Photos & story by Laura Read
The Furrow

WHEN VICTORIA OLIVARES waves a long stick of bamboo-style cane high into the branches of a wild mesquite tree, lemon-yellow catkin flowers jiggle among the leaves like pipe cleaners, and a few dried-up old bean pods flutter down to a plastic sheet laid on the ground. The legumes were plump when they were ripe last spring, but by this time in winter they’ve withered. Olivares gathers them anyway. They’ll be good for the cows.

The farmer’s wife isn’t here to collect old beans, though.

The tree is part of a mesquite woodland on the alluvial floodplain of the Rio Salado inside an extremely diverse region in south central Mexico called the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley. The arid and semi-arid hillsides and riverbeds here contain one of the greatest concentrations of plant and animal life in the world, although you wouldn’t guess it.

The landscape seems to support more thorns than leaves.

At another mesquite tree nearby, two of the people with Olivares, Minerva Cruz Vasquez and Richard Hanson, press their fingers into dark sap that bubbles on the trunk. They dab some of it onto their tongues, then spit in disgust. The sap tastes foul. Olivares breaks out laughing.

But there’s a part of the tree that tastes far from foul: the legumes. That’s why Cruz and Hanson are here. They’ve driven three hours from their workplace to have Olivares show how in springtime when fresh legumes hang fat and in clusters, she’ll shake hundreds of them off the tree and collect them on the ground. They’ll then be transported across the desert valley and over a mountain range into the neighboring Etla Valley, where they will be dried and milled by a new cooperative into flour.

There’s good reason for the effort: “These mesquite pods have better flavor and nutrient concentration compared to those in the central valleys,” says Cruz. She runs the new cooperative, called Xuchil Natural Foods. Not everyone believes that mesquite beans can be eaten by humans; people are used to feeding them to animals. But Cruz and her Xuchil team are betting that once people try the gluten-free, high protein flour milled from these bean pods, they’ll want to keep it on hand.

The cooperative formed in 2015 when its members — Zoraida Perez, Petronila Hernández, Antonio Garcia, and Carlos Lopez — identified existing resources (water, solar, natural edible plants), then developed a business plan. After flavor and nutrition profiling, the group determined these particular pods were of the highest quality, and once cleaned, dried, and milled would make an exceptionally delicious flour.

The tree is the Prosopis leavigata, or smooth mesquite, one of 44 mesquite species in the world, and native to not only Mexico, but also Bolivia and Peru. It is considered threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In Mexico — as in many countries — mesquite trees are often ripped out to make way for farm fields and roads. But here in this boulder-laden river bottom of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, they’ve largely been left alone. That’s good for Olivares because she’s earning a little extra income from the trees, thanks to Xuchil.
Sarahi Garcia cofounder of the nonprofit Tejiendo Alianzas

Sarahi Garcia, cofounder of the nonprofit Tejiendo Alianzas, which advises the startup Xuchil Natural Foods, agrees that a bubble of mesquite tree sap tastes foul.

Ancient farming. The cooperative’s success is linked closely to this valley. Archeologists have unearthed evidence that ancient people were cultivating beans, corn, and squash here 6,000 years ago. They’ve discovered remnants of irrigation systems — dams, canals, and aquifers — that are 2,000 years old. UNESCO listed the region for protection in 1998 and 2018, citing the value of its 36 plant communities that include more than 3,000 species of vascular plants and represent 70% of worldwide flora families. It sustains 134 animal species, 356 species of birds, 53 species of reptiles, and between 15 and 24 species of bats, according to UNESCO. The heritage of its human residents is diverse, too. They descend from seven different ethnic groups, some of which were active here 10,000 years ago.

“The semi-arid climate, access to water, and mineral rich soil are apparently what set these beans apart from the deserts in the north where mesquite grows everywhere,” Hanson says. “We know that the beans are thicker, longer, and sweeter.”

Hanson and his wife, Sarahi Garcia, founded the nonprofit Tejiendo Alianzas (the Spanish name means weaving partnerships) in Oaxaca a few years ago to connect rural start-ups in villages like Xuchil with experts who help them to succeed. In addition to the village of Santiago Suchilquitongo, where Xuchil is located, they work with communities like Santa Maria Ixcatlan, where they support palm crafting and mezcal projects, and San Dionisio Ocotepec, where they assist makers of shoes, mezcal, and chocolate. “We are active participants in marketing, promotion, product development, research, and sales,” says Hanson, who moved to Oaxaca from Texas 12 years ago. “Tejiendo Alianzas links us to many worlds, from agriculture to artisan craft, both of which are incredibly important in Oaxaca.”


Victoria Olivares showing how to harvest bean pods

Victoria Olivares shows how she harvests bean pods from mesquite trees for Xuchil near her home in south-central Mexico.

An important move for Tejiendo Alianzas was to connect Xuchil to the National Polytechnic Institute in Oaxaca. “We partnered with a professor and graduate students to identify the proper way to dry the beans in order to not lose their nutritional properties, while making them easier to mill,” Hanson says. “The sugars make the inside pulp very sticky, so drying it as much as possible makes a huge difference. We also sent the flour to a nationally certified lab to get the official nutrient breakdowns that we can put on our labels.”

Research on the human food value of mesquite is also happening in northern Mexico and the southern United States. Depending on the species, the pods can have 7 to 22 percent protein, according to researchers. They contain potassium, manganese, and zinc and up to 41 percent sugar, mostly fructose. Lab tests showed the Xuchil beans have protein levels of 19 percent.

“It is a yummy superfood,” Hanson says.
South central Mexico’s Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley photo

South central Mexico’s Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley is considered one of the world’s cradles of agriculture.

Spreading the word. Making a good flour was only half the battle for Xuchil. The other half was helping people to learn how to use it. Hanson turned to professional chefs to spread the word. Oaxaca’s culinary culture stems from its agricultural abundance. People make elaborate meals at home, and inventive restaurant chefs serve an eager community of visiting and local diners. “It’s really impactful here in Oaxaca when people can say, ‘We have this high-quality product, and it’s not only made by local people, but also made with local natural resources,’” Hanson says. Oaxaca’s chocolate, chilies, and an old regional favorite, fried grasshoppers, are popular on many café and restaurant menus… Mesquite flour? Not as much right now.

Food journalist Fred Jimenez has worked out many mesquite recipes for Hanson and Xuchil. Recently, he was a chef at Exhacienda Guadalupe, a retreat center that is also home to the design center Oax-i-fornia, which promotes local artisan crafts. “The flavor intrigues me,” says Jimenez, who’s tested the flour in everything from fettuccine and fried chicken to banana bread and pan de muerto, the bread served during Day of the Dead celebrations. “It’s between sweet and something like the husk of wheat or toasted wheat. I wanted to experiment with that little pinch of sweetness.”

Joseph Gilbert is chef-owner of El Destilado, a contemporary place in Oaxaca’s historic center known for its novel multi-plate chef pairings. Mesquite flour makes the crust of his key lime tartlet more dense and nutty-tasting, and gives an earthy depth to the spread of crumble he serves with homemade ice cream. He’s using Xuchil’s beans in culinary experiments with seasonings made from an edible Japanese mold called Koji. “Mesquite flour lends a depth of smokiness and sweetness,” he says, “similar to the effects the wood has when using it to smoke food products.”

Hanson and Garcia also test the flour at their Oaxaca home. “We’re making a sweet extract that is used in many ways – in ice cream, in butter, in mixed drinks,” Hanson says. “There’s a byproduct I toast and mill in a coffee grinder.” He brews it with hot water and drinks it every morning. “It tastes like caramel coffee.”

To refine their production, Hanson has connected the Xuchil team with engineering students at the University of Texas, Austin, who design and test equipment prototypes in their classrooms, then visit the Etla Valley during spring break to help build final systems. Last year they constructed a greenhouse outfitted with mobile racks. The cooperative also built rinsing and drying stations on the rooftop of its headquarters, taking advantage of the intense solar power concentrated there.

“The earlier dryers were efficient, but we just had a very low capacity,” Cruz says. “We could dry a maximum of 24 kilos or so of beans in two days. With this new greenhouse system, we can dry up to 120 kilos in the same period. The drying process itself is fundamental in our production.”

The word collaboration comes up a lot at Xuchil headquarters. “One thing that’s really important to this project is the social part, the idea of spending time with another human being,” says Xuchil’s Antonio Garcia Lopez. “Like with the harvesters — we eat with them, we spend time with them. They like how we’re collaborating with them, and we see that our purchases of beans from them are definitely increasing the incomes for families.”



Above. Xuchil Natural Foods in Mexico’s Etla Valley mills high-protein flour out of mesquite beans from a historically significant agriculture valley three hours’ drive away. Oaxacan chefs develop recipes for bread, desserts, and pastries using mesquite flour made by Xuchil. Minerva Cruz Vasquez leads Xuchil, whose entrepreneurs studied in a local business program to market goods made from existing resources. Here, she scans the fertile Etla Valley from a rooftop greenhouse built for drying mesquite beans.

Tree mystique. Back in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, residents are not surprised that their mesquite trees have lots of value. They’ve known that bit of wisdom all along.

“We use the resin as a natural glue when we make piñatas,” explains Javier Ortiz Bautiste, who owns Tio Jose’s restaurant. “You can also use the resin for medicinal purposes. If you hurt yourself, if you break a bone, or you have some kind of injury in your arm or leg, you can apply the resin. It reduces the pain.” A tincture made from the leaves can soothe sore eyes, and the sap that Cruz and Hanson found so bitter is a self-generated salve the tree uses to heal its own wounds.

For the eight or so women Xuchil employs as harvesters, the local trees are an economic windfall. The work adds an extra $40 to $80 a season to incomes that are tied to the farming of crops like papayas, melons, and the fruit tree chicozapote.

As Cruz, Hanson, Olivares and the rest of the group exit the mesquite woodland after their harvesting excursion, Ortiz and Olivares point to how easily tender young trees are already sprouting.

Later at her home, Olivares serves up hunks of fresh bananas to the hungry crew. The $4 U.S. per 15 kilo bag she’ll make from Xuchil this year will help her to buy beans, corn, and medicines for the household. She smiles at that.

Rhapsody Magazine

IF DANIELE KIHLGREN had his way, the Italy you experience as a visitor would not be manicured Tuscany or spit-shined Amalfi Coast but the stone-cool inside of a medieval room in a village called Santo Stefano di Sessanio, its mattresses thick with local wool, its fabrics spun by artisans living nearby. Cobblestones and floorboards would be scalloped by a million heels, and windows would open onto landscapes marked by farms from the Middle Ages.

Preserving the features that make a place unique is the mission of Kihlgren’s pair of boutique lodgings (one here and one in Matera), both called Sextantio, the early Roman name for the village where he developed his first hotel. The Swedish-Italian entrepreneur is using tourism to save Southern Italy’s hilltop towns, which are facing extinction after years of emigration.

“Today, we are living in worlds that are losing their identities,” Kihlgren says. “One of the big losses in Italy after the post–World War II economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s is that too many historical places have been replaced by ugly cement housing.” In an ironic twist, Kihlgren’s family fortune came from the same cement industry that built these boxy, anonymous postwar suburbs. “People,” he says, “are nostalgic for the old Italy.”

KIHLGREN FIRST SAW the pretty crenelated tower in Santo Stefano di Sessanio, an Apennine town in the province of L’Aquila, in 1999, while motorcycling through the humpback mountains of Gran Sasso National Park. He bought up as many properties in the nearly abandoned village as he could and, in 2005, opened Sextantio Albergo Diffuso—or “scattered hotel,” a reference to the way rooms are peppered throughout the village.

Guests enter a lobby in the town’s former stables at the top of the hill and are escorted through narrow lanes to their dwellings. Kihlgren installed modern technology and earthquake stabilization but preserved original walls and floorboards; chairs might have belonged to work-worn shepherds or members of the famed Medici clan, who once ruled this region. The hotelier even tapped an anthropologist to recreate old formulas for soaps, shampoos, and candles, using such ingredients as lupine seed and flax. In an on-site artisan workshop, guests can learn how to craft straw chairs and tables, make natural oil soaps, or weave scarves, hats, and wraps.

“When people make a new hotel, they renovate away the cultural identity,” he says. “In a way, they obscure the emotion of such places. Sometimes people don’t understand that old places have an emotional impact. In a place like this, you change your pace, you become more calm, less neurotic, less obsessive. You are in tune with what you have around you.”

In 2009, he opened a sister property in the UNESCO-designated district of Sassi di Matera, in the Basilicata region (roughly the “instep” of the Italian boot), where people have lived in caves for some 9,000 years—making it among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the world. Rooms at the Sextantio Le Grotte della Civita are illuminated with beeswax candles and beams of sunlight entering through slots carved by prehistoric troglodytes. Sinks are built into mangers once used by donkeys, but there are still a few nods to modern luxury, including bathtubs by Philippe Starck.

MATERA WILL BE CELEBRATED as a European Capital of Culture in 2019, and in preparation Kihlgren is transforming 14 more abandoned caves at Le Grotte della Civita into hotel rooms, a restaurant, and a new spa. Kihlgren says the spa’s approach will be “linked to Matera’s system of cisterns and underground water collection,” while treatments will incorporate herbs foraged from nearby Murgia National Park.

Perhaps no amenity at the Sextantio Albergo Diffuso better expresses Kihlgren’s philosophy than the carafe of homemade genziana—a liquor infused with the roots of yellow flowering gentians—that he leaves out for guests in the hallways. One sip communicates everything he wants you to know: With no sugar added to soften the shock, the true-to-life spirit splashes the tongue with gusto.

“It is bitter,” Kihlgren says. “It’s expressive. I like that.”

ON THE MORNING of Aug. 1, 2013, Iditarod legend DeeDee Jonrowe peeked into a wooden doghouse fenced off among some trees on her property in Willow, Alaska. Inside was Challon, a husky that Jonrowe had recently bred to an athletic male dog named Jarvi. Nearby, tethered to their own houses, more than three dozen other dogs made a symphony of howls.

 A day earlier, Challon had nudged away her kibble, exhibiting a classic sign that she was ready to release her pups. By the time Jonrowe reached the pen, five pups had squiggled out of the womb and onto the hay beside their mother.

Five was a fine litter size, but Challon wasn’t done. Another body emerged, and then another, until finally the puppies totaled nine. This was already no ordinary group.

“It’s going to be my next race team,” Jonrowe said, her voice sparkling.

Five foot three, sixty years old, and a bundle of muscle, Jonrowe is one of the toughest female athletes in the world. She’s not an Olympian or part of any celebrated sports team. Instead, she’s among an elite group of competitors in one of the world’s most grueling races, one that requires marvelous stamina and cunning, and perhaps a little madness: the Iditarod, a sled dog race run every March across 1,000 miles of Alaska’s frozen interior from Anchorage to Nome.

If some people in the mainstream don’t recognize Jonrowe, millions of Iditarod fans do. In 31 races, she’s had 16 top ten finishes and placed second twice. Her pink logo wear is a staple in Iditarod gift shops. Fans know her bright voice from media interviews. “Was that DeeDee?” a hiker asked one day after watching Jonrowe and her two yellow labs charge up the Butte Trail in the Mat-Su Valley. “Tell her that I love her!”

They love her not only for her charm and verve, but also for the way she’s endured some difficult battles.

The Iditarod has a ceremonial start in Anchorage, where fans packsidelines and “Iditariders” (who win at auction with a $7,500 starting bid) ride for 11 miles on mushers’ sleds. The official start is the next afternoon 70-miles north in Willow.

After traversing snow-covered mountains, riveting gorges, and sections of crunched up sea ice, it finishes on the Seward Peninsula in the town of Nome. It links villages of Alaska’s interior that just a few generations ago saw few if any motor vehicles at all during winter. Back then, dogs were critical to survival. Residents raised them for transportation and hunting. Mushers were local heroes, driving dog teams through winter landscapes to deliver medicines, mail, and even preachers. The Iditarod was established in 1973 to honor that tradition.

Only a few Iditarod mushers have become legendary, and Jonrowe is one of them.

Challon is the key.

A mantra among mushers is that the real race athletes are the animals. “It’s not about the mushers,” they say. “It’s about the dogs.”

The sled dogs are fed with meat and fish plus high-calorie, high protein kibble containing amino acids, probiotics and minerals. On the Iditarod trail, the dogs can run up to 100 miles a day, burning 7,000calories per day. They can eat 2,400 pounds of food, all of it dragged in bags and fed to them by the musher. They are rested and inspected by veterinarians at mandatory checkpoints every 18 to 85 miles.

To build a winning team, mushers breed their dogs to have competitive traits, including endurance, speed, a smooth gait, an insulating but not-too-heavy coat, and tough paws. Some, like Jonrowe’s dogs Fudge and Omnistar, become ultra-intelligent team leaders. Others are middle-of-the-pack pullers. Others, still, are wheel dogs running closest to the sled, which can carry more than 100 pounds of gear. Gouda is a favorite wheel dog. In a race, “she’s directing my sled,” Jonrowe explained. “She plays the back line like a piano wire. She’ll jump over, and have both dogs pulling the sled away from the obstacles.”

The performance qualities come only with practice, training and good health. Managing that is much more than a full-time job; it’s a lifestyle.

 Touring Jonrowe’s 17 acre property, it’s clear the yard is planned for efficiency: tethers keep dogs from tangling with each other; wide corridors allow for poop cleanup and snow shoveling; and the houses, made by Jonrowe’s husband, Mike, slide up and down on poles so they can be raised and lowered with the snow level.

“Any one year we might win or we might have a bad year,” she said, “but we’re taking care of the dogs 365 days a year. We’re living with them and their little idiosyncrasies. We’re providing for them.”

The bonds that develop between dog and musher make all the difference in the race. The team tries to navigate and avoid many disasters on the trail, from tipping over the sled to getting a dehydrating flu that can spread among participants. One particular day remains strong in Jonrowe’s memory, and marked a turning point for her. Near the end of the 2002 race, crossing the sea ice to the town of Golovin, she felt strangely weak.

“Walking the dogs across the bay, I was stumbling and falling,” she said. “The dogs would come along up around me. I was sure I was going to die out there that night.” At the check point in Golovin, she drank several liters of fluid to stem her dehydration.

A few months later, she learned she had breast cancer, a disease her mother, Peg Stout, had beaten a few years earlier. But cancer couldn’t chase the Iditarod out of her. The next year, three weeks after finishing chemotherapy, she raced to Nome in 18th place.

And that’s where the second key to Jonrowe’s success comes into play: an ability to focus and recover even when things get impossibly bad.

On the Iditarod, quitting the race because you’re tired is not an option. “Somebody has to risk their life to come get you if you quit,” Jonrowe said. “To just quit takes an extreme situation.”

In 1999, she had that extreme, and it was threatening her dogs. “I had bad storms and leadership issues,” she said. “I was 90 miles either direction from anything. I couldn’t walk in front of the dogs to take them in safely anywhere. I made camp for them, and the storm raged and raged.”

Eventually, she signaled for rescue from a bush pilot. “That was one of my lowest points in racing,” she said. “I took all those dogs safely off the river, and two years later we made a top ten finish. We regained their confidence and mine. Sometimes the steepest learning curve is in failure.”

But her most persistent stronghold is in her spiritual faith.

“I like the adrenaline of the edge,” she explained. “People talk about faith being a crutch, but faith is my parachute. I can jump off the edge because I’ve got faith. Whether that’s a good idea or not,” she laughed, “that’s how I live my life, and it’s worked real well.”

Jonrowe’s kitchen is a few steps from the yard where her top competitors live. Someday some of Challon’s pups might be there, too. Like she does most early mornings, the musher watched the dogs through a window, observing them closely for injury as they stretched and took their waking steps.

“Our concept is to know our dogs well,” she said. “All year I’m learning about their potentials, their comfort zones and their talents.”

When feeding time arrived, some of the keenest four-legged athletes in the world howled, leaping up on hind legs in order to touch their keeper.

Jonrowe called out to them brightly. “Good morning, Merlot! Hello Gouda!”

After the dogs chewed and drank, they settled down with eyes closed. “Look at them,” Jonrowe said. “They’re so happy, happy, happy. As (Iditarod champion) Martin Buser says, when you provide for everything they need, they’re content. They’re saying ‘We’re warm, we’re fed, we’re watered….’”

“But then,” she added, “a sound might wake them, and they perk up. They say, ‘There might something happening! There might be something…’.”

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

By Laura Read

THE RECENT QUAKES AROUND LAKE TAHOE have not only jiggled residents’ homes, they’ve also unleashed thoughts of the “Big One.” The fears are not unfounded, scientists say; but a prediction is elusive, and there’s still a lot to learn. One thing we know is that the story begins deep in the past.

Between 12,000 and 21,000 years ago, a strong earthquake shook Lake Tahoe and loosened about 3.5 cubic miles of earth on the West Shore around McKinney Bay. The debris tumbled downward and across the lake bottom with such force that chunks scattered as far as 9 miles out. Slabs a mile across and 500 feet high stayed intact, according to recent measurements. The McKinney Bay Landslide cut a chunk out of Lake Tahoe’s shoreline and gave it the west-bulging shape it has today.

But the drama wasn’t over. The cascading earth sent a giant wave surging eastward in a swell that reached 330 feet high. The action is animated in a 15-minute film produced by scientists at the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC), called Tahoe In Depth 2D. Images generated by sonar and radar equipment reveal just how much impact the tsunami probably had.
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The powerful wave offset by the crumbling earth moved so quickly it took less than 10 minutes to cross the lake and roar up canyons on the East, North, and South shores. In 10 more minutes, the water receded from those hillsides, then splashed up on all sides of the lake. Sloshing back and forth, then, like water in a tilted tub, it scoured the slopes and pulled every living and loose thing downhill. According to geologists, Eagle Rock, a volcanic plug at the mouth of Blackwood Canyon, received a sort of neck scrubbing; its base shows the evidence to anyone looking closely today. The new lake bottom was now scattered with monolithic rocks and deposits of sand and gravel from the mountainsides. Today, the subaqueous wonderland is a fascinating place for scientists to explore, which they do using submersible diving vehicles, remote-operated vehicles, and underwater photography.

It’s not crystal clear what caused the McKinney Bay Landslide, but scientists like Richard Schweickert, emeritus professor of geology at the University of Nevada, Reno, say it probably was a profound quake. Sediments on that side of the lake contain weaker layers of an ancestral lake, Schweickert said. They did not hold up to the earth-ripping jolt.

Despite the dramatic past, tsunamis haven’t been top of mind for many geologists; but this spring, on the morning of May 28, one of Lake Tahoe’s three faults, the Stateline-North Tahoe Fault, shifted twice, 30 minutes apart, at magnitudes 4.2 and 3.1. Not only the scientists paid attention. Other observers wondered, “Are we in for The Big One?”

