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!