Gulliver's Nest

In the Mines of Potosí

2011-11-19T10:38:00.001-08:00

One week while Andrew was tied down by work in La Paz, Tom and I wandered off to see something of the country’s rugged Central Highlands. We traveled mostly by bus, except for the initial flight out of La Paz, which we were forced to take because the Aymara of El Alto were blockading the highway heading east out of La Paz. From Cochabamba we meandered to Sucre, and then we made our way to Potosí, one of the oldest cities in North America. It perches just above 4000 meters. Our bus ride up was entirely at night, winding along the side of vast gulfs and broad, treeless plains, all indistinct in the starlight. We hadn’t made a reservation in Potosí, which made me more nervous than usual about our arrival, but we found a cold, quiet hotel as fans were leaving the bars at the end of a Copa de Oro game.

The Spanish founded Potosí in 1545, shortly after silver was discovered in Cerro Rico, the tall, triangular peak that lies just north of town. The mines were extraordinarily productive, with hundreds of shafts sunk into the mountain once the surface deposits were exhausted. The crown took a fifth of all production, and its share was brought to the Caribbean by mule train and boat, where it became part of the fabled Spanish “treasure fleet” that sailed across the Atlantic once a year in a massive convoy. Francis Drake made his name by raiding these ships.

The conditions of mining were brutal. The Spanish imported millions of African slaves to work in the mines, of whose descendants, the Afro-Bolivianos, only 35,000 survive (they’ve mostly moved northwest, into a fertile, quiet valley of the Yungas Province). The imperial governors also conscripted millions of indigenous people to work in the mines as part of the mita system, a required annual stint of labor that the colonial administration adapted from an old Inca policy. Perhaps as many as eight million men died in the mines over the centuries (many secondary sources assert this number, though I have to admit that I have yet to find a convincing explanation of the estimate). The silver eventually ran during the eighteenth century, but miners later dug for tin and, nowadays, lead and zinc.

While most of Cerro Rico’s wealth was exported, the city itself did grow to as many as 160,000 people, making it the largest city in the western hemisphere in its 16^th century heyday. Tom and I wandered its streets for a day, taking in the small but ornate churches. At the Convento de San Francisco, we climbed to the top tower, from which we could take in the whole of Cerro Rico’s ochre and gray bulk. Its top half is so riddled with mineshafts that miners may only dig on its lower sections, where the roofs of the passageways are less likely to cave in.

Both the guidebooks I had on the trip (the first, sadly, left on the back seat of a La Paz taxi) strongly recommended but also sternly warned their readers about a visit into the mines. Of course, I was deeply intrigued. I made arrangements to enter a cooperative mine with a reputable tour group, Greengo Tours, the next morning. Then Tom and I went out for dinner at a rollicking café whose owner was probably the most extroverted Bolivian I met during the entire trip. We eventually left when he began to exhort us to dance to the music of a local band.

I rose early to meet my guide at the tour office. He was a short, stocky fellow named Julio Morales who spoke decent English, and he endeared himself to me with a number of off-color jokes. We were joined by a pair of Belgian girls who had traveled all over Bolivia for the previous month. They seemed remarkably sanguine about our trip underground.

We took a bus up the side of the mountain to a small office owned by the tour company, where we donned mining outerwear and boots to keep our clothes from getting all wet and dirty. This included putting on a hard hat and a miner’s lamp of the kind that clips right onto the helmet itself. Next, we walked to a small mining market, where we bought coca, orange juice, and several sticks of TNT to give to the men we would meet inside the mountain. According to Lonely Planet, the owner of Greengo Tours is fighting against incorporating dynamite explosions into tours, but apparently this ethic did not extend to actual use of the device.

Another bus took us up onto the mountain itself, where we dismounted by several shacks, one of which had a sign inscribed Cooperative Minera. Several men were sitting around, apparently on their lunch break. One of them couldn’t have been more than 14 or 15 years old. Julio stopped to chat with them, seemingly making a joke or two at our expense, as they all laughed together heartily. Here and there around us were empty carts, some turned over on their side. A small-gauge railroad track ran through the carts and into a small, dark hole in the side of the mountain.

Julio eventually collected us, and, after going on at length about the challenges of the darkness and confined space that would soon engulf us, led us into the hole. On this first section, we had to move fast, as the railway sloped downhill and, every so often, a cart would come hurtling along, loosely guided by a pair of miners (the most junior of the workers, according to Julio). If we were caught on the track, it would have been very bad news indeed.

I immediately was aware of just how small the tunnel was, as I had to constantly stoop as we trotted along. The hard hat came in handy when I smacked my head against a wooden buttress supporting the roof of the tunnel. It was very tiring keeping up with Julio – we were at 13 or 14,000 feet, now, and I hadn’t eaten much breakfast.

When we did stop, it was to duck into a side chamber where three or four miners were operating a gasoline-fueled winch. A wire ran down (out of sight) eighty or one hundred feet to the bottom of a shaft, where other men were using pickaxes and shovels to load rock into a bucket at the end of the wire. When the bucket was lifted back up to top, the waiting men unloaded its contents into a cart, which they hustled out to the surface.

The miners were happy enough to chat with us, or were at least pleased to get their present of coca leaves (as with Luis on Huayna Potosí, they seemed to consume little but coca - notice how many in these pictures have a solid wad tucked into a cheek). Then we headed on, further into the mountain. We descended several wooden stepladders to see what the operation was like at the end of a winch. The Belgians and I took a turn shoveling rock into a bucket. Julio often stopped to tell us about some detail of the work in the mines. He had spent three years as a miner but quickly grew restless. Judging by his clothes back in town, he had done well for himself on the outside, but he still seemed acutely aware of the social hierarchy within the mine. Everything on the inside works on the basis of seniority, and we ran into one foreman who was miffed that Julio had not taken us to see his own operation because he wanted a share of the gifts we had brought into the mine.

At one point while Julio was talking, we heard a distant pop-pop-pop, like fireworks across a large lake. It was dynamite going off somewhere not too far away. We stopped midway down one shaft because there so much silica dust filled the air. Most miners get silicosis pneumonia after a decade or two of work in the mines and die; indeed, I only saw one or two men in the mine who appeared to be older than thirty. All of them seemed to be short, efficient, and cheerful – content in relatively good-paying work that allowed them to realize their masculinity. I tied my bandana over my mouth and tried to breath lightly.

On our way out, (we were all exhausted by the bending and hustling, not to mention the air) we stopped in a small passage occupied by a grotesque figure carved to represent some sort of underworld god. It sat by the edge of the wall, taller than any human, looking like a cross between the Minotaur and a Rastafarian. It was covered in silly string and had coca leaves and a cigarette dangling from its mouth; in its hand was a plastic bottle filled with a clear liquid that must have been grain alcohol. The miners try to keep this creature pacified with such gifts, for they believe that when he is angry, fatal accidents occur. Julio also made a veiled but meaningful allusion to its sexual appetites, which evidently are not confined to women.

In fact, women are rarely allowed into the mine. Miners believe they bring bad luck, but exceptions seem to be made for foreign tourists, about whom the miners are, unsurprisingly, very curious. I bought Julio lunch when we were back in Potosí after the end of the tour (at an exchange rate of 7 to 1, I could afford to be very generous with my guides), and he was eager to tell me about his odd situation mediating between the hard-bitten miners and his relatively affluent clientele. He was an opinionated, prejudiced man, but it was unfair to judge him by American standards, and I found his direct honesty appealing, as he found my expressed desire to relate the experience to my students at home.

Daylight and space to stretch my legs were bliss once we were back outside.

Huayna Potosí

2011-09-04T08:20:00.001-07:00

After acclimatizing in La Paz and elsewhere for more than two weeks, I decided to look into climbing a big peak. While in Ecuador during college, I got fairly high up on Cotopaxi and did well with the altitude, so I’ve since eagerly sought to return to the Andes. Not far from La Paz rises a peak called Huayna Potosí, well known as a relatively easy 20,000 footer. After my bus trip with Tom finished up, I went down to Calle Sagarnaga, the backpacking district of La Paz, and made a reservation with a guiding company.

A couple days later I showed up at the office at 9 AM. Luckily, they provided me with most of the gear I needed, including ice axe and crampons. All told, the three-day venture only cost $150. After a brief delay while I ran out to get a scarf – the office manager assured me I did would be okay without it, though I decided differently – I met the guide, Felix, and we piled into a van, where a young Scot and Polish pair were already ensconced. We drove to a storehouse, where we collected and fitted our gear, and then we were off in earnest, climbing up, up, and finally over the lip of the canyon to El Alto. Beyond its outskirts, we bounced across the altiplano towards Huayna Potosi, an imposing pyramid of white. When we stopped to take a couple pictures of the mountain and a lake in the foreground, the wind was steady and brisk.

We stopped at a pass between Huayna Potosi and another mountain. Just beyond the high point was a dam, behind which had pooled a lake with the distinctive light-blue tint of glacial sediment, or glacial milk, as it is sometimes called. At the lake’s edge was our first refugio, a cold, lonely building that nonetheless contained a friendly cook who provided us with some hot meals, as well as a relatively comfortable array of bunkbeds.

That afternoon, Felix, David, and Jacob, my Scottish and Polish companions, hiked up to a nearby glacier to practice our technique on the ice. Felix rigged up a belay secured by an ice screw, and we clawed our way up some short, steep pitches of ice, then rappelled down. It was great fun, but it did make me a little nervous about the terrain on the actual mountain. Felix, however, assured us that there would be no technical climbing.

We went to bed at 7:15 that evening. At 4,800 meters, I had a considerable headache, and it was difficult getting to sleep. However, since we went to bed so early, I did eventually nod off, and my headache was gone when I woke up.

Felix was nowhere to be found in the morning. I wasn’t sure where he’d gone until the cook informed me that he had climbed up to the second refuge, halfway to the summit, after dinner the previous evening. Evidently, he was accompanying other clients to the peak in the wee hours.

After lunch, Felix and the people who made the ascent in the early morning began to trickle down to our refuge, all of them worn out. Only a few had made the summit, some with the assistance of various remedies for the altitude, including, in one case, dexamethasone. Felix was tired but clearly used to the grind. At two, we started up.

Most of the afternoon was simply steady ascent up through fields of rock. It wasn’t particularly interesting hiking, but it was good to be on our way. We were in clouds most of the time, and I began to observe differences in the other two climbers. David, the Scot, was inexperienced but very strong, while Jacob moved more slowly, often coughing. Neither spoke any Spanish, nor did they make much effort to communicate with the guide. I became the de facto translator. Felix moved slowly, effortlessly, not wasting any energy. We were joined by a second guide, Luis, who, like Felix, was short and compact.

Along the way, we came upon a hut made entirely of stone but lacking a roof. Inside of it sat two Aymara women, who collected our fee of 10 bolivianos, as this was the entrance to the National Park. They were quite pleasant and up for a brief chat, but when I asked to take their picture, they declined. David persisted, and they turned away from the lens as he snapped the photo.

At the top of a particularly steep pitch, we came upon the first of the refugios halfway up the mountain. This one was open to the public, but we didn’t stay for long, as we wanted to reach our own, about 100 meters higher up vertically (perhaps half a mile further). At this point, we put on our crampons and got our ice axes out, and we began hiking up a snowfield behind the refugio. At this point, as the fog rolled in, Jacob really started to slow down, feeling the altitude and dismayed that we couldn’t see our destination.

The second refugio was not too far, however, and I was pleased to see it after 15 minutes, especially now that my head was pounding fairly hard. A simple affair of orange metal walls and two levels of bunks, we quickly got inside and started drinking water. The guides lit the stove and made a bit of dinner—Ramen and two hot dogs for each of us—but I couldn’t get it all down. At 5, about an hour after we’d arrived at the refugio, we slithered into our sleeping bags.

Sleep was elusive. I felt my headache acutely, and the other two, who had been arguing about not feeling the altitude, clearly were susceptible, especially Jacob. I barely slept and tried to decide whether or not to continue on in the morning (or rather, night, as Felix had informed us that we would be waking up at one AM).

It seemed to take ages to reach one o’clock, but evidently I did fall asleep briefly, because my headache had subsided considerably by the time the alarm finally went off. In fact, I felt pretty good, except that I couldn’t keep down a bit of bread I ate with my tea. However, I forced myself to swallow some more, and soon it was time to head off. To my relief, Jacob announced he did not feel up to continuing.

Without Jacob, David and I could each rope up with one guide. I was very pleased to get Felix, with whom I had developed a rapport. As we started up, it was extremely dark—we even lacked starlight, which couldn’t penetrate through the clouds. The two pairs hiked close to each other, headlamps all on. I found it very difficult lacking a sense of how far we needed to travel. I only knew that we had about 700 meters of vertical ascent remaining.

We were on glacier now, and from time to time, Felix would point out crevasses to the right or left. Some were small, while others gaped. One was named “the hotel.” The hiking wasn’t particularly interesting, just plodding along our route, known as the “auto-pista” due to its well-traveled, wide treadway. Below us, we could see a few lights from climbers who had started from the other refugio. Every now and then we would stop for a bit of water and banter. I ate a Snickers bar or two and hoped the tube of my Camelpak wouldn’t freeze (it did, eventually, much to my chagrin, but I at least had a wide-necked Nalgene).

The clouds did eventually clear, and I began to get a sense of the large ridges around us. After a couple hours, I began to tire. My steps were harder, and I took longer breaks. Felix, however, seemed not to feel the altitude at all. I never saw him eat or drink anything during the climb save for coca leaves. Luis had a sip of my water, and that was all. I, in contrast, was constantly thirsty.

Step, step, step, step, rest… This became my rhythm toward the very top. The wind picked up, stinging my face. I had all my clothing on, and we took shelter twice in small dugouts next to the trail. Other climbers caught up and rested with us. The snow, which was soft lower down, became hard, and then shaped in nieves penitentes – formations that look a bit like people at prayer. They are a foot or so high and covered entire slopes.

Then Felix told me we were just below the summit. We climbed a final, steeper pitch, and then to my surprise, we stood atop a knife edge (the Polish Ridge, named for someone who fell off of it). There were serious drops on both sides, not quite vertical, but in the realm of 60-70 degrees. One side, I believe, was Huayna Potosi’s south face, which is a couple of thousand feet long. A small path ran to the official summit, a couple hundred yards away. Several other climbers and their guides were pushing past me to move toward the summit. At this point, I decided I had gone far enough, much to Felix’s disappointment. However, he obeyed my request to stop, and I sat, panting, soaking in the altitude and the sense of the void next to me. It was still dark, but the eastern sky was just beginning to lighten.

Soon, we descended off the ridge and into a bit of shelter, where we rested again. The sun came up, illuminating a cottony landscape of clouds and glacier. A few peaks poked up above the undercast. Then we started down, much more quickly. It was amazing to observe the difference between the effort it took to go up and the ease with which my momentum carried me down.

I didn’t stop to take many pictures; I was thirsty and didn’t want to delay. Now that the landscape was lit, I could take in the glacier and its crevasses in all their detail. It was beautiful, but the light was bright, even with glacier goggles, and I only wanted to get somewhere where I could drink as much water as I could hold.

It only took a bit more than an hour to descend what had taken us four and a half hours to climb up. By the time we reached the refugio, the clouds were lifting and the sun was shining with its full power. The sunlight gave me new energy, and it helped when Felix brewed up a pot of tea. I can’t ever remember being so thirsty, and the liquid going down my throat was an indescribable relief.

David and his guide made it down about twenty minutes later. Meanwhile, I packed up my gear, knowing that while he and Jacob got their things together, I would have plenty of time to gaze around at the surrounding peaks. We eventually got going, Felix and Luis anxious to get down to meet their new clients, and David falling rather quickly behind. His bag was poorly packed, but he was so tired, he didn’t care. When we stopped to take off our crampons, Felix simply shouldered his pack so that we could descend more quickly.

I scampered down behind Luis and, as we moved on ahead, got to know him a bit better. It was amazing how quickly we covered ground that had taken us three or four times as long to climb the day before. When we reached the refuge, fatigue finally hit me. I didn’t want to eat anything solid, turned down a steak proffered by the cook, and just lay around after eating a bowl of soup. A minivan arrived at noon, dropping off a new batch of climbers, full of eager energy. I said a warm goodbye to Felix and assuaged his evident worry that I would go off without tipping him (apparently, this was why he had pushed to complete the final hundred yards up top). I was back in La Paz by mid-afternoon, awash in the bustle of the city, while my mind still basked in an alpine glow.

Afternoon on the Ridge

2011-08-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

A couple of Wednesdays ago, I went for a hike with my brother, Townley Chisholm, an old friend from camp who teaches at Exeter, and Townley's daughter and her friend up Mt. Monroe. It was an absolutely sparkling day, the kind that only appears four or five times in an entire summer.

When I worked at Pasquaney, Townley and I took a couple of "nature hikes" to look for the Dwarf Cinquefoil, a rare plant that I have written about elsewhere. Because it is so small, barely larger than a quarter, we were never able to find it. However, AMC friends later pointed it out to me, and now it was my turn to show Townley. We also did some poking around at the top of Oakes Gulf and got particularly interested in the lichen thanks to Townley, who is truly a lifelong student (and teacher) of biology.

The jaunt also allowed for some socializing up at Lakes, where I had stayed earlier in the summer. It was the day before the end of the summer season, and the Huts Manager and his assistant were up training new fall croo. Townley actually ran into a former student, while I was able to horse around with my old croo mate, Nick Anderson, who was Hutmaster at Lakes this summer.

I'd never gone swimming in the Lakes before but was persuaded to go for a dip. My entrance was considerably more cautious than Nick's, however.

It was cold! But deeply refreshing.

This creature, Moseby by name, belongs to Townley. I think the hut naturalist should use him for a joke program, something along the lines of "Habits of the Alpine Deerhound"

On the far side of Monroe, we saw this fellow swooping in toward Eisenhower.

I assumed that someone was pretty badly hurt down there, but the chopper made a couple of passes, so its crew was probably simply training. Bad luck for anyone up seeking the freedom of the hills in its vicinity. Later on, the hut croo confirmed that, since their radio was quiet, nothing had gone wrong.

Seeing a helicopter up in the mountains still gets my pulse racing.

Terraces and Raised Beds

2011-08-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

In grad school down at UT, we read quite a bit about various agricultural adaptations in the Pre-Colombian Americas. Public knowledge about the sophistication of indigenous civilizations is improving (do elementary schools still teach, as they did when I attended mine, that all Indians were essentially hunter-gatherers?), but my sense is that people still do not appreciate the scale of development, especially in Central and South America. It was the article The Lost City of Z, published four or five years ago in the New Yorker, that opened my eyes. David Grann, an magician of an author who turned the piece into a book, highlighted archaeological finds in the Amazon that are consistent with an account by a Spanish conquistador, Francisco de Orellana, of vast settlements. After Orellana passed through, smallpox and other diseases ravaged the population, and since inhabitants relied on mud and wood as construction materials, decay erased the built record to all but the most astute eyes.

In the Andes, the Incas were only the last of several empires that flourished. One of their predecessors, based at Tiwanaku near the south shore of Lake Titicaca, developed into a city of 15-30,000 people, with hundreds of thousands more tilling the shores around the lake. Since Lake Titicaca sits high on the Altiplano, at 12,500 feet, well above the Andean treeline, these people had to develop incredibly sophisticated methods of farming to survive in the harsh alpine climate. And yet, they not only scratched out their existence but thrived, making Tiwanaku the seat of an empire that stretched up and down the Pacific coast for hundreds of miles and reached east into the lowland jungle.

When I took the bus to Copacabana, a touristy little town on Lake Titicaca just east of the border with Peru, I had ample opportunity to scrutinize the hillsides. At one point, we had to get off the bus to cross a small strait (the bus rides in one rickety wooden boat, the passengers on another due to an unfortunate capsizing a few years back). Above the dock, the hillside climbed several hundred feet, every inch of it covered in crumbling terraces. Nowadays, people only till the flat lands closest to the lake (though they don’t seem to have any mechanized system of irrigation). The amount of labor it took to carve the hillsides into terraces is mind-boggling: people must have swarmed across these hillsides like ants, once.

Proximity to the lake affords a major advantage for farmers, as the massive body of water acts as a heat sink, extending the growing season considerably by warding off destructive frosts. The locals further developed this system in miniature, in what is known as suka kollu or raised bed agriculture.

On the floodplain adjacent to the lake, farmers created a series of long, relatively narrow (several meters wide) beds, interspersed with channels fed by lake water. Again, the water served as a local heat sink, extending the growing season and, at times, mitigating the effect of the harsh Andean sun. Irrigation was easy, and when soil on the beds grew exhausted, farmers could reach to the bottom of adjacent channels and scoop up mud rich with nutrients from decaying plant matter. While crops such as potatoes were rich in carbohydrates, waterfowl and fish in the channel provided a convenient source of protein.

Contemporary farmers in the region have lost the knowledge to cultivate these fields, but a few experiments by social scientists have found that the raised bed system can yield ten times as much produce as conventional methods and one and half times as much as conventional methods supplemented with artificial fertilizers and pesticides. It is not easy to convince the local population to adopt unfamiliar methods of farming, however.

Back near the capital city, Andrew, Tom and I went for a walk along a ridge west of La Paz. Our perch had tremendous views of Illimani, a giant 6,000 meter peak that looms over La Paz, as well as the agriculture along the valley walls. Innumerable fields, most long abandoned, were visible. Since the climate is so dry, it takes centuries for wild plants to recolonize tilled soil.

The population pressure to cultivate such seemingly marginal landscapes must have been intense. That people did so and were able to build a thriving civilization seems to convincingly refute the Malthusian thesis.

Three Weeks in Bolivia

2011-07-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine from grad school, Andrew McCown, entered the Foreign Service after graduating from USAID. After several months of training in DC, he was posted to La Paz, Bolivia. When he left in February, I was already hatching plans for a visit. I loved my month in Ecuador in 2003, and Bolivia has a great many items of interest for a geographer. And, in addition to having a comfortable base at Andrew’s house in La Paz, another of our pals from UT, Tom Barnett, was cajoled into joining us for ten days. Having steeped in Latin American geography while in grad school, we had a lot of fun thinking about our professors and various articles we had once encountered on such once obscure topics as raised beds and lithic mulching (more on these subjects, anon).

I hope to write several entries about the trip over the next couple of weeks, but let me begin by describing the singular nature of La Paz, where I spent the plurality of my time in Bolivia. Many people know that it is the highest capital city in the world, and indeed, when I first arrived, late at night in early July, I could feel the difference in the air as soon as the cabin depressurized. Each breath simply was less rejuvenating than what I was used to, particularly as I began moving about.

As we drove away from the airport, through an area known as El Alto (in fact, a separate city from La Paz), I became keenly aware of drab brick and stray dogs, with little evidence of the mountainous landscape that I had anticipated. Then, we abruptly dropped off the side of what turned out to be the altiplano, the enormous alpine plain that occupies most of western Bolivia, into the canyon across which La Paz sprawls. A rolling carpet of stars unfurled beneath me as if the night sky had suddenly turned upside-down.

In most cities, the wealthy live high up, for a better view, but the inverse is true in La Paz due to the climate. El Alto, it turned out, is notoriously poor and unsafe. Most people who live there are Aymara Indians, so the town has a great deal of cultural significance—it’s the largest concentration of these indigenous people in the country—but it’s also the kind of place where people string up dummies on lampposts to signal that vigilante justice is in effect.

Andrew’s house (provided by USAID) was down in La Zona Sur, a couple thousand feet below El Alto (the airport is over 13,000 feet). It became noticeably easier to breathe during the descent, which was long and steep. Bad as the city must be for car brakes, I never saw a cyclist during the entire trip. La Zona Sur is a world away from El Alto— it’s warmer and less windy and is full of substantial houses and apartment buildings. The population is generally white and, if the omnipresent billboards are anything to go by, aspires to American style consumption patterns.