Alert!
“It’s a wakeup call,” said Jim Howle, with the U.S. Geological Survey. “This is a good time to think about earthquake preparedness.”
Tension and Release

In fact, Lake Tahoe is due for a major rupture. If it occurs, it will most likely be along a 25-mile-long crack that lies west of the Stateline-North Tahoe Fault Zone, called the West Tahoe-Dollar Point Fault Zone, scientists said. Whether that happens tomorrow or in a thousand years is anybody’s guess. “Take a yard stick and bend it, and tell me when it’s going to break. If you do it gradually, it won’t break; then, boom, it breaks,” said Graham Kent, director of the Nevada Seismological Laboratory at UNR. “Sometime in the next thousand years — or maybe tomorrow — we’re going to get that West Tahoe Fault going, and it will be a catastrophic event.”

The idea that precursor quakes, or foreshocks, will warn of such a catastrophe is a misnomer, Howle said: Sometimes earthquakes have foreshocks and sometimes they don’t. “There’s no such thing as an early warning system for earthquakes,” he explained. That said, there have been thousands of little quakes in the Lake Tahoe Basin and surrounding areas that have not drawn much scrutiny, but the bigger quakes of May 28 caught his attention. “This is about as close as we get,” he said.

One place the public has turned to for information is TERC. The research center does not have a geologist on staff, said Heather Segale, TERC’s education and outreach director, but its focus on the watershed and lake health intersects with geological research. After the quakes, more than 100,000 people tuned in to the center’s YouTube channel to see Tahoe In Depth 2D, Segale said. “The earthquakes definitely have people interested in learning more.”

Heat, Ice, and Water
It’s easy to admire the lake’s sublime beauty, and to be comforted by the fact that in recent centuries, the features haven’t changed much. But geologists — who think in much broader timespans, in millions and millions of years — know that all of the earth’s surface is constantly rising and falling as the tectonic plates that form it shift under gravity’s pull.

As these tectonic plates push against each other, tension builds, Howle explained. The pressure or energy must be released, and is usually let go in a tremor, or quake, which can cause a rift in the earth called a fault. Ruptures can appear as “normal,” or “step,” faults, which slide vertically against each other and make a cliff drop pattern; or they can take the form of a “strike-slip” fault, which shifts from side-to-side the way two palms rub together, fingers to thumb.

Even though Lake Tahoe is huge and seems like its own entity, it is nevertheless part of the much larger region extending eastward into Nevada and westward all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Two million years ago, the Basin was less dramatic and held a shallow lake that captured rain and snowmelt, according to Frances Wahl Pierce, a retired geologist and TERC docent who hosted a video about the lake’s geology for TERC’s YouTube channel. Over time, as the Sierra Nevada lifted and a “basin and range” landscape began to form to the east, faults evolved around Lake Tahoe. As the faulting grew, the Tahoe Basin got deeper — even more so than today, for a while — holding a great volume of rainfall and snowmelt.

Volcanic flows on the North Shore blocked the Basin’s sole outlet, now called the Truckee River, Wahl Pierce said. The natural dams contained the water and raised the lake level, but then water eroded them and the lake level dropped, leaving evidence of higher shores on the mountainsides, she said.
Mountain to Basin

The shifting and shaking is far from over. Nowadays, geologists are watching three major normal or step faults that trend north-south through Lake Tahoe, Kent explained. These branch into a combination of normal and strike-slip faults. The West Tahoe-Dollar Point Fault Zone starts at the mouth of Emerald Bay and trends north along the West Shore to the east side of Dollar Point and beyond toward Northstar California Resort. Its effects can be seen from the Rubicon Trail at D.L. Bliss State Park, where a cliff plunges into deep blue water that’s 1,400 feet deep, and divers find boulders and fissures to explore. It also appears along Dollar Point, where, within 20 strokes, kayakers can cruise from water that’s 10 feet deep and the color of turquoise to water 30 times the depth and darkened to a haunting indigo hue.

East of the West Tahoe Fault, the Stateline-North Tahoe Fault Zone runs from Stateline into the lake at a southwest angle. It forms a steep drop just to the east of Cal Neva in Crystal Bay, plunging to the deepest part of the lake, 1,644 feet. Paralleling this is the Incline Village Fault Zone, Kent said. It runs southwest into the water out of Incline Village, cutting through land less than 2 miles away from the Tahoe Environmental Research Center.

Relatively recent breaks, the result of fault zone activity, are visible above ground in a couple of places, Kent said — near the old elementary school in Incline Village and at the Angora Lakes trailhead south of Fallen Leaf Lake.

It’s not easy for even scientists to tell exactly where a quake occurs. An earthquake’s epicenter is determined in part by its distance underground, as fault ruptures exist at specific depths, Schweickert said. When they run close to each other, as is the case with sections of the West Tahoe-Dollar Point and Stateline-North Tahoe faults, quake location will be determined by which depth the tremor corresponds to. Best indication so far for the May 28 quakes, according to Kent, is the bigger rupture was “a relay fault zone between West Tahoe Fault and Stateline-North Tahoe Fault — and was strike slip, left lateral,” meaning the epicenter occurred on one of the rifts that branch off the main artery of the fault trending from the north middle section of the lake through Stateline.
Action Everywhere

The Tahoe-area faults do not stand alone. They belong to an extended series of rifts that trends both south and west. Named Walker Lane, this zone is connected to the San Andreas Fault along the Pacific Coast, said Annie Kell, previously an education and outreach seismologist at UNR, in a video lecture for TERC citizen scientists preparing to paddle the Lake Tahoe Water Trail last month. The San Andreas Fault gets about 75% of the overall region’s activity, while Walker Lane exhibits 25%, Kell said. Walker Lane has experienced thousands of jolts across the centuries, from Mina, Nevada, to Mammoth, California, to Independence Lake. From mid-May to mid-June this year, the Stateline-North Tahoe Fault Zone alone ruptured dozens and dozens of times, according to USGS online records.

Kent has a creative interpretation of how the combined movements shaped Lake Tahoe. If you hypothetically combine all of Lake Tahoe’s known previous jolts in one long segment, the time it took to form the lake would comprise just half a day. “Lake Tahoe was formed in six hours of actual hell and terror separated by thousands of years,” he said. “There is mostly quiescence and then there’s a bad 30 seconds.”

Kent has studied the earthquakes recorded along the Pacific Coast and inland: He sees the big picture and finds it alarming: “Lake Tahoe could be the most dangerous geological hazard in the lower 48,” he said.

One reason is that thousands of people are present in the Tahoe Basin on any given day, he said. They’re sunbathing, dining in cafés, playing with dogs, skiing its slopes, or driving to work. Another reason is: At least one primary fault is overdue to rupture in a big way.

When geologists say the West Tahoe-Dollar Point Fault is ready for “the Big One,” they’re assessing risk by timeframe. It’s been 4,500 years since the last large rupture along that line, according to Kent. The known major event before that was 7,800 years ago, he said. The one prior to that was 11,000 years ago. If the time between significant ruptures is a pattern — roughly 3,200-year intervals — then the West Tahoe-Dollar Point Fault could be in for a big quake soon. Normal, or stepped, faults like this tend to rupture in large singular events, Kent said.

Tsunami Watch
That major earthquake could be bad enough, but will it also trigger a tsunami? Kent and other geologists interviewed said that kind of event is hard to predict. “It is a fact, you will generate a tsunami of a certain size by just dropping the Basin floor,” Kent said. A tsunami could also be triggered by a landslide that might come from a rupture in either a normal fault or a slip-strike fault. “The height is dependent on how that rupture happens,” he said. How will it affect people? “It depends on where you are around the lake and how unlucky you are on the shoreline.”

When asked how worried he is that a tsunami will occur soon, Kent said: “I work with fire departments. I’m worrying about Tahoe burning down about 10 to 20 times before we have an earthquake.” On the other hand, he also advises, “If there’s strong shaking at the beach, get off the beach immediately. If you see big changes in water level, get off the beach …. To a degree, we know we are running out of time on the West Tahoe Fault. It does have to relieve its stress.”

Kell — and Howle, too — won’t avoid Lake Tahoe. But they are wary. “It’s a good reminder that bigger earthquakes are not out of the question in this area, and everybody should take heed,” Howle said.

SOME 10,000 KNOWN SEAWEED varieties grow in oceans worldwide. Six hundred of those live along Ireland’s 3,000-mile-long coast. On the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, Darach Ó Murchú keeps track of his local species using notes that are hand written in minuscule print on water-proofed paper. He understands something that many land-dwellers don’t: Among pools left behind by the receding tide exists a magnificent world of edible plants.

“Some resemble trees, others resemble miniature plants, and others look like grasses,” Ó Murchú says. “They have all sorts of different forms – spirals, snake-like, sausage-shaped, tuber-shaped. Some are microscopic; others much deeper are massive, growing 150-feet tall.” He knows this world more intimately than most, and he wants the people who aren’t as well acquainted with oceans to know it, too.

Ó Murchú is reaching out by teaching about seaweeds in class offered through his business, Elements Outdoor Training, and as part of seaweed foraging and cooking classes at the Dingle Cookery School. Spending a few hours on the seashore with students, he explains how to identify, find and harvest up to 10 different kinds of seaweed. The group then travels a few miles away to Dingle, the peninsula's main harbor town, where they learn from Ó Murchú and Chef Mark Murphy how to use the seaweed they’ve collected to enhance their food. The course fits well into the Dingle Cookery School curriculum, which showcases fresh-caught seafood and traditional Irish cuisine.

“There’s been a great interest in seaweed in recent times,” Murphy says. “Darach has spent many years learning and using different seaweeds. He is a natural teacher.”

CHEWING SEAWEED IS TOUGH. It can be overwhelmingly salty, and smell unpleasantly fishy. And yet, people around the world are getting excited about its culinary possibilities. Some say different varieties can do everything from fight infection and rejuvenate adrenal glands to quell inflammation. It can boost calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, manganese, and Vitamin B12, according to experts. It can nourish the skin and ease congestion. For cooks, when seaweed is prepared just right, it’s also good to eat.

“These are the first two seaweeds I came in touch with as a kid,” he says. “The dillisk — I loved because it’s a salty, chewy snack. The carrageen, I didn’t love. My mom used to make ice cream with it. It was absolutely disgusting. There would be war in our house when she made it. Now I like it, of course.”

HIS WAY OF LOOKING at things comes from the unusual life he’s led life so far. He studied engineering at the Dublin Institute of Technology and then worked in Silicon Valley. He studied to be a mountain guide in Scotland, and led expeditions to the Himalaya and other high places. He’s always returned to the Dingle Peninsula, where he spent a lot of time as a child. Now, in between other stints, he teaches people that the sea plants they’ve thought to be stinky and ugly – are actually worth a taste.

The foraging workshop begins with a simple lesson: There are three classifications of seaweed — brown, red, and green. Even this little spot, the size of a small back yard, is diverse. There are groups of bladder wrack, oarweed, and dillisk – “powerhouses against cancer,” he says. And there are patches of carrageen and tangles of sea spaghetti.

Using scissors, Ó Murchú removes a strand of shiny, strappy oarweed (a type of kelp), leaving roots intact so the plant will grow back. “The Japanese use a closely related seaweed called Kombu to make dashi soup stock,” he explains. He runs his fingers along the side, drawing attention to the glossy gel that adheres there. “It has a strong umami flavor, and will deepen the flavor of anything. I’ll wrap a fish in one of the big fronds and bake it in the oven. The kelp gives it a bit of depth and flavor – a richness and a fullness.”

He cuts a branch of chestnut-colored pepper dulse. It’s also called the “truffle of the sea,” he says. Snipping it into bits, he fans the pieces onto his palm. “I grind this to powder and then sprinkle it on top of food — anything I think it goes well with. It’s tiny, but it’s just … powerful.”

HE LEANS OVER A CLEAR POOL that’s been left behind in the rocks by the receding tide. It’s full of filmy tendrils, brownish soft button shapes, and translucent leaves that seem spun of a lime-green silk — sea lettuce. The small pool illustrates a big concept. “These seaweeds are quite extreme in that they have to put up with extreme conditions,” he says. “On a sunny day, a lot of the water evaporates and leaves the salt behind, and then on a rainy day the rainwater fills the hole and the salt gets diluted or washed out.”

As students peer ever more closely, the discussion meanders, and soon the course is about much more than plants.

 Generations ago, Irish farmers were building new soil and enriching existing soil by folding in strands of seaweed they hauled from the shore zones. In certain parts of the island’s west coast, the technique is still in use. Ó Murchú worries that the rocketing world demand will cause careless harvesting and will damage marine ecosystems. He hopes to raise awareness in the class.

HE GENTLY PUSHES his thumb at a thimble-sized anemone to demonstrate the way it forces a mild suction against the skin. He points to cone-shaped limpets that look like volcanoes in a world of miniature Lilliputians. “That’s their patch for the rest of its lives,” he explains. Their calcium shells are developed to connect with the rock contours where they were formed. “Once the tide comes in, they’ll be eating small seaweeds on the rock or elsewhere. They have a tiny foot, and they’ll leave this spot and wander around.” The limpets wouldn’t be able to get the same seal against a rock if they were to settle in another location. “Once they sense the tide is going out, they come back to the same place,” he says.

When he’s foraging, Ó Murchú, too, watches the rise of the sea. Absorbed in the work of inspecting this freshly revealed ocean world, he can be surprised to find that so much time has passed, and the tide is returning.

San Francisco Chronicle

The morning of Jan. 24, at Squaw Valley Ski Resort was one of the most spectacular in recent memory. After years of drought, three storms in a row had blanketed Squaw’s legendary slopes with a dry, crystalline powder, the stuff of skiers’ dreams. Along with the rest of Squaw's ski patrollers, 42-year-old Joe Zuiches prepared dozens of hand charges – cap-and-fuse initiated explosives — and traveled by snowcat or chairlift up into the mountain’s most rugged terrain.

Normally, patrollers and other employees opening the mountain work a delicate dance of movement and communication to trigger avalanches in unstable terrain. The snow must be blasted from places where it builds up during storms from wind and snowfall and becomes unstable enough to topple onto ski runs. That can happen with a loud sound, a blast of wind, the movement of a skier, or the changing weight of the snowpack as the sun warms and binds the top layers. This day, something went terribly wrong.

By 8:35 a.m., Zuiches stood on a planned blasting route along Gold Coast Ridge, peaks of the snowbound Sierra Crest spreading north and south around him. The 42-year-old was killed when one of the hand chargers exploded before he could toss it at its target. He left behind a wife and an infant child, as well as shocked and grieving peers. The incident set off an explosion investigation, still ongoing, involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the FBI, and Cal/OSHA.

“Joe was a beloved leader in our ski patrol, one who served as a great mentor for his team, and we will never forget his dedication to his fellow patrollers and to the safety of our guests, said Andy Wirth, president and CEO of Squaw Valley Ski Holdings. A professional mountain guide and mountaineer, Zuiches climbed Mt. Rainer, Mt. Hood, Mt. Baker, and Villarrica volcano in Chile, and summited Mount Shasta 50 times. He’d been involved in ski patrol at Squaw and earlier at Winter Park Resort in Colorado for 17 years.

Death by an exploding hand charge has occurred twice previously since 1973, when a Mammoth Mountain patroller was killed, according to snow and ski safety consultant Larry Heywood //OF WHERE?//. There are strict protocols and many guidelines to ensure safe use of explosives at resorts, but on this, one of the most anticipated powder days in years, the hand charge claimed its third victim.

Using hand charges in resort avalanche mitigation is a common practice around the world, according to Geraldine Link, director of public policy at the National Ski Areas Association. The blasting creates a controlled slide before it can become a hazard. In addition to the hand charges, resort patrollers control unstable snow with projected explosives from mounted military artillery and avalaunchers (air-powered cannons). They also release snow by skiing patterns across areas of unstable buildup, a practice called ski cutting.

Hand charges are used to trigger snow in areas that the avalaunchers and artillery can’t hit, according to Heywood, who was ski patrol director at Squaw’s neighboring Alpine Meadows Resort for 17 years. “Given squaw’s steep terrain and at times intense snowfall and wind, Squaw has one of the largest and most complex hand charge programs of ski areas in the country,” he said. “There are a lot of small pockets that the other equipment wouldn’t be appropriate for. The artillery can’t hit every nook and cranny. You can get to all of those spots on skis.”

Patrollers travel well-established routes that put them into position, usually above a targeted slope, said Heywood. Squaw, the site of 1960s Olympic Games, has 60 full- and part-time professional patrollers who handle thousands of rounds of ammunition per year at the resort.

Recently the resort added to its arsenal five Gazex Inertia Exploders, remotely controlled systems using propane gas and oxygen to create a concussive blast.

Hand charges are shaped as slender cylinders, 2 inches wide and about 12 inches long, and weigh two pounds, Heywood said. They are filled with an ammonium nitrate putty and wrapped in heavy paper. An 18-inch fuse is attached with enough length to allow 90 seconds to pass between ignition and detonation -- a requirement by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

“Within 10 seconds the charges are supposed to be out of their hands” said Heywood, who helped write the “Avalanche Blasting Resource Guide” for the National Ski Areas Association. “Most of the time you are throwing it downhill, so it can travel a good distance. You’re supposed to then get behind a barrier – sometimes a terrain barrier like a ridgeline – and protect your ears during the blast.”

With the explosion, the hand charge is vaporized, he said.

Patrollers take years of classes, pass tests, apprentice with each other before they become, like Zuiches, a team leader. “Ski areas send patrollers to national avalanche school, and they bring in people to train them at the resort,” Heywood said. “The State of California requires they apprentice for three years under the supervision of a licensed blaster before they can take an avalanche blasting test administered by Cal/OSHA.”

Team members learn about not only the area’s snow behavior and avalanche history, but also how to work in concert with other crews opening the resort. “The job takes a whole lot of people and a lot of focus,” Heywood said.

Link said that safety requirements and avalanche mitigation programs are inseparable. “Unfortunately avalanche work can be dangerous,” she said. “That goes without saying. But three incidents over 43 years — it is just such a rare occurrence.”

Photos & story by Laura Read

In the first days of the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada last January, graphic novelist Marek Bennett peers excitedly through wire-rimmed spectacles at the adults who’ve clustered in the convention center to learn cowboy comics. The group includes two retired octogenarian ranchers, a couple of practicing ranch owners, and a 20-something buckaroo. There are also city folk from places like Las Vegas, Reno, and Chicago — an investment banker, an insurance broker, a communications specialist, and a member of the media. These are the usual suspects who land in Elko every winter for the week-long celebration of western music, arts, and dance.

The person who is less than usual is Bennett. 

A New England native from New Hampshire, the wiry cartoonist wears khakis, converse tennis shoes, and a wool driving cap turned backward — duds that are far from the Gathering’s more common attire of boots, jeans, and cowboy hats. Having a curly beard that sweeps toward his clavicle, he looks like a youngish Abe Lincoln clad in hipster’s clothing.

Bennett and his students represent simultaneous moments in American history that rocked the country into a new age: Folks attending the Gathering admire the Wild West as it was during the decades when 19th century dreamers, wranglers, and shysters spilled out of Midwestern farmlands to settle its unforgiving ranges: Bennett values stories of heartbreak, valor, and change that emerged during the 1860s Civil War.

The two have a parallel of place, too – albeit one that extends across different centuries. Bennett’s hometown of Henniker was settled in 1761, almost 100 years before Elko had a name. Surrounded by lush, forested lands around the Contoocook River, which flows through the Merrimack River into the Atlantic Ocean, Henniker grew up serving farms taking advantage of fertile soil. Bennett now lives on a road named for his grandparents. (They owned a fruit orchard and dairy and his grandfather served for many years as a town selectman.)

Some 2,500 miles to the west, Elko lies in a haunting terrain of dried-up lakebeds and chunky mountains where inland-flowing streams sink blithely into the desert ground. Elko took root a century after Henniker, in 1869, on the banks of the Humboldt River and astraddle the First Transcontinental Railroad. Elko’s first quasi-permanent structures went up just a few years after American leaders declared the Civil War to be over. With nods to the open range, beef cattle and sheep ranchers moved in.
 
Cartooning History Bennett has many enthusiasms: He plays an 1856-replica banjo in a band called The Hardtacks; he teaches comics workshops around the country; and he educates young artists in schools on the joys of cartooning. But his central focus is making graphic novels about history.

“A lot of graphic novelists are doing really adventurous historical graphic novels right now,” he tells the Elko students at the start of class. His favorites include the 1980s Pulitzer Prize winning “Maus,” in which cartoonist Art Spiegelman interviews his father about the Holocaust, and characters are drawn as mice, cats, and pigs. Another is a 2003 comic strip biography by Chester Brown called “Louis Riel,” about how a 19th century Canadian schizophrenic and rebel leader of the indigenous-French Metis people opposed actions by the government.

Eight years ago, Bennett found his own fantastic piece of the past to retell. In Henniker’s historical archives, he discovered a forgotten 30-page Civil War memoir written by a then-local schoolteacher, Freeman Colby, who described the months he and other members of the 39th Regiment spent building and tearing down camps, repeating endless military drills, choking down “hardtack” flour-and-water biscuits, recovering in sick rooms, and occasionally fighting their countrymen on the battlefield. Bennett knew that if Colby’s stories were brought to life in a graphic novel, they would relate the Civil War in a fresh way. 

“I was really curious about Colby's story, and I realized drawing it out panel by panel would help me to understand it better,” Bennett says. “I also felt an urge to help Colby tell his story to a new generation of readers...possibly his first ever generation of readers. I think that diary's been sitting in a box on a shelf for many, many years.”

Admittedly, the Civil War isn’t the first bit of history to flood minds when people think of comics. This bloodiest of all American conflicts, it scarred America’s early territories from Virginia to New Mexico, involving some 3 million fighters and leaving between 620,000 and 850,000 men dead.

“Colby’s story takes place at a cataclysmic meeting point of two worlds,” Bennett says, “an old agrarian world that had existed for centuries, and a new industrial world still forming. It was a fascinating fault line between the Middle Ages and the Modern World. It was that most distant point in history where I could recognize my own world, my own modern perspectives in some of the stories that come down to us. Here was this young school teacher from my town, writing about his experiences along that fault line, sharing his perspectives with us, if we would only take the time to listen — I mean read — I mean draw!”

In 2016, some 340 pages and thousands of cartoon panels later, Bennett published “The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby.” Its drawn stories are fascinating, funny, and tragic. Enough excitement bubbled around that book that this winter he launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for Volume 2. The book will be available in May.
 
Cowboys and Comics  In the convention center, Bennett warms up his budding artists with a camp humor rhyme called “Boomer Johnson,” written by Henry Herbert Knibbs about a gunslinger who “quits a punchin’ cattle and takes to punchin’ dough.”


“….He built his doughnuts solid, and it sure would curl your hair
To see him plug a doughnut as he tossed it in the air.
He bored the holes plum center every time his pistol spoke,
Till the can was full of doughnuts and the shack was full of smoke….”
 
When Bennett explains his drawing process, it’s clear his cartoons don’t pop without a hitch onto the page. He first drew Boomer as a human figure in a broad hat and a dark mustache. Then he stepped back. “I got to looking at my characters and thought, ‘Wait a minute; I have made an assumption about cowboys,’” he says. “I’d drawn the types of cowboys I’d seen in movies. Who knows? Statistically, in reality, maybe they were not all white or even all male.’” He redrew the gunslingin’ pastry chef as a figure less threatening, more abstract — a mustachioed swine wearing a vest and cowboy hat. The picture sends the students into giggles, exactly the response that both Bennett — and Knibbs — had in mind. 

