the US. We also got the opportunity to speak with two Whitman alums about their role within the organization.

We are now in southern California. For the next two nights we'll be staying outside of Joshua Tree and looking at the possibility of wind turbines on public land here. After this, it's on to the Tejon Ranch for one final writing workshop, then back up to Walla Walla to complete final projects and reinsert ourselves into society.

The Lichty Center

Our time in Mexico with Paul was both relaxing and stressful - our first real test of the semester and a paper due the day before kept us on our toes, but we also visited the beautiful Los Ojos Ranch and got to enjoy a hotspring on the property. We reveled in the Obama victory from across the border and enjoyed balmy temperatures before heading back up North.

Our next stop was the Lichty Center, a Nature Conservancy Owned cabin on a farm in southwestern New Mexico outside the town of Cliff. The cabin is set in a grove of maple trees next to several irrigation ditches, one well disguised as a wide stream. Sand hill cranes greeted us each morning, arriving in our field to snack on grain before heading along their way. We helped the TNC in a service project digging dirt, sand and weeds out of their irrigation ditch so it can more easily water their fields. During this project, we got to take a break and wander down toward an arm of the Gila River, an eventual tributary to the Colorado, and the only river in New Mexico that is not dammed. During our time at the center, we also got to participate in a writing workshop with author Sharman Apt Russel, best known for works Anatomy of a Rose, Hunger, and Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist. From Sharman, we learned the skill of integrating science into our writing. We also wrote a piece addressing what nature writers would be doing in fifty years. Here is mine:

Every day for eight days we rose before dawn, ate a quick breakfast of hardboiled eggs and coconut cookies, and crawled sleepily into the Land Rover. Starting the morning before the sun, we would watch dawn cast its’ light on the Rift Valley Escarpment, turning soft grey and dull tan to the brilliant green of baobab trees and rich red-brown of African soil. Each morning we would drive an hour and a half along the narrow two lane road between Mto Wa Mbu and Mswakini Juu to interview Maasai villagers about land use, agriculture and problem animals. And each morning along the road we’d see clusters of Maasai, clad red, purple and orange in brightly colored woven shukas waiting along the side of the road. They carried, sat on, and leaned against large blue and yellow five gallon containers they would carry to and from their bomas on the tops of their heads to wait for the government trucks carrying hundreds of gallons of water.

We traveled on foot between the communities of the Kwakuchinja Corridor, interviewing the patriarch of each boma and interacting briefly with their families. Sometimes they’d offer us spicy homemade chai, grey-brown in a dirty tin cup. I remember watching one young boy play a game to entertain himself while the rest of his family was preoccupied with us wazungus. He sat down in the dirt outside the door and licked his palm. I cringed, thinking about the cleanliness of my own palms, washed only several hours earlier, but coated already in grime. I looked again and watched as he placed his moistened palm in the dirt. Picking his palm up, he gazed admiringly at the miniature mud flat he’d created. I expected him to smear his hands together, or at the very least, rub the mud on his face. Instead, he again licked his palm, covering his tongue in a green-brown muck which didn’t appear to phase his taste buds. He continued licking, pressing, admiring and licking again throughout our conversation with his family. Every few minutes he’d spit out a mouthful of the mess. I remember thinking, “This family lives 25 miles off the highway. Who knows the next time they’ll see water? This boy will have the remnants of that dirt in his mouth and on his hands for days.” A few days later we came upon a little boy who was very sick, vomiting over the shoulder of his tired looking mother and I wondered if this was the fate of the dirt eating boy.

Traveling in Africa is like playing the role of an extra in a beautiful, heartrending movie. The grandeur of the landscape, flora and fauna seem to hide the dirt and poverty under which its’ residents live, but living and researching in this place allowed me to see firsthand the joy mixed in with the difficulty of life on the African savannah. Here in North-Central Tanzania, along one of the most traveled tourist routes running between Mount Kilimanjaro and the Serengeti, the Maasai live without water or electricity. Surrounded by tourist lodges with warm showers and electrical outlets for computers, phones and hair dryers, they depend on a government shuttle for their daily supply of water, weekly if they live too far off the highway. They use this water for cooking, making tea and watering their animals. Bathing and drinking are water uses for which the Maasai scoff, and they laugh too at our tiny bottles of hand sanitizer that we squeeze from before sitting down for lunch. In fact, they often laugh simply to laugh. I’ve never imagined a day without water until I worked among these people, listening to their apologies for not having enough water or sugar to make tea for us, watching their cracked lips move to a language that I didn’t understand.

