Spring update

It's been an action-packed last few months here at Teasdale HQ, leaving precious little time for bloggerating. But rest assured that all is well, though future posts may be "skinnier" than the epics I was posting for a while there. 

Anyone interested in seeing my latest story from British Columbia's fanged and furry Flathead Valley should head on over to Sierra magazine's website (or buy the current issue, May/June 2011, at your neighborhood newsstand, assuming you still have one). 

www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201105/flathead-guardians.aspx

A friend and I biked and packrafted the valley, then climbed a mountain at the river's headwaters that was threatened with mountaintop-removal mining and slept bare on its summit (you can read more about that adventure here: aaronteasdale.blogspot.com/2010/02/flathead-celebration.html).

My sons and I are also featured in the current (May) issue of Outside magazine, in their guide to fatherhood. In it, I dispense what they call "essential advice for adventurous fathers." Which I guess means that if you're an adventurous father you'd better read it. Or you could just take your kids into the woods. That's my essential advice: get out there, as often as possible.

The article and images also live online here:

http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-201106-kids-adventure-travel-sidwcmdev_156151.html

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.

Flathead Grizzlies

Continuing my celebration of British Columbia's Flathead Valley, I'm posting some images from a trip I took there two summers ago with my father and our friend Ron. My story from that trip can be checked out here. An excerpt to accompany the images follows...

The Flathead: a celebration

British Columbia's Flathead Valley is a special place. In fact, it might be my favorite special place on Earth. The last undeveloped and uninhabited valley in southern Canada, it's one of the wildest of our remaining wildernesses. An international border bisects the valley, and its southern half lies in Montana where my family has a small cabin. The North Fork of the Flathead River flows through the valley bottom and forms the western boundary of Glacier National Park. (It's also a river I had the pleasure of fording a few days ago on a ski trip into the park, but that's a story for future entry.)

For now, it's enough to know that the Canadian Flathead is a stomping ground for grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, mountain lions, and every kind of toothy creature that lived there when Columbus landed. But for years this sprawling nursery for everything wild has been under threat. Turns out it's rich in more than animal life and soaring mountains. First there were proposed coal mines, then coalbed methane, then gold mines. Things didn't look good.

I started heading up to the Flathead for adventures — and for stories that could help inspire people to demand its protection. Then, just yesterday, out of the blue, the B.C. government announced that they've decided not to allow mining or energy development in the valley.

To say that I'm jumping out of my underwear with excitement is an understatement. I'm rocketing out of my underwear until it's just a speck far, far below me and I realize, wow, it's really cold up here with no underwear, but I'm so excited it doesn't matter, so I just keep rocketing and rocketing.

In other words, I'm excited.