Is it a Cowboy Poem? The Cowboy Poetry Gathering draws performers from all over the world — from Jiggs, Nevada to Tulare, California, and from Hungary, Italy, Mexico, and Siberia. For years, one question has ricocheted from room to room: “What is cowboy poetry?” Must it have a full story, complete with beginning, middle, and end; contain line breaks, rhythmic beats, and plenty of white space; conjure scenes of cattle thieves, valiant heroes, evil bankers, lurking coyotes, and lassoing vaqueros? Or should it be free from all that?

In 2017, the Elko nonprofit that organizes the event, the Western Folklife Center, hired a new director, Kristin Windbigler, who is kindling a flame under that very discussion.

“In curating this year's Gathering,” she explains, “we wanted to make room for all sorts of stories that show the incredible variety of experiences, opinions, and beliefs among people who make their livings close to the land, and how much those people care about their communities and roles as stewards of the places where we live. I love old western movies as much as anybody, but that is often the limit of what the rest of the world knows about us. The single story of the rugged individualist, for example, is a stereotype of westerners that is a slim view of history and contributes to misunderstandings of how urban folks see the contemporary rural West.”

Reflecting different interests, the Gathering’s program presents all sorts of western skills, from hat making to leather tooling to Basque cooking. Dance classes include Zydeco, swing, and square. Literary functions address songwriting, journalism, and, of course, poetry. Artistic director Meg Glaser says Bennett’s workshop was the first of its kind here. “We thought it would be fun to give our audience and artists and schools the opportunities to try it out, advance their skills, and see where it goes,” she says. “Cartoons and illustrated letters, envelopes, and poems have long been used by the ranching community as forms of entertainment and expression, but using this medium in a longer narrative comic book or graphic novel form is not so common.” 

Comic Strip  As Bennett finishes his gunslinger segment, his students put pencil to paper, turning their own stories into dots, lines, and shapes. Their pictures have very clear settings – showing the vast grasslands of Montana, the sagebrush hills of Nevada, the salt flats of Bolivia. They have main characters – a stick-figure horseman, a bulging pregnant cow, a wayward traveling son. They have action – tricking the guys who snipped a barbed-wire fence; forgetting to tighten the horse’s saddle before mounting; rescuing an animal from an icy winter pond. And they have text – “Kersplash!”

Bennett chats while they sketch away. “Even though we're drawing different stories in different styles, there's something at the core that we're all doing – some basic visual human communication that connects and informs and empowers all of us,” he says. “You can see it in ancient cave paintings, in images all through human history, and you feel it whenever you just sit down with friends or family and draw, without worrying about ‘Is it good?’ or ‘Is it art?’ None of that judgmental evaluation matters; it's the moment of communication and recognition that makes all the work worth it.”

When a student asks Bennett what goes in to making his characters appear so frisky and full of life, he suggests the students stoke up their own cartooning spirit by emulating the work of their favorite artists. “It will probably change the way you think of yourself, and your story, too,” he says. “Whatever it is, it has to be something that can't be said by anybody else, in any other medium. That's your contribution to comics.”
 
The Next One After Bennett’s weeklong immersion in the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering’s western lore, is he tempted to explore in his next graphic novel how a buckaroo swashbuckled his way from a hopeless past to a new community? Perhaps tucked in a drawer deep in the Elko historical society archives, a diary of such a tale is craving to be found. Or maybe the long-lost narrative isn’t that of a cowboy, but of a leather worker opening J.M. Capriola Company, Elko’s famous shop of saddles, bits, and spurs; or of a waitress-turned-boarding house owner who slings hot potatoes, soup, and lamb onto tables for famished sheepherders; or a coming of age story about a ranch kid living in the middle of Nevada’s wide-open basin and range.

As Bennett implies — such stories are for an Elko cartoonist to discover. 

Travel + Leisure

THE PLEASURES OF Meáin are simple: a walk along the coast to the thunder of Atlantic swells; a tableau of fissured limestone that glimmers in the mist; the best potatoes you’ll ever taste. At the stone-walled Inis Meáin Restaurant & Suites, owners Marie-Thérèse and Ruairí de Blacam have equipped the five suites with bicycles and fishing rods; oversize beds come with alpaca throws, and 30-foot-wide windows look out onto Galway Bay and Connemara. The real allure is the 30-seat glass-walled restaurant, known for its deceptively basic fish dishes and homegrown vegetables. For dessert, try the seaweed pudding in wild-berry sauce at An Dún.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

Sierra Magazine

MY GUIDE IS PETER CURTIN, brewmaster, founder of the Burren Tolkien Society, and owner of the Roadside Tavern in the nearby village of Lisdoonvarna. He is helping me with my mission to visit the various habitats of the Burren, a 220-square-mile rolling limestone massif on Ireland’s west coast. Today we’re going to the top of bare-bones Turlough Hill, where we’ll search for traces of the people who lived here 4,000 years ago.

Under a pale mist, we navigate yawning rock fractures, fields of scree, and stone walls that have stood without mortar for 1,000 years. The Burren is one of Europe’s largest karst, or continuous limestone, regions. The limestone, which formed undersea 320 million years ago, is laced with fissures through which rainwater seeps, to collect in vast tunnel systems. Ferns, mosses, and wildflowers dwell in the cracks. In places, the limestone has eroded to a calcium-rich soil that nourishes meadows bursting with tiny flowers and thick grasses and more than 700 other plant species. Hundreds of generations of farmers have grazed livestock on the meadows. The Irish government now recognizes local farmers as “Keepers of the Burren” and pays them to preserve the habitat.

Atop Turlough Hill we easily locate the ruins: the remains of a cluster of hut sites inside a large circular barricade of stone. Around us, the slinky mist is replaced by a silvery light mirrored in stone. Fields explode in brilliant green, gray hills roll to a bone-white shoreline, and the Atlantic spreads out in a blue sheet.

Curtin believes that the Burren inspired places in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictitious Middle-earth. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf says, “The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it….White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” That conjures up the Burren, and Ireland itself, well enough for me.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

San Francisco Chronicle Magazine

THE JEEP BELCHED to a stop in a courtyard flooded with noonday sun. Dominating the space was a thatch-roofed building adorned with bulls-head carvings and decorated with flowers for tomorrow’s purification festival. Our guide, Sanjay Thakur, disappeared down a walkway to check us in to our bungalows. We cracked our tired joints and stepped into the cooling breeze. Across a ravine, sod and metal huts cluttered the hillside. Just as I’d read in anthropology books back home, they stood cock-eyed to each other so evil spirits couldn't move easily among doors. Behind them loomed a three-story Baptist church.
Our American tour leader, Bob Phillips, a retired Sacramento State University professor who now runs a small, word-of-mouth travel company, Mekong Tours, had already jumped down the hillside into a nearby yard. "Laura, take a look at this. Have you ever watched a pig being butchered?" Bob grew up on an Oregon farm. For him, pig butchering is nostalgic.
I shuddered. "Never have, Bob." My stomach was already gurgling with an unfortunate mélange of coconut cookies I’d bought earlier at police checkpoint.
But Bob was insistent: "Grab your camera."
I slung my Nikon around my neck and scuffed down the worn path after him. A sudden blinding flash of sunlight off a metal roof briefly forced me keep feel my way on the irregular terrain by foot. After I blinked, I was looking at a chopped off head of a flame-singed pig displayed on a firewood pile.
We were visiting the Angami Tribe of Nagaland, in their village of Touphema deep in the folding mountains of northeast India. Nagaland is named for its hill tribes, the Nagas, or "fierce people”. It encompasses the last wrinkles of the eastern Himalayan foothills, north of the Bay of Bengal. It also divides the sultry plains of Assam to the west from the country of Myanmar, (formerly called Burma), to the east. The Nagas had stopped chopping off heads in 1963 but had warred violently with each other over issues of independence from India until a ceasefire in 1997. Because of the state's remote location and the notoriety of its people, it had been closed to foreigners until 2002.
I was here to observe and photograph the mid-February Angami Sekrenyi Festival, a fertility ceremony of dance and song related to the planting season and recalling the headhunting activities that once scored their animist beliefs. I had known I’d see feast-making as part of the event, but had imagined a sauté, not a slaughter.
As we approached the butchering site, the hacking sounds intensified until they seemed to split my own bones. A satellite dish the size of a Volkswagen Bug screened out the Baptist church. Next to it, on a cement slab, five men crouched around a mess of meat and guts. Their muscled arms, shiny with effort, arced through the air, driving hand-forged blades through sinew and bone. As I moved in close with my wide-angled lens, the zinc-like scent of blood filled my nostrils and lungs.
“What an ironic introduction,” I murmured.
Before the Nagas converted to Christianity, they believed heads contained a life-force to be gathered in raids and hoarded. Cherished like gold, cleaned skulls were stockpiled in the eaves of houses or in underground burial spots. They influenced many aspects of village life: a boy was not able to marry until he secured his first severed head; a man who boldly "took" many heads was able to wear prestigious clothing and ornaments; and head-related symbols ornamented village gates and public buildings.
But all of that changed after the 1870s when Baptist missionaries thrashed through the jungles into the Naga Hills and delivered their convictions, along with their medicine and education, to the tribes. Disenfranchised tribes throughout the hill regions of northern India were attracted to the Christian promise of equality. In Nagaland, 98 percent of the population ties their fate to the will a single Christian God.
The Nagas are using tourism as a way to boost their economy as well as preserve their culture, artifacts and rituals. The best way to see the state is by visiting its many villages scattered throughout the jungly hills. But overnight facilities in those are rare. Only two villages have developed western-style lodging big enough for the groups. The Touphema bungalows and dining hall resembled traditional buildings, built of thatch and cement by local Angamis, and decorated with typical symbols. Lodge managers were skilled in English and often shared village stories. The food is a mixture of local and central Indian cuisine, usually delicious, occasionally surprising.
That night in the dining room, sautéed pork rested before me in a bowl on the buffet. I spooned the richly seasoned chunks onto my plate next to piles of white rice, nan, and steamed chard, then nudged Bob's elbow. "They've stewed the pork with potatoes."
"That's not potatoes; it's fat."
I quickly shoveled the flabby white chunks back into the bowl.
One engaging manager I met was Khrienno Kense, who three months ago had married a Welsh man and made an unlikely move to Wales. She was now home to help with the festival. After dinner, Khrienno pulled me aside. "If you like, I will lend you one of my meklahs to wear tomorrow during the ceremony."
I said I would be honored to wear the traditional ankle-length wrap skirt, and arranged to pick it up tomorrow.
The next morning, after feast of eggs and fruit outdoors, I looked for Khrienno in the dining room. From the kitchen, rumbling laughter indicated lunch-prep was starting. The giggles were no surprise: The Angami people were considered some of the most warm and friendly in all of Nagaland. Soon Khrienno emerged from the kitchen door, her skin glowing cool as porcelain, and handed me a folded skirt. I was amazed to see it was not the traditional black color bordered in pencil-thin pink and green stripes, but a ripe hue of tangerine.
"It is my favorite skirt, woven on a back loom by a friend," she said. "The locals will appreciate seeing you wear this."
I grinned. "I certainly won't disappear in the crowd."
I couldn't get the ends to tuck firmly at the waist, so Khrienno showed me how to hitch a corner into the top fold and let the tightly-woven cloth fall smoothly to just above my hiking boots. Wrinkles are a sign of the novice wearer, Khrienno said. There were no pins or buttons, so I added extra security by cinching my hip-belt camera bag over the waist folds.
"Promise me you won't remove the camera bag without checking that the skirt will stay up," Khrienno said. We laughed together and I left, feeling wrapped in spun gold and trying hopelessly to conceal my skirt-bound waddle.
Nagas look different from the east Indians we Americans are used to seeing on TV or in travel literature. Their skin is lighter, cheekbones wider, foreheads broader. According to anthropologists, they are related, instead, to the Mongolians, and speak dialects of the Tibeto-Burmese language. I objected to one early recorder's assertion that the men were handsome, the women plain. The women were exceedingly handsome -- gorgeous even, their beauty amplified by broad, natural smiles.
The men's athletic beauty was enhanced by their Sekrenyi uniforms. When I strolled into the festival courtyard, where the dancing was to take place shortly, I spotted performers helping each other into outfits. A couple of men were practicing harmonies. Preparing my camera, I moved close to the group. The whisper of my shutter mingled with the baritones. They welcomed me with smiles. I hopped behind a log where they'd placed their arm bracelets and hair pins. A girl pointed toward my feet. Oh, horror! I'd brushed against a sticker bush and the base of my orange skirt was covered in thorns. I reached down to see if I could pull them off without ripping threads and found they peeled off easily. The dressers continued their work, but one of the men helped me to clean off the horns.  
With an hour to kill, I wandered into a building overlooked a plunging canyon. A man crouched barefoot, measuring strands of cane against a 6-inch square he'd drawn on the cement floor with a pencil. He was apparently preparing to make a basket, one of the primary tools of the village. During the drive to Touphema, I'd seen plenty of them filled with wood or green stalks, balanced on women's backs by straps to the forehead.
The entrance to the oldest part of Touphema was marked by a wooden arch decorated with carvings of a warrior holding a blood-drenched severed head – a reminder lest I forget the original natures of my hosts. Roosters crowed, women hung out the wash, and, at a neighborhood faucet, a girl washed her hair. I found an overlook encircled with stone benches and sat down. I had read that this kind of platform was a meeting place for elders and leaders. The view stretched over rooftops into a blue, leafy canyon. At home, this view would be worth a million.
 Three men and a toddler joined me, and conversation quickly turned serious.
"Are you Christian?"
"Yes, but not everyone from our country is Christian. We have many religions."
"Mostly Catholic?"
"We have many others, including Buddhism and Muslim."
"Muslim?" They seemed astounded.
"In our culture, we try to be tolerant. It is one of the best aspects of American life." They nodded, uncertainly. I open my arms wide. "We embrace -- we TRY to embrace all religions. But we are not all successful at this. Some people can't tolerate others who are different. But we are one big stew pot -- being stirred over the fire." I laugh and they join me heartily. I gesture toward the tourist bungalows, their thatch roofs just visible over the hill. "Why do you want tourists here?"
The man with the toddler lifted the boy onto his lap. "We learn about your ways of doing things."
"What do you want to learn?"
"You are advanced.” He seemed to search for words. “Your homes are not built close together like ours."
"But that doesn't mean we have a better life."
"Your houses are not like this?"
"Not usually. They are in grids with sidewalks and paved streets. People spend most time inside their houses and when they come out, they get in their cars and drive somewhere. They all have cars, generally. But, look. Please keep in mind that just because a society is advanced doesn't mean the people are happier. Maybe we can learn from you. We pass each other in our cars behind metal and glass; you pass each other on foot and wave hello. We talk over the phone, without seeing each other's faces. You sit here on these stone benches. We settle things in court. You settle things in your neighborhood meetings, face to face. We don't have much time to gather together."
Another man says: "We have many opportunities to meet together."
"What does that do for your community?"
"We know each other very well. We share our different ideas. We understand each other."
"Do you have less conflict because of it?"
They give half-hearted nods, and then I remember they have big conflicts -- disagreements that have sparked terrorism against each other for forty years, and before that, clashes relating to chopping off each other's heads.
Time was up. I thanked them deeply for the conversation.
Back at the festival courtyard, the dancing started with chanting and the entrance of 30 Angami dancers wearing heavy bamboo headdresses representing the sun. They danced homage to nature to low, throaty chanting. Next entered a troupe in stunning criss-crossed vests in red, black, and white replicating garb used in headhunting raids. A piercing howl launched their wild circular dance. Some wore horns, and all of them carried small baskets at their waists mimicking those used during headhunting raids to carry sharp sticks that were placed in the ground to thwart pursuers.
Afterward, as I wandered again into the village, a gush of rapid-fire English erupted behind me. "My name is Medo Rio-- would you like me to show you around?"
She had two friends with her, but she did all the talking – at high speed. "It is a very beautiful skirt you are wearing and won't you come to my house I would like you to meet my aunt she will give you some tea." We followed a jeep trail past a kiosk selling soda and batteries, past a pen containing three black mithun, the Naga's favorite water buffalo, and up a short hill. Medo never stopped talking. "I go to school in Kohima (the Nagaland capital) and when I am here in Touphema I stay with my aunt and uncle." As we entered the smoky darkness of her hut, I cinched my meklah under my camera belt, hoping to smooth out un-presentable wrinkles. The interior was illuminated only by the glowing hearth. Dark corners dissolved into nothingness.
Medo's aunt unfolded from a stool where she was cooking by the fire and shook my hand. Her meklah was the rich color of eggplant. A strand of cornelian beads hung against her violet shirt. She had pinned her black hair loosely in a bun.
I bowed. "I am honored to be in your home."
"Oooh, ooh, oooh." She said, grinning and bowing.
"It means yes, yes." Medo answered my querying look. "She doesn’t speak English. Her name is Vila Rio."
Vila bent over the hearth and blew the embers to life with a hollow stick of bamboo. Naga houses don't have roof holes for the fire. Smoke filters into clothing and drifts out the door. Soot piles up on all the things stored in the room, including baskets, wooden plates, and vegetables hung to dry near the roof. The flaring fire lit up shelves stacked with a dozen plates, cups and plastic containers. Clean, bulbous aluminum water jugs gleamed from wall hooks.
As Medo chatted, Vila heated water and made me some tea with sugar and milk. Soon my brain felt tingly with the caffeine. "I love the color of Vila's meklah," I said. Medo fetched a folded purple bundle from one of the dark corners.
“Vila wants you to have this meklah," Medo said. "It is almost the same color."
I leaned away in surprise. "Oh, no, no, no. I am honored, but I cannot possibly take such a fine gift." It was not good manners to refuse a gift, but this one was too much for me to accept. However, I also did not want to imply I did not like it. I was socially stuck. "I would like to pay something for it. There is too much work involved in that for you to give it to me." Later I realized a gift exchange is far more meaningful to the Angamis than an economic exchange, but in the moment, I felt embarrassed, and wanted to give them the first thing I could think of – money.
The light outside soon faded. "I will guide you back with a flashlight," Medo said.
She put a match into a shiny soup can, and a candle mounted in wax inside flared. The can hung sideways from a wire handle attached to two holes bored into the curved topside. The flickering light was just enough to guide us. In the moments before my eyes adjusted, I had to feel my way by foot, relying kinesthetically on the uneven sensations of the ground against my boot soles. Through doorways and windows, I glimpsed shapes of people seated around the hearth, their soft voices and "ooh, ooh, oohs" now seeming especially soothing to me in the darkness. After saying goodnight to Medo and closing my bungalow door, I could not bring myself to flip on the electric bedroom light. The shroud of darkness nurtured me somehow. I lay on my bed, my tangerine meklah now wrapped lightly around my legs like a heavy sheet. My mind recalled the aromas of the day. The zinc tang of chopped pig and the nutty smoke of Angami hearths mingled with the real sharpness of my own end-of-day sweat. I drifted to sleep to the hum of voices outside – people rehearsing for the next songs of purification and good fortune, maybe, or else preparing for the next slaughter.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

San Francisco Chronicle Magazine

Sometime in the night our bunkhouse shuddered. Then something roared. I looked out the barred window, which separated the inky night into disjunctive frames. Earlier, eight bears had been milling around outside. Now I was just able to discern their milky forms moving about like Martha Graham dancers on a ghostly set.

I was in Canada, peering out from a mobile lodge on wheels parked 20 miles east of Churchill, Manitoba, on the western shore of Hudson Bay. The tundra buggy bunkhouse shook again, and I heard a familiar howl. Fine. It was the wind (an 100-mile-an-hour wind, I later learned). I gathered my quilt and snuggled in.

The north wind signaled the arrival of winter, when the Hudson Bay waters freeze and polar bears go out on the ice to hunt their most nutritious food, ringed seals. When the ice melts in June or July, the bears come ashore to pass the next four months in "walking hibernation" -- fasting and resting.

It is because of the Hudson Bay bears' unique sea/land life cycle that an interesting event occurs near Churchill every fall. In October, the normally solitary bears gather together -- as many as 1,000 of them -- to await the coastal freeze-up. A fascinating convergence of species takes place as travelers arrive by the thousands to observe.

I was not one of those bear-crazed types. If it hadn't been for my mom, I wouldn't have come. When she'd described "living among the polar bears in the tundra buggy lodge," the thrill in her voice reminded me that Mom rarely closes windows on possibilities. She's always game. I would be, too.

The next morning over wild-blueberry pancakes, I cupped strong coffee in both hands, calculating when to ask the lodge managers if the wind had ever capsized one of these tundra buggy bunkhouses. Before I could speak, Mom whispered, "There's Dancer!"

Yesterday we'd seen the 1,300-pound bear standing 12 feet tall on his hind legs, poking his nose through an open lodge window. Now, in the early light, Dancer was doing polar aerobics, pawing the air, rolling in the snow, stretching his massive neck and anvil head.

Dancer is often the biggest bear around camp. Looking at him up close and remembering what I'd read in biologist Ian Stirling's book "Polar Bears," I felt percolations of wonder. Coating Dancer's massive shoulders and flanks were two layers of insulating fur that kept him warm in temperatures below minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Although polar bears appear white, their fur is transparent, each strand a hollow core. When Dancer and the other bears move about, they lumber as if their bones are made of concrete. Part of that slowness is intentional. They are conserving energy, waiting to eat the food that fuels them best, the ringed seal, which has plenty of tasty fat rich with omega-3 fatty acids, something I prefer to get from walnuts. Part of the bears' sluggish behavior comes also from their massive weight, as much as 1,800 pounds for the most formidable males. They have some amazing powers, too. Our guide, wildlife photographer Jenny Ross, marvels at how sea bears navigate home on constantly drifting ice with no landmarks. They had also had a rather accelerated evolution, over 2,000 years, from ancestors that were dramatically different, the brown bear. Dancer's distant cousin is the grizzly.

Watching Dancer stretch, I couldn't wait to get next to him in the roving tundra buggy we used for bear-watching. Most days the sun was stingy, but on this morning it streamed under thick clouds. Our driver, Saskatchewan native Chris Hendrickson, stocked the vehicle with lunch, snacks and warm drinks, then handed one travelmate a broom. "I need to check something from the ground," he said. "If a polar bear gets close, whack him."

A tundra buggy isn't cute like a VW Bug, as its name implies. Instead, it looks like an ice box made for the jolly green giant -- dropped on its side, punched with windows and hoisted eight feet off the ground on giant tires made for farm tractors. On the horizon it resembles a spooky creature from "Star Wars."

Tundra buggies are equipped with propane heaters, double seats and big windows. "No arms or hands hanging out the windows please," Hendrickson warned. Years ago, when an excited photographer rested his elbow on a sill, a bear made a snack of his arm.