Water availability is an issue of world-wide concern. It’s not just rural Africans that lack ready access to clean water, but the disenfranchised everywhere who feel the effects of environmental justice. I saw this again on a visit to the Navajo Indian Reservation in the Four Corners Area. We stayed at the Dooda’ Desert Rock camp, a small plywood shack with a wood burning stove, no electricity and no water. Many Navajo on the reservation get their water from coin operated dispensing systems that fail nearly as often as they function. These dispensers are placed in major towns and communities, typically miles away from the homes of those who require their use, and often involve hours of waiting in line in the blistering heat of summer or the raging ice storms of winter. Electric and water pipelines are not built to reach isolated family habitations on a landscape where neighbors can be twenty miles, not twenty feet, away from each other. This, in our own country.

After my time with the Maasai, and after two months in the water warring West, I have learned that most people don’t live the way we live. We’re living outside our means, glorying in the half an hour shower and irrigating fields at high noon in the desert where, in other parts of the world, people have limited access to any clean water. I wonder if this is what it takes for people to see the face of water shortages and lack of infrastructure worldwide. These things I’ve seen are burned into my memory – a little boy gets sick from bacteria living in the dirt, his mother’s shame at not being able to properly welcome her visitors, the shabby lean-to in which Elouise lives. In the next fifty years, our world must become increasingly compassionate to these issues if we are to accomplish our 2015, 2020 and 2050 environmental goals. We are not a world of separate nations, but a world together, inextricably linked by the one thing that sets us apart from the rest of life on earth: our humanity. Fifty years from now, I hope our nature writers will be writing of the things they write of today, I hope these things still exist. Only this time, I hope it is with a status quo of common good, of common access to our shared resources, and of common understanding.

New Mexico to Mexico

Our time with Bill DeBuys was relaxing. The place he calls home is a beautiful little spot along a river in Northern New Mexico with a large field, several beautiful adobe homes and a dog which made it easy for us feel at home as well. After leaving him, we drove an hour or so Southwest and had a free afternoon in Santa Fe. The town is a funny mix of Native Americans selling silver on the street, yuppy twenty-somethings (a little too much like us Westies) wandering around and admiring trendy coffee shops, and regular Santa Feans just trying to buy some pens at the Barnes and Noble.

This entire trip I've been lusting after a turquoise ring worn by one of my fellow Westies, an intensely beautiful blue stone set in a plain silver setting. And after a few weeks in the turquoise country of the Southwest, I was becoming increasingly discouraged by the tourist prices - $50 and $60 for a small, plain ring. But we'd heard rumors that throughout Santa Fe there are places where turquoise jewelry comes cheap - either because the Native Americans had been forced to pawn it off to pay for electricity or water, or because it had been hunted out of graves and other archaeological sites. Neither of these made me feel great, but I wanted to see what was available, so Ben and I headed out to find some of the cheap stuff.

The very first shop we went into - Native Feather Jewelry - was run by two large Italian men who spoke rapidly back and forth in a broken mix of Italian and English. It seemed like a strange collision of cultures to have these large, polo shirt wearing, mob-like men polishing small pieces of silver jewelry with rags and admiring brightly colored turquoise and red stones in large, gaudy necklaces. Ben and I shopped around a bit, he was looking for a bear-shaped necklace pendant and I had immediately zeroed in on the rings.

After only a few minutes, Ben and I had both found pieces we were interested in. Upon asking the price, I learned that the ring I wanted was affordable, the only problem was that it didn't fit. "It's no problem," I was assured, "Take it across the street to Bear, and he'll resize it for you. Just three, maybe four dollars. You'll find him by his sign - 'Open when I can, Close when I want. Don't joke with him. I'm serious. And don't wear your sunglasses." I was sold. It was a beautiful, imperfect green-blue turquoise with mottled brown spots and I loved it. Ben was still looking around, so I went to the counter and paid for my purchase. Immediately, the man who helped me began berating Ben for his lack of chivalry - "Aren't you going to buy this for her? What, are you guys not married yet?" to which I jokingly responded that he wasn't trained yet, and that no, we were not married.