To go anywhere at all in Bolivia, I needed to drive up to the altiplano, so I saw quite a lot of La Paz’s various strata over the ensuing weeks, often from the back seat of a wildly weaving taxicab. The sleek chic at the bottom gave way to the ubiquitous chaos of downtown and, once over the canyon lip, drab, austere El Alto. To return to La Paz by car is like driving into a city from Biblical times: from far away across the brown plain you can see the outlying sheep grazing on brittle grass, and then the clusters of earth-colored corrals and houses, and, finally, highest on the skyline, for the missionaries have succeeded in their work, the white steeples of evangelical churches. Such a skyline could not exist in the developed world.

Alleys of Bloomingdale

2011-05-22T07:00:00.001-07:00

Between the warmer weather and a recent unit on urbanism in class, I’ve been getting out and about in DC more of late. There’s a neighborhood called Bloomingdale not too far from where I live. 1st Street, which runs north-south smack through the middle of the area has, for my money, has the prettiest stretch of row houses in DC.

In mountain climbing, the term gendarme, from the French for policeman, is used to describe a pinnacle of rock atop a ridge. The term could apply to these rooftops.

Apparently the kind of feathery border around the edge of the transom in the photo below is typical of Richardson Romanesque, an architectural style that was popular around the end of the nineteenth century (name for architect Henry Richardson, whose most famous design is Trinity Church on Copley Square in Boston). Harry Wardman, a developer who built thousands of row houses around that time in DC, was very taken by the style.

Bloomingdale's east edge is North Capitol Street, a thoroughfare for commuters driving into the city from Maryland and the dividing line between the northeast and northwest quadrants. Bloomingdale is a good deal further east than Shaw and Columbia Heights and thus gentrification, while well underway, is not quite so far along. Here and there, a house with boards over its doorway and windows interrupts the gingerbread rows of 1st Street. A pair of corner stores also remain alive on the street, indicating that a substantial segment of the older black population in the area remains. Indeed, after I took a picture of a particularly handsome house (not the one featured below) and inadvertently included its owner, an old African-American lady, she volunteered that she had been living on the same spot for 48 years and had no intention of selling.

Bloomingdale’s situation is somewhat different from that of Columbia Heights and Shaw, which may also explain the slower redevelopment. It is, for DC, distant from a metro stop, and it lacks a vibrant shopping corridor. What appears to have once been the main commercial strip for the neighborhood, along North Capitol, is now the province of cheap take-out and dollar stores. However, the intersection of 1st and Rhode Island has become the locus of upscale commercial development, with a café and restaurant opening up recently. A little further south is Big Bear Café, one of the city’s most popular coffeeshops, which seems to have particular cachet with the urban hipster crowd. I’ve been in on three or four occasions, and every time it has been packed to the gills with a young, well-heeled crowd. My impression is that Big Bear is both a gateway to Bloomingdale for outsiders and an anchor for new inhabitants, what geographers might call the central node of a functional region. (Note the bear mural in the upper left hand corner.)

I was curious about the backs of some of the row houses on 1st Street, so I made a foray into the alleys on both sides of the streets. Sometimes the city, like the fronts of these row houses, can seem a bit reserved and formal, but the rear of buildings are generally host to a glorious mélange of squalor and creativity. As James Borchert relates in Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, and Religion in the City, 1850-1970, DC alleys have long housed inhabitants, but thanks to shifts in mobility and the efforts of progressive reformers, they transformed into garages and recreational backyards during the middle of the twentieth century.

But perhaps the pendulum is beginning to swing back. Along the alley to the west of 1st Street, locals have refurbished old carriage houses, turning them into permanent dwellings. The surrounding blocks, like many in DC, form a square, creating the possibility of public space in the interior. In most cases, the interior simply gets divided up into parking lots, but here, the buildings are lovingly tended to. They are small, but their owners seem to lavish them with an intensity of decoration inversely correlated to their size (note the solar panels on the roofs). Apparently deliveries are such an issue along this alley that the city gave it an official name this year: Bloomingdale Court.

The next block up revealed what appeared to have been an old stable. The doors were locked, however, and a pair of old cars (one, an ancient VW Westphalia) parked along its walls are marked to be towed. The unmistakable scent of urine was in the air, and a dog barked from somewhere within the building, so someone seems to be making use of the shelter.

The next stretch of alley is host to great contrasts in use.

On the other side of 1st Street, I noticed a remarkable flow of people entering a particular stretch of alleyway. They led me to Crispus Attucks Court, a park that occupies an entire block’s worth of land. Saturday in the park was essentially a large flea market, with probably 50-75 people flitting around checking out each other’s wares. A band was playing, and I bought a hamburger from some guys who were working away at a grill. The only way to access this scene was through an alley.

The park is the product of two decades of perseverance. The block was once occupied by an industrial building, but after the city foreclosed on it in the 1998, the neighbors formed a community development corporation and convinced the city to allow them turn it into a tax-exempt park in exchange for guaranteeing public access. Needless to say, given its isolation, the park has an intensely local flavor.

Finally, farther up the alley, I came across this mural. It has caught my eye before while biking through the neighborhood. I spied a fellow sitting nearby on his porch and asked him about it, but he did not know about its origins.

This satellite photo shows both Crispus Attucks Court and the some of the alley interiors on the west side of 1st Street. The neighborhood certainly is dense, but the landscape is infused with all the more energy for its many inhabitants.

Lion's Head to Boott Spur

2011-03-29T20:26:00.001-07:00

Spring break afforded me a chance to get up to the Whites, where it is still very much winter, despite the nominal change in seasons. Last Friday, RD and I made another foray into the Presidentials. Though the Mount Washington Observatory predicted fog and light snow showers, we decided to head up Lion’s Head, planning to turn around if the clouds failed to lift.

Summer or winter, the first few miles are always the hardest. A winter of sloth in Washington takes some time to shake off, and the Tuckerman Ravine Trail is a dull, highway of a trail up to its junction with the Lion’s Head Trail. Here, we gratefully turned right, and a couple hundred yards later, encountered an idling snow cat where the road became a footpath.

Almost immediately after turning into the woods, the trail steepened substantially. Luckily, we put on our crampons just before we reached the steepest section, an uncomfortable scramble that I would not have liked to descend. A little further on, the pitch subsided but the wind picked up, and the trees we passed were noticeably smaller. Before long, we needed to bundle up in earnest.

We stopped for a solid snack on top of the Lion’s Head, and there, entirely above the treeline, we could see across Tuckerman’s Ravine to Boott Spur. The bowl was full of fresh snow (avalanche danger was high, according to the sign in Pinkham Notch), and the wind was whipping the clouds into feathery fluff on the opposite ridge. However, we easily had enough layers on, and the feeling of adequate preparation was a tonic.

Moving across the Alpine Garden, we saw three dots, climbers with whom we had traded places several times (we were not above letting them go in front so that they could break the trail), beginning to ascend the summit cone of Washington. But the climb looked like a slog through deep powder, and the summit was still in the clouds, so we began to loop around the ravine, with Boott Spur as our next goal.

The wind was sharp but variable, and a swirl of clouds rushed past overhead. At times, we were engulfed by white, but we knew that if we kept the small balsams to our left, we were in no danger of approaching the Ravine. The advantage in cultivating young climbing partners is that it leaves you little opportunity for trail breaking. Once over the ridge that marks the east edge of Bigelow’s Lawn, we turned left and soon encountered the cairns of the Crossover Trail. We followed these to the junction with the Davis Path, and then proceeded south, following the long, familiar line of cairns. Bigelow’s Lawn was absolutely deserted, white and clean and otherworldly.

At the junction with the Boott Spur Trail, we could ease up a bit, as only downhill remained. Sheets of ice, for some reason, covered much of the ridge, allowing us to test out our crampons. Clouds still engulfed us from time to time, dramatically altering our perspective. One moment, I considered sliding down a long slope of powder but decided it was too steep; a moment later, the clouds shifted to reveal that it was only a few yards long.

At the bottom of Boott Spur, we could not find where the trail entered the trees. The path takes a sharp left off the ridgeline, engulfing us in shadows. As we looked for a helpful cairn, I post-holed into powder up to my armpits. We put on our snowshoes and decided to circle around to the west, where we could find the Boott Spur Link, which descends into the Ravine. We came across its cairns unexpectedly soon, thankfully – I was not excited about the extra ascent.

From there, our descent was swift. The Boott Spur Link is very steep; in our snowshoes, we could practically sled down. The Tuckerman Ravine Trail is far more pleasant as a cool-down than a warm-up, and we were back at the Pink Ham by four. Nine more months until next winter.

Moods of Winter

2011-02-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

I took all four of these pictures during the last couple of weeks. It's still dark when I wake up, but spring is faintly in the air - not at this hour, but later on in the afternoon, when the sun's warmth presses and lingers, much as a chilly dusk in early September hints at fall.

Look carefully at where the light is most intense in each shot, and you can see how the sun is beginning to swing north in its orbit (or rather, the earth is revolving so that the northern hemisphere is getting closer to the sun).

The Pinnacles

2011-02-01T17:55:00.000-08:00

I don't know if I can get used to hiking in January, but it seems silly not to in the mid-Atlantic. Thanks to a couple of friends, Lynne Zummo and Sam Tormey, who were up for a wintry adventure, I made it up a peak called The Pinnacles (why it is plural, I could not ascertain) early on in the month.

The hike didn't require the technical equipment that its name might suggest, but the guidebook was pretty worked up about the initial push up Buck Hollow Ridge, described for descent: "[it] drops very steeply (35 degrees in some places). Hm. Up higher, there was a perfect dusting of snow - enough for a crunch beneath the feet, but not so much that our socks got wet.

Looking south from our lunch spot toward The Pinnacles. It was rather foggy, and with the wind, the cold was penetrating.

The afternoon involved a lot of ridge-walking, as well as a thorough search for Confederates lurking in the hollows and any mastodons that might happen to wander up to an open summit for roughage.

Early on in the hike, we came across this relict of Shenandoah settlers. Last time Stormey and I went hiking, we passed by a graveyard from the same era. It's sad to think about the locals being evicted after the National Park was established, but there is something about the traces of the human past that softens the landscape.

Translucence within an otherwise ochre forest.

Could the big bad wolf be far behind?

Mt. Adams, December 23rd

2010-12-28T15:37:00.001-08:00

A couple days before Christmas, RD and I made an attempt at Adams. Up at 6 in North Conway, with lunch and gear packed the night before, we were on the mountain by 7:30, so we had plenty of daylight to play with. But going was slow. Even the Appalachia parking lot had gotten a couple of inches of snow during the night, and the higher up we went, the more accumulation we encountered.

Elevation seems to influence weather even more during the winter than in summer. The hike up the Airline takes far longer in the winter than summer, inducing you to study the forest in somewhat frustrating detail. The whole time we had a pretty good idea of how far it was to treeline simply by the temperature. When we needed our hats, we knew we were about to pop out.

When we did emerge onto the ridge, visibility was limited, and snowdrifts began to seriously impede our progress. It probably took us an hour to get from treeline to the Airline Cutoff—a distance that only takes fifteen minutes to cover in the summer. Our snowshoes helped with the snow, but the pitch of the slope made us slide back, sometimes three or four steps in a row. The quads and hip flexors felt this part of the hike.

Unfortunately, the clouds never lifted as the weather report had suggested, so we never got to look across King Ravine. However, the rime ice on this trail sign was superb.

Past the Airline Cutoff, the wind increased sharply as we rose above Adams’ western ramparts. This made the going much easier because the snow was scoured from the mountainside, allowing the teeth of our snowshoes to bite into the granular snow, but of course the air grew a great deal colder, too. At the junction of the Airline and Gulfside Trails, we paused for a picture, a bite to eat, and a powwow about whether to continue.

Given the limited visibility and the difficulty of distinguishing cairns, which had become white lumps of rime by this point, we decided to forego a summit attempt and instead descended along the Gulfside to Madison Hut, which was rebuilt by the AMC’s construction crew during the late fall. It was a chilly walk downhill made eerie by the strange sensation of recognizing landscape features that, given the snow and ice, seemed very out of context. I was glad we did not continue up the summit cone, which I do not know so well as this section of the Gulfside.

The new Madison Hut, which CC was working on until Thanksgiving, looks snug and very similar to its predecessor (this photo shows the old bunkrooms, of which the skeleton has been preserved because it dates back to the thirties). The interior is apparently different, but since the hut was boarded up for the winter, reviews will have to wait until next summer. Not yet ready to head down the Valley Way, we trekked up to Star Lake and found the moon rocks, though the white quartz was concealed by a layer of ice.

The wind was fairly cutting here, too, so we turned around and sped past the hut onto the powdery length of the Valley Way. The snow was so deep that we could slide down the steeper patches at a great pace. Before long, we were exhausted, however, and the bottom half was a drudge. We were off the mountain at two, without having seen a soul the entire time.

The Food-Safety Bill Squeaks Through

2010-12-20T13:24:00.000-08:00

Lost in the turmoil over the DREAM Act and DADT, the tax compromise and debate over ratifying the START Treaty, the food-safety bill passed the Senate last night by unanimous consent. Given that it only takes an objection by one Senator to slow down the voting process by several days, and the bill had previously received 25 no votes, its easy passage was an enormous surprise. What happened?

The food-safety bill has been rattling around the Capitol since the early on in the 111th Congress, but despite prompt action by the House, the Senate, in keeping with its “deliberative” nature, dragged its feet. The bill would give the FDA substantially increased regulatory powers and $1.4 billion to hire thousands of new food inspectors, among other things, but it faced considerable opposition. In particular, small producers rose up en masse because the House version would have compelled them to pay substantial inspection fees and achieve the same standards for cleanliness as large producers, which would be both impractical and pointless. (A farmer who slaughters a few of his own grass-fed cattle doesn’t encounter the same issues as corporate operations that process thousands of animals a day in one abattoir.)

In any case, thanks to Jon Tester, Senator from Montana and a former organic wheat farmer, the Senate bill made an exception for “family-scale” operations (note the usual ridiculous conflation of domesticity and agriculture)—farms with annual sales under $500,000. The bill passed the Senate shortly thereafter by a vote of 73-25. While some have called it bipartisan, and it did pick up the support of a number of Republicans, the bill’s supporters were overwhelmingly Democratic.

It appeared, then, that the House needed only to pass its own version of the Senate bill (the language of the two bills must match or else representatives from both houses must reconcile the differences between the chambers, necessitating another vote on the final product) for the bill to advance to Obama’s desk. But then, appallingly, someone discovered that the Senate bill included revenue raising measures that, as directed in the Constitution itself, must originate in the House of Representatives. So the Senate’s efforts were all for naught, and a new bill needed to be advanced. With time short, and other, higher profile bills awaiting consideration, it did not appear that the bill would again be brought up. With Republicans taking over the House next year, this would have likely been the last of the food-safety bill.

The bill’s particular foe was Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who is particularly conservative and rather more ideologically consistent than most of his caucus. He objected to the increase in power for the executive branch through the assumption of new regulatory powers, preferring instead to rely on the power of the market to encourage voluntary self-regulation (not so popular with those who caught salmonella last summer). Joined by a coalition of corporate lackeys (wonder which party will receive more donations from agribusiness this year?) and the ignorant (some observers simply refuse to acknowledge the Tester exemption and treat this bill as the death knell for localism), Coburn stood ready to gum up the Senate if Harry Reid scheduled another vote on the Food-safety bill.

Until last night. Despite overwhelmingly negative predictions by the few observers in the press followed the story, Reid managed to pass the food-safety bill by unanimous consent. Evidently, the dogged Oklahoman blinked. What little has been reported about the bill’s success fails to explain why he stood down, but my guess is that the Senator feared making a futile gesture that would keep the Senate in session through Christmas day. The bill clearly had the votes to pass, and Coburn would have enraged the other Senators if he kept them in DC much longer. Thus, if my hypothesis is correct, this is one of the few times when Democrats have successfully manipulated their opponents into surrender. Hurray for Harry Reid—his recent re-election seems to have been cathartic, if the lame duck session is anything to go by.

The food-safety bill now heads to the House, which will need to vote on it once more before it reaches Obama. Without no filibuster available to the House GOP, its passage is assured, so Obama will sign it shortly. It should be a great relief to food consumers (everybody) that FDA will now be able to force companies to recall most tainted food (not meat, however). We shall have to see how vigorously Republican presidents fulfill the new mandate before rendering final judgment. However, as discouraging as the past couple months have been politically, passing the food-safety bill is a major achievement, and for all the problems with the Democratic leadership, they deserve a great deal of credit on this front.

I took the picture at the top during the summer of 2004, driving through the Palouse region of southeastern Washington State.

Nearing Solstice

2010-12-16T13:56:00.000-08:00

My apartment was suffused with light this morning. Evidently, there is something to be said for rising in the dark.

The steam is coming from the Lamont Street Lofts, which were originally the Arcade-Sunshine Company, a rare example of industry (laundry and dyeing) in the District.

And again, on the morning of the seventeenth. I got up early to bake some gingerbread (last day of classes before winter break) and was wide awake for the entire symphony. Milo in the Phantom Tollbooth never had it so good.

There is nothing like watching a series of sunrises or sunsets for developing a sense of place, but what with schedule and blocked horizons, it's rare to get an unobscured view of one in the metropolis.

Sunday on Lafayette

2010-10-20T18:46:00.002-07:00

RD and I spent two nights at Greenleaf, visiting Ari Ofsevit, an old friend of mine from college. The fall I worked at Mizpah, Ari was finishing the AT (it made a good topic for our alumni magazine, as it turned out), and he visited me at Galehead and Zealand a number of times. Finally, he could resist applying to work in the hut no longer, and he took a job as naturalist at Madison last summer. I've been eyeing the slides on the east side of Lafayette, which extend far down into the valley shared with Owl's Head, for several years, and our plan on Sunday was to circle around via the Franconia Brook Trail and hike the slides from the bottom.

At night, the temperature dipped into the teens, making for a substantial amount of frost and rime above treeline. Given the conditions, we decided it would be better to stay in the hut and stuff ourselves with bacon for most of the morning, but we did eventually head up to the ridge once the day warmed up. Here is one of the croo members, Laura, on the upper section of the Lafayette summit cone.

Mike, the assmaster, with Cannon cliffs and Lonesome Lake in the background. Laura was off to Galehead for days off, so for the rest of the afternoon it was the four guys. We spent a long time on the summit working on our Boston accents.

Though the slides were out of reach, there is a bare spur on the east side of Truman, the satellite peak between Lafayette and Lincoln, that exerted a pull. I was intrigued by the novel perspective on the Pemigewasset, not to mention the view back toward the slides and Franconia Ridge.

The going wasn't too bad, but there were a few patches of krummholz that wouldn't give in easily.

The view back toward the ridge.

Having a rest on the spur. It was a spectacular fall day, with plenty of warm fall sunshine that felt delicious in the crisp air.

A closeup of the cliffs on Garfield from a new point of view.

A look back at the Lafayette slides.

South across the eastern ridges of Liberty and Flume.

Looking across Owl's Head to Bondcliff.

Back up on the ridge, looking across the ridge that Greenleaf straddles, into the north country.

Now headed back down to the hut to get ready for dinner.

Dusk at croo rocks.

Norcross to Greenleaf

2010-10-17T18:38:00.001-07:00

From Norcross Pond, RD and I descended back down the Nancy Pond Trail, and from there, we drove to the base of the Old Bridle Path. We made it up to the hut just before Go Time, five o'clock, which is when hut croos start getting ready for dinner. This post is nothing more than a gratuitous display of some pictures I took along the way and outside the hut during dinner.

Nancy Cascades, unusually high in volume for this time of year.

Not too far from the Long Walk campsite.

Up on Agony Ridge, now, looking south along I-93.

Looking down at Profile Lake.

Mr. Jenkinson, snapping away. He likes the color orange.

Camel's Hump, off in Vermont.

Cannon Mountain. The buildings are the top of the tram.

Beaver at Norcross Pond

2010-10-14T18:56:00.001-07:00

Over the Columbus Day weekend, I flew up to New Hampshire, while my old pal from the huts, RD Jenkinson, drove over from Middlebury to meet me at the Manchester airport. RD and I worked at Mizpah (the Black Pah) in the fall of 2006, when we bonded over dressing up in drag to entertain hut guests and traversing the Presidentials at night to raid Madison and Lakes.

RD’s family recently bought a house up in North Conway, so we spent our first night there rather than hike up in the dark to Greenleaf, where we were meeting another friend of mine who has appeared in these annals. As we had some time to play with on Saturday morning, we hiked up the Nancy Pond Trail to Norcross Pond, which sits on a plateau between Mounts Nancy and Anderson at the eastern edge of the Pemigewasset Wilderness.

The Nancy Pond Trail was first cleared in 1938—the year of the Hurricane of ’38. Little of the trail remained in the wake of the storm. The next year, the Lucy family built a mill about halfway up to Nancy Cascades to salvage some of the downed timber, but little else happened along the old path until the sixties, when Camp Pasquaney, thanks to an extraordinarily energetic and hard-working counselor named Dave Ryder, reopened the old trail. He still works at camp, running the wood shop. When I was a camper, he was known for demonstrating the sharpness of an ax by using it to shave his arm hair.

I attended Pasquaney for five summers as a camper and returned for another five as a counselor. During seven of those summers, I spent five days in early July on ten man expeditions doing trail maintenance along the Nancy Pond Trail. Often we would camp by Norcross Pond, which empties to the west, into the Pemigewasset watershed. The stream has scoured a series of rock ledges, which are a good place to drop one’s pack and gaze west at the Bond Range. It is an ideal place to cook and sit around with your group.

One year, when I was leading an expedition in the region for the first time with an older counselor named Trey Winstead, one of the boys, a thirteen year old who was particularly energetic and mischievous, grabbed a grub hoe and ran off to dig in the mud holding back the pond behind us. Trey and I exchanged glances, relieved to have the boy occupied while dinner cooked. A few minutes later, however, a sheet of water washed over the ledges where we sat, and it did not abate. Luckily, the camper was able to put things back to right, but the pond had lost a couple of inches.

More recently, beavers recolonized Norcross Pond, for the first time, I believe, in camp memory. The lake now sits several feet higher than it used to, and much of the old trail that ran around the lake is now submerged. Last year, the Forest Service, assisted by Pasquaney, rerouted the trail to higher ground and installed dozens of new bog bridges. In the old days, camp might have handled all the work itself, but I am glad that we are now focusing on what we can do best (keeping the trail clear), leaving the heavy work to professionals.

Our hike was on a cool, crisp day—the best of New England fall. By the edge of the pond, the wind was swift and steady, forcing us to seek shelter in the forest while we ate lunch. In addition to the dam, the beavers have constructed a substantial lodge on the north side of the pond. Like the dam, it looks solid and well maintained.

Beavers have been on the move all over the Whites recently. I believe they have resumed activities in the Zealand Valley since I worked at the hut in 2008, causing some flooding to the trail there, too. Alex MacPhail included a photo on his blog not long ago of a metal pipe someone had stuck through a dam to improve drainage. When I was the naturalist at Zealand, I gave a program, usually to younger visitors, called “Our friend, the beaver,” for which I learned that beavers, despite their reputation, don’t actually work all that long during the day. They are incredibly energetic during those hours that they are active, however. Apparently the sound of water stimulates their dam-building acumen. That pipe won’t be effective for long.

A few summers ago, a beaver turned up in the vicinity of Lakes of the Clouds Hut, no doubt having climbed up Ammonoosuc Ravine. It must have disappointed to find no trees to fell across the outlet of either lake, and I am curious where this singularly persevering rodent waddled off to when it left.