Tundra buggy lodges like the one we were staying in are made of individual buggies converted into kitchen, dining and bunk rooms and linked together, Amtrak-style. Bands of windows give constant visual access to the bears. Only two companies have permits to run tundra buggy lodges in the Cape Churchill Wildlife Management Area. Our tour operator, Tundra Buggy Adventures, was the first buggy concessionaire and still had its No. 1 tundra buggy in operation, not for tours but to carry a mounted video camera that streams images to www.polarbearcam.com.

Every day it took awhile to organize our cold-weather gear and camera equipment. We were all amateur photographers, some with professional lenses big enough to spot bruises at a Super Bowl. When the bears moved, the whir-click of camera shutters followed. The only other sounds were our own giggles. Despite being a cliche, the wild white teddies were just too cute.

Jenny Ross, who lives in Truckee, has photographed every bear species in the world. She recently spent two years on assignment capturing photos for her traveling exhibition, "Bears! Icons of the Wild." Ross, a former Harvard-trained attorney who chucked the legal life for a more creative pursuit, didn't conceal her childlike affection for the bears. She said things like, "This magnificent animal is an evolutionary masterpiece," and she talked easily about why some people love the bears so much. "We tend to think they are like us," she said. "They inspire emotion, they're playful, they appear to be affectionate toward one another, and they are good mothers." They also survive by their wits, contemplate challenges, sleep eight hours and break ice in frustration when they miss a meal.

Our group didn't have to travel far from the lodge for action; bears were everywhere. Polar bears congregate near Cape Churchill because ice usually forms there first along the 30-mile coastline extending eastward from the town of Churchill to the cape. While the bears wait for the freeze-up, the 780 Churchill inhabitants adjust their habits. Rule No. 1 is, don't leave town on foot. A "polar-bear promenade" nearby is a death walk for humans. At night, "polar bear police" scare interloping bears with rubber bullets and flares. In the mornings, patrol members ensure children get safely onto school buses, and on Halloween they circulate with the little devils and goblins. Bears have more trouble adjusting. Those addicted to the town dump either end up confined in a holding cell, affectionately called the polar bear jail, or tranquilized and transported away by helicopter.

Remarkably, in recent decades, deaths by bears in Churchill have been few. The last was in 1983. One night a man scavenged meat from the refrigerator of a burned-down hotel, stuffed the food in his pockets, then rounded the corner smack into a bear.

However, close calls continue. Bears normally run from helicopters, but last year one didn't. It hid in a depression, and when a researcher jumped out of the helicopter, the bear knocked her down. Other people were able to scare the animal away. The woman suffered minor injuries.

One night last year two Italians broke down in a rental car. They walked the five miles to town with all senses alert, no doubt appreciating each breath. They saw amazing Northern Lights and made it to bed without trouble.

Inside the buggies I didn't worry; the vehicles were like rolling fortresses. Our only occasional discomfort was the cold. With windows open, I sometimes shivered in my knee-length coat. On the open-air viewing balcony, my nose froze. Mom warmed hers with a thumb-sized fur cap.

Mom also made me put warming packs in my boots and mittens, even though I didn't want them. Soon everyone was wearing them. The days living among the bears were luxuriously timeless. We saw three young adults having a standoff, mothers trailed by twins, bears curled under crusts of snow, bears spread-eagled on their bellies to cool down, two young bears rolling together in a shallow snow pit. We never wanted to move away from any scene.

We spotted almost every activity bear lovers yearn for, including a ritualized sparring between males called play fighting. Why expend the extra energy when they need to conserve it, I asked Ross. She explained that play fighting most likely develops the motor and coordination skills bears need on the ice. Then she added with a mischievous grin, "Scientists try to avoid anthropomorphizing, but the play-fighting polar bears in the western Hudson Bay do seem to be enjoying themselves immensely."

Bears mate in April and May. Instead of returning to ice in the fall, pregnant females enter dens where they typically have two cubs. Newborns weigh less than 1.5 pounds, according to Ross, who once crawled into a den to photograph tiny twins. Mothers nurse them with milk that contains 35 percent fat. When the new families emerge in the summer, the mother hasn't eaten for eight months. Mothers and cubs are fun to watch and hard to spot, but we located several groups.

I was beginning to feel especially small. How physically humble we humans are when stripped of weapons, man-made tools, energy resources and speedy transportation. Around Churchill, our monolithic vehicles gave us tremendous advantages. Looking beyond that, however, I found a new sense of myself as a player of equal, rather than dominant, status in the natural world. Not only the polar bears reminded me of this, but also the three other species that, with the sea bear, make up the subarctic Big Four, including the arctic fox, the arctic hare and the ptarmigan. Also impressive was the complex landscape, rigid with permafrost yet supporting a food chain that began with the lemming and ended with the largest carnivore on Earth. And then there was the climate, which made its stormiest presence known to me that unforgettable bunkhouse night when the north winds bore the promise of winter.

Ironically, the climate may be the bear's final predator. Their ice-bound habitat is disappearing as a result of global warming. Scientific modeling predicts that if the warming trend continues, polar bears may be trying to survive in a nearly ice-free Arctic by the summer of 2080.

Last June, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature announced the Hudson Bay population has declined recently from 1,200 to 1,000. The decline is related to an early break-up and later freeze-up of the ice, the group said. Also this year, the Center for Biological Diversity has asked the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. It's a sad day when one realizes that for all of the pleasure and knowledge the bears give us, we are poisoning their world in return.

As the tour ended, I admitted the bear cuteness factor was acceptable. I even bought my own National Geographic video. In the Churchill airport, however, I lamented that the Northern Lights, usually easy to see at this latitude, had eluded us. Thirty minutes later, on the Calm Air flight to Winnipeg, we had a surprise: All across the blackened sky ethereal green lights leaped and shimmered in their own boundless dance. I offered my window seat to a woman on the aisle so she could see them. As I stood waiting, head bowed awkwardly under the airplane's low ceiling, I noticed Mom patting her lap. "Sit here, honey," she said. I paused, but only briefly.

ON A QUIET LANE in Agnone, Italy, inside a dimly lit workshop owned by the local Marinelli family, master craftsmen circle a pit that is packed with dirt. Rivulets of fiery molten bronze have just streamed from a superheated furnace into a giant clay mold that is buried in the pit. As the men wait for the bronze to cool, beams of daylight cut across the room from high windows. Dust whirls in the air, along with murmured incantations: Catholic priests are invoking good fortune for the bell, and giving thanks.

When the chanting ends, workmen begin heaving out of the pit the material that less than an hour ago they were shoveling into it. They unearth a housing of wood the size of a small shed, and as a mechanical lift eases the block up out of the hole, the craftsmen stand still, their thick hands clamped to the handles of their spades.

The block contains a heavy bell that has been at least a year in the making. Once installed in a tall church belfry, it should ring for decades if not centuries, striking in the minds of all kinds of people feelings of nostalgia, or urgency, or in some cases fear.

Those tugs of feeling will have their origins in this workshop.

The finished bell is only as successful as its bronze pour, says Ivo de Simone, an interpreter who leads small tours through the foundry. If the mold were to jiggle or shift in the dirt while the liquid bronze is racing into it, the decoration could be blemished, or the bell’s shape could be ever-so-faintly distorted, a tragedy that could make the bell’s harmonic timbre sound — to a sophisticated ear — subtly off-tune.

“This is a dangerous moment,” de Simone says. “To make the mold, it takes many months or a year; to make the bell, it takes two minutes.”

One of Italy’s many picturesque mediaeval villages, Agnone tops a ridge in the Molise region of the Apennine Mountains, a few hours’ drive southeast of Rome. Home to some 4,000 people, it is known among Italians for having an extraordinary number of churches, many dating to times in the Middle Ages when families living close to each other could afford to support a small community church. In one old neighborhood, the corners of three churches nearly bump against other. At one time in Agnone, there were 10 bell foundries; now there is only the Marinelli workshop.

One of the oldest companies in the world, the Marinelli Foundry began making bells in 1339 in a shop that had already been making bronze bells for at least 300 years. In the foundry’s museum hangs proof — an oblong bell that was produced there around 1000 AD. The company is now run by two Marinelli brothers, Pasquale and Armando.

Over the years some high profile places have coveted their work. Marinelli bells ring in the Tower of Pisa and in the preserved ruins of Pompeii. In 1924, the Vatican awarded it the “title of pontifical foundry.” In the year 2000, the company made a 5-ton bell that was 19 feet in circumference for the Vatican’s 2,000-year anniversary. In the mid 20th century, the foundry replaced bells that were destroyed during World War II.

The company also has made bells in observance of two sad occasions involving Americans: In 1996, Italy sent a Marinelli bell to Bodega Bay, Calif., to honor a boy who’d been shot and killed by thieves while he was in Italy on vacation with his family. After the death, the boy’s parents had donated his organs to seven recipients, and the story had raised awareness about organ donation. In 2007, the region of Molise presented a Marinelli bell to the West Virginia city of Monangah at the 100-year anniversary of a coal mine blast that killed 367 men, 87 of whom had roots in Molise.

People will want a Marinelli bell, in particular, because of the precision of design, the beauty of detail, and the alluring sound of the timbre. The exquisite production demands an array of skills — from stone masonry to carpentry to the delicate work of sculpting three-dimensional reliefs. The production technique is more than a thousand years old, and is called “lost wax.” It requires the making of a hollow mold that is sized for the bell’s musicality and tone, which is determined by the mathematical relationships between variables — thickness, diameter, etc.

The lost wax process begins as builders assemble broken bricks and clay into a core support that is slightly smaller than the finished bell will be. The craftsmen then apply wax to the core to create the bell’s shape and thicknesses. They carve and apply wax details to this layer, creating a three dimensional surface design which might include human figures, abstract patterns, or compositions of foliage. The wax is encased in another layer of clay. After everything hardens, the wax inside is heated up and melted away to make room for the molten bronze. Carpenters then build a wooden framework around the mold.

This is where the pit comes into play. The foundry’s centerpiece is an area where bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) is melted in a furnace set at a scorching 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. A pit lies next to the furnace, and the wood frame containing the bell is lowered into it. Workers pack dirt around the frame to hold it firmly in place.

The next moments are when some people get a little nervous, according to de Simone. “There is a lot of tension in the room,” he says. The priests start their incantations, the oven chute is opened, and hot liquid bronze pours down the channel like a fiery River Styx, to drain into the hollow place left by the melted wax. “They have to get the quantity of bronze just right,” di Simone says. After the liquid metal stops flowing, the chanting ends.

When a new bell sees its first daylight, the surface gleams like polished chrome; but it is not ready for show until artisans buff out irregularities and fine-tune intricate detail.

The bell is then shipped to its new home, which could be as far away as Indonesia, or as close as the next hilltop town. There, hoisted into its tower, it will ring out over the rooftops its sounds conceived in the sun-streaked workshop at the end of this tiny Agnone street — for ages to come.

By Laura Read

A MEMOIR IS NO GOOD WITHOUT a mission-driven narrator the reader cares about. In Tahoe/Truckee, we usually see a good memoir every decade or so. But in 2022 and 2023, no fewer than six residents have published or are soon to publish books about how they navigated important moments in their lives. Six!

Do we care? Yes! The stories say a lot about what makes a person who’s drawn to the Tahoe surroundings tick.

In the recent spate of memoirs we get to enjoy stories from, chronologically: Suzanne Roberts, acclaimed literary writer and teacher; Tim Hauserman, accomplished humor writer and backpacking expert born in North Tahoe; Eddy Ancinas, a multi-decade resident and nonfiction writer connected with the downhill skiing culture; Jeremy Jones, snowboard superhero and environmentalist; Hans Burkhart, a big personality associated with Palisades Tahoe and tramway history; and Alenka Vrecek, one-time big mountain ski coach and owner/founder of Tahoe Teas. Books are available at Word After Word, Alpenglow Sports, other book venues, or from the authors.
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Moonshine Ink set out to bring these gritty locals together on one page.
ACCLAIMED: Suzanne Roberts has published numerous books poetry and nonfiction and helped many a Tahoe student birth his or her memoir.

Suzanne Roberts taught writing for many years at Lake Tahoe Community College on the South Shore. As a current instructor at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe’s low-residency MFA writing program and as a local coach giving independent workshops, Roberts has helped many a Tahoe-ite birth his or her own tales. While she also has published several books of poetry, her nonfiction works primarily are memoir, the most celebrated of which is being released by the University of Nebraska Press this summer in a 10th anniversary edition: Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail. Her 2020 book Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (University of Nebraska Press) has won numerous awards.

But her new book is a whole different beast. Meshing the intimacy of poetry with the yarn-spinning drama of storytelling, Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (2022, University of Nebraska Press) she gathers searing essays that are mostly lyrical in style, which explore very difficult emotions, namely her recent responses to aging and death. Even more than her other books, these stories cut deep. All of the books reviewed here clearly required extraordinary effort to write, but in Animal Bodies, in which Roberts revealed what it means to live through and with the traumatic losses of her parents, friends, and dog, she plumbed an emotional well that few dare to test.

For Roberts, writing is not worth the effort if it doesn’t reveal new insights. “My friend Kim Wyatt says, ‘If it isn’t honest, it’s just noise,’ and that has always resonated with me,” she told Moonshine. “I want to make more with my words than just noise … We all have to live with difficulties, but the writer can transform the most difficult things into art.”

For those who want to tap their own memory wells, Roberts is teaching a four-part memoir course in South Lake Tahoe in February. Learn more on her website, suzanneroberts.net.
IN THE WILD: Tim Hauserman opens up about what it’s like to hike solo in the Sierra and elsewhere.

Tim Hauserman. In Going It Alone: Ramblings and Reflections from the Trail (2022, University of Nevada Press), Hauserman — a frequent Moonshine Ink contributor — also goes introspective, revealing what it’s like to feel both lonely and exhilarated while hiking solo on some of the Sierra’s iconic trails. His stories convey the magic not only of the Tahoe Rim Trail, for which he separately has written a guidebook, but also of the paths and lakes in Desolation Wilderness. He then shares a troubling experience he had on a multi-day Minnesota hike that both surprised and liberated him. Completing the book was yet another challenge, he said.

“In many ways, writing the memoir was a form of therapy, helping me to delve into the challenges I’ve faced,” Hauserman told Moonshine. “My favorite form of writing therapy is using humor at my own expense to delve into the pitfalls of life. To finish a memoir, you need to have a passion for telling your story, and to allow yourself to be vulnerable.” His local writing group helped immensely with feedback and goal setting, he said.
INCA TRAILS: Ancinas’ story about travel over the Andes with friends is heartwarming and thoughtful.

Eddy Ancinas. Anyone who’s known Ancinas for a while may have heard about an adventure she had in 1986 traveling to Peru and over the Andes by horseback for seven days with two local friends. Quirky, surprising, and sometimes scary things happened on that trip, including an injury, an unplanned eight-hour trek along the Urubamba River, and a frightening brake-impaired truck ride over a 14,000-foot pass. The experiences yielded Tracing Inca Trails: An Adventure in the Andes (2022, She Writes Press). In her writing, Ancinas responded closely to the landscape, its people, and their social situations, and conveyed her observations with sensitivity.

“I am desperate to get as close as I can to this grand spectacle,” she reflected in the book when recalling the impressive Salcantay, the 12th highest mountain in Peru, reaching 20,574 feet at its summit. “… but it is rough going over the giant rocks the glacier has piled up over the centuries. Just as I find the perfect rock to sit on and peer over the edge, I hear a low rumble and then a thunderous crash … I have never seen anything so big, so powerful or so magnificent.”

Ancinas told Moonshine, “Although a memoir is about a personal experience, I think, like all good literature, it must have a universal message. It can’t be just about your amazing feats (chest thumping). It needs the usual story arc (beginning, middle, end) and characters the reader relates to.”

Jeremy Jones. Annotated drawings, detailed charts, alluring paintings, impressive storytelling — all appear in the book the elite snowboarder and environmentalist released this year, The Art of Shralpinism: Lessons from the Mountains (2022, Mountaineers Books). The work is a smorgasbord you can dip into and out of on any page to enjoy Jones’ anecdotes, honor codes, snow wisdom, and more. It is a delight to read, and since there will be a review in our February issue (with a fun twist), there is less analysis here. Suffice it to say, the book compiles the thoughts and memories of a person who has a lot to share.

Hans Burkhart, a well-known — and at times feared because of his powerful presence and exacting style — manager at Squaw Valley U.S.A. (now Palisades Tahoe) was even more significant as the go-to architect of many of the first ski area tramways in the western U.S. In December, he unveiled a finely printed and far-reaching memoir, Above and Beyond: My Life Giving the World a Lift (2022, Hans Burkhart and Peter Bansen), written over the past few years with the help of his friend Pete Bansen, a longtime local who was for many years the fire chief in Olympic Valley.

Born in 1935 in Oberammergau, Germany, in the same town where the Passion Play is produced every decade, Burkhart became devoted to skiing early, according to the book. “Often, I’d ride my bike for two days into Austria just to ski,” he wrote. “I’d carry a backpack with some clothes, a sleeping bag, and light provisions like teabags. Then I skinned up to a mountain hut operated by Munich Mountain Club and spent the better part of a week skiing the various peaks of the area before riding the bike home. The trip home had much more downhill and I could sometimes ride the whole distance in a single day.”

The book explains how Burkhart arrived in Olympic Valley in 1960, became a right-hand-man for then-owner Alex Cushing, and was hired by various entities to chart and build what was then a new and exciting conveyance system transporting groups of people to the mountaintops quickly.

Burkhart told Moonshine that the book helped him to record the many stories he has been long telling his kids about his life. “It is a lot of work,” he admitted in his typical truncated style. For 2.5 years he and Bansen met weekly to flesh out the memories. Punctuating the details are captivating tales of near-death experiences, of which Burkhart lists 12. All of them pitted his human body and vigorous strength of character against the brawny forces of nature and the powerful mechanical equipment with which we humans attempt to control it. The last chapter, titled Now What?, implies that in Burkhart’s world of defying both death and gravity, there is clearly room for a 13th.
INSPIRING: Vrecek, a North Lake Tahoe big mountain skier and owner of Tahoe Teas, shares her harrowing mountain bike ride from Tahoe City to Baja.

Alenka Vrecek. The Slovenian-born big mountain skier is esteemed among Tahoe’s extreme athletes, having taught many of them when they were youngsters in the big mountain ski program at Palisades Tahoe. At the height of her calling, however, a leg injury ended her career. That was just the start of a cascade of life-altering incidents including her breast cancer, helping her wheelchair-bound daughter recover from a car accident on California Highway 89 North, and discovering her husband’s Parkinson’s disease.

Rather than shrinking inward, a few years ago Vrecek decided that, despite being in her 50s, it was time to pursue an athletic dream she’d held for some time — to ride a mountain bike on a 2,500-mile journey from Tahoe City to near the tip of Baja — alone. Her 57-day trip yielded endless stories, connections with local vaqueros and ranchers, and personal struggles. It also led to plenty of steep uphill climbs, moments in the dark in which she tucked behind shrubs hide from strange passing cars, and long hot days of pedaling during which her drinking water ebbed perilously low.

Vrecek’s book, She Rides (2023 She Writes Press), describes all of this against the backdrop of her Slovenian childhood and her first years living in California as a young woman. It shares her love of family and of place, and her embrace of the kinds of achievements we can make with our human bodies, if only we try — hard.
“I looked to my left, checking out a mass of granite boulders just as a giant orange full moon rose from behind the mountain, welcoming my arrival to the land of magic,” she wrote about a section of dirt road she traveled south of Tecate, Mexico. “I was soon bouncing mercilessly along a washboard road by the light of the full moon. My son, Tilen, texted me: ‘Mom, are you still riding? Isn’t it dark already?’ I texted back: ‘Yes, I am riding by the light of the moon, and an owl is keeping me company.’”

Hours later, things turned scary. “Sleeping on the side of the road by myself in the tent was definitely unnerving,” she wrote. “I was pushing negative thoughts and fear out of my mind. I repeated my mantra: ‘I am not afraid! I am not afraid!’ I was hoping no one could see me but the invisible spirits of the ancestors who were watching over me. I closed my eyes. I was done. Listening to an owl hooting nearby was comforting, and I drifted off. They heard me! I was safe!”

These memoirs urge readers to leave their comfort zones. What’s out there? What’s inside? For each of us, the journey will have distinct challenges and beauty. As these writers attest in their undeniably Tahoe stories, we can only find our own successes if we reach high.

AFTER MORE THAN 40 YEARS, in 2022 The Great Ski Race changed the course of its annual North Tahoe 30k cross-country ski tour. It was a big decision, because since 1977, the event that calls itself one of the largest races west of the Mississippi had followed a historic point-to-point route along an old postal route and logging trails from Tahoe City to Truckee.

Now the course starts and ends at Tahoe XC in Tahoe City. It still follows part of the old postal route and uses old logging trails that are familiar to mountain bikers and hikers in summertime and snowmobilers and skiers in winter, but it is now a loop race and slightly shorter than it was in the past; however, at a whopping 26k, not by much.
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Colorful XC skis make a rainbow in front of signs that show winners of previous races. Photo: Troy Corliss

“It was a difficult decision after so many years of going to Truckee,” Race Director Dirk Schoonmaker said. “Once we made the change, the logistics got easier for organizers and racers and every comment I have heard has been positive, especially regarding the downhill.”

Will The Great Ski Race originators be doing flip flops over this change?

No way. One early Great Ski Race supporter was Tahoe Nordic Center founder Skip Reedy. Retired now, he lives with his wife, Katja, in Bend, Oregon. “I was not surprised when the course was changed,” Reedy said. “It was always a hit or miss being able to get the finish to go all the way to Hilltop/Cottonwood [Restaurant in Truckee] with heavy brush, low snow, and reluctant neighbors allowing the course to cross their land.”

Reedy sponsored three races annually during the 22 years he owned and operated North Tahoe cross-country ski areas. “Two races were always loop races, but the point-to-point Tahoe-to-Truckee race became the most popular,” he said. “The team’s choice of the new loop around Mt. Watson has some wonderful terrain. I have skied that area in the past and think it’s a good choice for taking advantage of higher snow levels. Sorry, Truckee.”

Warm snow has indeed had a major impact. Low snow conditions forced the race cancellation in four out of the past ten winters. Before that, the race had been abandoned only once in 33 years. It was called off because of low snow that time, too.

In 2020, The Great Ski Race was cancelled once again, this time because of the pandemic. As its coordinators regrouped, they decided it was time to adjust the course in case the minimal snow years continued. The new loop course was born.
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Race proceeds from The Great Ski Race support search and rescue operations in the Tahoe backcountry. Photo: Troy Corliss

The course still features the strenuous Starratt Pass climb from the forests above Tahoe XC, as well as famed Soup Station One, but from that high point, instead of veering downhill on the legendary and steep S-turns toward Truckee, the route goes straight along old logging roads toward Northstar California. It then swings around Mt. Watson and back through the forest above Carnelian Bay onto Tahoe XC’s Blue Trail to finish on a sizzling downhill at the Tahoe XC lodge.

Skiers don’t depart just because they’re done with the race: There’s plenty of partying to be had at the Tahoe XC lodge. The ski area’s parking lot is cordoned off for dancing, chowing, and jabbering, and of that there’s plenty. Hot food is on order, as usual. The food truck Men Wielding Fire has been serving up soup and other goodies — and they will again with owner Jack Lyons at the helm.