Ben was deciding between two pieces, both a little spendier than he'd like, but upon telling the proprietor this, he was admonished with the words, "I give you good deal on this, man. You go somewhere else to buy, I kill you." I, meanwhile, was helping the other man pick out a necklace for his wife as a reconciliation gift for apparent adultury. Ben decided he'd better buy one of the pieces so we could leave. After he'd paid and endured a little more sarcasm for his ungentlemanly ways, we left in a hurry, and went to the central plaza to meet the rest of the Westies for lunch. On our way, we passed rows of Native American sellers who had set their pieces out on blankets on the sidewalk. I stumbled across one interesting man who was completing his fourth master's degree and selling jewelry to pay tuition.

That afternoon, we decided to head down to a different part of town, stopping by to look for Bear on the way. We weren't sure if we'd find him in a jewelers store, or if we'd find him on the sidewalk, so we wandered for a bit, keeping our eyes out for anyone who might fit the description. After meandering through one small mall, we turned a corner and ran into a small, worn desktop with a closed window over it. A small sign reading "Open when I can, close when I want" told us we were in the right place. Additional signs "50% deposit before work" and one that said something along the lines of "I'm a biker. To all you solicitors, proprietors, and other beggars leave me alone. If you bother me, I'll make you sorry unless you're blind and can't read this." Unfortunately his shop was not open.

The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully - we tried to blend in at the local bookstore, then got delicious organic frozen yogurt at a small shop along a small street. I returned to Bear's shop once more before we left, again to find the lights off and the door locked. Though the ring I bought is too small, it is the most beautiful piece of jewelery I've seen and I hope eventually I'll find someone who can fit it for me.

From Santa Fe, we drove a little South of town and set up camp at the Camel Tracks National Guard Training Site. Over the course of our stay here we would be buzzed by lowflying Blackhawks and Apaches and occasionally run into a military convoy. We spent the next few days doing ecology fieldwork in Bandelier National Monument near the Valles Caldera with Phil's college roommate. Though I can't say ecology is my favorite (or anywhere near it) subject, I really enjoyed the time to hike around the monument - first up and over Scooter Peak, a small mountain on the edge of the Caldera, then through Frijoles Canyon - filled with cliff dwellings, cave art and a small stream that would eventually lead us to the Rio Grande. We then did a day of fieldwork near our campsite on the mesa in the burning heat.

After these days, we moved down to Southern New Mexico to the Chihuahua Desert less than 50 miles from the Mexican border. Here we spend several days looking for the extremely rare Pinocereus Gregii - or night-blooming cereus - the subject of Paul's research at UNM. Though we only found 3 individuals after days of looking, we found several stashes of waterbottles and clothing from border crossers and ran into several horny toads. It seemed a little surreal to be in a place so controversial, something that we were consistently reminded of as helicopters flew overhead and a border blimp rose a few miles away.

We then headed down to Mexico. We've spent the last few days on the San Bernadino Ranch which butts up directly to the US border. Our first night here we walked down to the barbed wire fence that serves to delineate our country from our neighbor. In one place there was even a gate, easily hopped over even if it was chained shut. The ranch is a recovering wetland, a private conservation project entirely supported by the Austin family. We did a morning of fieldwork looking at different marsh plants and their frequency along the edges of the cienega, then wrote a quick paper and headed off to another ranch to spend the night at a hotspring.

The night of the election was spent "in one of the forgotten corner's of the world, huddled around a radio" and though it was strange to be so far away from home and not even in our own country, we were grateful that Obama recognized us and we can't wait for January.

Only two weeks remain in this grand adventure, a fact that most of us are still refusing to acknowledge. Next it's back to New Mexico for a little more writing.

Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico

Almost another month has passed since my last post. Time alternately flies and goes slowly out here and between cooking meals, moving camp and hiking and talking to speakers, we have very little free time. We've spent the last few weeks moving around the Four Corners area.

After spending a week with Ann-Weiler Walka near Bluff honing out observational and written skills, we produced several short works and one longer essay. I found this experience incredibly rewarding for my own mental health, a break from the crazy schedule we've been living, but also frustrating. A Northern Rockies girl at heart, I had a difficult time relating to the harsh exposure of the desert. As a result, here is the piece I wrote:

I splash cool water over my face, a soothing change from the baking sun and abrading wind. Lying face down on the contoured sandstone, I stare at my reflection in this pothole, surprised at how little has changed. Days in the desert, this land of rolling rocks and shifting sand, has left me raw - burned from the sun, cracked and scratched from the land, and exposed – as though my secrets are uncovered for all to see. I am surprised that this desert capsule has not swallowed me up with its vast canyons and raging winds. No, this desert leaves me solitary, alone in my unease. And so I search for a place here that I can call my own, a home where questions have answers and I am sheltered from the elemental force of this land.

