Yellowstone's Lamar Valley

My recent weekend in Cooke City allowed me a bit of time to explore the Lamar Valley, famous for its wolves and other charismatic megafauna. I headed out at sunrise one morning to see what there was to see. No wolves, but I did see the wolf watchers.

Every morning they gather to, you guessed it, watch the wolves. Using antennas and radio telemetry to locate the collared canids, a core group of wolf enthusiasts spend their mornings (and maybe their afternoons and evenings, I don't actually know how long they stick around...) checking out the pack. I hung around for about an hour, but the wolves never showed themselves.

Cooke City, Montana: of beetles, trees, and skiing.

Headed over to Cooke City, Montana a few days ago on assignment for Backcountry magazine to ski with Jesse Logan, a backcountry-skiing entomologist who is studying mountain pine beetles and their devastating impact on whitebark pine trees. WBPs are beautiful, often ancient trees that grow in the high mountains of the Northern Rockies, Sierras, and Cascades. Their nuts are a critical food source for grizzly bears and other mountain wildlife, while the trees themselves are vital for backcountry skiers. Not only does their wide spacing allow for excellent tree skiing, but they provide "safe zones" on steep mountainsides, anchor potential avalanche slopes, and prolong the spring snowpack with their thermal cover (which is also good for down-valley trout and other water-loving creatures, like people). And, according to Jesse, they'll be functionally eliminated from most of the greater Yellowstone ecosystem within five to ten years.

Behind the covers

Besides being a freelance outdoor writer/photographer, I work a few days a week for Adventure Cyclist magazine as an editor/photo editor. (Was there full time for a couple years, but a full-time office job, even one as cool as that, was entirely too office-y for an outdoor junkie like me.) So I manage most of the photography for Adventure Cycling and one of my favorite things to do is put together the covers of both Adventure Cyclist and Cyclosource, a gear catalog also published by the Adventure Cycling Association. There are some brilliant photographers out there traveling in remote corners of the planet on bicycles and I love going through their best work to find striking covers that convey the majesty and daring of their journeys.

Here's a look at some of my favorite recent covers and the original shots that birthed them. I often see a cover in a horizontal shot and then crop it to fit. A perfect example of this is the cover of the April issue, which we just sent to the printer (Adventure Cycling members can expect it in their mailboxes in about three weeks). Here's the cover...

Awards are nice

There are a lot of great ways to start your day, but one of the best I know of is to get an email telling you that you've just won a writing award. This had only happened to me once before — until last Monday. That's when I received word that I'd snagged third place in the Northern Lights Awards for Excellence in Travel Journalism and Photography for my story "Return to the Wildest Valley" which ran in the June issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine.

 

If the importance of writing awards correlates with the length of their title, then I'm set. Screw a Pulitzer Prize — that's only two words. My award has seven words, and that's not even counting the really short words. Heck, my award has so many words in its name I don't even have to count them all.

Staying Alive

I recently finished an article on survival gear for a Montana magazine. In the article, I suggest that every outdoors person carries a "possibilities bag" in their backpack that contains basic survival and emergency gear. Here's mine, exploded for the article.

I've got an emergency bivy sack; tiny headlamp; firestarting tinder in a waterproof bag; a first aid kit in a waterproof bag; a lighter; waterproof matches in a waterproof container; super glue; a multi-tool with pliers, knife, and scissors; pain pills; whistle; compass; duct tape around a pencil; signal mirror; chlorine dioxide water-treatment pills; and a waterproof stuff sack to hold it all together.

Three Cheers For The Brits

The British magazine Singletrack just came out with a story of mine from an ultralight bikepacking trip last summer. I love the layout and the images they chose. Funny captions, headers, and pull quotes, too. Plus, the editor is my man Chipps Chippendale, who has a flat-out classic name. Great working with you guys on the other side of the kiddie pool...

River skiing

In the ongoing meteorological tragedy that has been our winter in Montana this year, daytime temperatures are now hitting the mid-fifties and our snowpack is going fast. We'll be skiing in the mountains for a couple more months (knock on wood), but the valley snow is almost gone. Recently took the family out on the skinny skis for a day cruising the ice ledges still clinging to the North Fork of the Flathead River along the western border of Glacier Park. Bet you can't ski there anymore, but we had a great day exploring and, best of all, no one fell in the river...