More than 150 search team members and residents volunteer multiple hours to put the race on — not all of them skiers, but all ready to have a good time and present a great event, according to Schoonmaker. Volunteers deal with parking, food service, starting-gate and finish-line setup, timing, registration — you see it, there’s a job for it. There’s always at least one volunteer MC squawking over the loudspeaker as racers finish. Last year it was Michael Hogan joined by team member Kyle Railton. The Great Ski Race has been known for antics and costumes, and Railton didn’t let anyone down. His Captain America outfit was a red-toned hit atop the announcer’s podium.
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Doug Read and other originators don costumes along with racers and cheerleaders. Photo: Troy Corliss

The outfit echoed one of many race traditions. Organized by team members in the late 1980s, The Great Ski Race Cheerleaders have raised a ruckus on the course every single year since, cheering skiers at the top of Starratt Pass, hooting them on to Truckee at Soup Station Two, and calling them home at Cottonwoods.

In 2022, the same cheerleaders honored local athletes who have competed at the Olympic Winter Games. It just so happens that at the 2022 Olympics, JC Schoonmaker was a standout cross-country ski racer on the US team. His dad is Dirk Schoonmaker, The Great Ski Race director for more than 20 years, and his mom is Marty Schoonmaker, who helped organize races at the Far West Nordic training program. Schoonmaker was joined at the 2022 Olympics by cross-country skier and North Tahoe resident Hannah Halvorson, who now teaches skiing workshops at Tahoe XC.

The Great Ski Race participants are timed, and start in waves according to previous times. Photo: Troy Corliss

For years The Great Ski Race has been the main fundraising event for TNSAR. The team could count on raising at least $30,000 per year from the proceeds, according to records, and that paid for all the equipment and training needed for the year. But those days of simplicity are gone. The team has grown from a one-truck operation and a bunch of construction workers bent on being well-organized, teaching kids to survive, and knowing the backcountry to a well-oiled force that has plucked more than 400 shivering lost folks from the winter-bound backcountry. Their efforts require not only securing equipment and training, but also leaving their families and homes usually late in the evening, pushing through snow and wind and sleet, and sometimes, late in the night when they can’t get home quickly, warming up a chilled lost person around a campfire hand-built in the snow.

The team has also expanded in transportation methods — from a group of skiers only, training on slim wooden skis and leather boots, to a combination of skiers, snowmobilers, communication van drivers, and snowcat drivers operating sophisticated equipment propelled by advances in technology, resources, and human ingenuity.
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Colleen Conners Pace stokes skiers along with traditional course cheerleaders who have worn different costumes for every race since the late 1980s. Photo: Troy Corliss

As technology has advanced — with cell phone batteries lasting longer, GPS units aiding communication and tracking, and a special app mapping out search patterns — everyone’s equipment has improved. Now team members locate lost people more quickly and get them out of danger much more rapidly than they did in the past.

The 2022-2023 winter snowstorms have delivered endless days of skiing, and the pandemic’s restrictions have spawned a new load of skiers, snowboarders, snowshoers, and snowmobilers in the backcountry, potentially getting into trouble. Fortunately, at the team’s first meeting of the season, more than 20 newcomers asked to be involved. New members do not join search teams right away. In on-snow and off-snow training, they first learn about terrain, equipment, snow behavior, lost-person behavior, search techniques, and team protocols.

The Great Ski Race has become much more than a fundraising event. It is now part of North Tahoe and Truckee culture. Every year, skiers, some fresh off the couch, train for, talk about, and dream of it. Afterward, they compare notes and official race times. And the stories go on.

“Last year there was so much positive and exuberant energy at the start and finish that it made all the hard work by the volunteers and all the tough decisions by the race committee seem minor compared to the outcome and the return,” Schoonmaker said. “As much as anything it pretty much guarantees that we can hold the race every year regardless of snowfall, since we stay at a higher elevation.”

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Having evolved over the years, TNSAR members wear identifying red jackets and use modern snowcats to transport skiers and carry found people out of the backcountry. Photo: Troy Corliss

The Great Ski Race takes place March 5 this year “at 9am sharp!” Online registration costs $80 until Thursday, March 2. The fee includes a celebration party with delicious hot food, live music and dancing, and many prizes. Pickup for bibs and the pre-race packet is at Tahoe XC Friday, March 3, 12-5pm, Saturday, March 4, 9am-5pm and Sunday, March 5 (race day) until 8:30am. For details and to register, visit thegreatskirace.com.

Online registration costs $80 until Thursday, March 2. The fee includes a celebration party with delicious hot food, live music and dancing, and many prizes. Pickup for bibs and the pre-race packet is at Tahoe XC Friday, March 3, 12-5pm, Saturday, March 4, 9am-5pm and Sunday, March 5 (race day) until 8:30am. For details and to register, visit thegreatskirace.com.

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Laura Read has been a member of the TNSAR Team since the mid-1990s, helping to handle PR, functioning on the once-essential-now-defunct dispatch team, and helping to teach fourth graders how to survive when lost in the woods. She is the Opinion Editor with the monthly news publication, Moonshine Ink.

Boise’s Tractor Doctor
Rob Bearden revels in try-it-again pluck of tractor-makers
By Laura Read

Every Wednesday in Boise, Idaho, amid stately historical buildings — the domed Greek Revival courthouse, the Spanish-Colonial train depot — a tour of one of America’s great vintage tractor collections takes place. The man leading it is known as the Tractor Doctor. Google him, and the results fill two pages. Ask fellow staffers about him, and they break into grins. “He has a genius’s brain,” says one.
On every afternoon but tour day, the Tractor Doctor is cleaning, painting, repairing — maybe even cranking up — one of the 50 vintage tractors and steam engines he cares for onsite; but when the tour begins, he fires up stories. His name is Rob Bearden, and he gives voice to the try-it-again pluck of America’s early tractor builders.

The tractors are front and center in Boise’s new community center, a 7.5-acre park and gathering space called Jack’s Urban Meeting Place, nicknamed JUMP. Without the tractors, JUMP might not exist. Without Bearden, the tractors wouldn’t carry the panache they do. “In 1790, 90 percent of people were farming, and we fed the United States,” he likes to say. “In 1990, 2 percent of people were farming, and we fed the world. It’s because of tractors!”

The collection originated in 1998 when, after its previous owner passed away, Idaho’s J.R. “Jack” Simplot, founder of one of the world’s largest private agricultural companies, bought them at auction, saying he’d build a $100 million agriculture museum for them back home in Boise. In 2008 at the age of 99, Simplot died without making that happen. But his vision endured. His heirs formed a foundation and created JUMP, which opened in 2015.

Searching for a tractor guru, JUMP found in Bearden a charismatic blend of storyteller, tinkerer, and engine aficionado. He’s loved engines since he was a child roaming among the garlic, onion, and alfalfa fields of Yerington, Nev. After his family moved to Washington State, he devoured drafting, electronics, and welding in shop class. “I was a mechanic from day one,” he says.
Bearden relishes new facts and rare bits of history. He’s also fascinated by people. “I’ve pushed people for hours in wheelchairs,” he says. “Little kids — I’ve pushed them onto tractor seats; their eyes lit up. You talk about a community…” He leaves his thought unfinished, then adds, “This is a lot of fun.”

Some of Bearden’s stories refer to the same decade in which Jack Simplot raised his first potatoes. Simplot was 20 years old in 1929 when he launched J.R. Simplot Company in Idaho. The company developed a dehydrator and supplied millions of pounds of dehydrated potatoes and onions to the military during World War II. Later, it created the first commercially viable frozen French fries for McDonald’s.

Bearden admires that spirit of invention. “After 1885 when the internal combustion patent expired,” he says, “everybody started to build engines, some of which evolved into tractors. The race was on!”

His first tour stop is the 1909 Advance-Rumely “Kerosene Annie,” the groundbreaking Oil Pull factory prototype that abandoned the complicated, heavy, and expensive steam power systems of the time. “This prototype was built just to see if it would work,” Bearden says. Steam engine tractors required two operators, he says. Kerosene Annie, with an internal combustion engine that started on gas, ran on kerosene, and cooled with a lightweight oil, required only one.

The 1920 Frick Eclipse is one of his favorites at JUMP. “Sooo original!” Bearden exclaims. “The steering is extra heavy duty. It has a twin cylinder engine. The boiler is on its own frame. Nothing bolts to it!”
There was a time when do-it-yourself machines were the rage. A tribute to that, JUMP’s 1936 Theiman looks like a giant — and elegant — praying mantis. “It was a kit tractor,” Bearden says. “For $185 you could buy everything you needed to build it,” except for the automobile engine that powered it.

There’s also a 1926 Fordson Model F, a Harrison Jumbo, a 1935 Oliver Hart-Parr Row Crop, and a 1912 Olmstead Four Wheel Pull. There are two Deere & Company machines: a GP and a Model D — and two more Deeres in storage across town. Bearden’s booklet about all of them is available for free on JUMP’s website.

The community center complements Boise’s architectural landmarks with its unusual design by Adamson Associates, Inc. A helix-shaped structure integrates the garage and tractor displays with activity rooms made for everything from podcasting to exercise to cooking. Details emphasize “play,” even on the garage’s top floor, where a tube slide spirals five stories down to the ground below.

“The element of surprise and delight — it shifts your brain because you walk into a world that’s so different from your day-to-day,” says Maggie Soderberg, JUMP’s founder and director. Among the lawns is a 30-foot-high jungle gym. “Kids get up there and yell, ‘I’m not afraid of heights anymore!’” she says. “The five-story slide is a little scary when you start down it; but when you get down, you can say, ‘Wow, I did that!’”

Bearden has as much fun as the kids. His office, cocooned in JUMP’s central core, brims like the workspace of a wizard with tools, toys, and talismans — plus a mini-museum of small engines. File drawers hold copies of period tractor manuals. It doesn’t take Bearden long to find one for a Deere & Company Model E engine. Instructions say, “Read Carefully, Save!”

J.R. Simplot would be content.

One Day / One Place Grass Valley, Calif.

by Laura Read

San Francisco Chronicle

Thirty minutes north of Interstate 80 on the Gold Rush Highway (Highway 49), the town of Grass Valley butterflies across rolling slopes above Yuba City and the Central Valley. For 106 years, between 1850 and 1956, workers from around the world drilled 367 miles of tunnels into the earth for Empire Mine. Their legacy lingers in the vintage ambience of Grass Valley’s historic downtown.

Morning

After breakfasting on potato pancakes at South Pine Cafe, walk to Mill Street, the town’s treasure trove of vintage, art and collectibles shops. It’s possible the area has more used and rare books for sale per capita than any other American town. By itself, the cavernous Booktown Books, above, probably proves it. Prowl among stacks for a used “Diary of a Forty-Niner” by Chauncey Canfield or an old Grass Valley historical home walking tour guide, then go around the corner to the Book Seller, one of the many new-book stores, to find the latest by local writers like Beat poet Gary Snyder, whose “Danger on Peaks” shares moments of life and thought that occur in the depths of these forests.

Midday

At the funky Cousin Jack’s Pasties, in an old gas station that still smells of oil, munch on the same hearty potato-and-pork pasty that Cornish workers carried into the mines in triple-decker lunch buckets. (Jack is the large size; Jenny is the small.)

Afternoon

Catch afternoon breezes on the forested lawns around Empire Mine State Park’s Bourn Cottage, an 1897 Cotswold-style home designed by Willis Polk for mine owner William Bourn Jr., who also built Filoli mansion in Woodside.

Evening

See who’s playing live music on the patio at Diego’s, and sit down to an Electric Lemonade, made with rice-distilled vodka, and a dish of mahi-mahi Anticucho marinated South American-style in a fresh chimichurri sauce. At the Center for the Arts, you can get a seat for the live music, but you probably won’t need it if the audience does its usual thing: dancing like crazed buffleheads in front of the stage. Fall’s lineup includes singer-songwriter Laura Marling and dobro master Jerry Douglas. Arrive early for drinks among the comfy couches of the stage-side lounge.

Spend the night

Walk a few blocks to bed in the tiny but cute restored room at the 1930s Sierra Mountain Inn. There are one- and two-bedroom suites, some with kitchenettes; a detached cottage has a convenient living room and kitchen.

If you go

South Pine Cafe: 102 N. Richardson St., (530) 274- 0261. www.southpinecafe.com

IN 1949, THE PICTURE window of Grace Marchant’s flat, on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, framed a discouraging view: The empty lot next door held a tangle of old bedsprings, bottles, and lumber, cast-offs from dismantled earlier lives that had once populated the slopes above the city’s hectic waterfront. One day, the fed-up 63-year-old marched outside and hurled the bottles and bedsprings off a cliff onto the empty lot below. What happened next is just a twig short of legend.

On a recent morning, the writer and publisher Larry Habegger, who moved next door to Marchant in the 1970s, reconstructed the anecdote during a chat in his kitchen overlooking the hillside sprawl of leaves, limbs and flowers. The cliff she’d hurled the stuff over was the lip of an old quarry, he said, and the debris that landed below annoyed the agents of the city. But Marchant didn’t care. “When the city ordered her to stop, she told them to stuff it,” he said.

Marchant, who’d seen a fair amount of life’s quirks already — she’d been a shipyard riveter, a ceramic artist, and a stuntwoman in the silent movies, among other things — had an unwavering vision for the space. It would shimmer with beauty and color; it would be a garden. What she didn’t envision was that someday her efforts would grow influence beyond her realm, and charm the world.

Telegraph Hill rises 284 feet above the San Francisco Bay. At its summit is the 1933 landmark, Coit Tower, from which you can gaze onto such treasured sites as Alcatraz, Angel Island, and the graceful Golden Gate Bridge. Halfway down the east slope, on the warmer, less-windy side of the hill, blooms Marchant’s half-acre of paradise.

To get there, you don’t simply park and walk; you climb. From Sansome Street below, Filbert Street turns into 95 metal and concrete steps zig-zagging up the old quarry face. At the top, a wooden stairway appears, and then a refreshing scene unfolds — wildly vivid, fragrant, and twittering with the chatter of people and birds, it is Marchant’s garden in bloom. There are pink teardrops of fuchsia, bold plumes of hydrangea, and speckles of anemone. There are groves of cone-shape foxglove and sprays of quivering poppy. There are green-fanning banana trees, yellow-fruited loquat, and princess trees spilling with violet trumpets. Everywhere grows Marchant’s favorite flower, the rose.

This is similar to what Habegger found when he first explored the steps with a friend some 37 years ago. “We saw hummingbirds and flowers everywhere,” he recalled. “It was like walking into an Eden.”

One cottage in particular caught his eye that day, and as he returned to the lavish block, enjoying the garden again and again, he started to dream of living in the house someday. What happened a year and a half later can only be called fate. The house’s resident, Gary Kray, advertised for a roommate. When Habegger moved in, it touched off a life-long friendship binding the two of them to the wildly tumultuous pocket of greenery outside.

In the 1875 house next door to Kray lived Grace Marchant; by now tending the garden was her daily passion. “She had turned a junkyard into an oasis of beautiful flowers and tranquility,” Habegger said. “Everybody appreciated what she did. She did it with no compensation.”

Habegger learned that when Marchant had started the garden, she’d been suffering from arthritis, but time among the plants had limbered up her joints and eased her pain. In her 90s when he moved in, she was finding the work more difficult, especially the weeding. “Occasionally the neighbors would get together for weeding parties,” Habegger said. “We’d work for half a day, and a few weeks later the weeds would be back.”

In 1979, Kray decided to help more consistently as her apprentice. “He learned how to garden from her, and he fell in love with the garden through her,” Habegger said. “From her death in 1982 on, Gary took care of everything.”

Kray brought the garden entered a new phase. He installed tree ferns, Italian cypress, and palm trees — plants that added variety and height yet did not shade the flowers that needed sun. “Rather than having everything be trim and neat, Gary liked painting the garden with colors and textures,” Habegger said.

The garden gained fame in guidebooks and travelogues, and its place as a landmark seemed secure – until 1984. That’s when a developer made moves to down an existing cottage nearby and build something much larger that would boom into the cultivated lot.

Neighbors were appalled. Together with Habegger and Kray they formed an ad-hoc organization, Friends of the Garden, to raise funds and buy the land and cottage. The required $320,000 seemed a phenomenal sum, but the group had verve.

“We ran a square-inch campaign,” Habegger said. “If you sent $10 to our cause, you’d get a certificate saying you’d have figurative title to one square inch of the Grace Marchant Garden.” Newspaper stories and a t-shirt campaign generated donations, and the group eventually raised $210,000 from 4,000 donors. The Trust for Public Land fronted remaining funds, sealing the purchase. The Friends then sold the cottage with deed restrictions so it could never be expanded, and they paid back the Trust. Leftover funds went into an endowment. The garden was saved.

During the same decade, Kray and Habegger were able to buy the house where Marchant had lived. In 1990, Habegger and his future wife, Paula McCabe, moved into the top floor apartment.

Kray’s time as garden curator sadly ended in 2012 when he died of heart failure, ripping a hole in the Habbaggers’ lives and opening a question about who would tend the garden. The uncertainty didn’t last. McCabe had been helping Kray with the garden for 10 years, and she and Habegger gamely took over the task. Now they have their own goals, which include clearing out the big, leafy ferns that camouflage some of the flowers, and cleaning up the paths in order to make the garden more inviting.

 “I really enjoy doing it,” McCabe said. “I love having it on my doorstep. When I’m out here, I’m very happy.”

Just then, two young women walking by stop for a moment to watch the McCabe, the secret tender of the garden. One thoughtfully turns to her friend and says, “It’s wonderful what she does. It’s a gift to the city.”

And the Grace Marchant Garden is a gift to its curators, as well.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

AT THE EDGE of a muddy salt flat on Nevada’s section of U.S. Highway 50, a cream-colored mound rises from a mosaic of desert shrubs, looking like a dune of the moon. Neither a mirage nor a transplant from outer space, it is a 600-foot-tall, naturally produced wedge of sand. For 3.5 miles from peak to floor, its main ridge winds along a wind-scoured knife edge, catching the morning sunshine on one side and shielding murky blue shadows on the other. To some observers, from a distance the curving line looks like a serpent’s spine.

Ninety miles east of Reno and 400 miles north of Las Vegas, Sand Mountain is a crossroads of intense interests – and the subject of a fragile truce. West of the mountain is the marshy Stillwater Wildlife Refuge, a stopover for migrating birds on the Pacific Flyway, a popular duck hunting area, and an ancestral hunting ground for Native Americans. To the east is a bombing practice range set up by the nearby Fallon Naval Air Station, which is home to pilots training in the elite U.S. Navy Fighter Weapons School also known as “Top Gun.” About 26 miles away is Fallon, a city of about 9,000 and the center of a network of dairies, alfalfa farms and beef cattle operations.

 Fragile Agreement A decade ago, the BLM addressed a dispute that was roiling among three Sand Mountain stakeholders— off-highway vehicle (OHV) enthusiasts, conservationists, and Native Americans — by splitting the 4,795-acre site into designated parts. The Sand Mountain Blue Butterfly Conservation Plan was an attempt to balance recreation access, rare plant and animal species habitat, and Native American ancestral sites. Today the factions maintain an uneasy peace.

Melanie Hornsby, an outdoor recreation planner with the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the Sand Mountain recreation site, makes sure the 150 or so rudimentary camping sites, the interpretive signs, and the other facilities are in good shape. Every weekend, crowds OHV riders inhabit the site. Vacationers throng there during holidays like Easter and Halloween, when a light parade and trick-or-treating activate the scene. “One person driving by on Highway 50 once told me it look like Disneyland,” Hornsby says.

A 2004 study estimated there were 56,000 visitor uses of the mountain per year, a number that was up by 40,000 from visitor usage in the 1980s, according to the BLM Conservation Plan report. “On big weekends, it’s like having a fully functioning city out there,” says Ken Tedford, mayor of Fallon.

Next to all of the buzz, about 1,700 acres the mountain is closed off to motorized use, according to the BLM plan. There, every summer a new population of tiny Sand Mountain blue butterflies is born. Protecting the species is important for both OHV riders and butterflies. A BLM interpretive panel at the site explains why: “Success in protecting the butterfly reduces the possibility of listing it as threatened and endangered under the Endangered Species Act,” it states. “If listed, OHV use would be significantly impacted at Sand Mountain.”

One off-road user website calls for a boycott of Native American owned businesses in Fallon, hoping to pressure Tribe members against forcing further closers at the mountain to protect their cultural sites.

“It’s a challenge to manage for multiple uses of a resource,” says Dean Tonenna, a botanist with the BLM. “There are a number of issues,” Improving people’s appreciation of the dune’s story is one of the missions of the BLM’s 2008 plan.  

Ancient Grains The mountain’s materials are much older than the shapes of its immediate surroundings. Its sand particles – composed mostly of feldspar and quartz – originated 100 miles away in the Sierra Nevada mountain range bordering Nevada and California. Over centuries, cascading snowmelt settled downstream in Nevada. About 14,000 to 10,000 years ago great shallow lakes filled much of Nevada and other parts of the West. When the lakes shrank, roaring winds lifted up the sand from the dried-up basins of Lake Lahontan and whirled them against a southern flank of the Stillwater range. In time the winds shaped the sand dunes into the cones and ridges we see today.

And yet, compared to the millions of years of geologic time, “the dune field as a whole is fairly young,” says Nicholas Lancaster, an emeritus research professor at the Reno-based Desert Research Institute. “You can see the shorelines of the lake high up above the dunes, especially on the southeastern side.”

Researchers have classified dunes around the planet into six general geometric forms. The Sand Mountain dune series contains many of the the forms, each shaped over time by different wind speeds and currents. “There are parabolic, linear, traverse, star dunes at the site,” says Tonenna. “Star dunes are rare. You can see the one at Sand Mountain from above, but can’t easily sense it when you are standing on it.”

Linear dunes resemble the Paiute’s sleeping serpents, their crowned spines curving as if draped over bumpy ground. Star dunes look like mammoth sleeping creatures suitable for a “Star Wars” set.

Robert Gott, owner of UTV Addiction, an off-road vehicle rental company based 90 miles away in Reno, has been riding OHVs for more than 20 years. He graduated from using early VW dune buggies to quads and then on to today’s roll-bar-protected ultimate terrain vehicles. “I love Sand Mountain,” he says. “It’s just so special because it’s an anomaly. You can ride the sand dunes during the day, and shoot out on the Pony Express Trail (a historic jeep trail) to grab lunch at Middlegate Station (a historic café 25 miles away on U.S. Highway 50).”

One of Gott’s favorite spots is a wind-carved hole near a high slope the off-roaders call the Super Bowl. “Where the wind drops the sand, there’s a vortex it all times that’s about 150 to 200 yards in diameter and 20 to 60 yards deep,” he says. “The sand changes shape, but the giant bowl never fills up.”