Terry Tempest Williams tells us, “If a desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found,” and, on occasion, I agree with her. Standing on top of Comb Ridge for the first time, we watched a storm descend on us from farther North. A curtain of water engulfed us, washed us clean of our preconceptions and inhibitions about this place and left us bare, exposed to one another, to the landscape and to ourselves. I watched rivulets of water stream between my toes and felt a strange communion with this desert, a communion that quickly dried the following morning with the last sodden remnants of the storm. But those moments have come only occasionally for me and this exposure I feel brings with it a discomfort that characterizes a foreign place.

For days here I struggled to find meaning, to create a deep map that portrayed my own feelings and understandings of a place that isn’t mine. I find myself falling too easily into cliché and don’t know how to add meaning, add newness and shine to a landscape I do not know. Rather, I begin to depend on the words of others to conceptualize the desert. I can feel the sandstone beneath my feet, but don’t have the words to describe the way it confounds my toes into thinking I walk on crushed velvet, not rock. I admire the vistas, but see these mesas and canyons as static landmarks to help me get my bearings rather than stops along the crawling geologic process of time. I need the words of others because I do not possess the words to write the desert, to unearth, within myself, a sense of place here.

This time in the desert has left my feeling lost. My compass still points North, but learning the landscape so I can get my bearings is a slower process among landforms that look to me like one continuation of the same grand idea and leave me turning circles. I stand alone here, between sand and sky, and think about home. Home is a place I haven’t been for awhile, but the more I move the easier it is to find. And so I take this idea of home and translate it here onto the desert.

After days of wandering on this slickrock slope, I came to a place yesterday I can point to and say, “This place, this place I understand.” Ancient grey-green juniper trees and overgrown, snarled shrubs shade two pools – one large and one small – that probably see no more than three hours of sunlight each day. Two stones configure into stairs, complete with juniper handholds, and lead down to the larger pool. On one side, a private changing room for the shy guest, on the other a perfect shelf on which to re-warm stiff muscles after an icy dip. In a desert, famous for its absence of hiding places, this spot is sheltered, overhung and obscured from the passerby. And so, I’ve found my home here in a little alcove completely uncharacteristic of this land. The water is chilly, and moss stays green for days after rain in the shade of a thick slab of sandstone. Rather than exposure, I feel a deep sense of secrecy, of comfort, of conspiracy as though this place and I plot our clandestine enjoyment hidden from the rest of the land. It’s not rawness, but refreshment that brings a tingle to my skin as I slide my naked body into the frigid water of this desert pot-hole. Refreshment and relaxation, relief to have finally found a retreat for myself. Though this haven is not the quintessential desert written about by Mary Austin, Ellen Meloy or Terry Tempest Williams, this is the desert for which my words convene. We are told that deserts are a sacred journey to the self found only because there are no places to hide. But for me, I’ve found my hiding place here, my blue amidst a sea of red, and so I am home.

After the week with Ann, we had our mid-semester break, a four-day rafting trip on the San Juan River between Bluff and Mexican Hat. Though not the warm, sun-basking trip we'd hoped, we enjoyed rock art, cliff dwellings, garnet deposits and the wonderful company of our field managers father and several of his friends. Highlights included an animated version of the Hokey-Pokey and guitar serenades in the morning.

After taking off the river, we headed South for several days on the Navajo reservation. We met with several different organizations including two fighting the incoming coal fired power plant and a few lawyers working on various environmental issues. We also got the opportunity to stay just outside of Canyon de Chelly and take a moonlit tour with a national park service employee. Once again, we are reminded of our relatively recent hold on this land the immense amount of tradition that came before us.

After Navajoland, we returned to the Bluff area of Utah for a four day writing workshop with area writer Craig Childs. The first few days were spent romping up, down and around Mule Canyon, exploring cliff dwellings, frigid pools and learning to move like lizards on the sticky sandstone. Our time with Craig was highlighted by storytelling, of his adventures in the area and the outside world, the history of the people who inhabited the four corners, and his many harrowing tales of living outside for a majority of his life. From Craig we learned that everything is a story, that everything can be somehow tied to everything else, and that an unimproved road is the one most likely to lead somewhere exciting.