In celebration of this resilient beast, then, nearly hunted to extinction for its pelt, I offer a song that I learned while working at the W. Alton Jones Field School:

Beaver one, beaver all,
Let’s all do the beaver crawl!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver two, beaver three,
Let’s all climb the beaver tree!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver four, beaver five,
Let’s all do the beaver jive!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver six, beaver seven,
Let’s all go to beaver heaven!

Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha,
Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.

Beaver eight, beaver nine,
Stop! It’s beaver time!

Go beaver! Go beaver! Go Beaver!

Wild and Wonderful

2010-09-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, Will Kryder and I drove out to Dolly Sods, lured by a description in Backpacker Magazine that mentioned "harsh winds, bogs, stunted spruce, and snowshoe hare." In short, it sounded a bit like New England's north country, though the region is actually part of the Monongahela National Forest, which covers much of the rugged Allegheny Mountains. The drive out was long, over three hours, but it was beautiful traversing the valleys of eastern West Virginia. They are mostly too uneven for mechanized row cropping, so cattle and chicken farming are fairly common.

The hike did not disappoint. I've never walked across anything quite like this undulating, tundra-esque landscape. We spent most of the day in the open, striding through expanses of heath dotted with trees. The trail also plunged into dense thickets of conifers and a copse or two of deciduous trees in the midst of succumbing to autumn.

The evergreens peering over the grass give this picture a sinister aspect, particularly because the grasses are bending away from the trees, toward the camera. The weather was grey and windy, with a consistent speckling of raindrops, though the storms mostly held off. The landscape felt desolate and isolated, as a far corner of the Arctic might while preparing for winter.

Washington has been unbearably hot of late, but at 3,500 to 4,000 feet, the elevations at which our hike took place, the vegetation was faded and colorful. Imminent death hung over the landscape.

The region also has some notable outcrops of limestone, which have weathered into some bizarre formations. In the distance in above picture is Blackbird Knob.

In the spring, Dolly Sods must have a vastly different mood. We spent much of the day hiking along Raven Ridge but didn't catch a glimpse of the bird. I'll look for them when I'm back, hopefully after next winter.

The plateau was once covered by a vast forest of Red Spruce, which was reported to be the largest stand of its kind in the world. Wikipedia tells me that the trees grew as tall as ninety feet, with diameters up to twelve feet! Once the railroad penetrated the region, however, the forest was doomed, and with the trees gone, the soil dried up and blew away. Sparks from steam locomotives soon ignited slash left behind by the logging, and the trees still haven't come back, though the ecology became ideal for blueberry and huckleberry bushes. Their scent was distinctly in the air on Sunday. The region gets its name from the Dahle family, who cleared the land of logging debris so that they could sheep along the new pastureland.

The local ecology now, like the alpine areas of New England, has much in common with the Canadian tundra. In short, it feels familiar, and though a bit of a push for a day hike, should make for a good overnight in the future.

Notes on the Chelsea High Line

2010-08-30T17:40:00.000-07:00

By now, most people with an interest in urban architecture have heard of the Chelsea High Line. Designed by Diller, Scofidio, and Renfro, the sleek architects who are also responsible for the subject of my fifth blog post, the ICA museum in Boston. The High Line opened a year ago to much fanfare. It remakes an abandoned elevated railway, built in the thirties to move freight to downtown Manhattan. As trucking became cheaper in the sixties, rail freight declined, and the railway closed in 1980. Subsequently, the tracks sat vacant, a slender thread of uncultivated greenery safely inoculated from overt human interference by its height. Two New Yorkers hatched an idea in the early part of this decade to convert the railway into a fully accessible park, however, and the resulting length of iron, stone, and gently waving grasses will eventually extend from Gansevoort Street all the way to 34th (the NYC City Council just approved the purchase of the last chunk). Only the first section, terminating at 20th Street, is open so far, and my brother and I walked it during our weekend in New York.

The High Line is surprisingly polarizing to critics. Nicolai Ourrossoff of the New York Times gushed over it, calling it "mesmerizing," "magical," "invaluable and transformative," and "one of the most thoughtful, sensitively designed public spaces built in New York for years." Others, notably CNeal over at his superb blog The Vigorous North, have lamented the loss of wilderness inherent in its transformation to fully functioning park. CNeal also pointed out that while the idea for the High Line came from relatively ordinary New Yorkers, it became a means for the rich and powerful to mold the once gritty landscape of Chelsea into a windfall for developers (much like the ICA on the South Boston waterfront). Meanwhile, the neighborhood is fast transforming into a glittering nest of socialites. The picture above includes the Frank Gehry-designed IAC Building that sprouted in 2007.

While the High Line is certainly a creature of capitalism, my impressions were favorable. I like the juxtaposition of old water towers atop warehouses with brilliant modern creations of glass and steel. The High Line is a distinctive perch, providing a rare vantage point for gazing across at rather than up to the dense layers of urbanism in Chelsea. For me, ascending to the elevated park triggered a memory of climbing up to tree branches, from which I gained a parallel perspective into the canopy of a beech tree.

The design is playful, weaving through several buildings and including an unexpected view down into 10th Avenue that is highly reminiscent of the ICA mediatheque. While I wish there were more traces of the High Line's former industrial function, the architects did leave a few rails embedded here and there in the walkway. The High Line is very much a park, striving to divert rather than explicitly educate.

The High Line succeeds entirely in its ambition. When I visited on a Saturday in August, the park was full but not crowded, and strollers were obviously amused by the unusual point of view. As The Gates did several years ago in Central Park, the High Line is stirring excitement and curiosity about place - the best thing a park can do.

Found in the Bronx: Kweenz Destroy

2010-08-24T18:16:00.002-07:00

On a Robert Moses pilgrimage last weekend to see exactly how the Master Builder plowed the Cross-Bronx Expressway through the neighborhood of Tremont, my brother and I came across these graffiti.

This shot and the one above, go together. Odd subject matter, I thought.

I know very little about graffiti, or street art as its finer examples are now known (how's this for the SAT - graffiti: street art; comic books: graphic art?!), nor can I claim to have listened to much rap music growing up, but these pieces display a pride in their craftsmanship. They were fresh, hardly relics of the early eighties, and as the paint spread across several blocks of vacant but tidy warehouses, their creators clearly had permission from the owner.

Following the suggested link led me to Indie184, (check out the .net cousin for a good post-modern workout), a rare female graffiti artist. She hails from Washington Heights, is a mother of three, and has several interviews on the web, in which she describes her fashion brand, Kweenz Destroy. My impression of the collection is of hipsters cross-pollinating with the world of hip-hop - American Apparel for the urban set. So much for my excitement at finding a surviving example of graffiti giving meaning to bleak concrete; commercialism has subverted even this quintessential tool of the rebellious. However, give Indie184 credit for honesty, as she responds to a question probing for Bronx hardcore nostalgia by quipping, "Rather corporate than crack any day."

Scaling Up Farmers' Markets

2010-08-09T07:41:00.001-07:00

On Tuesday, the USDA released one of the more encouraging news items of the week—figures for the growth of farmers’ markets over the past year. Numbers are up 16% from 2009, nationally totaling well over 6,000. In 1994, when the USDA began collecting the data, there were fewer than 1,800. The top ten states are essentially California and various Midwestern and Northeastern states. Encouragingly, a southern state, North Carolina, has cracked the top ten.

One of the main arguments against localism is its cost—critics charge that paying extra for heirloom tomatoes is inherently elitist. These numbers pretty convincingly refute this contention, however, because the recession, if anything, has accelerated the growth of farmers’ markets. Localism has even ignited a small backlash against the USDA organic label, as I chronicled a few months ago. While it is important to understand how corporate agriculture has exploited the USDA label, the fact remains that the pursuit of customers who pay attention to the label encourages far better farming practices than the conventional norm, not to mention educates people, albeit imperfectly, about the source of their food. In any case, small producers rarely compete directly against corporate organic products, and they can easily get around the difficulty of getting certification by marketing themselves as “beyond organic” (or some such variant). Hence the success of farmers’ markets and CSAs, where the playing field is tilted irrevocably against corporate, large-scale operations.

At this point, with the weekly farmers’ market present in most towns of any size, advocates for local food need to consider how to increase the intensity of consumption of local food rather than its range. Either they need to carve out a larger space for themselves within existing chain stores, increase the demand for co-ops and natural food stores, or, in what to me seems the most promising option, increase their operations where they already enjoy an advantage over potential corporate competitors: farmers’ markets. In short, they should work towards sustaining farmers’ markets that open daily. The best local products, fruit and vegetables, are by their nature highly perishable; shopping once a week simply isn’t enough to enjoy summer’s bounty.

The prime difficulty is finding open space that can be dedicated entirely to markets. Parking lots, which seem to be their most common site, can be spared for a day, but city governments and nearby stores will likely balk at reserving them consistently. On the other hand, markets do bring new customers into an area, and the crowds spill over to shop in adjacent stores, so perhaps an economic argument can be persuasive on this point. Certainly, few small farmers can afford to come to market every day—when would they weed and harvest their produce if they did?—but by sharing stalls with similar vendors, they would provide customers with consistency.

The most tempting alternative for small producers who want to scale up may be to make the leap to supply traditional grocery stores, which reach many more consumers than farmers’ markets. However, these outlets need corporate suppliers because they operate on economies of scale. Small producers are much more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of weather and markets and thus should avoid the long-term contracts that chain stores require (cooperatives change the dynamics entirely). Natural food stores are more favorably disposed to local suppliers, but for whatever reason, growth on the scale of farmers’ markets seems to elude them.

Convening daily farmers’ markets will offer benefits beyond simply higher sales volumes and healthier eating. The more time people spend shopping for food, the better. Farmers’ markets encourage casual interaction, whereas at a grocery, one needs only talk to the cashier (automated checkout are becoming more and more common). Like any point of assembly that encourages conversation, whether church, school, or a sports stadium, the marketplace is fundamental to civics.

My First Few Days in the Sierra

2010-07-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

In My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir, who had landed a job as a sort of back-up shepherd, described his emotions as the flock began its ascent toward the high country thusly: “Now away we go toward the topmost mountains. Many still, small voices, as well as the noon thunder, are calling, “Come higher.” This, sans wilderness harmony, approximates my own urge to wander in the High Sierra.

I started the trail in Yosemite Valley. Many hikers eschew the first two days of the hike, partly because it is difficult to reserve permits in advance (I bought mine at the Park Permit Office after waking up at 5:30 AM to get a good place in line—it turned out that several backpackers had slept on the office porch), but also because starting two days late in Tuolumne Meadows means avoiding the 6,000 foot ascent out of Yosemite Valley. I found the first couple of days to be brutal but manageable, made far more enjoyable by a Albertan doctor named Joe whom I fell in with. The effort convinced me to cull a number of non-essential items from my supplies while at the Tuolumne backpackers’ campground.

On the third day, I made it to within a mile and half of Donahue Pass, by which the JMT exits the national park. I camped by a sapphire lake at the base of a magnificent glacial cirque, with a panorama of 13,000 foot snowy peaks behind it. But the bugs were astonishingly bad, and not for the first time on the trip. Even with long sleeves, DEET, and a mosquito net over my head, it was astonishingly uncomfortable to be outside. Mosquitoes mixed into my pasta as I was cooking. I worked out a system of backing and rolling into my tent to minimize the amount of time the zipper was open, but I still spent several minutes killing the five or ten mosquitoes that flew in whenever I went in.

In the morning, I got up before the sun crept over the pass so that the mosquitoes, dulled by the nocturnal chill, wouldn’t bother me, and waited to eat breakfast until I reached the pass itself. At 11,000 feet, the winds were too strong for the bugs, and the view stretched north along the valley up which I had hiked and south into the High Sierras. Here indeed was Muir’s “Divine, enduring, unwastable wealth.”

Once out of the felsenmeer, however, the mosquitoes returned, and I never encountered another spot along the trail free of them. Dinner that night, despite a solid day of hiking and good companions, was again rushed, and I couldn’t even find a place to cook breakfast the next day after another dawn rise. On July 19th, 1869, exactly 141 years before, John Muir wrote of “Everything awakening alert and joyful; the birds begin to stir and innumerable insect people.” How he could refer so charitably to the mosquitoes, even while observing “The pale rose and purple sky changing softly to daffodil yellow and white, sunbeams pouring through the passes between the peaks and over the Yosemite doms…” is beyond me. He did at least go on, several days later, to wonder “if any island in mid-ocean is flyless,” also noting that the bugs are “sensitive to cold, and fond of domestic ease.” He was an unconscionable anthropomorphizer: “The whole landscape,” he continued, “glows like a human face in a glory of enthusiasm…” Such was not my visage on the morning of July 19th.

Henceforth the hiking itself was steady, but practically every time I stopped my tormentors descended, preventing me from enjoying the lakes, peaks, meadows, and open pine forests through which the trail wound. So on day five, after notching sixty miles, I stopped at Red’s Meadow Resort for a double cheeseburger and took the bus out to Mammoth Lake. I hate giving up on things, but it seems senseless to continue when relaxation and enjoyment are so elusive. Muir would have been disappointed, but then he reveled in finding a joyful God infusing the landscape—“Divine, enduring unwastable wealth—whereas I was only in search of a pleasant summer vacation.

Nevada Falls at the head of the Yosemite Valley.

My first campsite, near the Clouds Rest junction. Mount Starr King is in the distance.

Near Donahue Pass.

The pass itself.

Mount Banner, past Thousand Island Lake.

Across the Ridge

2010-07-01T14:38:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week, I hiked up to Madison Springs Hut, where an old college friend, Ari Ofsevit, is working this summer. Nick Anderson, a croomate of mine two years ago at Zealand Falls, had croo switched over for the night - here he is on the Airline, by the lip of King Ravine, to which we scuttled after dinner to take in the sunset.

Madison, the next morning. The hut is to be demolished this fall and rebuilt. Despite its charm, the hut is cramped, and its systems simply do not work very well. Indeed, the plumbing was having fits during my stay. The altitude is too high for composting toilets, and the old flush system has particular difficulty with cold weather. In this picture, Nick is helping the huts manager, Eric Pederson to put up the anemometer on the hut roof. The cook, Carly, happened to be washing dishes at the same moment.

Nick, Ari, Caitlin McDonough - an AMC researcher - and George Heinrichs - another former hutmate of mine from Galehead - headed over to Lakes of the Clouds on my second day. Here, the Gulfside Trail looks almost like a road. Indeed, it was carefully crafted over a century ago by J. Rayner Edmands and a team of Italian workmen he hired up from Boston. Freeze-thaw cycles seem to have broken the treadway less here than along most of the winding path it traverses through the Northern Presidentials.

A dwindling snowbank that looked like the skin of a giraffe.

Mountain Heath.

New growth on the alpine balsam.

Monticello Lawn on the southwest flank of Jefferson.

Nick, Caitlin, and George near Sphinx Col.

At the junction of the Gulfside and Westside Trails.

Looking west from Washington towards Bretton Woods.

Traversing across the bulk of Washington, beginning to close in on Lakes.

The sunset that night was spectacular. In some ways, haze is more beautiful at dusk than clear air.

It was hutmaster set at Lakes - every hutmaster in the system had convened at Lakes for three days, ostensibly to mull over the responsibilities of leadership.

Mountain Laurel Ball

2010-06-02T16:31:00.001-07:00

The ridge of the Shenandoahs is about the last place in Virginia with spring blooms at this point, but what a riot of pink and white it is! I've hiked through Mountain Laurel in the southern Appalachians before and even seen small patches in New Hampshire, but its character is very different in full bloom. Its twisted, gloomy wood and subdued greens give way to a profusion of blossoms. Their delicate shades shift with the sunlight; tablecloth white turns to rich carnation as the sun descends toward the horizon.

I took these pictures last weekend along the Appalachian Trail between the Elk Wallow Wayside and Byrd's Nest #4. We saw a young bear, several deer, and a few thru-hikers making their way north.

Kalmia Latifolia is fond of rocky, hilly slopes and acidic soil, which is why it grows in such profuse thickets in the Shenandoahs. It is quite adaptable, however, and is found all along the Appalachians, from the northern hardwood forests of New England to the heath balds and longleaf pine forests of the Southeast. An opportunist, it tends to thrive in disturbance and may have benefited from the devastation of the American Chestnut by Chestnut Blight in the early twentieth century. Despite its tolerance for shade, it will eventually succumb to lack of light in a mature forest.

This last shot is looking west across the Shenandoah Valley. Two bends of the wonderfully serpentine South Branch of the Shenandoah River are visible.

Skyline Drive

2010-05-15T20:41:00.001-07:00

Logistically, the Shenandoahs are an odd place to hike. They are a long, thin range, with few outlying peaks, and Skyline Drive cuts along near the crest of the ridge for its entire length. Thus it is difficult to avoid encounters with the automobile when climbing any of the taller peaks. Just last weekend, my hiking partner Paul Singh and I emerged from the Bluff Trail onto a dirt road to a find a couple (mother clad in fur) wheeling a stroller. Not far beyond, we arrived at a parking lot where the trail (now part of the AT) crosses the Drive. A license plate read “1derer.”

With the exception of a jaunt up Old Rag, about which word is definitely out, I haven’t encountered many people on trails of the Shenandoahs this spring, even along the AT near the crest of the ridge. Though it is considerably closer to DC than the Whites are to Boston, its perceptual distance seems to be substantial to most Washingtonians. The ranger at the Drive’s gate was quintessentially Park Service chipper about “Wildflower Weekend,” but traffic was light on the road itself. Apparently fall is peak season.

Skyline Drive is here to stay. Built in the thirties, originally under the WPA and with help from the CCC, it is a National Historic Landmark. Entrance costs fifteen dollars, and as two of the park’s four campground were closed last weekend, the park can probably use every penny of the revenue. On the other hand, the 40% of the park that is wilderness is literally all on the mountainsides; the ridge is very much trammeled by man.

In New Hampshire, the closest parallel is probably the Mount Washington Auto Road, though its impact is proportionally far smaller given the size of the Whites. In the thirties, a road to run along the spine of the Presidentials was proposed. Potential construction and maintenance costs were vast, however (alpine freeze-thaw cycles are unkind to asphalt), and the plans were scrapped.

For the casual hiker, Skyline Drive does present an interesting ethical quandary. Should one condemn the road as a biological and geographical intrusion and forgo its offer to relieve tiresome hikes up to the ridge or accept its permanence and embrace the enhanced access?

Last weekend, Paul and I did use the road and had the unusual experience of starting our hike in descent. In fact, our midpoint, a gorge called The Devil’s Stairs, is only served by a trail descending from above that ends at the park boundary. The return across the ridge was mostly in emerald woods, with a few rocky outcrops interspersed. The AT crossed the road several times, giving the hike a rural rather than wild flavor.

Shenandoah Spring

2010-05-04T16:13:00.000-07:00

Spring seems to be to the Potomac region what fall is to New England. I’ve been doing my best to get into the backcountry over the last couple months, and the Shenandoahs are only a couple hours to the west from DC. They have a bucolic, woody appeal. As with any mountain range within striking distance of the megalopolis, the famous hikes are overrun on the weekends, but much of the range, at least away from Skyline Drive, feels old and left behind. The fields adjacent to the first uplift are still cultivated, but I suspect that the mountains themselves are far more forested than they were a century ago. One path in particular, the Upper Dark Hollow Trail that crosses Broyle’s Gap, must have been built for wagon traffic.

I imagine the old hollows full of hardscrabble subsistence Scotch-Irish farmers, camps of Civil War cavalry pausing after a feint to draw out the troops in the valley, and CCC employees constructing retaining walls and switchbacks to curtail erosion. Old Rag, Mill Prong, Monkey Head—the mountains are saturated with memory. For now, while my affinity for the region is more perceptual than absolute, my imagination is free from the boundaries conferred by experience.

Truly Happy Cows

2010-02-15T15:16:00.000-08:00

The organic label has lost some of its cachet in the last few years, supplanted by the local food movement. Largely thanks to Michael Pollan, who pointed out in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that organic certification does not necessarily preclude industrial production methods, awareness of organic shortcomings has grown immensely. Even as Wal-Mart and other mainstream supermarket chains introduced organic foods into their product lines, foodies reached a general consensus that localism is the most ethical way to eat.

They argue that industrial agricultural corporations, through influence in the business-friendly Bush administration, watered down organic rules to allow corporate farms to masquerade as small, sustainable producers. In the dairy industry, for example, organic rules only required that cows have “access” to pasture during the growing season. With such intentionally vague wording, farmers with thousands of grain-fed cows could keep their animals indoors as long as some obscure route outdoors existed. Such rules saved them the time and expense of moving the cows at the expense of health and happiness. Nobody likes a concrete bed.

As I wrote in a February 2008 post, Horizon Organic, which plasters its products with a drawing of a cow leaping in front of the earth while holding a flag that reads “organic,” exemplifies this cynical behavior. It began supplementing its production from individual farm members with milk from several enormous indoor operations that it set up in Idaho and Maryland. While plenty of alternative companies resist such methods (Organic Valley is the best-known), Horizon’s growth has been phenomenal. Indeed, in 2003, it was snapped up by the giant agribusiness corporation Dean Foods. (Aurora Organic Dairy, Wal-Mart’s main supplier, is even worse – apparently even the Bush USDA had to crack down on it for the way it treat its animals.)

Thus it was gratifying to read earlier this week that the USDA has at last clarified the meaning of access. Now, cows must spend the entire grazing season on pasture and consume at least 30% of their food from pasture during that time.

I’ve been aware of this issue ever since I started research on my undergrad thesis in 2004. There is nothing the USDA could do to help small organic dairy farmers against their industrial competitors more than issue these new rules. While there have been many disappointments so far in the Obama administration, I have only good things to say about the actions of the USDA and EPA under his leadership. Tom Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, has turned out to be a more zealous advocate for consumer rights, and in this latest decision, the hand of Kathleen Merrigan, the USDA Undersecretary who came from Tufts and once helped write the Organic Food and Production Act while a staffer for Patrick Leahy, is pretty clear.

A writer in The Times notes that the rules also pertain to cattle operations except during finishing . This is a fairly useless point, since ranchers only confine cattle and feed them grain during that last period just before slaughter. However, I vaguely recall reading that the USDA is also taking a hard look at pesticide use in feed lots (I cannot find a related news clip, unfortunately). Given its aggressive posture so far under Obama, I would not be surprised if the USDA goes after this particularly filthy and cruel aspect of American agriculture—if Obama lasts eight years.

Mount Abigail Adams?

2010-02-06T07:48:00.000-08:00

The toponymy of the White Mountains is typically early American. The settlers who displaced the local Abenaki chose for the most part to honor political, scientific, and local leaders in the names that they bestowed on the peaks, rivers, and notches. A few landmarks reflect the physical landscape (Whiteface, Tripyramid), and a couple even commemorate indigenous leaders, though of Chocorua, Tecumseh, and Osceola, only the first was actually Abenaki.

Note how few females are memorialized in the landscape. By the 20th century, the Forest Service and local clubs began to name a few landmarks after women—the Dolly Copp Campground or the Kate Sleeper Trail, for example—but such monuments are still rare.

The paucity did not escape Bethany (Benny) Taylor, a former AMC croo member who is now finishing up grad school in Montana. Noting one of the peculiarities of the toponymy of the Presidential Range, she has proposed changing the name of the bump now known as Adams Four to Mount Abigail Adams.

Mount Adams, the second highest peak in the Whites, has several satellites, of which the two largest, John Quincy Adams and Sam Adams, are fairly well known, as the Gulfside Trail traverses past them on its way to Mts. Madison and Jefferson. Adams Four, which rises to the northwest of the true summit at the end of Nowell Ridge, is somewhat smaller. Along with its even more diminutive sibling Adams Five, it completes the Adams Family. While the use of numbers in the names of these nubbles perhaps adds a remote quality to the local landscape (think K2), Benny has espied an opportunity to add a little gender diversity to the Presidentials.