Dune Tunes Appearance and composition are just the beginning of the mountain’s quirks. It is one of only 30 in the world to “sing.” In North and South America, and in Hawaii, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, under certain conditions a few singing sand dunes produce noises from within. Their vocalizations can sound like the drone of a high jet engine, the hiss of a power line, or the gurgling of an Australian digeridoo. Scientists relate the phenomenon to a couple of factors: percussive sound bouncing through the lighter surface sand off of dense wet sand layers deep within the mountain; sand grains of similar size impacting each other; and dry air. Conditions are not always right for hearing the noise, but once you hear it, according to observers, you don’t forget it.

“If I were to describe it, it’d have to be as a ‘cold whisper’,” says Gott. “There’s something so beautiful and mysterious about it.”

To Jane Moon, director of Tourism in Fallon, “the ‘humming’ is an extremely faint and musical, guttural, almost chant-like, sound.”

Donna Cossette, registrar at the Churchill County Museum and a member of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, heard of the mountain’s percussion when she was young. “It made the sound of a snake or a rattle,” she says.

WHEN THE OHVs THROTTLE down, and nighttime steals the desert’s heat, critters get busy. “The place is alive at night when many nocturnal species come out,” Tonenna says. “There are tracks everywhere.” Rodents share territory with jackrabbits, cottontails, scorpions, and beetles. “The kangaroo rats’ long tails drag behind them as they go from place to place, leaving linear features in the sand.” In winter, long-horned owls hoot a feathered version of Morse code — long-short-short-long mating calls.

Plants and animals have adapted to the desert climate – its fierce wind, arid soil, hot days, and cold nights. The fourwing salt bush produces “winged” seeds that get to new locations by catching rides on the wind. “The needle and thread grass has thin strands like hair that move gently in a breeze” Tonenna says. “You have to be there at the right time of year to see it. It doesn’t last for more than a couple of weeks.” There are also greasewood, Nevada ephedra, Indian rice grass, and Galleta grass, and, “there’s a very beautiful lily – a sand lily – that grows way on the tops of ridges behind the sand dune,” Tonenna says “It comes out around Easter – blooming from March to April. After that you won’t see it because the whole plant dries up.”

A perennial shrub with more than 15 minutes of fame is the red-barked Kearney buckwheat. The Sand Mountain Kearney buckwheat habitat is the only place in the world where the Sand Mountain blue butterfly lives. Its 1,700-acre habitat is the focal point of the 2008 BLM plan. The butterflies emerge in mid-July to live in 10-day cycles through mid-September, according to the BLM plan. The plan restricts OHV usage to 21.5 miles of trails and closes 1,700 acres on the dune as protected butterfly habitat.

FULLY APPRECIATIVE of the scientific explanations of the place, the Churchill County Museum’s Donna Cossette says that Native Americans, whose ancestors have populated the region for more than 10,000 years, think about the mountain in different terms. “Its original name is pronounced Kwazi,” she says. “It’s a sacred place. We would seek out that location for prayers or healing. Oftentimes with these kinds of places you may leave with something you didn’t intend.”

Although she does not visit Sand Mountain today without a purpose, the mountain still figures large in her mind. “I remember going there in the 1970s when I was about four or five years old,” she says. “I sat at the base of the dune where the greasewood and Kearney buckwheat met the sand, and dug holes, all the while thinking

ALONG THE WEST coast of Ireland’s County Clare, where swells of the Atlantic Ocean thunder against rocky shores, a large region of limestone called the Burren is home to hundreds of ancient and historical sites built by farmers. Some of the ruins date to pre-Christian activities of the Celts; others are from the Dark Ages when Christians made Ireland a stronghold while the rest of Europe fell into chaos. A few that are more than 5,500 years old indicate that people were doing field work here as far back as the Stone Age. Together, the sites reveal important pieces of information about the world's earliest food-growers.

Recently, farmers have started a Heritage Farm Tours program taking people onto their private lands to see these old ruins, places that before now have only been accessed by family members and friends.

The tours complement efforts by regional governments to promote the roles that farmers have played in the Burren since people first settled here. Many farmers have been working on projects that restore and protect their land’s archeology and natural features. In a crafty marriage of tourism and farming, through the tours they now can share their progress with the public.

Last summer, the heritage tours drew attention from Prince Charles, who with his wife, Camilla, walked among the terraced hillsides of Oliver Nagle’s land south of Galway. The visit garnered much attention, which pleased Dr. Brendan Dunford, the researcher whose work on the land benefits of the Burren farming practices instigated the current conservation work.

 “His visit will hopefully reinforce the message that these wonderful landscapes are also home to people who have shaped, and been shaped, by these places for millennia, and that the future of these people and their places is deeply intertwined,” Dunford says. “The Burren is Ireland’s greatest repository of natural and cultural heritage, and encapsulates our very essence as a people.”

Comprising about 100 squares miles between Galway and Shannon, the Burren (the Gaelic word Boireann, means “place of stone”) originated undersea 360 million years ago when calcified marine life and plant debris built up on the ocean floor and hardened over time. The fossil-rich rock was eventually uplifted out of the sea and folded into hills and valleys. Forests came and went, and glaciers scraped and polished the exposed rock into flat surfaces now called pavements.

Since the ice age, rain has been the Burren’s primary sculptor. Acidic rainfall slowly dissolves parts of the limestone surface into potholes and cracks that widen with time into deep crevices. The cracks and depressions hold a constant temperature, creating protected moist micro-climates that support ferns, wildflowers, and grasses. Some 600 of Ireland’s native plants grow here, including 24 of its 28 species of orchid. Water draining through the cracks has worn a complex system of channels and caves deep in the rock, a playground for spelunkers who travel from all over the world to explore it.

Because the “barren” Burren has not been particularly appealing to development, it is a treasure store of history. There are 2,700 recorded heritage sites belonging to every era from the Stone Age to today, including an estimated 75 wedge tombs (generally dated to between 3000 and 2000 BC), 500 ring forts (fortified pre-Christian homesteads), and hundreds of Bronze Age cooking sites, according to Dunford, who wrote a thorough analysis in his book, “Farming and the Burren.” There are also Neolithic burial mounds, ecclesiastical sites and holy wells, as well as remnants of early water troughs, livestock shelters, and field systems. Two significant ruins have been developed for tourism: Caherconnell, a medieval ring fort, and the Poulnabrone, a megalithic portal tomb that was found to contain human bones 5,800 years old along with evidence of an ancient farm economy that included cattle, sheep, and goats.

The farmer-guided walks follow ancient stone walls and paths and meander cross limestone pavement tableaus. Visitors can peer into wedge tombs, and see ring fort ruins. They can climb onto ancient burials mounds and stare into pristine natural springs. Far off, they might see wild goats scurrying up a hillside; close up, they can admire a single fern clinging to a fist-wide limestone crevice.

But the tours are not at all only about ancient sites.

“People are interested in the wedge tombs and the ring forts, but most of them want to talk about what it is like to farm such a place,” says Frank O’Grady, who takes people to his property at Caherfadda (a Gaelic term meaning long fort.) “They are interested in the history of the farm, how the Burren as a landscape was farmed, and how we, in particular, came to be farmers.”

In a reversal of common practices elsewhere in the country, Burren farmers graze their cattle in the lowlands in summer and on the highlands in winter. The winter lowlands are too wet and muddy for the cattle, and cattle do better grazing there in the warmer months. The Burren’s limestone holds a constant temperature through the winter, creating good conditions for grass to grow during the colder months.

Oliver Nagle’s 72 acres of winterage pasture are in a spectacular location among terraced limestone hills that resemble spooky settings from “Lord of the Rings.” (In fact, an annual Burren Tolkien Festival in Lisdoonvarna postulates that the Burren inspired the great novelist.)

“The cattle go up before they calve in October, then don’t come down until the first days of February,” Nagle says. The animals remain in the uplands until Christmastime. “As the calves grow inside of them, we start to bring them down the mountain. By the time they are heaviest with calves, they are on the flat.” The animals are then hauled 14 miles away to the Nagle's lowland summer pastures near the town of Corofin.

The Irish government and the European Union have been piloting the Burren Life Programme, reimbursing farmers for completing projects that restore and protect the Burren heritage sites and environment. As part of this “farming for conservation” effort, Oliver and his father, Patrick, have repaired two older springs and developed three new ones. They’ve constructed troughs at the springs, and created barriers that prevent cattle from polluting the water. Their work reducing acres of scrub has opened up more grazing ground, allowing them to boost their herd numbers. In one location, scrub-removal uncovered the new discovery of a very old stone herdsman’s hut.

People on the walks get to do things that a more developed tourist site might not allow. For instance, on Nagle’s winterage upland, people can squirm through an underground souterrain (pronounced soo-terrain), if they aren’t afraid of small spaces. “To think you should have a man-made structure 600 to 1000 feet above sea level in a small corner of land — it’s magical,” Oliver Nagle says. “The slabs covering the roof weigh 3 to 4 tons apiece. I remember the first day my father showed it to me and my father remembers when his father showed it to him.”

Leading groups does not necessarily come naturally to the independent farmers, but the Irish warmth and quick humor sparks connections. “We’ve had a lot to learn,” O’Grady says. “We are not tour guides; we are farmers – talkative farmers. We answer people’s questions as best we can. There’s the joke about the Kerry farmer — he’s out standing in his own field. That’s what we do.”

And small groups of people from around the world are showing up in person to stand there with him.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

FROM HIS HOME in north central Nevada, Mike Williams drives a brief distance on bumpy farm roads to the shore of Stillwater Marsh, where he strides through winter grasses to a thicket of tule stalks, and peers across the same freshwater pools his ancient ancestors knew well. He bends to inspect the brown mottling that can spread naturally across the tule stems. Sometimes the mottling is too dark, or its pattern too chaotic; other times, it is lovely — a spray of chestnut freckles amplifying the cool oat-colored skin.

Williams lives on the marsh’s edge in a subdivision of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe reservation. His people have populated this part of the Nevada high desert for thousands of years. “The tribe here is called Tui Dicutta, or ‘cattail eaters,’ because they used cattails and tule for food,” he says. The interpretation does not take into account the varied use the early Native Americans made of plants that have grown so abundantly here for centuries. By weaving or bunching the tule (pronounced too-lee) stalks, or stripping them into parts, they created items for survival, including cone-shaped huts, cigar-shaped boats, and protective clothing — hats, sandals and, skirts — that helped them to endure the desert’s searing winters and sweltering summer sun. Their lives were so entwined with the marsh that their hair, fingers, and nostrils were likely full of its musky scent.

IN TUI DICUTTA LORE, the marsh is presided over by Fox Peak, a mountain of the Stillwater Range, which cuts upward from the water’s east shore. For a few minutes, Williams studies the peak’s silhouette. The mountain symbolizes his people’s origin. It inspires their strength and their sense of identity. “It is a spiritual place,” he says

Eighteen years ago, Williams sought a connection with the ancient people who inhabited this place. The craft he wanted to revive would have him transforming the living marsh grasses into hunting decoys – the kind his ancestors floated onto the water to coax migrating birds out of the sky. There was a problem, though: No one he knew could teach him how to make them.

STILLWATER MARSH SPREADS like a hawk’s wing in pools and streams across 20,000 acres of high desert terrain. From it, a patchwork of farmland constellates south and east across a valley encircled by choppy mountain ranges and outcroppings that in places display the abstract animal and cosmos shapes of Native American petroglyphs. Both farms and marsh are fed by waters flowing from the Sierra Nevada mountain range 100 miles to the west.

Williams’ mission today is to identify the tule that makes the most beautiful ducks. His decoys do not return to the marsh for hunting use, but are in art and historical collections across the country, from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. to the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum on the Chesapeake Bay, to the offices of three American presidents.

One reason the decoys have gained such fame is that he replicates one of the most celebrated of the diving ducks to frequent the marsh – the canvasback. Long bodied, strong, beaked, elegant necked, the male canvasback has signature vivid colors: a flame-colored head set off by a black-feathered breast and tail and a middle section of pure white. Every spring, hundreds and hundreds of canvasback ducks join thousands of other migrating birds to rest at Stillwater Marsh during their long flights from wintering grounds in the American south to breeding habitat in the far north. In fall, they’ll fly south again.

The public’s attention turned to Native American decoys in the 1920s, when in a cave about 40 miles north of the marsh near the town of Lovelock, archeologists unearthed a buried cache of 11 tule decoys. They were 2,000 years old. “At one time, there was water all the way to Lovelock,” Williams says. “Our people roamed through that whole area. You can go visit the cave and read about it now.”

When Williams first began creating decoys, it took some time to perfect softening and bending the tule stems and securing the parts together. “I was learning as I went,” Williams says. “It took about two years to get started, and I’d say it took me a good 10 years before I felt comfortable with what I was doing.” He hung a black and white photo of one of the Lovelock Cave decoys in his home, and poured over every detail – the way the tail tapers, the width of the body, the way the neck and body attach to one another. He studied old decoys held in local museums. He noted bird behavior in the marsh.

He became deeply acquainted with tule.

SOMETIMES CONFUSED with cattail, which has at its top a bushy brown seed bundle, tule is a hard-stemmed tubular perennial that soars to heights of ten feet or more in shallow, fresh water. It is green in spring, golden the rest of the year, and displays no leaves, only a spray of small flowers and seeds that form a lose bouquet at its slender tip. The tule’s outer sheath – sturdy and thin, like stiff waxed paper – encases a wooly membrane that absorbs nutrients from the soil upward.

After harvesting, he soaks the tule in a tub of water for a couple of hours, then drains the water and lets them sit a while. “I like to work with them when they are moist,” he says, “not real dry, but not real wet. This way they are not going to shrink after they dry up.”

He trims the softened stems with a razor knife, then bunches and bends them into the head and body forms. The head and beak are secured to the body with a “scarf” made from strands of the tule’s inner spongy fibers. “I like to get a fine wrap,” he says, sharing one of the techniques that give his decoys a singular elegance. “I studied this head so much. There’s a certain way you have to wrap it – in a figure eight.”

FEMALE DECOYS remain unadorned with color. “The archeologists found two plain ducks, which they consider to be the females,” he says. “My painted and feathered ones are the males. When you see the male canvasbacks in the wild, the plain-looking females are with them.” To suggest the male’s vivid shades, he affixes long white goose and turkey feathers to the middle body, tying them into place with string made from wild hemp plants gathered around the valley. Black stain for the breast and tail comes from powdered resin he makes burning pinyon pine logs in his own fireplace. “I crush it up and mix it with water into a paste,” he says. Red coloring for the head and neck comes from ground ochre pigments he finds among the hillsides beneath Fox Peak. “Everything’s natural,” he says. “I feel this is as close as you can get to the original ones. When I take something from Mother Earth, I always give back so she knows I respect her.”

It may seem meaningful enough to some observers that Williams signs and dates each decoy, but in fact the birds carry much more significance than this – which isn’t at all as evident as the signature mark. “Each bird is very sacred and special,” Williams says. “I pray over each bird. I pray that, wherever the

FROM HIS HOME IN SOUTHERN ITALY, Vincenzo Altieri beholds a neighborhood that looks straight out of Biblical Jerusalem. The townscape springs from caves built 7,000 years ago into a wall of the Gravina River gorge. It’s called the Sassi, an Italian word for “stones” that reflects the fact that every surface, joint, and vaulted arch is made of rock.

The district lies within the boundaries of Matera, a city in the midst of olive groves and wheat country above the Ionian Sea. Archeological evidence shows that people were settled in its caverns during the Neolithic era, which ended between 4,500 and 2,000 B.C. The caves remained intact through the Bronze and Iron ages and on into the first and second millennia A.D., when residents began using excavated stone to expand their homes, building rooms on top of the underground chambers. The sloping town survived plague, tyranny, and war, but today is seeing dramatic change as residents equipped with new technology are reinventing it.

The improvements suit Altieri. “We’re in the middle of a great story,” he says. “We are sharing building methods with people of Neolithic and Paleolithic times. I feel the story every day.”

Ancient Roots: But the Sassi was a marvel of technology even in its earliest years. The first excavators found that the Gravina’s limestone scarp was soft enough for carving, yet sturdy enough to support a honeycomb of rooms. Its location kept it out of view of passing marauders, and its expanding labyrinth of twisted streets made it difficult to raid.Homes and pathways are so entwined that residents love to say, “When we walk on the street, we’re stepping on people’s ceilings.” Because deeper layers also contain ancient burial sites, they also claim, “We’re sleeping with the dead.”

Through recent millennia, Sassi residents — farmers, shepherds, and craftsmen — spent most of their time outdoors, the men working outside of town in fields, the women and children gathering in courtyards with neighbors to make bread, wash laundry, and discuss the day. So efficient was its infrastructure and social life that as time passed, the Sassi changed little. Not even the Industrial Age – when cities elsewhere erupted with steel and glass – touched it. After World War II, as the rest of Italy modernized, the Sassi remained stuck in history.

Few anticipated the jolt that would occur next.

Past into present:  In the mid-20th century, when the 1945 book written by Carlo Levi called “Christ Stopped at Eboli” described conditions in the Sassi, Italy woke to the fact that the city’s 12,000 residents dwelled in caves without basic services, and suffered high rates of malaria, malnutrition, and dehydration. Children were dying at a rate of 50%. Starting in 1952, the alarmed government began moving thousands of people out of the Sassi into new housing built on the plateau. Soon the stone city that had endured for 200 generations grew silent.

A popular storyline circulates today describing how the Sassi residents were grateful to escape the town, but Altieri – who grew up living on the plateau above town and knew some of the previous villagers — says plenty were not so when they couldn’t recreate their tight community bonds in the new city layout. Cars and electricity bewildered some of them, and the individual houses isolated them. Some of the people pressured the government to re-open the Sassi, and in the 1990s, the government allowed people to move back into the area if they agreed to improve the houses to modern codes.

When Altieri bought his house in 1998, he was just 28. “In a way, it was my mother’s fault that I did this,” he recalls. “She was passionate about the place, and she gave me this passion.”

An expert coder, he had a good job as a software engineer for a satellite company, but he wasn’t happy. “Getting the opportunity to put your hands on a satellite is something you cannot buy,” he says, “but in that world, you’re just a small part; you’re replaceable. I realized I didn’t want that for my life. I gave up that job and have been working on my place every since.”

His home protrudes from a knoll on the cliff’s edge; he shares it with his French wife, Karla, and their kids. From their terrace, they can watch a ceramicist in the shop below selling bird sculptures to passersby, or they observe wandering tourists lose themselves in crooked passageways, or see neighbors hanging laundry on an outdoor line.

“The best thing in the town is the neighborhood and the sharing that went on,” Altieri says. “That is why it has survived.”

What Altieri found when he opened the building for the first time was perplexing, even to an engineer. First he removed garbage and debris that had been sealed inside the walls for 30 years. Then he cleaned and fixed cracks and shored up crumbling walls. He installed bathrooms and opened up channels for electrical wires, water lines, and sewer pipes.

“Once you buy a place like this you discover several layers of thousands of years,” he says. “There were seven different floors inside. The more you fix, the more you have to find creative solutions for the next problem.”

Water, Air, Light: Since ancient times, the management of water, air, and light has been a feat. Because the rocky slope contains no naturally flowing springs, early inhabitants collected rainwater for domestic use. They built a primary bell-shaped cistern on the plateau above town and took turns transporting water down the steep lanes to their homes. Some built smaller cisterns close to home that they shared with neighbors. The cisterns captured water that drained from roofs and gullies through sequences of tunnels and clay pipes.

Altieri’s cistern is inside of a wall that he shares with a neighbor. “I’m harvesting water,” he says.

Strategically placed doors and window slots allow air and daylight into the rooms, just as they did in the past. Fireplace cooking areas are where they were in the old days — in the front of the house; bedrooms and sitting areas are in the rear. Donkeys, priceless for transportation and farm work, spent the nights inside the caves with their owners. (They are not part of the household today.)

Altieri cleaned out wall nooks to use as storage and lighting shelves; he smoothed uneven floors and rebuilt stairs; he found thick wooden doors and iron hinges, and installed them as they were hung in Medieval times. The family quarters are on the second level: The front room is a kitchen that opens to the dining area, living room, and bedrooms. Beneath the home are several rock-hewn chambers which Altieri restored into cozy bedrooms and bathrooms. He opened his current business, La Dolce Vita Bed & Breakfast, where travelers get to sleep between walls of their primitive ancestors.

These days, the Sassi is no longer hushed. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 1993, and the European Union recently named Matera a Capital of Culture for 2019, which means the district is seeing yet another resurrection, this one economic. With new hotels, craft shops and restaurants, the crooked lanes that were once as silent as stone, now echo with voices.

“When you look at the Sassi, what do you see — a beautiful postcard?” Altieri asks. “I see the message of the city. The story was built by common man with their habits, with their approaches, with their problems. This is a big, living machine.”

By Laura Read

OFF THE WEST COAST OF IRELAND on the tiny isle of Inis Oirr, there is perennial discord about limestone walls. Some of the oldest walls are loosely piled mounds, while the younger are crafted in specific patterns. When you arrive at the island by ferry, the maze of ancient stone spreading across the land is the first thing you’ll notice: The walls form corridors, rectangles and corners, framing one-lane roads, linking cottages to vegetable fields to seaside coves, enclosing cattle, goats and the occasional horse.
“I tell you, we are stone mad!” exclaims Martin Conneely. A fourth-generation farmer who has lived on Inis Oirr his whole life, Conneely tends several tracts of land that, scattered around the island, give him access to a complement of resources —the meadows, the drier terrain, and the seaside, where he harvests seaweed used to enrich the sandy soil.
Life can seem peaceful and often quit congenial on the island, but in fact, all is not well in this little world of walls.
Conneely is keen to point out why. Traveling by van one day from his hillside cottage to his seaside fields, he remarks that a few of the Inis Oirr residents have failed miserably at their duties and let their walls go. Structures that were once trim and functional have tumbled into ruin. Some are smothered by plants gone wild.
In front of one pile of neglect, the farmer slaps his thigh in frustration. “That lazy man!” he cries. “See all those briars growing on the wall? Briar is another name for lazy!”
To Conneely, when an owner ignores his stones, he’s violating history.

The word “lazy” does not come readily to mind when imagining the many centuries worth of energy the Irish have invested in their walls — the volumes of stones and slabs their arms and backs have lifted.
In the old Irish language, Inis Oirr means something similar to “back island.” It’s called Inisheer in English. Located at the mouth of Galway Bay, it belongs to a group of three landforms named the Aran Islands.
The islands’ spare beauty has inspired several creative works: The writer J.M. Synge spent five summers there before composing his acclaimed play “The Playboy of the Western World;” the groundbreaking 1934 ethno-documentary “Man of Aran,” showing life on Europe’s western rim, was filmed there; and in the 1990s, one of the islands was the setting for “Craggy Island” in the rowdy television series “Father Ted,” about the lives of cranky Catholic priests.
In real life, the islands have been home to farmers and fishermen, pirates and kings. Hints at early cultures still exist, preserved in stone: Defensive ring fort foundations are partially intact from the Bronze Age, and portions of Christian monasteries survive from the first millennium A.D. Political power has been held over time by Irish chieftains, religious leaders, and absentee British landlords. Meanwhile, wall builders figured out how to stack rocks without mortar to impressive heights.