We've now moved South to New Mexico once again for a brief stay with William DeBuys on the property he writes about in The Walk. This morning we took the walk with him, and listened to his stories of the 35 years he's spent on this land. Again, we count our lucky stars to be here with this group, traveling through a landscape both coveted for its; beauty, but also controversial for its' resource use and extraction.

the last month or so

I don't think I can try to catch up with everything we've done in the last month, but I'll try to at least describe, however briefly, a bit of something we did in each place.

Since we left Lone Pine, CA, we've been in three states. We started back in Nevada in the northeastern part near a town called Jackpot. Here we spent several days with John Marvel looking at the destructive nature of cattle on public land. John is adamant that cattle deserve no place on lands that each person in our nation lay claim to, and is doing his best to ensure that ranchers are following regulations set up for them so they don't destroy the land. After this, we moved to the Cottonwood Ranch where we spend two days touring a couple different ranches with the owners, ranch hands, government agents, and scientists who have, collaboratively, been attempting to maintain and even improve the health of the landscape while still using it for grazing.

Immediately after this we spent a few days on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument with Tamara Naumann, a botanist for Dinosaur who taught us about tamarisk and provided tasty nourishment while we tore it out of several popular lunch beaches.

Then on to Paonia, CO where we met with journalist Michelle Nijhuis, who has since become a proud mama. We stayed on 80 acres of communal land owned by Michelle and her husband and four other families and had several writing workshops with Michelle. She taught us about the importance of voice in prose pieces. We also got to tour High Country News and meet several staff members including editors, staff writers and interns. This was a really great opportunity to see journalism in action and also about how to cater writing to a very diverse audience.

We then moved to the Lost Marbles Ranch outside of Aspen, owned by the president of the Sopris Foundation. His staff person, Piper, spent several days with us in and around Aspen talking to various people about renewable energy technology and innovation. This time in Aspen was a nice break, a light in the seemingly dark of the West full of cows, weeds and dry lands.

From Aspen we moved on to the Fishlake National Forest in Southern Utah with ecologist Mary O'Brien. With Mary we did a series of vegetation transects and creek mapping to look at the viability of beavers in the 10 Mile Creek system. After four days of data collection, we went to Castle Valley, UT, outside of Moab, to Mary's home for several days of data analysis. From Mary, we've learned that an ecosystem is only as good as the sum of its parts, and the origin and contribution of these parts are important. Mary also works to control the impact of cattle on a landscape, but does so through education and on the ground science. Leaving Castle Valley was bittersweet because it marks the end of our time with Mary who voice and thoughts have underlain a majority of our semester so far.

We find ourselves now outside of Bluff, Utah. Our campsite is in Doc's Hollow below Comb Ridge, famously mentioned in Monkey Wrench Gang. For the next week we will be baking ourselves and learning to write the desert.

Our week in Lone Pine was spent writing. This opportunity to focus so deeply on the written word, than speak with Paul about our thoughts and ideas, was wonderful. On our last night, we shared our longest piece to the group. Here is my first epiphany:

Epiphany #1

We are attracted to topography. Dramatic peaks and vast canyons steal our gaze and direct our cameras as we drive or hike throughout the West. Perhaps this attraction lies in our inability to see the effect of our own hand on these landscapes. It is the level lands we have tried to master. On these desolate flatlands we try to mimic the creations of the earth – building infrastructure where we perceive none, chasing our surveyors scopes with asphalt trucks and backhoes.

I sit on a ledge above a lake high up in the Sierra-Nevada of Southern California. My feet hang over thirty feet of empty air and my heart races as I survey the landscape below me. From this vantage point I can see for miles, I can hear the quiet. Dropping away below me are scree-laden slopes, lake basins and trees. Above me, ridgeline, landslide chutes, the sky. My lungs feel tight both from the altitude and the knowledge that one false step will send me careening down to meet the boulders hundreds of feet below. I slowly become accustomed to the sight and my eye is drawn up, from where each throaty gully deposits her mouthful of gravel and dirt, to the sky. I follow the jagged serration of the ridgeline until it becomes imperceptible in the blue depths beyond. These lines for the architecture of this place – the sand and rock an eternal foundation on which trees and the trail of a falcons flight act as scaffolding to the ceiling of blue. These lines for my understanding of this place – the contours of the skyline, my rooftops and chimneys decorated by a wallpaper of rock columns. These lines converge to create a topography unknowable to the cement and steel of man.