Abigail Adams is best-known of the early Presidential wives due to the survival of the prodigious correspondence that passed between her and her husband. David McCullough’s biography of John (not to mention the HBO miniseries that aired a year or two ago) brought a wave of attention to the relationship. Abigail is an easy woman to like, as her letters reveal a lively wit and an engaging intelligence. Additionally, she was outspoken in her opposition to slavery and advocated for women’s rights such as property ownership.

Benny submitted a proposal to rename Adams Four to Mount Abigail Adams a few months ago. If you favor the change, please write an email in support to the USGS. The relevant email is bgnexec@usgs.gov.

Thelma, Louise, and Landscape

2009-12-20T08:21:00.000-08:00

What is it about inland western landscape that makes it such a rich setting for film? Its features are emblazoned in American consciousness, woven into perceptions of our history and identity. Perhaps its stark, arid texture is intrinsically suited to the violence and romance of drama.

In Thelma and Louise, a landmark movie still too recent to gain popular recognition as a classic, director Ridley Scott develops landscape into its own character. Its evolution matches the maturation of the two main characters themselves.

When it was released in 1991, Thelma and Louise thrilled feminists. Janet Maslin, the outspoken critic at The Times, penned the movie a love letter of a review, citing its “sense of freedom and excitement.” Yet in 2007, Judith Warner, another Times columnist, wrote, “Remember, in 1991, how topical the movie seemed? How revolutionary, how thrilling, how cathartic?” Now, after watching the movie again, “It simply seemed depressing, oppressive and hopeless. It seemed like a relic from the past, a buried memory. It was dark. It was disturbing.”

Thelma and Louise polarized viewers in 1991, often by gender. Some male critics rather defensively criticized the movie’s one-dimensional portrayal of its male villains. Their point is literally true—we never learn why Darryl, Thelma’s husband, is so abusive —but misses the point that intimidation is usually one-dimensional to its victims.

At its core, as Warner points out, Thelma and Louise is about sexual violence motivated by male fears of female empowerment. The attempted rape in an Arkansas truck stop that sparks the movie’s plot is much more chilling than Louise’s shooting of the assailant. Tension infuses every one of Thelma and Louise’s interactions along the road, all of which are with men. The dynamics shift, however; when they reach the towers and buttes of southern Utah, the once spacey and submissive Thelma locks a state trooper in his trunk and blows up a tanker belonging to a misogynistic trucker.

As the two drive deeper into canyon country, Scott lingers on the empty, barren landscape, and he also uses more close-up shots of their faces, emphasizing the dust and absence of make-up. “You feel awake?” asks Thelma to Louise. A moment later, she continues. “Wide awake. I don't remember ever feelin' this awake. Everything looks different. You know what I mean. I know you know what I mean. Everything looks new. Do you feel like that? Like you've got something to look forward to?”

Cigarettes and whiskey bottles are piling up by this point, and the film’s last twenty minutes, with its guns, chases, and vast panoramas, are worthy of a bona fide western. The film’s most ominous shot is a chilling panorama showing their Thunderbird kicking up a long tail of dust along the lip of the Grand Canyon. Slowly, a helicopter glides out from behind the cliff like a bird of prey, unseen by the car’s occupants.

Roger Ebert has justly criticized Scott’s lack of faith in his ending—the freeze frame of the car shooting across the Grand Canyon fades to white far too quickly, and the subsequent shot of Thelma and Louise in happier times robs the moment of its emotional impact.

Nonetheless, Scott makes an important point through this allusion. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, these two outlaws choose to go out on their own terms. Women belong in the history of the west, and not simply as appendages.

The Starting Point

2009-11-01T15:17:00.000-08:00

The following piece, sadly homeless, dates from July:

“I’m a lazy farmer,” says Carolyn Fryberger, contemplating a fried Duck egg. Indeed, an 8 AM wake-up is late, especially if midday heat is to be avoided. But it’s an unusually cool summer in Swannanoa, North Carolina, where she is halfway through the first season on her new Crossing Point Farm.

This morning, she’s helping a friend harvest chickens. Crossing Point is small, just under an acre, with a ten member CSA, so to make extra money she hires herself out to other farmers, as well as working a part-time job as a School Garden Educator for the Town of Black Mountain. “The farm pays for itself, but not for me…yet,” she explains. After a little weeding—ragweed is threatening her pepper plants, already stressed by a fungus—she drives a few miles down the road, where a mobile chicken processing unit is waiting. Thanks to the USDA, a farmer must process any chickens he sells on his own farm. It’s a labor-intensive job, so between neck-cutting, feather-plucking, and eviscerating the birds’ guts, it helps to have five on the job besides the owner and Carolyn.

Raised in Black Mountain, just east down I-40, Carolyn attended Macalester for two years, studying Geography and Environmental Studies. “It means a lot to me to be from a place,” she says, explaining her subsequent transfer to UNC-Asheville, where she completed her degree in 2007. Farming “is the culmination of many different threads in my life.” These include African dance—“A lot of those dances are based in celebration of harvest”—as well as her academic studies. “Within the Environmental Studies field there’s a negative paradigm of the human-environment relationship. Farming is something I can do to restore it.”

After graduation, Carolyn moved to Austin, Texas, where she interned with an ambitious young farmer supplying urbanites with organic produce. The summer heat was brutal, and the farmer, burdened by debt, worked his interns hard. “After Texas, I had still survived,” she says. “I figured if I could make it in that heat, then I can do it. But I wanted to be back home.” She learned about the small parcel of land available for rent in Swannanoa, conveniently situated near Asheville. Nestled among houses built for workers employed by the Beacon blanket factory, it has been cultivated on and off for 70 years. “This whole thing is only possible due to the community here. I’m supported by this whole group of family, friends, neighbors and other farmers. Everything I have on this farm is used. Some people buy from me simply because they know me. For a first year farmer, that’s huge.”

She hopes to work on this piece of land for four years and then take stock of her situation. “I think of this as my graduate studies.”

Back at Crossing Point in the late afternoon, Carolyn and her intern, a young engineer who recently quit her job, are weeding again. It’s work that makes the body stiff and sore, and unlike harvesting, it is peculiarly frustrating because it lacks finality: the weeds always come back. Tomorrow is pick-up day for the CSA, and Carolyn is thinking about how to fill out the bags she prepares for her customers. Most pay $25 a week (for a 15 week season), so it is important that she give them good value. But in this, her first year of production, yields are unpredictable, particularly early on in the season. Her neighbors are surprised that she is not growing more corn, beans, and potatoes, but arugula and bok choi are what customers want.

Finally, at 7, Carolyn and the intern return to the house. “It’s difficult finding balance between how long I actually need to work and being able to get away from it and have time for myself, especially since it’s right in the backyard.” She works later in the day than most farmers—“When I go to sleep at night, it’s looming outside the window.”

Tonight, however, she’s off to the Swannanoa Gathering, an annual folk and bluegrass music festival at the nearby Warren Wilson college campus. Knots of people sit here and there, starting informal jam sessions, while the curious and appreciative look on. Banjo left at home, she’s brought a kale salad and watermelon to share in a potluck with friends who are thrilled to see her away from the farm. Square dancing follows dinner, then more catching up. She doesn’t return to the farm until midnight.

In the morning, she comes in after breakfast bearing a cardboard box. “Here are the first tomatoes!” She is harvesting, washing vegetables, and bagging lettuce mix. Customers will begin dropping by around mid-afternoon. “My favorite thing about doing this work is my position in the community. I love going to the farmers’ market. I love it when my CSA members come to pick up…People who I’ve known for a long time meeting each other and getting to be friends through the farm. I feel like I’m creating something that people want to come together around.”

All photos are courtesy Ms. Fryberger

The Adams Slide Trail: A Short Walk in the Great Gulf

2009-08-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the history and geography of the Adams Slide Trail on this blog. Its incline—“referred to as the steepest path of its length in the White Mountains,” according to the 1960 White Mountain Guide—and location on the south side of Mt. Adams continued to intrigue me, though I was not able to bushwhack it while working in the huts.

Last week, during a visit to Madison Spring Hut, I was lucky to have good weather and spare time, as well as two excellent friends—RD Jenkinson and Hillary Gerardi, both croo at Madhaüs)— with whom to attempt the climb. After RD and Hillary finished cleaning up breakfast and we had a chance to get some food into our own bellies, we began our descent from the hut along the Buttress Trail. It heads southwest, traversing the southeastern slopes of Mt. Adams before dipping down into the Great Gulf. After 1.9 miles, it intersects with the Six Husbands Trail just below Jefferson Ravine.

The Adams Slide Trail starts near this junction; I won’t say exactly where, but it shouldn’t be hard for anyone with access to a decent White Mountain library to find it. Luckily, RD has sharp eyes, so we quickly began scrambling up a small herd path. A handful of people must bushwhack the trail every year, as traces of their steps persisted until we reached the felsenmeer.

The trail is indeed extremely steep, but progress was surprisingly steady. While undergrowth has spread across the trail during the past forty years (little evidence of the trail’s original exposure on the bottom half remains), a depression is still clearly visible in most places where hikers wore down the earth. At times, we strayed to one side or the other, but between the three of us, we were always able to return to the original tread. Here and there, we came upon a red blaze, a couple of which were reduced to a tiny smear on the rock.

Popping out above treeline, about halfway through our ascent, brought us views of the Great Gulf and into Jefferson Ravine.
Since the south side of Adams falls away so steeply, we could see much more of the Great Gulf than is visible from Adams’ summit, and in greater detail. The waterfalls on the far side of the Gulf flanking the Wamsutta Trail were magnificent. Then we fought our way through a brief section of krummholz—here, crawling was sometimes easier than walking because the firs and spruce have not yet colonized the packed earth of the old tread, allowing us to wiggle through a tunnel beneath the branches.

We stopped for pictures and to look for cairns, of which many remained. They were not well built but were often topped by quartz, distinguishing them from the background of grey schist that makes up most of the felsenmeer. I was more aware of the trail’s steepness above treeline because we rarely had to slow down to get through branches, and thus I had no excuse to pause and catch my breath.

Near the top, the cairns disappeared, presumably scattered when the trail was discontinued so that hikers would not stray into the trailless region. But we scrambled along what appeared to be the most interesting route up the cone and were rewarded by coming across a substantial cave. Had anyone sheltered in it before us? Not far beyond, we came across the blue blazes of the Star Lake Trail. From here, as the old guidebook says, it is but “a few rods to the summit of Mt. Adams.”

All told, the trail ascends 2,308 feet in 1.26 miles. We did the climb in about two hours, with ample time to enjoy views and pose for photos. It was easier than anticipated; this is one of the easier bushwhacks I have done in the Whites, mainly because we did not have to fight through the spruce-fir forest. However, we were lucky to have access to the hut. If one were to begin and end at the base of the Great Gulf, it would indeed be a full day.

Finally, isn't RD a hell of a photographer?

The White Mountains, by Train

2009-07-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

From Appalachia:

The mountains may be the same as they were in the 19th century, but the trip there has changed immeasurably. Once tourists, mountaineers, laborers, and botanists climbed aboard their passenger cars at the Boston and Maine Terminal north of Haymarket in Boston or at the old Union Station in Portland, Maine or Springfield, Massachusetts, and they steamed past the fields and forests of central New England (in those days, far more fielded than forested) on their way to the White Hills. If the trip was slower than today’s ride up the interstate, passengers did not have to deal with traffic jams or tolls, and they could pass the time in conversation or a book. The railroads made the White Mountains accessible to urban populations, ushering in an era of genteel tourism punctuated by the grand hotels that sprang up around the region. While tourism is now an enduring feature of the White Mountains, its character has always been molded by how people get there. The era of railroads was indeed distinct.

Early American industrialists quickly recognized railroad’s potential after it was first developed in England. Trains could move freight and passengers more cheaply and quickly than horses or canal boats, so Yankees strained to complete their first locomotive. The Tom Thumb, as it was named, began operating on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in 1830, only five years after the first English train began regular operation.

States began issuing charters for railroads even earlier. The northeastern seaboard was the site of the first tracks, as the mines, mills, and ports fueling the Industrial Revolution were growing enormously and needed better integration. In the early days, state governments subsidized much railroad development, as investors lacked confidence that the new system would become profitable, but by 1850, interest on railroads had risen enough that private money was assured.

Several regional railroads soon sprang up to connect the White Mountains with northeastern cities. Chartered in New Hampshire in 1835, the original Boston and Maine Railroad was one of a half-dozen lines built to link Boston with Portland. After a series of mergers with an alphabet soup of short-lived, regional lines, the B & M became the dominant coastal company, and from this regional base, it spun a web of tracks across northern New England, stretching from Massachusetts into Canada. While none of the lines that originally reached the White Mountains belonged to the B & M, it consumed almost all of them by 1895, save for the Maine Central Railroad.

The first thread of track to enter the White Mountain Region belonged to the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, which connected Gorham with Portland in 1851 after five years’ labor and $2,800,000. For $4.50, Bostonians could now catch a Boston and Maine train north, change at Portland, and arrive in Gorham in nine hours.

Rail access to the southern side of the mountains came more slowly. The Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad built a route extending through Laconia and Plymouth on its way to Woodville in 1853, but one still needed a stagecoach to penetrate beyond the Lakes Region. In fact, from The Weirs, just beyond Laconia, one could take the “Lady of the Lake” across Lake Winnipesaukee to Centre Harbor, where the stagecoach waited to make the journey’s final leg. By 1873, the B, C, & M extended as far north as Littleton.

The Portland and Ogdensburg was chartered in 1867 to run from Portland to Crawford Notch, where the owners planned for it to join their “Vermont division,” a western branch line. The task of construction was immense, as the tracks climb nearly 1,400 feet through the Notch, an average of 116 feet per mile between Bemis and Crawford House Stations. Along the way, engineers built both the remarkable Frankenstein Trestle (named for a painter whose name was attached to the nearby cliff) and the Willey Brook Bridge, which both rise precipitously above the conifers. “No other railroad in this region traverses such wild gorges, or looks out on such majestic peaks, close at hand,” wrote James Osgood in his 1884 guidebook Sweetser’s White Mountains. The line was not complete until 1875, and shortly after the western branch was finished in 1877, the Portland and Ogdensburg went bankrupt. In 1888, after a succession of short-term leases, the Maine Central, itself the product of a merger, took over the line, evocatively christening it the Mountain Division.

New Yorkers had a difficult time getting to the White Mountains, but they could choose among three routes: either travel first to Boston and then north; follow a series of small railroads up the Connecticut River Valley; or travel first to Saratoga Springs, itself a tourist mecca, and then east past the southern tip of Lake Champlain and across the Green Mountains—a rather more arduous journey that depended on steamship and stagecoach as well as rail. Many chose simply to remain in the more accessible Catskills or Adirondacks.

The 1860s and 70s were a heady time in the railroad industry, when tens of thousands of miles of track were laid, often without economic rationale. Speculators overreached, creating a “railroad bubble” similar to the recent internet and housing boom and busts. The railroad frenzy was such that although the US had fewer than 100 miles of track in 1830, the Union Pacific railroad spanned the continent by 1869.

The new industry was exploding at the same time as Americans began to take an interest in the wilderness they had once feared. By the mid-1800s, attitudes toward the outdoors were changing quickly, as the last mountain fastnesses were explored. Even before the railroads arrived, taverns and tourist sites were springing up to serve outsiders with an interest in the mountains’ recreational amenities or natural resources.

Crawford Notch, a key pass through the heart of the White Mountains, was a microcosm of the greater region’s evolution. It still retains a great deal of physical evidence of its railroad history, especially now that the Crawford Scenic Railroad has been revived. Mostly unknown to European settlers until the end of the eighteenth century, the Notch was opened in the 1790s by the family whose name became attached to it. Abel Crawford, his father-in-law Captain Eleazar Rosebrook, his son Ethan, and Ethan’s wife (and cousin) Lucy, used state money to spearhead the widening of the road through the notch, meanwhile constructing a chain of inns along the notch floor. The new route made travel between Portland and the Upper Connecticut River far quicker, and traffic increased considerably, with the tourist industry showing its first stirrings. The Crawfords blazed the first hiking trails in the region during this period to drum up business for their inn trade.

As railroads began to snake around the edges of the White Mountains, making them accessible to city dwellers, the influx of people drastically altered the region’s human geography. A tiny village before 1850, Gorham’s population quadrupled in the decade after the Atlantic and St. Lawrence’s completion. The railroad company built a $20,000 White Mountain Station House, which was both hotel and railroad station, with 165 rooms and capacity for 250 guests, while two other large hotels, the Alpine House and the Mount Madison House were soon to follow. Hiking in the Presidentials, which had previously focused on the range’s southwestern flanks, suddenly shifted east. The Crawford Path nearly went extinct, though it was later revived by the extension of the Portland and Ogdensburg to Crawford Notch.

The Crawfords themselves became obsolete even before the railroad arrived. Although they played the part of mountain men to the hilt, they could not satisfy the appetite for elegance and professionalism among the newer, more urbane customers. In 1837, a professional hotel manager from Portland, Horace Fabyan, acquired their inn and renamed it the Mount Washington Hotel (not to be confused with the far grander, surviving hotel of the same name, opened in 1902). After fires destroyed the expanded hotel and its successor in 1854 and 1858, it was left to a Colonel Cyrus Eastman to open a new Crawford House. In 1874, Sylvester Marsh and colleagues opened the magnificent 500 room Fabyan House, the largest hotel built in direct response to railroad construction. Its design maximized efficiency rather than style, and it was criticized for its industrial appearance, resembling, to one critic, “a cotton factory.”

Railroads irrevocably changed the experience of traveling to the mountains, which had hitherto occurred via stagecoach and boat, as Guy and Laura Waterman describe in their history of northeastern hiking, Forest and Crag.
Railroad trips were faster, thus occupying less of the traveler’s time. Train trips were more hectic, certainly noisier, and involved less social interplay among travelers or between travelers and drivers. On the other hand, railroad travel had a new kind of excitement and bustle. For many travelers, trains seemed to have a personality of their own in ways that perhaps steamboats and coaches did not, and that surely today’s airplanes and buses do not.”

The relationship between the trains and hotel companies proved lucrative for both sides, as the more people were caught up in the new interest in the outdoors, the more both industries stood to gain. Many hotels, like the Fabyan House, had their own train station, or at the very least a livery to collect patrons from the nearest station. The Profile House, named for its excellent view of the Old Man of the Mountain from its site just north of Franconia Notch, was accessible only by stagecoach for the first twenty-five years of its existence. In 1878-79, its owners built a nine-and-a-half-mile spur to Bethlehem Junction, which the Boston, Concord, and Montreal had reached several years earlier. The Profile and Franconia Notch Railroad, as the little line was called, allowed the Profile House to expand on a truly grand scale, ultimately reaching a guest capacity of 600 by 1905. Guidebooks of the era noted the integration of rail and hotel and devoted considerable space to describing the various rail routes to the region. The subtitle of the 1888 guidebook Ticknor’s White Mountains reads, “A guide to the peaks, passes, and ravines of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and to the adjacent railroads, highways, and villages…”

The hotels were a sturdy anchor to summer communities, often attracting people who preferred the seclusion of a woodland cabin rather than a hotel’s bustle but who appreciated some of its creature comforts and chose to build nearby. In some places, the summer communities have outlived the hotels. Randolph, a few miles of west of Gorham, still survives as an unobtrusive but tightly-knit summer community, perhaps best known for the labyrinth of trails on the northern side of the Presidentials maintained by the Randolph Mountain Club. This group’s roots extend back to the 1880s, when most summer residents stayed at the Ravine House, the Mount Crescent House, and Kelsey Cottage, all of which lay along the road now named Route 2. Most had ridden the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad to Gorham before switching to coach for the last few miles. A few of the more industrious vacationers joined with hotel owners and a few local woodsmen to build the first trails in the region, returning each night to their families at the hotel, where dances, charades, and communal suppers awaited them. “Here in Randolph we have met with the most charming hospitality I ever knew,” wrote Carolyn Morse Rea to her mother during her honeymoon in July 1904.

The RMC continues to maintain most of the old trails; Lowe’s Path and The Watson Path are two survivors named for hotel owner/builders, but they are now rarely used because they begin on the sites of the old hotels instead of the current departure point at the Appalachia parking lot. The Northern Presidentials still have the densest network of trails of any region in the White Mountains, and they would never have been constructed had the railroad not reached as close to Randolph as Gorham.

If a full day of trail clearing and trimming was not for every tourist, there was plenty of less robust amusement back at the hotel, perhaps peering at the sublime landscape from a rocking chair on the hotel veranda or finding refreshment in the cool woods and streams of the valley. For those who wished to experience the mountains without compromising their gentility, a short-lived network of bridle paths and summit houses grew up, allowing tourists to reach summits such as Moosilauke, Lafayette, Washington (which had five paths passable by horse during the 1850s), and even Moriah (just south of Gorham) before a bridle path reached Washington’s peak. Like horses, the summit houses, which varied from little more than a rude shelter to fully outfitted hotels, soon disappeared from every White Mountain summit save Washington and Moosilauke. Many foundations remain, however, as do the gentle inclines of some of the old horse paths, now trodden only by grateful hikers.

The railroads continued pouring people into the mountain resorts throughout the boom and busts of the late nineteenth century. The Civil War did not slow the White Mountain tourist industry, and a cholera outbreak shortly afterwards was little more than a hiccup. Industrialization allowed many American to attain new standards of living with leisure time and disposable income. While certainly many a Captain of Industry sent his wife and family north for the summer, only to visit on weekends, the size of the White Mountain tourist industry is most of all a testament to the emerging American middle class. The period has guided American attitudes toward leisure and tourism ever since. In his book, Grand Resort Hotels of the White Mountains, Bryant Tolles writes, “This concept of escape came to fruition during the 1860s in the White Mountains…the quest for success, while embraced by many, became an all-consuming preoccupation that large numbers of people sought to avoid through the new summer vacation ritual. Ironically, for many the selection of a vacation site, in turn, constituted a form of competition in itself.”

Economic recession in the mid-1870s slowed tourism for a few years, but the symbiosis between railroads and hotels that underlay the first period of growth persisted, and tourism soon recovered. The Boston, Concord & Montreal pushed on to Twin Mountain and Fabyan in 1874, where two years later it finished a seven mile connector to Marshfield, the base of the Mt. Washington Cog Railway in 1876. Meanwhile, the Portland and Ogdensburg pushed up to Fabyan from Crawford Notch, where the mammoth feat of construction generated a burst of national attention for the local tourist industry.

It was now possible to travel entirely by rail from Boston to the top of Mt. Washington. Designed by Sylvester Marsh who, legend has it, conceived the idea while lost on a hike to the summit, the Cog, as it is now known, has an average grade of 25% and was understandably scoffed at when Marsh approached the State Legislature for funding. After trains began successfully climbing the mountain in 1869, however, Marsh’s innovative rack railway system for climbing was studied by Swiss engineers harboring similar plans for their native Alps. Along with the Mount Washington Auto Road, the Cog continues to ferry thousands of passengers to the summit every summer, and it is perhaps the premier tourist destination in northern New Hampshire.

Like the other railroads in the White Mountains, the Cog stimulated commerce at its destination, particularly in the hotel trade. Summit buildings existed atop Washington before the Cog; Ethan Crawford had built three stone cabins in 1823, while the Summit and Tip-Top Houses, competitors, went up in 1852-53, but when the Cog arrived, pressure increased to provide better lodging. A new Summit House, accommodating 150 guests, was constructed in 1872-73 at the cost of $70,000. It took freight trains (one car per train) 250 trips to bring up the 596 tons of building materials. Meanwhile, Marsh was soon busy putting up the architecturally uninspired Fabyan House in the valley, where it was ideally situated to take advantage of the new rail traffic to Mt. Washington itself.