The first fieldstone walls probably appeared there 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, according to experts. The writer Tim Robinson estimated in his 2009 book “Stones of Aran: Labyrinth” that the walls of Inis Oirr total about 300 miles. If the walls of all three islands together were linked end to end, they’d stretch for some 1,200 miles. An attempted cross-country jaunt among them would likely end quickly in a mess of bloody lacerations on the fingers and knees.
The artist Gordon D’Arcy endured that very hardship to sketch the edifices for his 2006 book “The Burren Wall.” Inis Oirr walls, he says, “…are probably the best-known examples of drystone walling in Ireland. They are wonderfully constructed with perfect balance between the natural friction of the limestone and wind holes. Their builders were engineers without knowing it.”
They stand apart for a couple of reasons: “To begin with they are higher — up to three meters in places,” D’Arcy says. “They are mainly built from a single course of stones, and are incredibly storm-resistant.”
They were designed not to fight against the weather, but to work with it. Irregular slots allow winds to blow through the walls rather than against them, creating “chunks of stone; chips of light,” as D’Arcy writes.
They gain strength from their patterns: The rocks are stacked in ways to naturally support each other. They can be arranged big next to small, vertical next to horizontal, patchwork patterns atop rows of teeth.
Conneely says different clans developed unique identifying patterns. “One of the distinctive ones is little stones on the bottom and big stones on the top,” he says. “You’d think it would be the opposite, but the ones on top keep it tight.”
While the walls are configured to keep people and pests out, they also contain obscured points of access. The builders sometimes cantilevered horizontal stepping stones between the rocks so farmers can climb over the walls without too much trouble. They formed V-shaped depressions that are low enough for humans to step over, but high enough to keep four-legged animals penned in. Some builders filled gaps between two upright slabs with small rocks that could be removed for passage.

Conneely gets a kick out of a hand-me-down technique that uses a hunk of erratic granite, left behind by the ice age, as a human-propelled hammer to crush limestone slabs, which are more brittle. On a tour of the field, he takes a chance to demonstrate. He hefts a granite boulder the size of a Dutch oven overhead. For a fraction of a second, as the rock wavers in the air, time seems to pause, giving a moment to wonder how many different hands have gripped the same boulder for the same job in years past. In an instant, Conneely smashes the boulder the earth. The limestone explodes. The Stone Age lives on.
Can Conneely guess how many miles of walls are crisscrossing his own fields? “Ah, jeez, I don’t know,” he says. “If I had $1 for every stone, I’d be a millionaire.”
A hard rock millionaire, devoted to his walls.

VIA Magazine

In the 1950s, ranchers in northern Nevada dreamed of having a straight-shot  drive to the California redwoods, where trees soar to the clouds and the ocean mists cool the air. But they were thwarted because the direct route west wasn’t completely paved; it took way too long to reach their paradise.

Hopeful minds went to work, and many handshakes later the fully paved Winnemucca to the Sea Highway was born. The 494-mile-long motorway never gained the acclaim its originators imagined, but today it is finding a niche among people looking for unusual ways to access the West. On two-lane roads, the route joins a handful of colorful towns to link Nevada's Great Basin vistas to the small wineries and mountain resorts of Oregon and the rugged California coast. Traveling the full length of it can take two days or two weeks, depending on your curiosity and time.

The journey begins at a bend in the Humboldt River, where the town of Winnemucca, Nevada has bloomed on the site of an early wagon train camp. A hundred years ago, Basque sheepherders migrated here to work in the nearby hills. In wintertime they took lodging at the 1898 Martin Hotel, gathering in the big dining room for meals. Today, the Martin’s menu remains the same, from starters of soup and vinegary salad, to plates of sweetbread, lamb, and rib eye — all washed down with generous carafes of wine.

The Winnemucca to the Sea Highway’s eastern segment was labeled Highway 140, and that’s where, north of Winnemucca you turn west from U.S. 95, and the hum of traffic fades as you cruise into the Quinn River Valley and its framing mountain vistas. It is land suitable for Zane Gray and the Lone Ranger — vast and silent beneath eggshell skies.

Before long, the Denio Junction Café appears in a cottonwood tree oasis. Stop for a burger and some shoestring fries, because it will be a while before you see a restaurant again. Soon, Highway 140 enters the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge and climbs a rise near a deep crack in the earth called Thousand Creek Gorge. Follow jeep roads to the gorge’s rim, and you can stomach-crawl onto the sun-warmed rock and peer down at the stringy creek below.

Nearby is Duffurrena Ponds, where sandhill cranes and other migrating birds feed, and fishermen catch largemouth bass. This area produces fire opals; at the Royal Peacock Mine, you can sift through tailings for your own sparkling cache.

“Sagebrush is a very fair fuel,” wrote Mark Twain in his memorable chronicle, “Roughing It,” “but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure.” The Sheldon Refuge pronghorn antelope would disagree. They find plenty of sagebrush to eat on the 900-square-mile refuge. From a distance, the tawny ungulate resembles a white-tailed deer — until it runs. Springing across the plains on slender legs, it can sprint to 60 miles per hour. Having ultra-keen eyesight, it can spot a moving critter — or your car — three miles away, so look sharp.

Pronghorn share their terrain with wild mustangs, wild burro, and bighorn sheep, whose hoofmarks pock the refuge’s dusty side roads. Lucky visitors might see a herd of bighorn sheep scrambling across the highway near Adel, Oregon. Wait a minute as they go by, and they might actually stop once they’re off the pavement and turn to stare at you.

Adel is smaller than Denio, but has a combination store, saloon, and café that is large in atmosphere. Duck inside to see vintage saddles dangling from the ceiling like chandeliers, and get a close look at taxidermy restorations of animals that wander the region. 

As Highway 140 meanders through southern Oregon, big animals give way to big mountains. West of pretty Upper Klamath Lake, the volcanic summit of Mount McLoughlin lords over the southern Cascade Range. Here you can disappear among fir trees on the 9.3-mile High Lakes Trail, which is wide enough for wheelchairs. Both the High Lakes Trail and Highway 140 pass the rustic Lake of the Woods Resort, where anyone can rent a boat or, better yet, sag into a log cabin chair with a book. (instead of the book, this could say something about the bacon and eggs you get there at the lakeside greasy spoon)

Farther west, the road drops into the Rogue River Valley, where the city of Medford anchors a landscape of rolling hills and tabletop bluffs. Visit the Rogue Creamery and the Harry and David fruit store, or sip some Gold Medal Syrah or Claret at the locals’ hotspot, RoxyAnn Winery, tucked into historic Hillcrest Orchard. (http://www.roxyann.com)

The Winnemucca to the Sea Highway then joins Interstate 5, where it climbs into the sporty village of Grants Pass, a home base for whitewater kayak trips on the Rogue River (http://www.orangetorpedo.com/rogue-river-rafting), geocache excursions, or watching the hand-blown vases created by the artisans at The Glass Forge (www.glassforge.com).

When the route veers south onto Highway 199, you’re approaching the ranchers’ redwood heaven. But don’t hurry on just yet. At Cave Junction, take a detour to Oregon Caves National Monument. While prowling the twisting tunnels, you’ll likely spy a miniscule life form as fascinating as Nevada’s leaping pronghorn — the white springtail, no bigger than a snip of grass. In a feat as marvelous as the antelope’s spectacular sprint, the insect catapults itself a distance several times its body length simply by vaulting off of its tiny, folded tail.

Finally…the redwoods. Highway 199’s passage through Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park intersects paths that wind deep into the muscular beauty of these sky-bound conifers. Stout Grove is a particular gem.

Grab a strawberry milkshake at She She’s Drive-In, and then travel just a few miles more to where the road arrives at Crescent City and its endless beach. Here the Pacific unrolls its silvery waves onto the amber sand.

But the journey’s not over until you’ve had a good meal. At the Seascape Restaurant, that Winnemucca steaming plate of lamb is rivaled by heaps of sautéed scallops, oysters, and shrimp — a mouthwatering catch from the sea.

All Photos Laura Read

Elko, Nevada’s Folk Life

NINE YEARS AGO, in the town of Healdsburg in California’s Sonoma Valley, the lot at 25 North Street near the Village Plaza held an abandoned appliance store. As the local farming economy worked through a romance with tourism that had been blooming by the decade, this was one of the village cornerstones that people wondered about: What would its future hold? Who would do just the right thing there— for the town’s economy and for its people?

Today, the lot is filled with glass, steel, food, and people. It hosts a new building that blends references to the area’s food-growing history with the efficiencies of modern technology. The building backs a courtyard of picnic tables and umbrellas, where on any morning of the week customers huddle in conversation over moon-white mugs of coffee. This Saturday, a man in a striped button down shirt is telling another in black-framed glasses how his pruned apple trees are producing; two mothers are rocking baby strollers with the toes of their shoes, nibbling ginger muffins made with ground millet at the café inside. Shortly, a store clerk emerges through the building’s swinging front doors, unlocks the hinged sidewalls of a vendor cart that’s big as a camper van, and critically eyes the products inside. There are books, work gloves, tools, seed packets things for both hard core farmers and back-yard hobbyists.

This new building is one of the latest hotspots to open here in the northern tip of California’s Napa and Sonoma valley wine country. Equal parts produce market, farm shop, provision counter, and café, it is designed around, as owners Cindy Daniel and Doug Lipton like to say, “promoting and celebrating good farming, good cooking, and good eating, and helping people to see the links between those.” It is called, simply, “SHED.”

On SHED’s fifth anniversary, its success is linked to the present excitement around the world around fresh food dining and small scale farming, as well as budding affections for all things rural among residents of crowded San Francisco Bay Area.

 SHED’s STORY REACHES back to the 1970s when, in college, Daniel and Lipton experimented with compost and began thinking about how they might one day be farmers. The couple’s Healdsburg journey began in 1996 when they bought a 16-acre farm situated on rich alluvial soils outside of town next to Dry Creek. They built a rammed-earth house and raised a family. He, a soil scientist, now works restoring San Francisco Bay Delta wetlands; she, while raising children, has developed education programs in local schools. In 2010 when the couple realized they could buy the old appliance store property at 25 North Street, they were ripe for adventure.

A main focus was to be sensible and efficient with existing structures. “We tried to use the building as it existed, putting a second floor over it, but that was structurally challenging,” Daniel says. The couple had the old building removed, recycling the steel and other parts, and with the help of Jensen Architects and Soule Building Systems, erected the current glass-walled, steel-trussed structure that looks alternately like an airplane hangar and a hay barn-inspired cathedral. The building’s steel frame is made from crushed old cars and its insulation comes from recycled denim, Daniel says. To manage interior temperatures and expand public spaces, the building’s glass paneled walls roll open like garage doors. Interior walls are paneled with locally harvested wood in such a way as to make pleasant acoustics. The soaring, open, sun-lit interior space is exciting, airy, and fresh.

Setting the tone for its 100 employees to make the place welcoming and fun is a key ingredient to success, Daniel says. “It’s so important to think about beauty around you,” she says. “Why not take the time to make things beautiful? It enhances communication when people feel good in a place, and when people are friendly.”

INSIDE THE 11,000-foot-square building, the energy hums: coffee baristas steam milk for cappuccinos, bakery clerks stock warm loaves of French bread, larder clerks scoop fresh-ground tahini, a produce worker stocks bins of asparagus, a store manager leafs through children’s books with a customer, and a mixologist serves customers at the “fermentation bar” a tumbler of vitamin-rich fresh juice. In a central open-air kitchen, SHED Café Culinary Director Perry Hoffman places two slices of watermelon radish – its pigment blushing a burst of pink – atop a salad of butter lettuce, pomegranate kernels, and beet wedges arranged in a handmade rustic bowl.

Everywhere, people bubble with chatter. Today is not an anniversary date or festival: It’s just another Saturday at SHED. The buzz is part of the plan.

“In a world that’s becoming virtual,” Daniel says, “we wanted a place where people come together, where they are welcome on all levels. We set up the store to reflect that.” She takes inspiration from words by author Wendell Berry that first grabbed Lipton’s attention in college: “An agrarian mind begins with the love of the fields and ramifies in good farming, good cooking, and good eating,” Berry wrote.

To this end, shelves and tabletops display goods made locally, including a line of modern-rustic ceramic plate ware, “bug hotels,” natural-shaped beehives handmade from rye grass, and Japanese seasonings. SHED began producing its own line of finishing powder this year based on Chef Hoffman’s recipes. “You may taste something in the café on any day that has our finishing powder on it,” Daniel says, “maybe sauerkraut, charred eggplant, smoked onions. We also have our own line of pickles and olive oils. We grow a French variety of olives. We buy seaweed foraged locally in the Pacific Ocean.”

Getting Together The downstairs commercial space is only half of SHED’s mission. The other half is addressed upstairs in a wide open, wood-floored event gallery. Quiet this Saturday morning, it is being prepared for an afternoon herb workshop.

“This is what we call our modern grange,” Daniel says. “We do workshops, panel discussions, films, dances, music, and community suppers. We’ve put on hundreds of community and educational events in five years.”

The couple arranged with the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry to use the “Grange” name in their logo, but SHED is not a member of the fraternal order, Daniel says. “Our idea of the modern grange is to create a place where people come together around food and farming, so we just thought of this as a grange,” she says. “So many newcomers to town have said they’re getting to know their community through SHED by coming to the dinners or classes, or getting coffee. It’s really nice to know we’ve become a community hub.”

With its multiple parts, SHED combines so many business models that there’s been a big learning curve. “We thought it would be simple, but it’s really seven businesses in one – from the grocery to the restaurant to events to retail,” Lipton says. “When we opened, we’d never had a restaurant before. We’d had a food coop, but not a restaurant. Our intention was clear: We were never here because we wanted to sell a lot of stuff. In fact, our friends call us reluctant retailers. Selling is not in our being, but our intention is to celebrate what’s good on the land and the earth and in the people who grow from it.” 

Fortunately for the two of them, the 80- to 100-hour work weeks are easing up Lipton says. “This is a labor of love,” Daniel says. “To offer a place where a lot of people are coming for different things — that’s been a real pleasure.”

https://healdsburgshed.com/

https://jensen-architects.com/case_studies/case-study/shed/#article-panel-138

Adventure Sports Journal

SEMI-TRUCKS THUNDER past; perspiration stings my neck; overheated thoughts spiral into chaos. What am I doing? Bicycling through California Gold Country – yes. Grinding over one of America’s tallest mountain ranges – yes. Suffering a mother lode of curses inside my helmet-shackled brain – like a drunken prospector, yes.

I am bone-tired and glum. “It’s time to stop this adventure and go home,” I whine to my sinking ambition. But right now I really have no other option than to keep cranking up the road.

Seizing a whim, I’d begun this solo bike tour five days earlier on the northern end of State Route 49, which is named for the waves of fortune seekers who swarmed into California during the 1848-1855 Gold Rush.

Like their journey west 160 years before me, this would be no breezy jaunt. The northern end of Highway 49 starts in the Sierra Valley at 5,000 feet, about 40 miles north of my home in Lake Tahoe. My plan was to ride a counter-clockwise route west over Yuba Pass, south through Gold Country, east up State Route 88 over 8,500-foot Carson Pass, down into Hope Valley and then north over Luther Pass to Lake Tahoe.

It would be about 220 miles and a lot of up and down, all in six days.

So far, with the trip about two-thirds complete, I’ve pedaled down densely forested mountainsides, across rolling oak-covered foothills, and through a half dozen canyons. Now I’m angling for home on a 40-mile, 6,000-foot undulating ascent up the Sierra’s west slope. I hope to reach my lodge at Silver Lake before nightfall, but I’ve been riding, resting, or eating — mostly riding — in heat for seven hours, and my will power is fading.

Another rattling truck leaves me choking on diesel fumes. I groan. From inside of me, something whispers back — a raspy male voice.

“Little lady,” it says, “you wanted this challenge. You need to face this down.”

It’s my inner gold miner telling me to buck up.

I’ve always wished I could have whacked about as a 19th century Gold Rush miner with a pick and shovel. I’d have liked, romantically speaking, to swill whisky, roast rattlesnake meat on a stick, and recollect stories by the campfire.

Though I couldn’t really be one of those hardy guys, I realized that I could test my grit against the Gold Country in another way.

I’d dreamed of doing multi-day bicycle rides in California. I figured doing a ride alone would push me to rely on my ownresources. Mapping my route, overcoming fatigue, fixing my own flats — I’d be 21st century tough.

Opportunity arrived when I had an unexpected gap in my schedule in September. I wasn’t in good enough shape, but the window was open. I could make excuses, or just go. What would a frontier miner do? He’d go.Highway 49 skirts the Sierra Nevada in a wavy hem from Sierra Valley to Oakhurst near Yosemite. It crosses many of the greatest rivers draining the Sierra; in the northern section, where I’d be riding, these would include forks of the Yuba, the American and the Cosumnes. Highway 49, of course, is also the rope that connects the Gold Country’s most colorful mining towns. Downieville, Nevada City, Auburn, and Placerville would be way posts on my path.

My plan was to sleep in hotels to keep my load light. Comfy beds aren’t exactly miner material, but it was a concession I made knowing I’d be a shriveled violet without good sleep.

It’s mid-September when I tie a rucksack to my Bianchi and pedal off.

In the 19th century, people plodded through the region on foot, mule, horse, and barrel-stave snowshoes. With the benefit of pavement, good wheels and fresh legs, I cruise over 6,700-foot Yuba pass in less than two hours.

Stopping in a Sierra City café for lunch, I take the last table among a pack of motorcyclists and gobble a chicken sandwich and fries. Next to bikers wearing black leather and big boots, I feel self- conscious in my favorite cycling shirt — a bright orange affair emblazoned with a giant yellow butterfly good for alerting motorists on mountain roads. My mint- green Bianchi next to their Harleys looks wimpish; but my muscle power isn’t at all milquetoast.

The ride to Downieville (elev. 2,925) is easy. I check in at the Carriage House Inn and jump into the Yuba River for a swim.

The next day’s route drops into three river canyons — the three forks of the Yuba — on the way to Nevada City and Auburn. This is sublime country, for sure. The terrain-cutting rivers roil below, and forested slopes stretch to the sky. Pickup drivers are insanely polite, shifting into oncoming lanes so as not to bump me off the road. The flies are not so. The hovering vermin bite at my neck and knees like obsessed miners who have just struck gold.

In North San Juan a motorcyclist on a beastly Harley toys with me. I’ve had my share of run-ins with bullies. Once a trucker chucked a beer bottle at me; another time a biker gunned his engine so loud that I careened off the road;and once a car passenger screeched, “Environmentalist!” Now there’s a dirty label.

“I saw what you ate yesterday,” the biker snarls. “I was wondering what you people eat.”

What kind of thug would fix his unsavory nature on a woman riding a 21-pound Bianchi? Huffing back, I gun my own engine and pedal away into the leaf-flecked countryside, seeking friendlier encounters.

The heat of late summer is bearing down. When I reach the South Fork of the Yuba River, I jump in and don’t want to get out.

The next morning south of Auburn, torture takes a new form: traffic. Cargo vans nudge me off hairpin turns; tourists bleep their horns. To get away I peel off Highway 49 onto backroads to Placerville, where I flop into a musty bed at a cheap motel.

It’s time to leave this narrow road, I decide; the streaming traffic is a hammer to my spirit. The next day I chart backroads between Placerville and FairPlay. My journey begins in a cool tunnel of overhanging cedar on Cedar Ravine Road, and takes me into the winery and rancho estates of El Dorado County on Mt. Aukum Road.

The backroads deliver me to a good- as-gold lunch of black truffle fettuccini at Bocconato Trattoria in Fair Play (elev. 2,320) and a blissful all-afternoon wine tasting at Winery by the Creek. That night at the Barkley Homestead B&B, the proprietors serve me up some homemade fried chicken from their kitchen. We stay up late telling stories in the flickering beam of their big screen TV, sadly a 21st century replacement for the campfire.

The next day, my fifth, starts out great as I climb up the forested and lonely Omo Ranch Road to its juncture with Highway 88, where I find more sustenance worthy of a hungry miner: three flapjacks fried in butter at a greasy spoon inside Cook’s Station (elev. 5,000), an old roadside stop built in 1863.

This route over the Sierra connecting the Central Valley with Nevada’s Carson Valley was blazed in 1848 by Mormons traveling east to Salt Lake City. Despite admiring their pluck, I stick with prospector legends for my inspiration. The rasp of my inner gold miner has got me through one hurdle, after all.

An hour later though, I’m struggling with a stubborn flat, and my resolve is tested. The doldrums hit again. A trucker roars too close. “I’m over it!” I scream in fatigue and frustration. I consider thumbing a ride.

Suddenly, a roadside apparition appears, too unexpected to be even a hallucination. I cut off my whiney complaints the way a miner might use a shovel to sever a rattlesnake’s head.

At first it’s just a bright moving speck on the roadside. Then, I make it out to be a runner in shorts and a tank top … a man jogging along the highway … out here?

His name is Charlie Engle, age 45, who I would later learn is a well-known adventure runner who’s made two documentaries about long excursion runs.

He’s on another one now. In fact, he’s attempting a 3,000-mile run across America with ultra-marathoner Marshall Ulrich, who’s somewhere down the road still.

Sounds like slow torture to me; but he’s thrilled, if tired from today’s climb.

We begin to puff and pound together into the Sierra high country and have a real campfire-style chat, diving right to the heart of things.

Do we do these hard endeavors because they’re mostly fun? Easy answer, yes.

Because they make a difference to anybody else or the world? Not necessarily, but maybe.

Is there something else this effort is good for?

“To see what I can do, I guess,” I say. “To see if I’ve got it in me.”

“Got what?” he asks.

“I’ll tell you that when I’m done.”

“That’s just it,” he says, adding that you can’t always know what to expect when you start, but whatever comes your way, your body can adapt marvelously. It adapts and improves. So does your mind. That’s when you achieve things you never imagined you could.

Now I’m feeling like I’ve just discovered my guardian angel and spiritual guru.

The truth is, when I started this odyssey I wasn’t at all sure I could finish this Highway 88 leg. But here I am, churningaway, displaying way more physical and mental strength than I knew I had. It begs the question: If I can do this, what else can I do?

As I pedal away, I feel calmly focused. What kinds of reserves might I discover? If I give up now, I’ll never know what I have. Into my thoughts enters the phrase: quiet mind, quiet mind.

Up the road a ways I pass a support crew parked in the shade waiting for Engle.*

An hour later Silver Lake appears, cradled in granite. On the eastern end, I roll up to the rustic and elegant Kit Carson Lodge, a copacetic alpine oasis for a road-weary cyclist.

Below my cabin the lake glimmers in moonlight. Above me, a ghostly ridge elbows the sky. I scramble downhill and follow the shore to a cove. My legs buzz from the day’s effort. It’s the biggest, baddest ride I’ve ever done.

My Gold Rush-sized feat is no longer the stuff of unrealized dreams, but now a nugget of satisfaction.

The next day, rejuvenated, crossing the summit of Carson Pass feels relatively easy. The rest of the ride is froth on the brew — a breezy coast down the pass into the aspens and meadows of Hope Valley, a tiny grind up Luther Pass, and finally, a return to Lake Tahoe. I’m plumb tuckered out, yet stronger and wiser for making the journey.

