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.