By the 1880s, nearly all the major rail construction in the region was complete. The last decade of the nineteenth century was a golden era for White Mountain tourism, with around 200 hotels, inns, and boarding houses accommodating 12,000 people. The region held the country’s greatest concentration of grand hotels.

Grace Herreshoff, a 27 year old Bostonian, captured the spirit of the era in her journal account of a February 1908 trip based at the Iron Mountain House in Jackson. “Took train (leaving hotel about 9) up the [Crawford] Notch, but did not get much of a view on account of snow flurries.” After an exhilarating day snowshoeing up Mt. Clinton, she and several companions returned.
“Singing and dancing we proceeded down—waved to an engineer as we crossed the treacherous icy meadows in the valley, and broke in on a big crowd at the [Crawford House] station. We had fine views going back thro’ the Notch—a glimpse of Washington, and looks up the precipitous cliffs of the west side of Frankenstein. It had been a gorgeous day—full of exercise and vigor—great beauty and fury of weather. We rode up in the pung [sleigh], warm tho’ stiff! After an extra “spread” we had our dance—a great pleasure to me, for I had no lack of good partners, and was treated with almost too much attention in our extremely festive Virginia Reel!”

Even before the First World War, however, the relationship between rail and hotels began to fray. Driven by fierce competition, the hotel industry became ever more professionalized and large-scale, requiring greater operating capital. “In a curious, almost perverted way,” writes Tolles, “the grand hotels were victims of their own fantastic success…Their appeal remained for a selected few, but their broader, largely upper-middle-class clientele gradually slipped away to engage in other leisure-time life patterns and pursuits.”

There were a host of reasons to seek out an alternative summer vacation. The invention of the car allowed vacationers a new measure of freedom, and while it took decades for a modern road system to develop, especially in northern New England, the middle class enjoyed the flexibility of road trips, especially as motels began to spring up along roadsides. Fashionable ocean liners and, eventually, airplanes, made travel to exotic destinations much more feasible and fashionable for the rich. Those who did spend the entire summer in the lakes and mountains began to favor private cottages rather than hotels, and as more women entered the workplace and summer camps became mainstream, the function of hotels as summer refuges for wives and children became obsolete. Finally, unlike the Civil War, the Depression and the World Wars severely depressed the national economy, devastating the hotel and railroad industries while they were locked in fierce competition with new technologies and social values. Many hotels, built of wood, were replaced when they burned down during the nineteenth century, but in the new era they were simply abandoned after destruction. Only four survive: The Mount Washington Hotel—“the most ambitiously conceived, elaborately appointed and conspicuously palatial,” according to Tolles—The Balsams at Dixville Notch, and Wentworth Hall Resorts and the Eagle Mountain House in Jackson.

Ironically, White Mountain passenger trains enjoyed a brief but memorable renaissance during the height of economic trauma during the 1930s and 40s. At the instigation of the AMC, the Boston and Maine Railroad began running “snow trains” to carry skiers north from Boston. Skiing did not achieve mainstream popularity in America until after World War II, but it became popular in the late twenties among some New Englanders who observed the sport in Europe, where it was blossoming in the Alps.

American ski infrastructure lagged behind that of France and Switzerland, but many northeastern outdoorsmen and women were intrigued, organizing through college groups such as the Dartmouth Outdoor Club or Harvard Mountaineering Club. In Boston, the Appalachian Mountain Club was the impetus for many skiing adventures.

Joe Dodge, the legendary AMC Huts Manager, led a few friends into Tuckerman’s Ravine in 1926, where they skinned some ways up the bowl before descending (Dodge’s son, Brooks, was known in the late forties and fifties for his daring in the Tuckerman couloirs). The cirque quickly developed into the most exciting ski scene in New England, and the Boston ski club Hochgebirge organized the Inferno, a blistering race from summit to base, including the ravine headwall. An AMC member, Hollis Phillips won the first race, in 1933, while in 1939 the young Austrian Toni Matt completed the run in a reckless six and a half minutes. Matt took the several thousand foot descent of the headwall without turning, a feat that continues to win him the highest accolades in skiing circles. Elsewhere, AMC members began scouting and clearing ski trails, often assisted by the CCC. Mt. Cardigan’s Duke, Kimball, and Alexandria ski trails were cut in 1934-35 (the name of the first honors a Russian émigré nobleman who taught skiing at the base cabin), while the notorious Hell’s Highway was cut by the DOC on Mt. Moosilauke in 1933.
Snowplows were scarce and winter roads dangerous, so trains were the most reliable method of winter transportation. At the AMC’s instigation, the Boston and Maine ran a train from Boston to Warner, New Hampshire in January 1931, pitched specifically to skiers. “You’ll have a glorious Sun-Day,” read the B & M poster. It was a popular idea, and the snow trains continued to run during the holidays throughout the thirties and forties.

George Macomber, now 81, rode the snow train while on winter vacation from high school. Up at 5:30, he would take the bus to Newton Corner, near Boston, where he caught the MBTA trolley into the city. After changing at Park Street, he arrived at North Station, where the train began to roll north.

“All ages were on the train,” Macomber told me when I visited him in his Boston apartment. “Everybody getting ready for a good time, lugging their skis and boots.” The train ran quickly, reaching its destination within two and a half hours. They were long, he said, “16 cars, must have had a couple thousand people on them. We’d get off at North Conway and parade down to Cranmore,” a resort that still exists, though it is now overshadowed by larger ski areas such as Wildcat, which Macomber later helped found with Brooks Dodge and two others.

The ride home was often high-spirited. “On the way back, the college kids and twenty year olds were having a good time. A lot of liquor, beer. A lot of trying to smooch. As a naïve 15 year old, I enjoyed watching all of that.”

Macomber’s wife, Ann, took some of the same trains, though she did not yet know George. Her family went as far north as Intervale, where a car from the Glen House picked them up to stay for a week and also took them to Pinkham Notch, where they could begin the skin up to Tuckerman’s Ravine.

Skiing’s popularity soon skyrocketed as former members of the 10th Mountain Division returned to fan out across the country and cheap surplus military gear flooded stores, but the snow trains were short-lived, doomed by the societal shift toward cars. The Boston and Maine steadily cut passenger service through the fifties and sixties and only continued freight service through a series of state subsidies and bankruptcies. Finally, Guilford Transportation Industries (later Pan Am) purchased the remnants in 1983. The Maine Central, after a similar decline, had succumbed to Guilford three years earlier.

Gas prices will need to increase far beyond $4.00 per gallon to bring back regular passenger service to the White Mountains, but nostalgia for the era of railroad and grand hotels has surged over the past couple of decades. The Cog continues to haul thousands of people to Washington’s summit in the summer months, while the Conway Scenic Railroad has refurbished the old Mountain Division tracks running through Crawford Notch. Beginning at the North Conway Station, built in 1874 for the Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad, the train travels eleven miles north to Fabyan Station. From there, it is but a short shuttle ride to the Mount Washington Hotel, now a National Historic Landmark and in good financial health, having emerged from foreclosure in the early nineties. Passengers can disembark at Crawford’s Station by the AMC Highland Center, whose gables faintly echo the old Crawford House, on which site the new eco-friendly building stands. The CSRR and Cranmore Mountain even sponsored a “Snow Train Weekend” last January.

While the methods of transportation to the White Mountains are vastly different today, the cultural and structural legacy of railroads and the hotels they helped build still stands. How will technology and social values of the next century affect the White Mountain landscape?

Illustrations, in order: a B & M snow train poster, a B & M railroad bill, Frankenstein's Trestle, The Crawford House, The Profile House (twice), Winslow Homer's "The Bridle Path, White Mountains," a 1914 map of the New England railways, another B & M poster, and Tuckerman's Ravine in its heyday.

Monument Valley

2009-07-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

I took this photo from Muley Point, an obscure lookout about forty miles to the north. The San Juan is in the foreground.

The road descending the escarpment was a bit hairy

From the north

The Left and Right Mittens

The Totem Pole. I've wanted to visit it since watching Clint Eastwood and George Kennedy caper on it in The Eiger Sanction.

Texas, according to John Ford

Basin, Range, and the Colorado Plateau

2009-07-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

Central Nevada, which, according to John McPhee, is slowly being stretched apart.

Zion: outside looking in

The Colorado by Vermillion Cliffs

Bryce Canyon

Canyonlands, looking out from the Island in the Sky

Delicate Arch, Utah's most famous arch, is on the left. The tiny bumps to the left are tourists more ambitious than I.

Along the Coast

2009-07-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles

The Big Sur

Winding along the coast

The Bay Area from the Berkeley Hills

The Golden Gate in its natural habitat

Point Reyes

Redwoods

The middle Oregonian coast

A fishing boat returns to Newport Bay

West to the Ocean

2009-06-28T18:31:00.000-07:00

White Sands National Monument

Saguaro outside Tucson

Entrance to the desert in Joshua Tree National Park

The next morning

The Pacific!

Raising Steak

2009-06-17T12:40:00.000-07:00

This is a review I wrote for the June issue of the Radcliffe Culinary Times.

When I began my graduate research on cattle ranching in Texas, I thought it amusing that most ranchers I spoke with talked a blue streak about their desire for independence and self-reliance, yet they all dressed, drove, and drank the same. Meanwhile, they eyed those few among them who challenged conventional ranching methods with deep suspicion.

Betty Fussell examines the same dynamic in her wonderful, sprawling Raising Steak, an investigation into the economics, culture, and gastronomy of American beef. How can a good steak symbolize rugged cowboy individualism when its producers are terribly afraid of sticking out from the herd?

The conundrum troubles few people, if the exploding popularity of steakhouses is any guide. Fussell gets right at steak’s raw patriotic appeal, writing, with typical strength and directness, “Real American men, women and children eat steak because it’s red with blood, blood that pumps flavor, iron, vitality, and sex into flaccid bodies. For women, steak is better than spinach. For men, it’s better than Viagra. With steak, it’s easy to get carried away.” I’ll say!

Fussell dates the blossoming of America’s lust for beef to the second half of the nineteenth century, when railroads and industrialism made cheap beef available to the urban masses. Cattle replaced buffalo on the Great Plains, completing the defeat of the Indians and establishing its American bona fides. The actual period when cowboys drove cattle north to the western railroad terminus was a brief interlude, “yet those twenty years [1867-87] had etched a schism in the American imagination…the sudden, invasive presence of the urban Machine created a deep nostalgia for lost Wilderness, which our stories often presented as the conflict of Eastern capitalist against Western cowboy.”

It is a sad commentary on American culture, and particularly masculinity, that our diet is so symptomatic of unfulfillment, but Fussell aptly concludes, “Images eat reality, and we feed our hunger for power and glory more than our need for nutrients when we eat steaks.” Yet despite its many unsettling revelations, Raising Steak is generally upbeat, sustained by Fussell’s infectiously enthusiastic voice.

She is fascinated by the characters inhabiting the world of beef. Crisscrossing the country indefatigably, she interviews an impressive, even bewildering array of sources, from the plucky lady who purchases meat for Peter Luger Steakhouse to Temple Grandin, an autistic animal scientist who designs half of the country’s animal handling facilities. Down-to-earth and witty, she makes the hefty text a fun read, though the vastness of information needs a more systematic presentation than it gets with her travelogue approach.

Fussell, born a Westerner but now residing in Manhattan, is somewhat of a paradox herself, which becomes problematic as she turns from the cattle industry’s history to its present situation. If Michael Pollan brings “an Easterner’s view to the West,” this Westerner is too indulgent toward ranchers. She details how the big meatpacking companies, assisted by the USDA, run their industry as a virtual oligopoly, driving down prices at which they purchase cattle, but fails to note that many rich hobby ranchers often sell cattle at a loss, hurting full-time producers who operate on a narrow margin. The reflexively macho and anti-government rhetoric common among cattlemen only makes truly independent ranchers more vulnerable to exploitation and wary of sissy solutions such as cooperatives. Fussell finds plenty of inspiring exceptions, but I am skeptical that the cattle industry can willingly reform itself without some massive cultural shifts among ranchers as well as packers.

When Fussell does get hot, she is forceful and eloquent. The USDA and the corporations it enables receive much warranted criticism, particularly for their despicable handling of Mad Cow Disease. Isn’t it funny how industry studies have a way of showing that consumers want whatever is cheapest for industry to produce? Money, mixed with a bit of cultural resentment, greases the industry wheels, and towards the end of the book, Fussell’s tone becomes reminiscent of muckraker Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation. She does not outline how she would reform production—her issue with the current system seems to have more to do with its execution and oversight rather than its inherent structure, and she implies that feedlot, corn-finished beef has its place in America.

Fussell is at her best when describing the cultural and culinary habits surrounding steak. She concludes with her own evaluation of the various cuts of beef—a section for which I am particularly grateful—and offers a series of recipes to describe the standard approach to cooking steak among major beef-eating cultures. Ultimately, steak, whatever its cultural and economic meaning, is awfully tasty, and we should honor it for its ability to sustain and nourish us, no matter what our reasons for eating it.

Street Art in the Cherrywood Neighborhood

2009-06-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up to my last post, here are some rather less controversial examples of street art in my Cherrywood neighborhood, an enclave of grad students and young families on the western edge of the East Side. The artist has painted over the Neighborhood Watch signs. I like the color and cheekiness, and also that the artist is content to anonymously adorn the local neigborhood.

To me, Austin's charm lies mainly in those of its residential neighborhoods that maintain an unassuming and relaxed atmosphere.

I took this photo in the Blackland neighborhood, a few blocks to the south. What a vehicle!

Gentrification and Weirdness in Austin

2009-05-28T17:22:00.000-07:00

There are many blue college towns in mostly red states, but people in Austin are particularly aware of their plight. In the 2004 election, Travis County was one of a handful in Texas that Kerry carried. The city’s motto, “Keep Austin Weird,” is partially a commentary on the perceived homogeneity of the rest of the state, while also referring to the city’s status as a center for hippies, alternative country music, and racial openness during the sixties and seventies.

In 1984, Michael Dell began selling computers out of the Dobie Center, UT’s skyscraper dormitory that looks as if it belongs on the set of Blade Runner. Nine years later, he moved the company to Round Rock, a northern suburb, where it matured into one of the largest corporations in America.

Austin has experienced enormous growth since Dell expanded the city’s economy beyond the administrative and academic spheres. Austin is not a town with a rich legacy of historical architecture, but even so, the proliferation of one-story houses in sprawling suburbs is remarkable. The city has made some sustained attempts to foster tighter development, including preserving the marvelous riverside Zilker Park and, more recently, building a light rail line between the northern suburbs and downtown, but opposition to zoning is so vehement that development continues apace. The most rampant construction has occurred to the west of the city, in the Hill Country, where views and lake access have drawn many of Austin’s wealthiest citizens. Meanwhile, on the East Side, in a geographic region known as the Blackland Prairie due to its rich soil, property values have until recently stayed quite low, despite the excellent access to downtown. The inhabitants were mainly black and Latino.

City-wide property values rose so high, however (housing prices have fallen less in Austin than in most cities; there is little evidence of recession here), that some affluent Austinites, especially those with a taste for the urban and hip, began pushing into new real estate territory. Their energy is transforming the city. A bevy of new condominiums, as tall as anything on the skyline, have ascended over the past two years, leading locals to quip that the town bird is “the crane.” They are thickest in an area near the river known as the Warehouse District, which has outlived its appellation and centers on a cluster of new retail developments, including the headquarters of Whole Foods.

Meanwhile, the East Side is transforming, lot by lot, into a center for contemporary architecture. Dusty old Victorian shacks sit across the street from plastic and glass cubist creations. While the money that has moved into the downtown condos is ostentatious, the East Side has acquired a hipster veneer. Tattooed bicyclists wait in line at East Side Pies, while old black folks eat barbecue in the shade outside Louie’s on MLK.

These two new housing trends have caused quite a bit of consternation among native Austinites. Concentrated housing is demonstrably healthy for so sprawled and parched a city, but on the other hand, the locals like their yards, and they resent the nouveau-riche atmosphere around the condos. On the East Side, things are uglier due to the racial and class nature of the competition. A number of graffiti have appeared, warning yuppie whites to keep out, but migration has not been staunched. The new light rail, which was built on an existing right-of-way, actually travels through the East Side, oddly missing such obvious destinations as the University due to its eastern arc. It is, however, attracting new development to the East Side, as new condo complexes, with their signature New Urbanist combination of commercial and residential space, are springing up around stations such as the rather conscientiously named Saltillo Plaza.

It has been intriguing to watch white Austinites, usually a very proud species, struggle to reconcile the tensions between their liberal impulses toward environmentalism, multiculturalism, and fairness that are, in this instance, competing. My own feelings are that while gentrification is causing a great deal of disruption on the East Side, it benefits those locals who are willing to sell out, since the property values are now so high. Austin is a surprisingly segregated city, and the mixing that is going on among blacks, whites, and Latinos, is probably a good thing, though it may be short-lived. Change is inevitable; stasis is impossible, though that does not condemn the East Side to becoming an enclave for the rich and hip.

In any case, Austin may have been “weird” back before Michael Dell got started in Dobie, but these days, it faces the same raft of challenges as all other western American cities that are coming of age. Last November, Obama managed to capture Harris (home to Houston) and Dallas Counties, as well as a wide swathe of counties in the Rio Grande Valley, but Austinites almost seemed miffed that the blue of Travis County was not alone in a sea of red.

The Guadalupes

2009-05-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

In mid-May, I spent a few days in the Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns to kick off the post-Masters era (let us hope that my affinity for blogging revives). Tom Barnett, with whom I traveled to Big Bend after the fall semester, joined me, while Professor William Doolittle came along in spirit.

Guadalupe Peak is the highest summit in Texas. Like the Chisos Range in Big Bend, its ecosystem changes with elevation, becoming far wetter and more forested as one ascends.

I hiked to the Basin shortly after we set up camp. It is the only area in the range high and flat enough to support alpine meadows.

We camped at a site called Pine Top, about 8000 feet high and across the valley from "Guad" Peak. I did not bring enough water and spent a rather parched night.

The next morning we descended and drove west, passing some salt flats.

On Googlemaps, I had noticed a lush patch of green to the west of the Guadalupes. It is Dell City, an isolated farming town of about 500 people. On our way through the outlying fields (all watered by pivot irrigation), we passed several abandoned cotton gin mills. Many fields lay fallow. But in most cases, the desert still blooms, and the enchiladas at the Spanish Angels cafe downtown were the best I have had in Texas.

Red Rock Basin: glacial cirque or fluvial ravine?

2009-01-19T15:52:00.000-08:00

According to Richard Goldthwait (as he expounded in his 1970 paper, Mountain Gaciers of the Presidential Range in New Hampshire), late geologist of Ohio State University, there are nine "steep-walled cirques" in the White Mountains, three “incipient basins” that were “ice-deepened,” and several other “névé basins holding firn”—an intermediate material between snow and ice.

As this map shows , Goldthwait believed all of these alpine glaciers, which he established were active before the onset of continental glaciation (a topic of great academic controversy a century ago, Woodrow Thompson tells in History of Research on Glaciation in the White Mountains), lay in the Presidential Range, with the possible exception of one or two on Moosilauke. Alex MacPhail’s recent series on glaciation beginning with this post on his excellent blog, White Mountain Sojourn, highlighted Goldthwait’s work and spurred my interest in the subject.

Goldthwait omitted one or two ravines that are strikingly similar to glacial cirques in their morphology. In particular, Red Rock Basin, as Alex calls it, a massive bowl on the west side of Guyot, has typically steep sides (note the fresh slides in the photos) and a relatively flat bottom. I wrote about bushwhacking up to and out of the ravine in my June 2007 post, Finding Red Rock Pond. It is far larger and more carved than any fluvial ravine I can think of in the Whites, and it splits into two distinct lobes. The photo at the top of the post, taken from West Bond's summit, clearly shows the bifurcation. Within the northern ravine sits a small, shallow body of water, Red Rock Pond, possibly a small tarn (cirque lake). Indeed, just below it, there is a “little headwall” similar to that found below Hermit Lake in Tuckerman’s Ravine.

Problematically, Red Rock Basin, opening to the southwest, lies in the opposite direction to which most local glaciers formed, which is probably why Goldthwait discounted it. Goldthwait diagrammed the direction of glacial movement in the accepted White Mountain cirques around the points of the compass, finding that they are distributed from northwest to southeast, on average pointing northeast. Consequently, prevailing winds usually blew from the opposite direction, the southwest (today it usually blows from the west or northwest), when these alpine glaciers formed. The wind pushed snow off the ridges into the ravines, where it accumulated until the pressure and cold transformed snow into ice, creating the alpine glaciers. Tuckerman Ravine’s enormous powder stash derives from the same circumstances. If Red Rock Gorge was glaciated, then how did it accumulate enough snow to create its glacier?

I propose two possible solutions: either the wind was more variable than Goldthwait believed, or perhaps snow was transported off the unnamed ridge to west into the Basin. These are both precarious hypotheses; there needed to be a great deal of snow consistently blowing into the ravine to cause glaciation. For example, Goldthwait speculates that the Valley Way on the north side of the northern Presidentials never developed into a cirque because nearby feeder ridges were too small to provide sufficient snow, whereas King’s Ravine, just to the west, gorged on the drifts blown off massive Durand Ridge and the large alpine expanse just south of Mt. Adams’ summit. The unnamed ridge may not have enough surface area or to have provided sufficient feeder material to Red Rock Basin.

Nonetheless, the physical evidence of the ravine—i.e. the U-shape rather than the V-shape typical of fluvial erosion—still supports glaciation. I like this final picture, taken by Alex two winters ago from Lafayette, because it contrasts the minimally eroded, clearly fluvial ravines on the north side of West Bond in the center of the photograph with the far grander Red Rock Basin on the far left. Perhaps significantly, all the major ravines on the west side of the Twins and Bonds - the Twin Brook valley, Red Rock Basin, and Hellbrook Ravin - are far more developed than their cousins on the east side of the Franconias.

Cannon’s plans to reopen the old Mittersill resort

2009-01-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

From the current issue of Appalachia, and the fruit of a much smaller post written two years ago...

Cannon Mountain is spacious, uncrowded, and reliant on a local clientele—an unusual set of circumstances for a New Hampshire ski resort. To purists, it is a skiing Shangri-La—and for those who crave off-piste terrain without a strenuous ascent, the state-run resort adjoins the defunct Mittersill ski area. Using the Cannon lifts, skiers can trek across the mountain’s northern ridge to a patchwork of winding, deserted trails and then loop back to catch the Cannon lifts at the base.

But led by Commissioner George Bald of the New Hampshire Department for Resources and Economic Development (DRED), Cannon is considering expansion into the neighboring area. Facing criticism from conservative state legislators, who laud the 1998 leasing of Mt. Sunapee, New Hampshire’s other state-owned resort, to private operators, these officials hope to increase attendance and revenue for the ailing resort. In 2007, thanks to excellent snowfall, Cannon ran in the black for the first time since 2002. To backcountry skiers, conservationists, and a small bird named the Bicknell’s Thrush, the alteration of the historic and ecologically sensitive Mittersill landscape demands scrutiny. What is the proper balance between recreation and conservation?

Cannon was among the first American mountains that ski pioneers colonized. They cut the Taft Slalom Trail, the country’s first racing trail, in 1933. Five years later, the resort opened its aerial tramway (replaced in 1980), infusing the mountain with a European flavor. Being state-owned, Cannon is free of slopeside condos and most non-ski related activities, and it lacks the commercial tackiness that pervades comparable resorts at Loon and Waterville Valley.