Half a state away, the landscape tells a different story. A map of Reno and the surrounding area reveals a peculiar spectacle. A checkerboard overlays the city and nearby countryside. Little quarter mile squares dot the page like tiles on a kitchen floor. Over the checkerboard lies a spider web of crisscrossing, zigzagging lines. But as I walk away from Reno, these squares and cobwebs do not appear to me on the land. It stretches out in front of me as far as the eye can see, and obstacles only arise in the form of mountains or the blazing afternoon sun that burns my skin and forces an averted gaze. My only clue as to another hand at work is precisely that which keeps me moving – the road. It cuts like a scar across the great basin. A map of Reno is dominated by lines of our own fabrication. The checkerboard – an alternation between private and public land ownership, imaginary lines that cannot be seen on the land itself. The web of interwoven lines that tightens and multiplies to a point of confusion as it nears Reno – the system of roads and highways we’ve built to facilitate our movement between and beyond our life-sized board game. Even the few naturally occurring lines we’ve left compelled to claim, so put hash marks and unnaturally arranged arms across rivers to denote our dams and irrigation canals, then run lines parallel to them which serve as the railroad. Our townships and allotments divide the landscape, and we place our state lines across countryside that sometimes follows geographic features, but often doesn’t. Rather than a blueprint of connected, interdependent lines and systems to attach our world to Cronon’s “first nature,” our map looks like an etch-a-sketch left in a little boy’s backpack as he scampers, pauses, winds and cartwheels his way home from school. Not so for Mother Nature, earth’s grand engineer. Her lines follow and build upon one another.

From high up on my vantage point in the Eastern Sierra, the distant layers of mountain ranges give contour and dimension to the landscape. Time and again, we try to manipulate this masterpiece to fit our model of efficiency, order and ownership. But Mother Nature is a force to be reckoned with. Each landslide, earthquake and flood is not a natural disaster but a natural renovation, a remodeling of an already well-crafted landscape. Typically a generous landlord, the problems arise when we try to manipulate nature. When we overuse a resource, Mother Nature grounds us. When we become overconfident in our design, she strips us of our privileges and reminds us that her hand, not ours, put this world together. Each ridgeline, creekbed and hilltop was placed deliberately.

Our maps help us move from one place to another in this geometric, parceled existence we’ve carved out for ourselves. But these maps don’t tell the whole story. They reflect only the two-dimensionality of a world that daily confounds us with its three dimensions. Hold a map flat and you strip the world of the character bestowed by a force more creative, more meticulous than man. Instead, climb a mountain, a high one so that man’s lines blend imperceptibly and irrelevantly against those crafted so studiously by Mother Nature.

Atop my vantage point, I inspect the convergence and divergence she has made and realize that each line does not lead to a destination, but to another line, another drainage, another mountain range until my gaze is lost in the infinite blue beyond the horizon. Standing up, I briefly let my eyes drift once more, then follow the trail down.

Lone Pine, CA

From Eastern Oregon we headed South to Pyramid Lake, a large terminal lake outside Reno, Nevada. We spent our time there focusing on water issues including rights, diversion issues and development in and around rivers. The Nevada landscape is unlike anything I've ever seen before, where the tallest vegetation are the three foot tall juniper and sage brush bushes. Finally, after a couple weeks of cold we've reached a place where we can comfortably sleep outside and don't need our down coats as soon as the sun sets. Here we're learning to change our perceptions of beautiful to include brown, grey and beige in addition to green. On our last day in the basin we spent the afternoon swimming in the lake, clambering around the tufa rock formations and generally enjoying being clean (though the water is significantly more alkaline than what we're used to in the PNW).

After spending a few nights at Pyramid Lake, we've headed further South. Lone Pine, California is the starting point for ascending Mount Whitney and our camp is situated in the foothills below Langley Peak. Here again we're looking at terminal lakes, specifically dry Owen's Lake that is in the midst of a rehabilitation. Today we visited Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp in the valley that serves as another scar our nation has in its history. Being here in this place, surrounded by the first person accounts of the Manzanar experience was a sobering reality check in our present day political state. Later this afternoon we hiked up to an ashram about a quarter of the way up Langley Peak where we were encouraged by our writing professor to find inspiration and let it run with us. Today was the first time we've really had for introspection and absorption of all the material and experience we've had over the last three weeks, and for that I was grateful. The landscape here is breathtaking, as everywhere we've been so far. Nestled up against the Sierra Nevadas, the Alabama Hills (filming site of many Westerns) directly below.