These days, most of Cannon’s cachet comes from its association with Bode Miller, Franconia native and bad boy of the US ski team, who grew up on its slopes. Furthermore, the views might be as good as the skiing. The massive eastern cliff face (the northeast’s only true “big wall”) forms the western side of Franconia Notch, and lifts on the upper half of the mountain provide a fantastic panorama of Franconia Ridge. On the “front five,” the steep trails visible from Route 93, skiers plunge toward frozen Profile Lake. The only resort in New England with comparable scenery is Wildcat.

Mittersill has less scenic grandeur but a formidable pedigree. The founder was an Austrian émigré, Baron Hubert von Pantz, whose family made a fortune in iron mining. The baron was a lively aristocrat with an oversized ego; in his 1986 memoir, No Risk, No Fun!, he thanked “the disappearing species of waiters, barmen, maitres d’hotel, concierges, chauffeurs, barbers, and others who with their expert professionalism helped make that [carefree and glamorous] life even easier to enjoy.” A bon vivant, he admitted being “indebted to all the ladies whose favors I enjoyed throughout my young manhood. Without their kind cooperation this period would have been pretty arid.”

In 1935, the baron had bought Schloss Mittersill, a castle in the Austrian Tyrol, transforming it into a base for hunting and skiing. Shortly after the Anschluss, Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, the German SS confiscated the castle and the baron, like the Von Trapps of The Sound of Music, fled first to Switzerland and then to America to escape conscription.

The tram on Cannon attracted the baron to Franconia. After buying 550 adjacent acres, he opened the Mittersill resort in 1945. Though possessing only a small T-bar known as the “alpine lift,” Mittersill did boast a striking base hotel. Complete with overhanging eaves, stained pine wood, and decorative shields painted on the shutters, the lodge’s design was loosely based on the baron’s Schloss Mittersill in Austria. Indeed, the baron made a post-World War II visit in 1950 to examine his European property, which suffered damage from research by a Nazi doctor trying to justify their ideology of racial superiority. The baron restored the old club, and today, Schloss Mittersill is a Christian study center.

Though small, the American Mittersill exuded glamour. The baron and his wife entertained various European royalty, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Patti Page was a regular, and Bob Hope visited, though he preferred golf to skiing.

Mittersill was the first American resort to sell slopeside condos and develop an alpine-style “village,” which may be its true legacy to American skiing. Nancy Drourr, now Director of Development at the Brimmer and May School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, grew up skiing at Mittersill in its heyday. “It was idyllic,” she told me. “We had great instructors—Austrian Olympic skiers, Paul and Paula Valar. She was the first person I ever saw doing freestyle—eight months pregnant and doing flips.” As for the baron and his wife, “he’d walk around in lederhosen, and she’d wear a long skirt. They’d make sure we weren’t misbehaving.”

The baron sold the resort in 1969, and the new owners added a double chairlift and expanded to nine trails, increasing vertical elevation to 1400 feet. The terrain was challenging for such a small resort. Mittersill’s heyday was short-lived, however, for by 1978, the ski area had closed. It could not compete with Cannon Mountain, itself small compared to the best-known resorts in New England. Over the past couple of decades, the lodge has served as a center for the surrounding condos and time-shares.

During this time, the forest has encroached on the old trails, which were never wide, and the old lift towers, still holding up a rusty cable, felt slightly macabre when I skied through. The abandoned trail complex has an aura of mystery and loneliness, especially in the long shadows of the late afternoon. Still, skiers have made an effort to keep the paths free of dangerous snags. On the trek across the ridge from Cannon, someone has left a chair where the view opens up, and on clear weekend days, this satellite peak can take on a carnival atmosphere. Fresh powder does not last long at Mittersill.

In the meantime, Cannon has not sat on its plans for expansion, first outlined in its 1998 Master Development Plan. Presciently, the resort bought the old Mittersill property and now lacks only the sliver between the Hardscrabble Trail and the top of Mittersill, which is owned by the Forest Service. As this piece of land, about 100 acres large, controls access from the larger resort to the top of the smaller, it is critical to redevelopment. Its fate will be determined by the outcome of a land deal between the Forest Service and the state, which has proposed giving up 230 acres of land surrounding the Appalachian Trail in Sentinel Mountain State Forest in exchange. According to John Devivo, Cannon’s General Manager, a combination of operating funds and bonded capital funds will pay for the restoration of the Mittersill slopes. Via email, he added, “Mittersill will not be run or managed as a separate identity but as simply another lift and trail pod at Cannon Mountain, though offered in a much ‘rougher’ state than its other terrain.”

An earlier version of this plan ran afoul of USFS officials due to its possible impact on the Bicknell’s Thrush, most easily identified by its complex, burry, four-part song. Named for an American amateur ornithologist who observed the bird in the Catskills in the late nineteenth century, the bird was identified as a separate species from the Gray-cheeked Thrush only in 1995. It winters in the Antilles but returns in the summer to breed in the spruce-fir forest. The bird favors disturbed habitats such as fir waves and ridgelines. Acid rain has plagued the bird, and global warming has begun to shrink habitat that is sufficiently cool for breeding. In the White Mountains, the AMC has begun an annual survey to observe whether the thrush is shifting to nest at higher elevations.

Concerns about the thrush have influenced plans for expansion at Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks. In 2004, The Olympic Regional Development Agency (ORDA) declared its intent to develop the Tree Island Pod, a series of trails expanding Whiteface’s terrain by nearly 40%. By 2006, however, it had prepared an environmental impact assessment amending its plan, and since then, in tandem with groups such as the Audubon Society and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, it has sought ways to minimize pressures on the thrush.

Conservation biologists at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science (VINS) assisted ORDA, using data collected over ten years at Stowe and Stratton ski areas in Vermont. The VINS team did not find that the thrush population at those areas had suffered; nevertheless, in a 2004 report, it made several recommendations to mitigate potential impacts. These included halting construction during the breeding season (May 15-August 1) and moving the proposed trails away from exposed and disturbed terrain. Once construction was completed, they advised maintaining undergrowth in glades, discouraging skiers from cutting their own trails, and continuing surveys to monitor the thrush.

DRED and officials at Cannon are aware of the environmental sensitivity of their own project. Luckily for them, Mittersill’s northeastern orientation means that redevelopment will occur on the mountainside away from most windstorm disturbance. “We’ll be working actively with the Audubon Society to monitor the species' habitat,” wrote Devivo, “and have agreed to sign a Memorandum of Understanding that prohibits us from creating any net loss of its habitat in the area to be exchanged (if the deal succeeds).” Regarding the expansion of facilities, “a retrofit or replacement of the existing double chair, parking lot upgrades, a small base facility, associated lift ops and patrol structures, and very small-scale snowmaking facilities are planned…[We are] flexible at this point, and growth in that area may take shape over the next 5-10 years, and is largely dependent on the land exchange.”

In short, Cannon plans to restore Mittersill to its extent when closed in 1978. Beyond existing trails, no development will take place above 2500 feet. In a proposed revision to the Master Development Plan, DRED suggests managing the area as “intermediate advanced terrain with a backcountry feel”—implying that most crowds will remain on the existing trails. Cannon has already opened up a small beginner’s area, Tuckerbrook, that was once part of Mittersill. In my experience, this pod is relatively uncrowded. The resort also includes the derelict Mittersill trails in its trail map, piquing skier interest.

Mittersill aficionados diverge in their opinions on the proposed Cannon expansion, as I discovered through my inquiries at telemarktips.com, a popular site for backcountry enthusiasts. Rob Means, of Melrose, Massachusetts, began skiing at Cannon in 1968. “If they keep the original character and take advantage of all the tight glades by simplifying access and exit—well, that's great,” he wrote. Mike Gaughan, of Bristol, Connecticut, who has also skied Cannon since childhood, responded in kind. “If anything it will be a shot in the arm to a struggling ski area. As much as I hate to say it, Cannon needs a little development to remain relevant…Snowmaking and grooming have degraded of late; perhaps the income generated by additional skier visits resulting from the opening of Mittersill will allow for better services.”

Still, the redevelopment of Mittersill’s quiet and evocative terrain will be a loss for the adventurous and self-reliant spirit that makes off-piste skiing so compelling. Stephen Jevons of Claremont, New Hampshire, who avows planning his life around skiing, summed up these sentiments. “It pains me to think of that area becoming part of Cannon proper. Mittersill offers…secret glades and chutes cut into and around the trails. Opening this area will take away the uniqueness [and from] a growing dynamic of ski culture, which is ungroomed, unmanicured runs. It is one of the few areas in New Hampshire to offer competition to the glades and untamed terrain of Mad River Glen and Stowe. A true loss of a gem…at my favorite New Hampshire resort.”

Big Bend Country

2008-12-21T12:37:00.001-08:00

Sunrise in the desert after a frigid night.

The Santa Elena canyon from the north. The Rio Grande makes a dramatic exit, turning sharply to the east (left) in the beginning of the "Big Bend."

The canyon is about 1500 feet deep, with sheer sandstone walls.

Looking north into the desert as the Rio Grande changes course.

Tom does Clint by a silty bank.

The sandstone dips quite sharply in the opposite direction from the river's flow, creating the illusion that the water flows steeply but smoothly downhill. We could only walk about a half mile into the canyon before the banks ran out.

The Chisos Range framed by the canyon walls.

Two more days in the Chisos

2008-12-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

Juniper Creek Canyon.

The South Rim.

Casualty of the wind.

A perfectly flagged tree.

The Boot, with the Sierra del Carmen and Mexico in the distance.

Though December, the trees in the High Chisos were still changing. Texas does have a few pockets of autumn color.

This javelina and his companion were all too familiar with our campsite.

My companion, Tom Barnett, and a post-hike treat. Tom promptly retreated into his tent for a nap.

Change in the Zealand Valley

2008-11-05T20:19:00.000-08:00

It’s almost fifteen years since I began hiking seriously in the Whites (I took a bit of flak at summer camp for reading the White Mountain Guide during rest hour), but I am only beginning to understand how dynamic the landscape is. Humans are naturally inclined to consider nature in stasis; our life spans are too short to comprehend the immensity of geological time spans or even, too often, the pace of ecological change.

While many environmentalists have recognized this concept, the tipping point for awareness among northeastern outdoor enthusiasts may have come with the book Reading the Forested Landscape by Antioch University’s Tom Wessels. Using examples from northern New England woodlands, Wessels shows how a keen observer with only a passing knowledge of ecology can deduce landscape history by interpreting visual clues.

One of Wessel’s former students, Alex MacPhail is an OH (Old Hutsman) and a White Mountain native. Alex, now in his fifties, started working in the huts at a teen, and he has stayed involved in various capacities since then. I first got to know him as a tireless plotter of Pemi Loops (a grueling thirty-some mile circuit of the Franconia, Twin, and Bond ranges) when I worked at Galehead, and he came in to visit us at Zealand very often this summer. I chronicled our escapade on Whitewall Mountain in August.

Alex’s ecological knowledge is more than passing, and he has combed the Pemigewasset and particularly the Zealand Valley for decades. This is the kind of perspective that is invaluable to ecological insights, so I am thrilled that he has started White Mountain Sojourn, a new blog to record some of his observations. And indeed, he includes is a potpourri of other interesting items, including a record of encounters with the Presence.

A couple months ago, Alex sent me a picture of Zealand Falls Hut from 1969, posted at the beginning of the piece. I gave many a talk on the history of the Zealand Valley this summer, but I am still amazed by the changes in the hut and its surroundings since those days. Contrast 1989 photo with this modern shot, and observe the expansion of the hut building. Indeed, the recent photo was taken a dozen or so feet in front of the old one because the brush has grown up so high in the meantime. What was an open view to Zealand Falls is now obscured by Balsam Fir.

Change is a constant rule of existence. To forget it is a fundamentally human hubris.

What is a mountain?

2008-10-12T20:06:00.000-07:00

I am often frustrated, especially when talking to Westerners, who wield their magnificent Rockies, Cascades, and Sierras, by the difficulty of explaining that the Whites are indeed rugged and dangerous. The number of fatalities on Mt. Washington is a useful number to quote in such discussions.

Larry Price, a Mountain Geoecologist, lists three criteria in identifying high mountain landscapes. “High mountains should rise above the Pleistocene snow line, the zone of rugged and serrated topography associated with mountain glaciers and frost action; high mountains should extend above the regional treeline; high mountains should display cryonival processes such as frost-heaving and solifluction.” By this measure, the Whites qualify as high mountains—barely. The Presidentials exhibit various features formed by mountain glaciers, including the eastern ravines and an arête or two, while the alpine zone is notable, if small. Soil stripes are present, even if confined to tiny Monroe Flats.

I am reminded of a quote in Forest and Crag, Guy and Laura Waterman's wonderful history of hiking in the northeast. "Ferocious weather attacks these alpine zones, especially in winter. Winds elsewhere regarded as hurricane force are routine in these alpine zones...Taken with cold temperatures, frequent low visibility due to clouds and blowing snow, plus erratic changeability, Northeastern winter weather more than makes up for the region's lack of high elevation or consistent dramatic relief."

Washington, of course, is the site of the highest wind speed ever recorded. I’ve never gotten caught in wind over 100 mph, but I have felt some pretty strong breezes. This summer, when I was visiting Hilary Gerardi and her croo up at Greenleaf, our plans for a long day hike were ruined by the gale. We did notice, while devouring the latest adventures of The Pirates!, the steady increase of the peak gust on the Davis monitor. The anabatic wind, blowing up from the south, was funneled up the ravine encircled by Agony Ridge on the west side of Greenleaf, peaking in the tiny notch between the hut and the summit ridge; Eagle Lake, in the middle, was in a fury.

After trying our hand at drinking glasses of water in the wind, Hilary and I headed up the ridge to scout out conditions on the summit. The higher we went, the more the wind subsided, which was disappointing but made sense because Agony Ridge no longer constrained the air molecules. At the summit, a straggle of thru-hikers emerged out of the fog, looking vaguely hypothermic, though they were still energetic enough to badmouth the huts and assert the advisability of camping illegally. With little to see and peeing into the wind getting old, we headed down. It is one of the huts’ greatest luxuries that its inhabitants can habituate themselves to these initially fearsome conditions, and as Guy Waterman observed, such conditioning is one of the great joys of living in the mountains.

Thoughts from a kinda-sorta-ex-hut kid

2008-08-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

This piece is written by Beth Weick, currently the rotating caretaker in the Eastern Pemigewasett and a former Lakes of the Clouds Hutmaster.

For those who don’t know me or would feign not to, I’m writing this as a shelters caretaker. A new and different gig for me, and one that generates all manner of comparisons to the huts, however unfair and non-judicious that may be.

So. Guests. In shelters, we call them visitors, but we all know to whom we are referring. Those folks who come up from near and far to traipse about these White Mountains. Too many are foolhardy and stubborn, from Boston; many are also foreigners who don’t speak the language…from Quebec; and then there are the others who are from the far corners of our country, and abroad.

Let me tell you: you want your hutguests to be as inadequate as they are. Yes, guests—“goofers,” if you must—are the source of complaints, stories, expletives, frustrations, and burgeoning alcoholics. But that’s the point. Without miserably incompetent hikers, half the hutkid repertoire is gone.

In shelters, I daily interact with folks who can shoulder fairly well-packed packs, follow a map, feed themselves, entertain themselves, and infer from the rain that the weather is bad. They know that moose don’t become reindeer after age 10, they know the alpine zone wasn’t built by cutting down the trees, and they can distinguish between a wind generator and fighting mountain lions.

Boring. Not only do I have no one to complain with, I have little to complain about. Imagine what this would do to a hut.

1) You’d never miss a drinking opportunity due to late night “guided hikes.”
2) You could have meat, bread, and peanuts in every meal without hysterics and epi-pens to boot.
3) “Excuse me, sir” and “please, ma’am” would never imply “get the f*** out of my kitchen.”
4) You’d never revert to Borat-isms in a fruitless attempt to communicate with the ceaseless French-Canadians.
5) You’d never ruin a sunset moment with stock-option conversations or unsupervised rascals picking up the wilderness.
6) The tip jar would be $100 lighter because people could carry their own packs, or find their own family, or not break their ankle.

Moral of the story? Medicocrity, nay, failing at even mediocrity is never as fun to witness as in our “high mountain destinations. May guests live on as goofers in our huts, and may their obliviousness always hide them from it.

Bushwhacking Whitewall Mountain

2008-08-04T13:45:00.000-07:00

It has been a wet summer, and my hiking, like my writing on this blog, has amounted to less than I had wished. Nonetheless, I was inspired to bushwhack Whitewall Mountain a couple of weeks ago, accompanied by the intrepid old hutsman Alex MacPhail (or Macfool, as they called him when he worked in the huts).

Whitewall sits directly across the notch from Zealand Falls Hut, and its white cliffs provide a striking foreground to our view south through the notch. It was first named for an obscure local woodsman, but after one of JE Henry’s immense fires scorched the area so severely that the soil was incinerated down to the rock, it was renamed for the scars that endure, though much diminished, to this day.

As we did the bushwhack on a pack day, I had little time to spare. Shortly after breakfast, we descended the doozy and plunged into the brush immediately opposite the junction of the Ethan Pond and Zealand Trails. This way, we minimized the angle of our ascent and avoided any contact with the slides or cliffs, but we did ensure that once atop the main ridge opposite the hut, we would have to walk farther to reach the ledges on the south side of the summit. Indeed, while the initial slope was easy, the ridge proved overgrown.

Alex, who holds the record for the hut traverse (twelve hours) and once hiked (sprinted?) from Lakes of the Clouds to Zealand in 2:10, pointed out that the vegetation has changed since he roamed the ridge in the sixties. Apparently, there are many more balsam fir, and the forest has grown up considerably. While we encountered many beautiful birch glades, shining white as well emerald green thanks to the damp hobblebush, the going was generally slow through the spruce-fir forest.

The glades were full of moose scat, and we found many flattened ferns that had been used as bedding. Unfortunately, we did not encounter any megafauna, nor did we find evidence of a rumored “antler grove,” but we did find plenty of bear scat and a semi-alpine bog. At one point, I wandered off, nearly losing Alex in the process, to examine some largish trees in the distance—some of them were approximately ten inches in diameter, so they may be survivors from the pre-Henry days.

Eventually, we crested the summit and found some outcroppings of bedrock. After some more scratching and clawing, we emerged onto the ledges themselves, which have superb views over the heart of the Pemigewasset, including Carrigain—“the prince of the wilderness,” according to Professor Charles Fay, one of the AMC’s founders—the Hancocks, and the Bonds, in addition to the splendid forests in-between. While the mist obscured more distant peaks, it added an ethereal dimension to what mountains and valleys we could see.

The ledges themselves were of interest, as well. Some of the more sheltered crevices were blackened, evidently from the fires of a century ago. There was a Z shaped from rocks on the ground, presumably the handiwork of a past Zealand croo, as well as some rocks my own croomate Nick Anderson had left earlier in the season.

Before heading down, Alex wanted to check out a gully that runs from the ledges to the Ethan Pond Trail, about a thousand feet below in the notch. Given the night’s rain and the instability of the rocks, we had chosen not to ascend this way, but a closer look convinced me to try going down this way, especially as I still needed to pack. Alex declined and returned the way we came, more or less.

His was probably the right decision. The couloir drops between two cliffs, and there are some very large, very loose chunks of rock that need extremely careful negotiation. After observing just how fast and hard several shot down the slope and smelling pulverized rock in the air, I slithered into the brush on the side of the slide and avoided treading on rocks as best as I could.

After several hundred feet, the gully emerges beneath the cliffs, and the entire mountainside becomes a sea of scree and boulders. This section is slightly less steep, so I descended much more quickly and easily, feeling a palpable sense of relief. At the bottom, the steadiness of the Ethan Pond Trail was exceptionally welcome.

Zealand Falls Hut and its situation

2008-06-15T18:04:00.000-07:00

Six days into our summer, the Zealand Falls Hut croo has yet to hit the trail, due to time spent opening the hut and, more recently, poor weather. Beyond a Mountain Classroom group that spent a couple of nights, we’ve barely had any guests and are spending most of our time in the croo room above the kitchen, reading, eating, and sleeping.

Only 2.5 miles from an access road, Zealand is the most accessible of the huts, and its situation, though not as dramatic as Galehead’s, is beautiful and interesting. Directly to the south is Zealand Notch, which leads into the vast (for New Hampshire) Pemigewasset Wilderness, where I spent many weeks doing trail maintenance while a teenager at camp. On a clear day, you can see from our porch through the notch to Mt. Carrigain, a massive, lonely peak. Its fire tower, no longer in use, has the most wild and inspiring views in the Whites, at least to my eyes.

The rock around here is mostly Conway granite, which possesses a distinctive white hue due to its high content of orthoclase feldspar. About 200 million years ago, Pangaea, the “original” supercontinent split apart, causing volcanism and a great deal of magma to swirl towards the earth’s surface. Some of it cooled underground, which meant that it hardened slowly into large crystals. This, of course, is a distinctive trait of granite.

Runoff has gradually but steadily eroded the old rock formations so that the granite, originally buried, is now exposed in many places. Various ice ages and their associated periods of glaciation have also left their mark. 50,000 years ago, continental ice sheets up to a mile thick extended across this entire region. The rock around Zealand Notch was probably already weak from streamflow, but the glaciers carved the pass into its distinctive U-shape as they moved southward.

The east side of the notch is highly eroded. In fact, Whitewall Mountain, as it is named, gets its moniker from the crumbling Conway Granite on its flank. The trail through the notch is clearly visible through the fallen rock; it is remarkably straight and wide, which betrays its origin. The region around Zealand was extensively logged between 1880 and 1897 by the notorious JE Henry, who later moved his operation to Lincoln, from which he ransacked the southern Pemigewasset.

Henry based his operation at the junction of what is now the Zealand Road and Route 302, where he built a company town named Zealand. From here, he extended his railway south, eventually extending through the notch. The sites of his logging camps are hard to pin down, but I am told the remains of an old locomotive are strewn about at the bottom of the notch. Henry’s engines were wood-fired, which proved disastrous because they threw off so many sparks. Given the amount of “slash,” debris leftover from the logging operation, it was inevitable that fire should break out. Two enormous fires, in 1886 and 1903, burned thousands of acres in the valley. More importantly for Henry, a fire in 1897 consumed the town of Zealand, which spurred him to move the business to Lincoln. Apparently the lesson he took from the experience was to exclusively employ clearcutting rather than leave valuable timber to be consumed by fire.

In any case, one of the fires that swept through the notch was so intense that it burned up all the organic material in some places, leaving nothing but bedrock. The slope is steep enough that no soil has accumulated in the years since.

The hut gets its name from the waterfall within earshot to the south. While this brook empties through the notch, there are a pair of beaver ponds to the north which serve as the headwaters of the Zealand River. While the beavers move around from year to year, they have a dramatic affect on the landscape of the valley. Apparently the rushing sound of water motivates them to gnaw trees, though I would love to know how exactly researchers proved this point. Beavers are much more mobile in the water, which is why they construct dams, and they feed on the twigs and shoots of the trees they fell. They are a primary source of disturbance in valley ecosystems, infusing their pond areas with new growth and attracting animals that feed on pond vegetation such as moose.

Just above the ponds, across the notch from the hut, the crown damage on white birch is plainly visible. Many birch were severely damaged during an ice storm that hit New England about ten years ago. While they weren’t necessarily killed outright, trees suffered many broken limbs, allowing parasites access to their interior. Disease is now finishing off many survivors. Additionally, birch, being a pioneer species, colonized the area after the logging and fires of the Henry era. A century on, they are now being replaced by slow-growing, shade tolerant species such as balsam fir.

Evidently, the Zealand Notch area is subject to a variety of influences—ecological, meteorological, geological, and human. While it is typically human to exclaim over the changes in landscape we last observed it, we forget the dynamism of the forces affecting the exterior of the planet.

A different perspective on the grains "crisis"

2008-04-22T12:22:00.000-07:00

The media has lately seized upon rising food prices. The story is simple: Congress mandated a huge increase in biofuels production, spurring competition for various crops, particularly corn. The New York Times has run a series of articles on the ill effects, which include famine in developing countries, less conservation as farmers plant corn rather than leave land fallow, and bankruptcy for producers in the dairy, chicken, pork, and beef sectors. Indeed, the sustained growth in certified organic land may even be reversed because farmers can achieve comparable profit margins if they stay conventional and forgo the bother and cost of certification.

I don’t agree with the general consternation—in fact, I think the corn shortage has some silver linings for the US and the world. The memory of the crisis cheerleaders is stupendously short. Only three summers ago, the mainstream had its knickers in a twist over a corn glut. The Times' story on this faux problem included this arresting picture of a rotting pile of corn the size of a football field, too large to cover with a tarp.

Why might high corn prices be good? First of all, the US has long used its cheap commodity crops to undercut foreign producers. In the worst instances, the US donates “free” grain on a flimsy pretext. For instance, grain farmers in Ethiopia can’t make a profit if their consumers receive “free” American corn donated to prevent “famine.” Our Midwestern breadbasket is also used to justify Neoliberal reforms—if developing countries can count on cheap grain imports, it makes no sense to develop a broad base of domestic agriculture. Instead, they pursue a comparative advantage via crops such as coffee or cacao, but dependence on fickle foreign markets ultimately increases an economy’s fragility. Without competition from US grain imports, foreign grain farmers will thrive, although the immediate shortages are tough.

While it's similarly difficult for farmers and ranchers who are driven out of business, Americans could use a dose of reality regarding their consumption of these products. Meat, milk, and cheese are unhealthy in a Western diet unless consumed in small portions, but pocketbook rather than nutritional arguments are most likely to be convincing. Furthermore, these sectors of agriculture are horribly inefficient—ruminants consume enormous amounts of grain, so if the number of bovines decreases, the pressure on the grain supply will gradually ease, causing prices to fall.

Meanwhile, the high price of corn provides a compelling reason to do away with the unnecessary and wasteful agricultural subsidies that encourage overproduction. As for the possible decline in organic certification and farmland conservation programs, this will be more than offset if price increases provide an incentive for Americans to eat more healthily overall. It makes ever more sense to eat locally and organically (whether certified or not) to escape the costs of transport and artificial fertilizers and pesticides.

Indeed, in my own research area—cattle ranching—the best way to avoid buying grain is to increase the amount of time an animal spends on pasture. While grass fed methods do nothing to better chances of “organic” certification in the eyes of the USDA, they make raising cattle less expensive and, if the cattle are rotated responsibly, they are better for the land than conventional methods. Moreover, the beef is healthier.

I do not want to leave the impression that I think the biofuels mandate was a good idea. The latest research shows that burning ethanol actually releases more greenhouse gases than burning gasoline. Is this actually surprising to anyone? You don’t need to be a chemist to figure out that carbon consumption of any type is going to release carbon dioxide as a byproduct, and anyone who has sat by a fire, whether fueled by wood or cornstalks, should know that the result is dirty. Greenhouse gas emissions won’t decrease unless we harness truly alternative power sources (wind and solar) for our engines or we truly forgo using them.

Similarly, the fact that Congress passed the biofuels bill is hardly surprising. Farm state Senators control agricultural policy, and the Farm Bill is all about paying farmers to produce crops we don’t need more of. They need to dispose of “corn gluts” to justify their payments, which is why the US donates so heavily to the World Hunger Program, and why High Fructose Corn Syrup, which sweetens nearly a quarter of the products sold by an average American supermarket, was invented. These Senators are remarkably effective because they support projects championed by non-agricultural Senators, as long as they get their way on the Farm bill.

Although corn prices are the highest they have been in decades, talk of reforming Farm Bill subsidies, which will be renewed this summer, has died almost entirely. The biggest opponent of the subsidies is (surprise!) President Bush, but since environmental groups refuse to work with him and the farm bill doesn’t have the cachet of illegal immigration in the red states, he’s unwilling to put his neck on the line by really fighting them.

Changes in supply are a natural feature of our economy, but coverage tends to focus on the negatives (the same goes for global warming). The winners will be those who can adapt the quickest to the higher prices of corn and other grains. In the meantime, observers should strive for a nuanced perspective of events in the hope that we can use the new pressures to achieve a more sustainable economy.

Shiprock

2008-03-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

Were it not for the many other geological spectacles around Four Corners, Shiprock might be as famous as Devil’s Tower. Indeed, they are both remnants of ancient volcanos. Composed of breccia and other igneous rocks, Shiprock originally formed the volcano’s throat, several thousand feet underground, but in the 27 million years since inception, erosion has exposed the remnant.

Shiprock rises nearly 2,000 feet above the plain, and it is visible for scores of miles. Early Anglo pioneers thought it resembled a Yankee clipper ship. Last week, my old friend Sam Sweet and I approached from the north, first glimpsing it just after passing into New Mexico from Colorado. None but the hardiest grasses survive the arid conditions of the surrounding plains. Shiprock sits in the middle of a vast Navajo reservation that, to quote Robert Spurlock, is basically a third-world country sitting in the middle of the southwest. A town named for Shiprock lies fifteen or so miles from the formation; there was no sign of employment beyond service and government jobs. Power lines, apparently routing electricity from the turbines along the Colorado River to Albuquerque and Santa Fe, crisscross the vast expanse of the reservation. I never once caught a glimpse of cattle, which are ubiquitous elsewhere in the arid southwestern landscape.

Navajo legend tells that a village once occupied the top of Shiprock (Tse Bit’a’i to the Navajo), whose inhabitants cultivated the fields below. Lightning sheered off the trail leading to the bottom, leaving only a cliff and forcing the village to starve. The Navajo now forbid the rock’s ascent. Oddly, David Brower, later of Sierra Club fame, led the first recorded climb of Shiprock.

Highway 491 provides a constant vista of the peak, however, so we did not offend any resting spirits. Our Rough Guide, which contained a priceless section on “Traveling in Indian Country,” urges travelers to avoid making eye contact or being overtly friendly, as the natives apparently do not understand such paleface behavior.

Briefly disembarking to absorb Shiprock’s grandeur in the open air, I was struck by the trail of broken bottles along the road’s shoulder. Highway 491, nicknamed the Devil’s Highway, actually used to be 666 (the sixth spur of old Highway 66), until Bill Richardson and the New Mexican Congress changed it in 2003 to avoid “the mark of the beast.” Within the Navajo section of the road, a succession of fatal accidents led some to believe the road curse. Alcoholism is responsible for most of these deaths, however. Highway 491 is a road I would hesitate to drive at night—Shiprock is a massive, unearthly presence, and the image of headlights swerving head-on into my lane persists.

A bee in the organic bonnet

2008-02-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

This rather dry piece is part of my Masters Thesis, but I did most of the research for my undergrad thesis. All of the pictures are from southwestern Wisconsin, fall 2005.

The organic dairy world is one of the most important sectors of the organic industry as a whole. In 2003, its sales totaled $1.4 billion. People seem to associate milk with health and childhood, which perhaps convinces them to accept premiums for organic milk. Indeed, in the 1990s, the organic dairying grew the fastest of any sector of the organic industry (Greene, 2001).

The National Organic Programs (NOP) rules governing organic dairy cattle mention access to pasture, but they do not specify what access entails. Thus it is possible to feed dairy cattle organic grain while confining them on large dairy farms, sometimes called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). The debate over what access entails has played out in the competition between the two of the largest organic dairy operations in the country—Horizon Organics and Organic Valley—which approach organic milk production in markedly different ways.

Both companies were founded as cooperatives around the same time—Organic Valley in 1988, Horizon in 1992—and both were originally located in rural Wisconsin. Their rise roughly mirrored the explosion of the entire organic industry. After initial difficulty in finding their market niche, both companies settled on dairy products. However, while Organic Valley continued as a cooperative, buying milk only from member farms, Horizon, while continuing to purchase from its member farms, also bought its own large dairy farm in Idaho in 1994, which holds 8,000 cows, followed in 1997 by another in eastern Maryland, which houses a comparable number (Brady, 2006). Growth continued, and in 2003, as major food corporations began taking notice of the growing profits in the organic sector, Dean Foods purchased Horizon—now based in Boulder, Colorado—for $216 million (Pressler, 2003). Presently, the subsidiary works with 515 farms, and according to its website, 80% of its milk comes from members rather than its own operations in Idaho and Maryland (horizonorganic.com, 2008).

Nonetheless, Horizon has received considerable criticism from consumers groups. The Organic Consumers Association is leading a boycott of Horizon (as well as Aurora Organic, supplier to Wal-Mart, Safeway, Costco, and Target) because of the lack of access to pasture for cows on the large dairy farms. Logistically, bringing several thousand cows out to pasture is a daunting challenge when the cows also need to be milked twice daily. Practically, this means that the cows generally see pasture for two to three months per year, at the end of their lactation cycle. Since the USDA organic standards are vague, such conditions are legal as long as the cows are fed organic grains. The abundance of fecal waste and irrigation at large dairy farms—the Idaho farm was essentially created out of a desert—are also cited as reasons for the boycott (Brady, 2006). While major supermarket chains have not dropped Horizon or Aurora, the OCA has made some headway among natural food stores and coops.

Organic Valley, a giant in its own right with over 1300 member farms, has pursued a less controversial but also less lucrative strategy, at least in the short term. While diversifying into citrus and meat production, it has resisted using large dairy farms, however, instead relying entirely on small producers. Such a strategy has thus far proved healthy for the cooperative’s image, but the limits to supply come at a price.

In 2004, Organic Valley’s third largest customer was Wal-Mart. Executives at Organic Valley credit Wal-Mart with improving the cooperative’s efficiency and timing. Nonetheless, when a case of Mad Cow Disease was found in Washington State in 2004, consumers began switching to organic milk in such droves that the demand quickly outstripped supply. A shortage in organic grain for feed exacerbated the problem. Organic Valley was forced to shortchange its smaller customers in favor of Wal-Mart. The specter of competition with Horizon Organic, which was selling milk at 15 cents less per gallon than Organic Valley, convinced Organic Valley executives to drop the Wal-Mart account, despite the fact that the giant retailer had not asked for a price cut. Instead, Organic Valley focused on supplying its natural food store and co-op customers, avoiding vulnerability by maintaining a diverse set of clients. Though in 2006 Horizon sold $339 million worth of milk to Organic Valley’s $232 million, Organic Valley’s business with small distributors is growing. It is betting that the innovative nature of these businesses and the awareness of its consumers will endow it with long-term viability (Pattison, 2007).

Meanwhile, the bad publicity from the OCA boycott is beginning to take effect. Like Horizon, Aurora owns a pair of large dairy farms in Colorado, which separately hold 4,000 and 3,200 cows, and one in Texas, with 3,300 cows. When John Mackey, the vegan chief executive of Whole Foods visited the smaller of the two Colorado facilities, he deemed its conditions poor enough to preclude his grocery chain from carrying Aurora milk (Warner, 2006). Under threat of losing its organic certification, Aurora agreed with the USDA to decrease its herd size and buy more pasture, but it now faces several class action lawsuits (Martin, 2007). Horizon has not generated as much opposition as Aurora, but it was still compelled to issue its “Standards of Care,” which details how its raises its cows (horizonorganic.com).

Thus in the dairy industry, the controversy over pasture access, generated by the vague language of the NOP rules, tends to boil down to tension between corporate dairy companies and smaller, independent or cooperative producers. The influence consumer activism has borne on company behavior is worthy of note, and whether comparable activity will occur in regard to organic beef deserves attention.

Pictures: Cows on Mike Sebion's farm in Viroqua; the co-op in downtown Viroqua; a retail outlet for Organic Valley in La Farge; and Mike Sebion on his farm.

The Return of the Dwarf Cinquefoil

2008-01-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

From the December issue of Appalachia!

The view from Mt. Monroe takes in a remarkable juxtaposition of wilderness and civilization. To the north, Mt. Washington is grand and daunting yet subdued beneath the summit buildings. Lakes of the Clouds Hut cuts a lower profile in the col between Washington and Monroe, but it stands out in among the alpine tundra. The western approaches to the Presidentials are awash with human structures, while away to the southeast stretches the isolated Dry River Wilderness.

Close at hand is the slender Crawford Path, a route popular with parents and thru-hikers for its gentle circuit around the pyramid-like peak of Monroe. It passes Monroe Flats, 5,100 feet high and conspicuous for its level and patterned surface. Across several acres, strips of vegetation alternate with rust-colored lines of broken rock and soil, giving the Flats a terraced aspect. An avenue of pebbles cuts it through the middle.

This site is home to the Dwarf Cinquefoil (Potentilla Robbinsiana), a tiny flower species unique to the White Mountains. Its name comes from the French, meaning five leaves; the leaflets, which are serrated, often occur in threes as well as fives. Its flower is a bright yellow.

At once hardy and vulnerable, the Dwarf Cinquefoil has adapted to a unique combination of geomorphology and climate. Wind whips across its habitat, stripping cover and exposing the ground to scouring from snow and ice as well as opening it up to winter sunshine. The frequency of freeze-thaw cycles is what makes the site unique. Water seeps into topsoil and freezes, expanding and thrusting rocks and plants out of the earth. Subsequently, in a process known as solifluction, the disturbed soil and rocks coalesce into stripes, giveing Monroe Flats its unusual terraced appearance.

Most alpine plants, though adapted to the severe climate in the Presidentials, succumb to the constant exposure and freezing and thawing on Monroe Flats. Dwarf Cinquefoil, actually a member of the rose family, is the exception, with 95% of its population existing in that one area. Its small size, usually less than two inches tall and wide, and paucity of roots make it vulnerable to competition from bigger plants in more clement conditions, but in the alpine zone and particularly Monroe Flats, minimalism is an effective survival strategy.

A tiny patch of Dwarf Cinquefoil also survives in the Franconia Range. Most alpine plants in New Hampshire grow in Labrador, but not the Dwarf Cinquefoil—its niche is severely limited.

It is therefore particularly susceptible to disturbances other than freezing and thawing. Unsurprisingly, interaction with humans has not been healthy for the plant, at least until the last twenty years. In fact, our relationship with it is remarkably representative of society’s evolving attitude toward the natural world in general. Once nearly collected and trampled into extinction, Dwarf Cinquefoil is now making a resurgence thanks to local, Federal-supported, stewardship.

Besides a few hardy explorers, the first visitors to the alpine zone were tourists and botanists, whose ranks ballooned upon the completion of the first railroad to the White Mountains in 1851. American botany was then so young that many alpine flowers were undiscovered and unnamed—a treasure trove for those with the interest, funds, and resolution to attain the peaks’ higher recesses. Many of the first botanists were amateurs, but they made up for their inexperience with extraordinary energy. As Laura and Guy Waterman wrote in Forest and Crag, “It is conceivable that between 1825 and 1848…the Presidential Range was hiked more intensively, albeit by a tiny band of dedicated men, than it has been in any generation since, when almost everyone sticks to established trails.”

Thomas Nuttall discovered the Dwarf Cinquefoil, but James Oakes gave it its Latin name, honoring James W. Robbins, another botanist. Many early botanists gave their names to the landscape: Oakes Gulf, for instance, or Boott Spur and Tuckerman Ravine. Originally, these monikers were possessive, as in Oakes’ Gulf. Over time, convenience has had a shortening effect.

In those days, botany was as much a matter of collection as observation. As a stroll through any older natural history museum will demonstrate, scientists vied with one another for the most comprehensive collection, whether of rocks, plants, or animals.

Being rare and difficult to get at, Dwarf Cinquefoil was particularly prized. Indeed, some botanists supported their scientific excursions by selling specimens to collectors. In 1993, a researcher found 850 specimens of the plant in collections around the world.

An even greater threat to the Dwarf Cinquefoil was the Crawford Path, which originally ran straight through Monroe Flats and remains etched into the landscape—a straight, rocky line testifying to the slow pace of recovery in the alpine zone. Ethan Crawford, the legendary innkeeper in Crawford Notch, built the Path in 1819. Though large portions of it have been moved, it is the longest continuously used hiking trail in the US.

Crawford, remembered as the stereotype of a mountain man with his ragged hair, remarkable feats of woodcraft, and eccentric personality, was also a shrewd businessman. With his father, Abel, he built the Crawford Path (in addition to another trail which roughly followed the same path as the Cog Railway) for adventurous guests who might wish to walk—or, in later years, ride horses—to Washington’s summit and back. Conveniently, they would also have to spend a couple of nights at his inn and maybe even hire him as a guide.

What with the heavily-used Crawford Path and the less popular Dry River Trail, which ran through Monroe Flats on its descent into Oakes Gulf, it is perhaps surprising that the Dwarf Cinquefoil managed to escape extinction. A 1973 census of Monroe Flats counted 1,801 plants larger than half an inch in diameter, and ten years later, its numbers had dwindled to 1,547. Between zealous botanists and the backpacking boom of the 1960s, the plant population was declining to unsustainable levels.

Officials realized that without prompt action, the plant would soon decline below the minimum population necessary for survival. In 1980, they finally designated its critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act, providing impetus for several steps to protect the plant. First, to mitigate human impact, trail crews relocated the upper part of the Dry River Trail entirely away from the plant’s habitat and moved the Crawford Path to the edge of Monroe Flats. They then built a scree wall along the trail’s edge to discourage people from stepping off. Finally, a pair of signs was posted to inform hikers about the plant’s fragility and warn them to watch their step.

Results were dramatic. According to an AMC study, 10% of hikers stepped off the trail the first year after relocation, but since then, levels have dropped to 2%. An effort to educate passers-by was initiated, led by the croo at nearby Lakes of the Clouds Hut. Lynne Zummo, an earnest veteran of several seasons on the AMC’s hut croos who worked as the Naturalist at Lakes in 2006, says, “While the vast majority of people who come through Lakes have no clue about it [the Dwarf Cinquefoil], those who do, or [those who] learn about it while at Lakes, take an interest in it. I always thought about it as one more thing that connects people to the place, making them want to both return to and protect the area.”

Another strategy in the rehabilitation effort is transplanting. Before 1980, attempts were made to transplant the Dwarf Cinquefoil to 20 different locations in the White Mountains, but all failed because suitable habitat was so limited. Since then, there have been about a dozen tries. In recent efforts, seeds are gathered and taken to the New England Wildflower Society’s seed bank at Garden of the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts. Some are placed in storage, while others are germinated and held for two years, when they are planted, keeping the soil surrounding the roots intact. Success has been elusive, but transplants have survived in two places of note: at a new spot on Washington and at a new site along Franconia Ridge.

By 1992, Monroe Flats had over 3,000 plants, and 4,575 in 1999 (the censuses include plants wider than 14 mm. as numbers of smaller specimens vary dramatically according to season and climate). An original colony along Franconia Ridge, thought to be extinct, was identified in 1984, though it is only a tiny remnant of a larger population. This patch has been so eroded by hikers on the nearby Franconia Ridge Trail that the remaining habitat is unlikely to be viable in the long term.

Ultimately, while education, transplants, and habitat studies have played a role in the Dwarf Cinquefoil’s resurgence, “The recovery is largely a result of the habitat and population being left alone,” says Doug Weihrauch, an AMC staff scientist and alpine ecologist.

In 2002, using census data and other observations, the Fish and Wildlife Service deemed that the plant’s recovery was strong and danger of a relapse low. Consequently, they proposed and eventually did delist the Dwarf Cinquefoil as an Endangered Species, with the strong support of the AMC. Since the plant is entirely on Federal Land, it remains protected by USFS and state regulations forbidding its damage or removal. The Endangered Species Act also requires the Fish and Wildlife Service to monitor a species for five years after delisting.

During the summer of 2006, the designated census was taken, finding 4,777 Dwarf Cinquefoils growing on Monroe Flats. While the original population of plants on Franconia Ridge is unlikely to survive, the new transplant site is doing well—numbers have increased from 135 in 2000 to 165.

Though transplanting is for now mostly over, the AMC will continue moving new plants into the viewing garden site. According to Weihrauch, “This location has very limited, and probably sub-optimal habitat, but the idea is to establish a few plants here for education purposes, and so that those wanting to see/photograph the plant can do so without impacting the population.

“We will continue to collect seeds, at least for the next few years, for storage in a seed bank,” continues Weihrauch. “We will also conduct another count of the Franconia Ridge transplant population next year, even though it has increased overall…we want to make sure that the declines are…not the beginning of a trend.”

Despite the ever-growing number of visitors to the alpine zone, the Dwarf Cinquefoil’s future is brighter now than at any time in the past 30 years, thanks to the efforts to educate the public and minimize hikers’ impact on Monroe Flats. It is a hopeful but precarious balance, and one that will require vigilance in the years to come.

Photos: Monroe Flats, from Mt. Monroe (Ben Lewis), the DC up close, Lakes croo relaxing on the roof with Monroe and Monroe Flats in the background, and the DC up close again.

The West Texas landscape in film

2008-01-03T08:48:00.000-08:00

The two films that have received the most critical attention of the holiday Oscar season are the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Curiously, both were filmed in West Texas. As I have pointed out in earlier posts, it is a stark landscape, exceptional for its aridity and harsh, piercing, and beautiful light. In short, it is well suited to stories with biblical themes, which is undoubtedly why the Coens and Anderson chose to shoot their movies there (the Cormac McCarthy novel on which the Coen’s movie is based also takes place along the border, while There Will Be Blood, adapted from a muckraking Upton Sinclair novel, Oil!, is set in Southern California).

Spending Christmas at home in New England has increased my awareness of the contrast in landscapes. West Texas certainly has something in common with the Plains—the absence of trees means that the entire sky is visible, making one feel far more insignificant and exposed than in a hilly, forested place. On the other hand, such panoramas can be inspiring and liberating. No wonder that Marfa, a few score miles north of Big Bend, is an artists’ haven. It has been suggested that both films are “great American movies;” in that these stories of men who encounter great opportunity but ultimately are undone by greed evoke American themes of capitalism gone wrong, such adulation may be deserved. Certainly the acting of Daniel Day-Lewis and Josh Brolin is superb, though the Coen Brothers short-change character development by evoking themes of fate.

Quite a few developers have tried to make a fortune in West Texas, and most have failed. The landscape destroyed and was destroyed by the cattlemen of the late nineteenth-century. Too dry for open range grazing, its fragile grass ecosystems were ravaged by cattle before the cattle themselves died of thirst or cold or were shipped away to greener pastures. Even now, the semi-desert is mainly populated by invasive species, though there are efforts to bring back the native grasses. Abandoned fencing, homesteads, and various short-lived adaptations are now important features of the landscape in their own right.

Somehow, the light of West Texas, in its intense fragility, evokes the fleeting nature of human settlement out there. This quality is not unique only to West Texas—I’ve noticed it also in Idaho (it is omnipresent in Napoleon Dynamite, where it evokes the austerity and loneliness of its characters, behind their hip humor). Quite likely it is present throughout the American West, and indeed the dryer, more rugged regions of the world. Perhaps that is why country music, with its reliable and comforting themes of love and family, is so popular among inhabitants of these rather desolate places.

Such light, like these two remarkable movies, suggests that it is hubris to inhabit such places permanently.

These pictures are all from Big Bend National Park. The large rock mesa is Casa Grande, in the Chisos Range, while the pool of water amidst rock walls is part of the nearby Window.

Haze in the D.F.

2007-12-20T09:03:00.000-08:00

My experience in Latin American cities is pretty limited, but on a superficial level, Mexico City, or the D.F. as the natives know it, fits the superficial stereotype. It is vibrant, crowded, seemingly unorganized but actually quite hierarchical, and highly polluted. At 7,000 feet, it lies in a mountain bowl, surrounded by some of the biggest peaks in North America.