Unity, Joseph and Mount Howard

After Hell's Canyon, we spent a few nights along the North Fork of the Burnt River working on ecology with Suzanne Fouty and Mary O'Brien. We spent two days taking transects of the river and looking at potential beaver habitat and the viability of supporting beaver in the area. Spending two days on the river looking at plant life really changed my perspective on the health of riverine ecosystems. It made me realize there is a difference between health and biodiversity and aesthetics.

After three nights on the Burnt River, we returned to Enterprise and are now occupying a barn on a private ranch outside of Joseph. We've been talking about swimming in Wallowa Lake all week, and were excited to return to Joseph. Yesterday we rode the tram up from Wallowa Lake to Mount Howard and spent the day doing mini-projects on alpine eosystems. Following the data collection, we climbed to the top of Mt. Howard and enjoyed the view of Aneroid Lake and the drainage that flows into Wallowa Lake. It was windy and frigid at the top, but we enjoyed the opportunity to stop and admire our surroundings.

Upon returning to the parking lot, we all piled into the suburbans to return to the ranch. Initially, it seemed that the weather had foiled our plans of swimming, but our courageous leader Jay made the call to stop at the boat launch. We all ran down to the water, shedding our clothes along the way, to jump into the lake at 60 degree outside temperatures. The initial shock literally stole my breath, but as we splashed around and tried to wash the last weeks grime off our bodies, it made us feel alive - we were laughing, screaming, splashing and flailing for as long as we could feel our toes. What a great place to be!

Hells Canyon

We took off from Walla Walla around noon today. After a gorgeous drive along the Oregon Scenic byway through the canyon, then a brief drive along the canyon rim, we arrived at our campsite, outside the J2 Ranch. We've got a beautiful overlook of the canyon and a great setup here where we'll be for the next four nights. Jay, Season and Phil have worked really hard to ensure that we have a perfectly functioning internet connection, kitchen, tent, shower and bathroom system and we're living plush!

Today I realized what David Bayles meant when he says, "You are already at the center of the West." Each place we drove through today was the "Westernmost" of any Western place I've ever visited - Walla Walla offering free rodeo tickets and the billboard saying, "Don't let Seattle steal this election," the bison farm outside Enterprise and the Wallowa River gorge. I anticipate that this will be the case for the rest of the semester. And today we didn't even talk to anyone. I think this will be a semester of understanding, illumination and great questioning.

Hell's Canyon is a beautiful place to get acquainted to the West. The view is scenic, the weather is beautiful (so far, though we're expecting a storm tomorrow) and the company (as usual) is great. I can't wait to meet Mary and get started on the first assignment!

In The West?

The final chapter of this year of travel has begun. Currently, the Westies are living up at Johnston Wilderness Campus, about half an hour outside of Walla Walla doing various orientation activities, getting to know each other, and getting accustomed to living out of a duffel bag (yet again) for the next four months. We've had only one academic discussion so far, involving our perceptions of and thoughts about the West, which turned into a funny sort of defensive stake claiming of each person and their home state. The group is varied in terms of home, but not so much in terms of interests and viewpoints. For this, I am excited to get on the road and talk to other people. But so far we get along great and are similarly terrified and excited to get going.

Tomorrow we leave for our first adventure! It's off to Eastern Oregon for Ecology with Mary O'Brien. I can't wait to get started.

last week of summer

It's hard to believe that summer is already over. I leave for Walla Walla next Tuesday to head off on my next (and final) great adventure for my 21st year. This fall I'll be exploring some of the biggest environmental and political issues of the Western United States under the guidance of Phil Brick, an environmental-politics professor at Whitman and with 20 other students who I cannot wait to meet and get to know.

During the last 6 months, I traveled to Tanzania and Ecuador with school-related programs. The people I met and the things I saw and learned in these places are forever ingrained in my memory and will inspire me to be a more compassionate and active person for the rest of my life. To the friends I made in these places, I can't wait for our next great adventure.

So here's to the next page. I'll try to keep up with this as much as internet access allows, and I'd love to hear from anyone and everyone along the way.

Also, we have a website...www.semesterinthewest.org so you can follow our progress there!