I felt the altitude on my way up to the third floor of the Hotel Montecarlo, having carried with me a surplus of baggage for my return to the New England winter. On the streets, my breathing was fine, though Robert (a wonderful old college friend who visited me in Austin before I helped him kick off his month in Mexico) and I noticed a number of people wearing surgical masks over their mouths. Neither SARS nor bird flu was threatening Mexico City—these folks were simply worried about the particulates in the air.

On our first full day, we climbed the pyramids of Teotihuacán, enormous stone edifices built in the first century by the Olmecs. It was December 12, the anniversary of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s appearance back in the 16th century, and the sound of firecrackers reverberated through the air. Though a sunny, relatively dry day, it was difficult to even see to the horizon. Indeed, I never really got a sense of the city’s massive scale because every vantage point, even from the plane, was compromised by smog.

When I checked my email and the headlines over the course of the week, there was plenty of news about the failure to agree on reducing CO2 emissions at the Bali conference. While C02 isn’t particularly responsible for impacting visibility, its source and the slow but sustained nature of its effects are quite similar to the compounds impacting visibility and health—nitrates, carbon monoxide, and ozone.

While the evidence of global warming and its causes are by now obvious, the lack of an immediate crisis such as panda bears dying or local, fatal cases of asthma makes policy solutions far more elusive. Congress just passed an energy bill raising car mileage standards significantly, but another mandate to produce 15% of our energy from renewable sources by 2020 was stripped out because Republicans objected to raising taxes on energy companies to pay for the new investments. When, during a time of extraordinary profits for the oil and coal industries, Congress can’t muster the votes for what, in the grand scheme, is quite a small increase in renewable fuels, the situation appears hopeless.

Few people would be surprised by the amount of air pollution in Mexico City. But I’ve also seen disgusting levels in supposedly wild and pristine places this year. Up at Galehead, the smog floating in from the Ohio River Valley was so bad that we didn’t want to go outside sometimes for fear of the clear brown streaks in the sky. At Big Bend, as I’ve written about on this blog, despite being the most remote National Park in the lower 48, I could barely see the Rio Grande, only 15 miles away from the highest of the Chisos Mountains. The maquiladoras near Ciudad Juarez emit a stream of emissions that sails directly east into the park.

On my last full day in Mexico City, Robert and I took a bus up to the Paseo de Cortes, a mountain pass between two of the huge volcanoes east of the city. It is from this point, in 1519, that Cortes first beheld the city of Tenochtitlan, the marvelous Aztec capital. It was the Venice of the Americas, a series of islands grouped around a main temple complex, connected by canals and several long causeways to the mainland. Of course, less than fifty years after the Spanish conquest, the entire lake had been filled in to make room for the new Spanish city. Today, many of the older buildings tilt dangerously due to their shaky foundations on fill.

Needless to say, the city was invisible from our lofty vantage point, despite having gotten ourselves all the way up to 12,000 feet. On our way down, the sunset was magnificent—but such is the beauty of a hazy landscape at dusk.

PIctures: Robert and me on the Pyramid of the Sun, with the Pyramid of the Moon in the background, the view from the Pyramid of the Moon, a warning about volcanic eruptions, a tilting church in the Palacio Nacional, and sunset from the mountains to the east of the city.

New grass fed rules

2007-12-01T07:39:00.000-08:00

In mid October, the USDA released new rules for labeling grass-fed beef. The timing is indicative of the past decade’s remarkable surge of interest in healthy food. Fueled by increased access through stores such as Whole Foods and interest-generating books such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dillemma, the organic business is now worth $17 billion and the Farm Bill is currently instigating, if not a raging debate, at least a buzz of interest. With its grass fed program, the USDA believes it is protecting consumers and aiding producers trying to distinguish themselves from the competition. But like the USDA’s rules on organic certification, the unveiling of the new guidelines was accompanied by a series of salvos from industry and advocacy groups. What exactly is grass fed beef, and what does the debate illuminate about the forces buffeting the industry?

Interest in grass fed beef has intensified as some medical studies have shown omega 3 fatty acids, which occur abundantly in grass but not grain, to reduce risk of heart disease. Some prefer the taste of grass fed beef, while others find it too tangy, leading many producers to “finish” the cattle with grain. This is supposed to improve taste, but it diminishes omega 3 fatty acids. Personally, I am unable to detect the difference—give me a fresh steak, and I will happily polish it off, whether grass or grain fed.

The USDA’s definition of grass fed beef is surprisingly straightforward. To meet the minimum standard for grass fed labeling, a producer must feed his cattle grass or forage for their entire lives, except for milk they consume before weaning. Grain is not allowed as a substitute. Finally, the animal is required to have access to pasture during the growing season.

Simplicity is appealing, and unlike the organic standards, which it developed over twelve years in response to a Congressional directive, the USDA issued them on its own initiative. Unlike the USDA’s rules on organic certification, red tape is essentially non-existent. But therein lies the problem—like so many of the Bush administration’s environmental and health initiatives, grass fed labeling certification is voluntary. A producer who labels his grain fed cattle grass fed faces no penalty. The only way to punish the liars is through consumer activism. Essentially, by shifting responsibility to consumers, the grass fed guidelines take the opposite approach from the organic rules, requiring producers to pay for certification.

Were most cattle producers trustworthy, that should not be great cause for alarm, but a parallel case within the dairy industry shows that many are not. Since 2002, two companies have dominated the dairy sector—Horizon Organics of Boulder, Colorado and Organic Valley of La Farge, Wisconsin. As their headquarters suggest, Organic Valley is much more decentralized—it is a cooperative, in fact—than Horizon, which is corporate. While Organic Valley relies on hundreds of small dairy farms, fulfilling the spirit of organic dairy rules, Horizon confines its cows to enormous feedlots. Its cynical interpretation of the USDA rule obliging “access to pasture” ensures that the only interaction its cows have with the elements is through a small open door. Of course the cows are reluctant to explore beyond the known confines of their pens.

Luckily, through consumer boycotts and an excellent marketing strategy, Organic Valley has held its own against Horizon. Nonetheless, the implications for grass fed beef are serious. Lacking a definition of access in the voluntary guidelines, feed lots will be the prime source of grass fed beef because forage can be brought to confined cattle. No doubt some responsible producers will allow their cattle to roam during the summer, but the big-retailers will favor the cheapest beef. The new USDA label enables corporate agriculture to subvert the public’s obvious desire for cattle that graze freely.

aIn fact, the new label characterizes grass fed so narrowly that it permits giving cows growth hormones and antibiotics. Such flaw is clearly designed for exploitation by feedlots. Without ways to bring cattle to maturity quickly at a minimum risk of disease, they would quickly become obsolete.

The American Grassfed Association (AGA), which has spearheaded criticism of the new guidelines, has announced that it will set up an alternate certification program incorporating standards on growth hormones, antibiotics, and pasture access. Hopefully, as the USDA forfeits its oversight responsibility, consumers will continue to demonstrate commitment to truly healthy cattle and beef by recognizing the more meaningful AGA grass fed label.

Dancehalls and longhorns

2007-11-18T14:55:00.001-08:00

This Gruene (pronounced 'green') dancehall, built in 1878 and about an hour east of Austin, is the oldest in Texas. I've made a deal with another geography Masters student who's writing her thesis on how European ethnicity affected dancehall structure - she drives me out to ranches, and I'm company at a dance hall on the way back. Hoo-rah for honkytonk!

Mountain and desert in Big Bend

2007-10-17T20:58:00.000-07:00

Texas, at least to a northerner, is a surprisingly diverse state, both in landscape and people. An eight hour drive through hill country, limestone mesas, and desert will drive this home. The last piece of road, south from I-10 to the park entrance, appears insignificant on the map, but it turns out to be over a hundred miles.

To migrate through such a landscape must be terrifying. As we descended into the slightest of valleys, I thought of how desperate some must be for water, only to arrive at the dusty etchings of stream channels which only see water in floods. Average rainfall doesn’t matter down here; it all comes at once.

The Chisos Mountains, our destination, are in the center of the park, surrounded by desert on all sides, with the Rio Grande about 10 miles to the south. Given that one almost never hears about Texan mountains, they are surprisingly high and rugged, at 7500 feet in their highest point. Cliffs are everywhere. On the second day, we hiked Emory Peak, the tallest point, and walked out to the South Rim, a dramatic cliff escarpment stretching for several miles and dropping several thousand feet. The Rio Grande is a silver thread in the distance, shimmering all the more for the dusky air.

I was astounded by the park’s haze. Parts of West Texas are supposed to have the clearest air in the lower 48—UT has an enormous observatory by Fort Davis—but our views were just as polluted as those in the Whites. Big Bend is the most isolated National Park south of Alaska, but it might as well be in the megalopolis as far as I could see. Mexican factories are the culprits, but their goods are made for Americans.

Flora and fauna change as one ascends in the mountains, much to my relief. In fact, West Texas is known for its mountain “island ecosystems,” caused by the cold air and orographic precipitation. Several species of tree are peculiar to the Chisos, and the number and variety of birds of prey is astounding. Best of all, I got to wear pants in the evening.

We camped in the Chisos Basin, surrounded by the high peaks (the place names—Juniper Canyon, the Elephant Tusk, Laguna Meadow—are wonderfully evocative). There is only one outlet to this enormous bowl, which goes to show how dry it is. Water flows down through the Window, a dramatic gap in the basin walls, and spills over a 200-foot cliff to the desert below. I had to take the guidebook’s word for it, though, because the rock has been worn so smooth that it’s slick as marble.

Future trips will involve exploration of the broken desert country and canyons along the Rio Grande. I am also curious to read more about John Joel Glanton, the bloodthirsty soldier and outlaw of Cormac McCarthy’s book Blood Meridian, whose real-life savagery still appalls. The park’s human history is limited but fascinating—fertile ground for future posts.

Two days in the Chisos

2007-10-09T19:10:00.000-07:00

The Sierra Quemada is an arid, tumbling range to the south of the high Chisos, where we were hiking. The Rio Grande and Mexico lie just beyond.

The Window is the only outlet from the Chisos Basin. A 200 foot waterfall lies past the edge, but I couldn't get close enough to see it because the rocks were too smooth.

My companions. Katie Sharar, on the left, and I traded our room at 1630 Dayton while abroad during junior year. Amber works at a homeless shelter in East Austin with Katie, while Yla is a PhD student in Psychology here at UT.

A rattler exploded a couple of feet ahead of Yla on the trail one day. Luckily it slithered off into the brush.

Sunset towards the Window. More on this trip when I've time.

The South needs cold air!

2007-10-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

I'm now writing for a "green" travel site - is there such a thing? - called Rezhub.com. It's unpaid but hopefully something to pad my resume should I ever apply to Lonely Planet. My writing, I fear, will be rather trite. Here is the first example:

Shortly after President Bush took office, a small controversy erupted over his decision to water down Bill Clinton’s last minute executive order that new air conditioners would have to be 30% more efficient. Bush decided to decrease the rule to 20%.

At the time, I thought the news pretty ridiculous. What difference does 10% make?

That was before I moved to Texas. Down here, even though we’re more than a week into fall, temperatures get into the 90s daily. Breezes are minimal—and fans can only do so much to relieve the heat. Everywhere you go indoors, the air conditioners are blasting. Walking into buildings can be a bit disorienting, like getting a cold chill on a summer day. Sometimes I carry a long-sleeve shirt—to wear indoors.

In fact, traveling is when I find air conditioning to be most frustrating, because it is when I have the least control. The problem comes when I’m ready for bed. I like to feel the night air, but many hotels don’t have windows that open, since that would interfere with their air conditioning system.

All of which makes finding a green hotel the more important. A little attention to airflow reduces demand for electricity and makes sleep so much easier. I’d rather be camping—but if I’m in the city, I’ll take whatever feels most natural.

What makes the huts huts

2007-09-09T14:47:00.000-07:00

This post, part of an essay for my class Landscape, Meaning, and Society, concludes my series about the huts for the summer. I could go on easily, but now that I'm living in Austin, I'd prefer to focus on local issues.

Culturally, the huts are fascinating places. Despite only working together for several months during the summer or fall, the hut croos, individually and collectively, form as cohesive a group as I have ever been a part of. In addition to the shared experience of running a hut, croo come from remarkably similar backgrounds, assisting them in achieving a sense of place and community.

Applicants to the huts are largely self-selecting. Most hut croo are from rural New England, though there is a sizable contingent, including myself, which hails from the Boston area. In fact, this summer I knew of only one girl, from Kansas, who came from outside the northeast. This is unusual for an environmental job with free room and board—I have worked at several since graduating college and find that they often attract a remarkably dispersed group of workers. Many hut croo become acquainted with the huts during family summer vacations—families provide the bulk of our clientele, so prior exposure seems to be an important inducement for application.

Hut croo this summer, of whom there were about 50, were entirely white, and they tended to come from upper-middle class backgrounds. Pay is minimum wage or slightly higher. Outdoor sports, especially in the northeast, tend to attract mostly affluent whites from cities or rural whites. I can count the number of black and Hispanic adults I saw hiking this summer on one hand (though plenty of non-white children do arrive as part of the AMC’s outreach programs). Northern New England is ethnically homogenous—black and Hispanic minorities from coastal cities seem to favor (or are restricted financially to) urban pastimes. The one ethnic community that does take to the mountains is Asian, which has at times been reflected in the composition of the hut croos.

In sum, hut croo are often ethnically and socio-economically homogenous. This summer, they were all between the ages of 18 and 25, due to the demanding nature of the work (eleven days on, three days off, with intense activity around breakfast and dinner time, as well as two packdays a week, which involves carrying up to 70 pounds of “freshies”—fresh vegetables and “ham bombs”—frozen meat—up the trail). Hut croo are all either college graduates or in the midst of their studies, with typical colleges being small New England liberal arts schools such as Bates or Middlebury.

A peculiar phenomenon in the huts regards the shift in gender dominance. Until the late 60s, hut croo were all male. Women, it was thought, could not handle the physical aspects of the work. WWII and its shortage of male labor proved such attitudes wrong, however, and once women began to enter the huts, they thrived, despite the prevailing machismo of the day. Presently, there are more women than men working in the huts. I suspect this has to do with low pay—women are more willing to put up with it, as long as the intangible benefits of working in the huts are considerable.

Hut croo also share a strong environmental ethic. Since pay is so low, enthusiasm for mountains and hiking and a desire for simplicity are the strongest motivators. “Leave no trace” ethics; pack-in, pack-out, and composting are the rule (otherwise hut croo would have to carry refuse down the mountain). Electricity comes mostly from renewable sources, and meals are communal. One side effect of the anti-consumptive attitude is the attempt by many to conceal their affluent background—the more patches on one’s Carharts (a fashionable and durable type of pants), the better. In practice, hut croo often act as guardians of the fragile ecosystems they inhabit, particularly among the huts situated in alpine tundra. As dramatic landscapes surround them, croo do not need to rely on representations, but fervent debate about which hut possesses the best sunset occurs, in addition to distress over visible land degradation.

Thus in addition to extremely tight living quarters and the intensely cooperative tasks of caring for 40 to 100 guests every night, communal identity comes easily because hut croo rarely need to adjust their cultural expectations of their peers when they arrive at the job in late May. Similar interests and experiences growing up make them compatible. They can immediately begin assimilating into the highly practical, proud hut system, which is consciously distinct from northeastern hiking culture in general.

The huts have a vocabulary all their own, which can only be learned orally from veteran croo. “Moo” is dried milk, the “poop” the attic, and the “valley” anywhere accessible by road and thus in the lowlands (each hut also has a “ridge,” the crest of a nearby mountain range). Each morning, huts communicate on the radio during “social call,” a ten-minute segment when hut croo can make plans to meet on a mountaintop or for lunch in town. Guests are fascinated with “raiding,” a nocturnal game which involves hiking to another hut, confiscating old roadsigns hung on their dining room walls, and bringing them back by breakfast time (another reason why hut croo tend to be so young!). A ritual coming-of-age test involves a hut traverse: an extremely lengthy hike from one end of the hut system to the other, which must be completed within 24 hours. And once a summer, the hut croos convene for Madfest, the social high point of the summer season.

Hut croo remain fiercely separate from guests and even thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail, of whom there are many. The term “goofer” is a pejorative they use to describe an ignorant or foolish guest, as in, “Some goofer left orange peels all over that rock.” It is often privately assumed that all hikers are goofers, thus allowing croo to maintain a distinct identity. Another tactic is to reserve certain prime sunset viewing areas for private croo use; these include the hut roof or “croo rocks”—a spot close to the hut but hidden from public view.

The huts became known for their service and spirit during the 20s, 30s, and 40s, when Joe Dodge was Huts Manager. A hard-driving, ebullient, and charismatic man who expanded the system from 4 to 7 huts, Dodge tolerated, even encouraged, pranks and jokes, but never at the expense of service. Hut croo, then as now, also tend to be first responders to accidents in the Whites, so a measure of sobriety is of the utmost importance. Dodge is known as “the father of the hut system,” and the gist of his personality and contributions is well-known to hut croo. Thus they possess a common history, supplemented by stories, real and embellished, which are passed orally and through croo logs, journals which never leave the hut.

While a small-scale example, hut croo demonstrate how a shared affinity for the landscape, ethnic and socio-economic homogeneity, communal living, and boundary maintenance allow the evolution of a distinct identity and sense of belonging.

Upset at Outside

2007-09-08T20:54:00.000-07:00

Here’s a letter I got into the July issue of Outside Magazine:

“It’s deeply hypocritical to preach environmentalism in one breath and then, a few pages later in your Dream Jobs story, glorify a real estate developer like Rob DesLauriers, who is busily carving up a beautiful landscape.”

I got a little too self-righteous on this one. But Outside does tend toward soft environmentalism—suggesting easy solutions such as buying carbon credits or buying organic clothing—rather than promoting the hard, unpopular changes that are ultimately far more effective. It’s a lifestyle magazine with a wealthy, consumptive audience, and the bottom line is what counts. At least they're open to criticism.

Wilderness and the New England mind

2007-08-28T15:56:00.000-07:00

One of the pleasures of living at Galehead Hut is its access to the fabulous peaks and valleys within the Pemigewasset Wilderness. In June, I described bushwhacking to Red Rock Pond, possibly the most remote body of water in the Whites and, I thought, a prime destination for a true wilderness experience. But to my surprise, I found along the way the remains of an old logging railroad bed and a small cairn, and by the shore of the pond, charred wood. Obviously, I was only the latest of a great many people who have sought out Red Rock Pond, and though the hike was well worth the effort, I did not achieve the feeling of solitude I had sought.

Safely back at the hut, I began to examine how my visit may impact future bushwhackers. While I am a careful hiker and certainly did not light any fires, I left a trail of trampled moss and broken branches. It is quite possible that I left some remnants of trash from my lunch by the pond. Might I myself have degraded the wilderness? In fact, if we define wilderness as pristine or free of human influence, is it possible at all to enjoy wilderness without destroying it?

As Laura and Guy Waterman relate in their book Wilderness Ethics, Professor Charles Fay faced a similar quandary in the late 19th century when he built Dicey’s Mill Trail, which runs from the Ferncroft Parking Area in Wonalancet (then home to several hotels, though it could hardly be sleepier today) to the top of Mt. Passaconaway. Fay, an early AMC president as well as professor of romance languages at Tufts University, and his companions not only completed the trail but also built a log shelter below the summit and cleared a summit view. On the final night of their endeavor, however, Fay had a crisis of conscience. By encouraging travel to the peak—he suspected the trail might be expanded into a bridle path—he feared he was hastening the destruction of the forests and peaks he wanted to share.

Ultimately, Fay’s misgivings were never realized. Dicey’s Mill Trail is popular, but it remains a far cry from the yak routes of the Franconias and Presidentials. However, an activity of far greater impact than hiking began to dominate the Whites during that era: logging.

In the Pemigewasset, JE Henry’s East Branch and Lincoln Railroad reigned supreme. Henry’s rapacious drive to deforest his lands can perhaps be traced to his childhood—by 15, he was forced by his father’s death to provide for his family. Between 1892 and 1948, he and his successors systematically clear-cut nearly the entire Pemigewasset. The railroads beds over which locomotives hauled timber to Lincoln still line the valleys, only they now serve as excellent paths for foot traffic. The scars of old logging roads, along which horses drew sledges loaded with wood in the winter, are still visible remarkably high (up to about 4000 feet) on the mountainsides. The species composition on the old roads is different than on adjacent slopes—white birch is dominant due to the history of disturbance. Balsam fir and red spruce are more common in the older parts of the forest, providing a dark green contrast to the lighter green leaves of the birch.

With a little practice, one can find all sorts of remnants of the old logging operations. Clearings still exist where old logging camps once stood, surrounded by rusting bedsprings, pails, and other bits of junk that the loggers cast aside. The marks of old landslides, caused by the root decay following clearcutting, are still visible, and railroad ties, rails, and even one old trestle dot the Pemigewasset Wilderness.

When Congress passed the Wilderness Act in 1964, Howard Zahniser, its author, defined wilderness as “untrammeled.” Synonyms for untrammeled include unbridled, untamed, or uncaught. Clearly, Congress endorsed the idea of wilderness as distinct from human landscapes.

The act itself has been quite successful, at least in terms of the growth of wilderness areas. Since the Wilderness Act’s passage, Congress has created 702 new Wilderness Areas. Most recently, as I wrote earlier this year, Congress created and augmented several wilderness areas in New England. See http://gullivers-nest.blogspot.com/2007/03/wilderness-expands-in-new-england.html to read about it.

Even with the wilderness regulations, which limit group size to ten and restrict machines and camping, pristine backcountry is hard to find. 100 million people live within a day’s drive of the White Mountains—it is perhaps inevitable that illegal, or bootleg campsites, as they are known, spring up. Come midsummer, hikers are everywhere. The Vermont National Air Guard finds the Whites to be particularly useful in preparing its pilots for service in Afghanistan, so it is common to hear jets overhead. Verdant and relaxing the Pemigewasset may be, but it is hardly untouched by man.

In his book Wilderness and the American Mind, published in 1967, Roderick Nash challenged the dominant view of wilderness. Might it instead be a human construct—a state of mind, rather than a condition of geography? As I found leading trips as a camp counselor, wilderness journeys are really about finding solitude and achieving self-reliance. Indeed, though we abhor bringing large groups into wilderness, a backpacking trip can teach an enormous amount about camaraderie and teamwork. Ultimately, most of our excursions into the wilderness are about the human skills or emotions we seek, which wilderness can enhance but not create from scratch.

My ignorance doomed my hike to Red Rock Pond. Wilderness, as Americans have traditionally defined it, simply does not exist in New England; perhaps not even in those vast western landscapes. 400 years of European settlement, not to mention the often overlooked native influence in prior millennia (though it should be pointed out that there were few natural resources in the White Mountains to draw native tribes, and the locals at the time of English settlement, the Abenaki, were loath to visit the summits and risk offending their spirits), has had its effects on the landscape. But what we seek in wilderness—fun, self-improvement, spiritual renewal—is certainly close at hand.

To me, the close proximity of consumptive landscapes, e.g. North Conway, to our wilderness areas, is much more alarming than the passing of pristine wilderness. It suggests a double-standard of land use, an inconsistency which makes sustainability far more elusive. Stewardship does not end at park boundaries, and the insatiability of advertising and consumption poses the true threat to healthy landscapes, whether physical or mental.

Pictures: Birches in the Wild River Wilderness, Professor Charles Fay, the hiking trail on Bondcliff, behind which the scars of old logging roads are visible on Mt. Hancock, Roderick Nash, and looking south into the Dry River Wilderness.

Time fades away

2007-08-12T11:46:00.000-07:00

I've less than a week left at Galehead, making every last moment all the more poignant. We've been lucky with visits from friends and beautiful light out over the north country.