*Author’s note: When I checked Engle’s blog, charlieengle.com, for this story, I was shocked to learn he is serving a 21-month sentence for mortgage fraud arising from an attempt to raise funds for a 4,300–mile run he did across the Sahara in 2007, chronicled in the documentary “Running the Sahara,” narrated by Matt Damon. Regardless, that doesn’t in any way diminish the impact his advice had during my ride, which came from experiences well earned — physically speaking — and had nothing to do with how he funded them. Indeed, for others, his words may have even more power from prison. Engle has titled his blog, “Running in Place: A Blog About Surviving Adversity.”

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

Adventure Sports Journal

Semi-trucks thunder past; perspiration stings my neck; overheated thoughts spiral into chaos. What am I doing? Bicycling through California Gold Country – yes. Grinding over one of America’s tallest mountain ranges – yes. Suffering a mother lode of curses inside my helmet-shackled brain – like a drunken prospector, yes.

I am bone-tired and glum. “It’s time to stop this adventure and go home,” I whine to my sinking ambition. But right now I really have no other option than to keep cranking up the road.

Seizing a whim, I’d begun this solo bike tour five days earlier on the northern end of State Route 49, which is named for the waves of fortune seekers who swarmed into California during the 1848-1855 Gold Rush.

Like their journey west 160 years before me, this would be no breezy jaunt. The northern end of Highway 49 starts in the Sierra Valley at 5,000 feet, about 40 miles north of my home in Lake Tahoe. My plan was to ride a counter-clockwise route west over Yuba Pass, south through Gold Country, east up State Route 88 over 8,500-foot Carson Pass, down into Hope Valley and then north over Luther Pass to Lake Tahoe.

It would be about 220 miles and a lot of up and down, all in six days.

So far, with the trip about two-thirds complete, I’ve pedaled down densely forested mountainsides, across rolling oak-covered foothills, and through a half dozen canyons. Now I’m angling for home on a 40-mile, 6,000-foot undulating ascent up the Sierra’s west slope. I hope to reach my lodge at Silver Lake before nightfall, but I’ve been riding, resting, or eating — mostly riding — in heat for seven hours, and my will power is fading.

Another rattling truck leaves me choking on diesel fumes. I groan. From inside of me, something whispers back — a raspy male voice.

“Little lady,” it says, “you wanted this challenge. You need to face this down.”

It’s my inner gold miner telling me to buck up.

I’ve always wished I could have whacked about as a 19th century Gold Rush miner with a pick and shovel. I’d have liked, romantically speaking, to swill whisky, roast rattlesnake meat on a stick, and recollect stories by the campfire.

Though I couldn’t really be one of those hardy guys, I realized that I could test my grit against the Gold Country in another way.

I’d dreamed of doing multi-day bicycle rides in California. I figured doing a ride alone would push me to rely on my ownresources. Mapping my route, overcoming fatigue, fixing my own flats — I’d be 21st century tough.

Opportunity arrived when I had an unexpected gap in my schedule in September. I wasn’t in good enough shape, but the window was open. I could make excuses, or just go. What would a frontier miner do? He’d go.Highway 49 skirts the Sierra Nevada in a wavy hem from Sierra Valley to Oakhurst near Yosemite. It crosses many of the greatest rivers draining the Sierra; in the northern section, where I’d be riding, these would include forks of the Yuba, the American and the Cosumnes. Highway 49, of course, is also the rope that connects the Gold Country’s most colorful mining towns. Downieville, Nevada City, Auburn, and Placerville would be way posts on my path.

My plan was to sleep in hotels to keep my load light. Comfy beds aren’t exactly miner material, but it was a concession I made knowing I’d be a shriveled violet without good sleep.

It’s mid-September when I tie a rucksack to my Bianchi and pedal off.

In the 19th century, people plodded through the region on foot, mule, horse, and barrel-stave snowshoes. With the benefit of pavement, good wheels and fresh legs, I cruise over 6,700-foot Yuba pass in less than two hours.

Stopping in a Sierra City café for lunch, I take the last table among a pack of motorcyclists and gobble a chicken sandwich and fries. Next to bikers wearing black leather and big boots, I feel self- conscious in my favorite cycling shirt — a bright orange affair emblazoned with a giant yellow butterfly good for alerting motorists on mountain roads. My mint- green Bianchi next to their Harleys looks wimpish; but my muscle power isn’t at all milquetoast.

The ride to Downieville (elev. 2,925) is easy. I check in at the Carriage House Inn and jump into the Yuba River for a swim.

The next day’s route drops into three river canyons — the three forks of the Yuba — on the way to Nevada City and Auburn. This is sublime country, for sure. The terrain-cutting rivers roil below, and forested slopes stretch to the sky. Pickup drivers are insanely polite, shifting into oncoming lanes so as not to bump me off the road. The flies are not so. The hovering vermin bite at my neck and knees like obsessed miners who have just struck gold.

In North San Juan a motorcyclist on a beastly Harley toys with me. I’ve had my share of run-ins with bullies. Once a trucker chucked a beer bottle at me; another time a biker gunned his engine so loud that I careened off the road;and once a car passenger screeched, “Environmentalist!” Now there’s a dirty label.

“I saw what you ate yesterday,” the biker snarls. “I was wondering what you people eat.”

What kind of thug would fix his unsavory nature on a woman riding a 21-pound Bianchi? Huffing back, I gun my own engine and pedal away into the leaf-flecked countryside, seeking friendlier encounters.

The heat of late summer is bearing down. When I reach the South Fork of the Yuba River, I jump in and don’t want to get out.

The next morning south of Auburn, torture takes a new form: traffic. Cargo vans nudge me off hairpin turns; tourists bleep their horns. To get away I peel off Highway 49 onto backroads to Placerville, where I flop into a musty bed at a cheap motel.

It’s time to leave this narrow road, I decide; the streaming traffic is a hammer to my spirit. The next day I chart backroads between Placerville and FairPlay. My journey begins in a cool tunnel of overhanging cedar on Cedar Ravine Road, and takes me into the winery and rancho estates of El Dorado County on Mt. Aukum Road.

The backroads deliver me to a good- as-gold lunch of black truffle fettuccini at Bocconato Trattoria in Fair Play (elev. 2,320) and a blissful all-afternoon wine tasting at Winery by the Creek. That night at the Barkley Homestead B&B, the proprietors serve me up some homemade fried chicken from their kitchen. We stay up late telling stories in the flickering beam of their big screen TV, sadly a 21st century replacement for the campfire.

The next day, my fifth, starts out great as I climb up the forested and lonely Omo Ranch Road to its juncture with Highway 88, where I find more sustenance worthy of a hungry miner: three flapjacks fried in butter at a greasy spoon inside Cook’s Station (elev. 5,000), an old roadside stop built in 1863.

This route over the Sierra connecting the Central Valley with Nevada’s Carson Valley was blazed in 1848 by Mormons traveling east to Salt Lake City. Despite admiring their pluck, I stick with prospector legends for my inspiration. The rasp of my inner gold miner has got me through one hurdle, after all.

An hour later though, I’m struggling with a stubborn flat, and my resolve is tested. The doldrums hit again. A trucker roars too close. “I’m over it!” I scream in fatigue and frustration. I consider thumbing a ride.

Suddenly, a roadside apparition appears, too unexpected to be even a hallucination. I cut off my whiney complaints the way a miner might use a shovel to sever a rattlesnake’s head.

At first it’s just a bright moving speck on the roadside. Then, I make it out to be a runner in shorts and a tank top … a man jogging along the highway … out here?

His name is Charlie Engle, age 45, who I would later learn is a well-known adventure runner who’s made two documentaries about long excursion runs.

He’s on another one now. In fact, he’s attempting a 3,000-mile run across America with ultra-marathoner Marshall Ulrich, who’s somewhere down the road still.

Sounds like slow torture to me; but he’s thrilled, if tired from today’s climb.

We begin to puff and pound together into the Sierra high country and have a real campfire-style chat, diving right to the heart of things.

Do we do these hard endeavors because they’re mostly fun? Easy answer, yes.

Because they make a difference to anybody else or the world? Not necessarily, but maybe.

Is there something else this effort is good for?

“To see what I can do, I guess,” I say. “To see if I’ve got it in me.”

“Got what?” he asks.

“I’ll tell you that when I’m done.”

“That’s just it,” he says, adding that you can’t always know what to expect when you start, but whatever comes your way, your body can adapt marvelously. It adapts and improves. So does your mind. That’s when you achieve things you never imagined you could.

Now I’m feeling like I’ve just discovered my guardian angel and spiritual guru.

The truth is, when I started this odyssey I wasn’t at all sure I could finish this Highway 88 leg. But here I am, churningaway, displaying way more physical and mental strength than I knew I had. It begs the question: If I can do this, what else can I do?

As I pedal away, I feel calmly focused. What kinds of reserves might I discover? If I give up now, I’ll never know what I have. Into my thoughts enters the phrase: quiet mind, quiet mind.

Up the road a ways I pass a support crew parked in the shade waiting for Engle.*

An hour later Silver Lake appears, cradled in granite. On the eastern end, I roll up to the rustic and elegant Kit Carson Lodge, a copacetic alpine oasis for a road-weary cyclist.

Below my cabin the lake glimmers in moonlight. Above me, a ghostly ridge elbows the sky. I scramble downhill and follow the shore to a cove. My legs buzz from the day’s effort. It’s the biggest, baddest ride I’ve ever done.

My Gold Rush-sized feat is no longer the stuff of unrealized dreams, but now a nugget of satisfaction.

The next day, rejuvenated, crossing the summit of Carson Pass feels relatively easy. The rest of the ride is froth on the brew — a breezy coast down the pass into the aspens and meadows of Hope Valley, a tiny grind up Luther Pass, and finally, a return to Lake Tahoe. I’m plumb tuckered out, yet stronger and wiser for making the journey.

*Author’s note: When I checked Engle’s blog, charlieengle.com, for this story, I was shocked to learn he is serving a 21-month sentence for mortgage fraud arising from an attempt to raise funds for a 4,300–mile run he did across the Sahara in 2007, chronicled in the documentary “Running the Sahara,” narrated by Matt Damon. Regardless, that doesn’t in any way diminish the impact his advice had during my ride, which came from experiences well earned — physically speaking — and had nothing to do with how he funded them. Indeed, for others, his words may have even more power from prison. Engle has titled his blog, “Running in Place: A Blog About Surviving Adversity.”

San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 17, 2016

From Nevada City, Highway 20 snakes uphill along the razorback Washington and Harmony ridges, where pine forests clear now and then to reveal canyons that lured miners. The road merges with Interstate 80 to climb that scourge of wagon train migrants, Donner Summit. Beneath the pass, Truckee cherishes its railroad and lumber town grit as much as it does innovative food, fine crafts and heart-thumping athletic pursuits.

— Laura Read; travel@sfchronicle.com

Explore the town

Morning

At Coffeebar, it’s hard to choose between an expertly balanced cappuccino, a nutritious green matcha tea latte or a chai latte radiating waves of sweet, creamy spice. Enjoy whatever you choose with a flaky house-made croissant surrounded by friends (and their dogs) at a hardwood community table beautifully crafted by Three Dots Studios. Afterward put those calories to use ripping up Jackass Trail on a full-suspension Kona Precept mountain bike rented at the Backcountry. For a gentler ride, cruise the Legacy Trail as it winds through Martis Valley along the Truckee River. Access is from downtown at the end of East River Road.

Midday

At Old Town Tap, share plates of house-made charcuterie and beef tartare, followed by a gutsy pizza of the day, which, because Executive Chef Chris Watkins is crazy for pork, might combine guanciale (pork jowl) with onion and house-cured bacon beneath a drizzle of nutty honey.

Afternoon

Stroll down Truckee’s Commercial Row to Bespoke and pick up a set of Eko Kreations hemp and organic cotton dinner napkins stitched with inspiring words from John Muir, and a stoneware vase etched, scrimshaw-like, with “desert daisies” by Diana Fayt. Walk a few doors away to Bespoke’s sister store, the makersspace Atelier, and sign up for Fayt’s gestural ink painting workshop or a class in cheese making (both set for later this month). And at Gallery 5830’, view the art installations of Troy Corliss, who reinvents patterns of nature in metal and glass.

Watch your meter, as Commercial Row parking tickets are pricey. Park for two hours free across from the Truckee Hotel.

Evening

Start early in the Pour House’s cozy, wood-paneled tasting room on Jibboom Street (once the location of Truckee’s red-light district). Here is where conversations about wine and cheese and anything else take flight as you taste the day’s selection, which might include an Alexander Valley Trig Point Diamond Dust Vineyard Cabernet or an earthy, spicy Pinot Noir from Germany’s Karl Joh.

Later at Restaurant Trokay, relax in rustic-urban surroundings for a 10-course seasonal chef’s tasting menu, which might include an arrangement of unripe strawberries, elderflower sprigs and a cylinder of foie gras torchon, followed by ribbons of Mount Lassen trout embellished with clay cinders and the Italian “landweed” agretti, and then Kauai white shrimp with chawanmushi, a Japanese egg custard. Chef-owners John and Nyna Weatherspoon are transplants from New York City, where John studied with Daniel Boulud and David Bouley. Trokay pairs with Atelier to offer cooking classes in its kitchen.

Spend the night

Snuggle fireside in the lobby at Cedar House Sport Hotel, a boutique property blending Old Tahoe materials and details with European refinement. Although just a mile or so from downtown, because it’s surrounded by trees, the hotel feels like a getaway in the country.

If you go

Coffeebar: 10120 Jibboom St., (530) 587-2000. www.coffeebar.com

The Backcountry: 11400 Donner Pass Road, (530) 582-0909. www.thebackcountry.net

Truckee River Legacy Trail: www.townoftruckee.com

Old Town Tap: 10164 Donner Pass Road, (530) 563-5233

Atelier: 10128 Donner Pass Road, (530) 386-2700 www.ateliertruckee.com

Gallery 5830’: 10060 Donner Pass Road, (530) 902-0322. www.facebook.com/gallery5830

San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 17, 2016

Thirty minutes north of Interstate 80 on the Gold Rush Highway (Highway 49), the town of Grass Valley butterflies across rolling slopes above Yuba City and the Central Valley. For 106 years, between 1850 and 1956, workers from around the world drilled 367 miles of tunnels into the earth for Empire Mine. Their legacy lingers in the vintage ambience of Grass Valley’s historic downtown.

— Laura Read

Morning

After breakfasting on potato pancakes at South Pine Cafe, walk to Mill Street, the town’s treasure trove of vintage, art and collectibles shops. It’s possible the area has more used and rare books for sale per capita than any other American town. By itself, the cavernous Booktown Books, above, probably proves it. Prowl among stacks for a used “Diary of a Forty-Niner” by Chauncey Canfield or an old Grass Valley historical home walking tour guide, then go around the corner to the Book Seller, one of the many new-book stores, to find the latest by local writers like Beat poet Gary Snyder, whose “Danger on Peaks” shares moments of life and thought that occur in the depths of these forests.

Midday

At the funky Cousin Jack’s Pasties, in an old gas station that still smells of oil, munch on the same hearty potato-and-pork pasty that Cornish workers carried into the mines in triple-decker lunch buckets. (Jack is the large size; Jenny is the small.)

Afternoon

Catch afternoon breezes on the forested lawns around Empire Mine State Park’s Bourn Cottage, an 1897 Cotswold-style home designed by Willis Polk for mine owner William Bourn Jr., who also built Filoli mansion in Woodside.

Evening

See who’s playing live music on the patio at Diego’s, and sit down to an Electric Lemonade, made with rice-distilled vodka, and a dish of mahi-mahi Anticucho marinated South American-style in a fresh chimichurri sauce. At the Center for the Arts, you can get a seat for the live music, but you probably won’t need it if the audience does its usual thing: dancing like crazed buffleheads in front of the stage. Fall’s lineup includes singer-songwriter Laura Marling and dobro master Jerry Douglas. Arrive early for drinks among the comfy couches of the stage-side lounge.

Spend the night

Walk a few blocks to bed in the tiny but cute restored room at the 1930s Sierra Mountain Inn. There are one- and two-bedroom suites, some with kitchenettes; a detached cottage has a convenient living room and kitchen.

If you go

South Pine Cafe: 102 N. Richardson St., (530) 274- 0261. www.southpinecafe.com

Booktown Books: 107 Banks St., (530) 272-4655. www.booktownbooks.com

The Book Seller: 107 Mill St., (530) 272-2131. www.thebookseller.biz

Antique Emporium: 150 Mill St., (530) 272-7302. www.facebook.com/pages/Grass-Valley-Antique-Emporium/122563881134408

Cousin Jack’s Pasties: 100 S. Auburn St., (530) 272-9230. www.facebook.com/cjpasty

Diego’s: 217 Colfax Ave., Grass Valley, (530) 477-1460. www.diegosrestaurant.com.

Empire Mine: 10791 E. Empire St., (530) 273-8522. www.empiremine.org

The Center for the Arts: 314 W. Main St., (530) 274-8384. http://thecenterforthearts.org

Sierra Mountain Hotel: 816 W. Main St., (530) 273-8133. www.sierramountaininn.com

San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 17, 2016

Just 5 miles east of Grass Valley, in Nevada City the wealthier of 19th and early 20th century mine owners clustered their Victorian cottages along Deer Creek. Nowadays the town now still appeals to innovators, but the residents and many visitors strolling the pretty streets are thinking more often of contemporary themes — hippie, artist, techie — instead of gold.

Morning

Grab coffee and a bagel to go at Broad Street Bistro, and walk two blocks to the start of the Deer Creek Tribute Trail, which takes off behind the Miners Foundry Cultural Center. From a dirt road, the trail turns left onto a footpath leading into a wooded ravine, where the creek winds among monolithic boulders. A quarter mile in, you’ll cross a 150-foot suspension bridge over the water that lifts you into the air as you take each step. Check with Folk Trails Hiking Club if you want to join a local group for this walk.

Midday

Relax at Three Forks Bakery with a wood-fired pancetta and fennel pizza with an organic wild yeast crust. Wind up with a “Wheyward Girl Selects” cheese plate — why not, you burned the calories already this morning. The “French Beauties” plate includes Tomme de Savoie, Pierra Robert and Brie de Nangis. Stop next door afterward to see why Wheyward Girl Creamery causes all the fuss: Master cheese maker Barbara Jenness curates a mouthwatering collection of artisanal cheeses from around the world. Sign up for one of the cheese-making classes scheduled in the next month: Mozzarella, Cheese Making 101, and Mold-Ripened Cheese.

Afternoon

Wander the shops tucked behind brick and wood storefronts from the town’s mining heyday, then try a scoop of strawberry and sweet red pepper sorbet at Treats artisan ice cream shop. Later, settle in at Elixart Herbal Lounge, where you can steep yourself in mood-enhancing elixirs or sip creamy cacao. Fridays you can drink all the kava and cacao you want for $20.

Evening

After scallops and a salad from the seasonal menu at New Moon Cafe, finish the day at the Golden Era Lounge. Order the locals’ favorite cocktail: Oaxacan on Sunshine, a smoky-sultry blend of mezcal, Cointreau, lemon, Cocchi Americano and orange bitters. Owners Cindy and Steve Giardina opened this stylish place last spring in a building that had been serving spirits as early as 1867.

Spend the night

A mile from town, Erin and Dan Theim, who run Nevada City’s perky outdoor-themed Outside Inn, have opened the new Inn Town Campground, where you can rinse off in an outdoor shower at shared bath facilities, and then circle under the pine trees at an outdoor gas fireplace. Tuck under the quilts in a Boy Scout-style tent appointed with cowboy-style furniture and a balcony.

If you go

Broad Street Bistro: 426 Broad St., (530) 265-4204

Miners Foundry Cultural Center: 325 Spring St., (530) 265-5040. www.minersfoundry.org

Folk Trails Hiking Club: www.facebook.com/folktrailshikingclub

Three Forks Bakery: 211 Commercial St. (530) 470-8333. www.threeforksnc.com

Wheyward Creamery: 209 Commercial St., (530) 478-1665. www.facebook.com/wheywardgirlcreamery

Treats: 110 York St., (530) 913-5819. www.treatsnevadacity.com

Elixart Herbal Lounge: 408 Broad St. No. 8, (530) 265-1901. www.elixart.com

A New Moon Cafe: 203 York St., (530) 265-6399.

Golden Era Lounge: 309 Broad St. (530) 264-7048. www.goldeneralounge.com

VIA Magazine

IN 1846 EXPLORER JOHN C. Frémont christened the entrance to San Francisco Bay “Chrysopylae,” or Golden Gate. He compared it to the Golden Horn, a beautiful harbor in ancient Byzantium (Istanbul, Turkey) where land, sea, and the human race had converged for thousands of years. He didn’t know how apt that name would become.

Frémont may have noticed the many shades of gold that speckled the region: fields of orange poppies (now the state flower), hillsides of flaxen grass, and long afternoons filled with golden light. But he couldn’t have known that two years after the name was recorded, a pioneer would discover gold at Sutter’s Mill. The shiny nuggets made San Francisco and the West the land of golden opportunity. Today the Golden Gate Strait, which connects the bay to the Pacific Ocean, is the centerpiece of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a string of 37 public sites that preserve dozens of miles of spectacular coastline extending to the north and south.

Among the park’s many attractions are more than 130 miles of paths, 1,200 historic buildings, and 19 ecosystems. Sites include the renowned Muir Woods, Lands End, and Alcatraz, as well as lesser-known locales such as the Tomales Bay viewpoint at Martinelli Ranch and the paved Sneath Lane Trail at Sweeney Ridge, where Spaniards first spotted San Francisco Bay in 1769. The sheer breadth of the park leaves parts of it overlooked, even by locals.

At the heart of the recreation area are two tips of land bounding the strait: the Marin Headlands and the city of San Francisco, both of them beautiful places where people, land, and sea have come together to make history.

“The coast draws us,” says John Martini, who grew up in San Francisco and was a national park ranger for over 25 years. “The headlands of San Francisco and Marin are the ultimate example, especially during the American era, of how people were being drawn west as far as they could go.”

Debra Schwartz, founder of Tam Hiking Tours, which offers guided hikes on Mount Tamalpais, has walked the Marin Headlands for three decades and is still entranced by watching local weather patterns. “Depending on the time of year, when there’s a blue sky, the clouds will appear from nowhere, then race across the ridges,” she says. “It looks as if someone were blowing bubbles.”

For Schwartz, the headlands provide both adventure and retreat. “It’s quiet, and you get the whole ocean spreading out all around you,” she says. “It smells heavenly because of the blend of chaparral and sage.” She points out that the surface of the area’s Coastal Trail, partly a layered rock called chert, was formed at the bottom of the sea some 100 million years ago. “Think of yourself as walking on the ocean floor,” she says.

The Marin Headlands are prized for their views of water and city, and numerous trails lead you to dazzling vistas. The scented chaparral Schwartz promises accompanies hikers to the top of Slacker Hill near the city of Sausalito, for example, where the ocean connects San Francisco’s skyline to the Farallon Islands, some 30 miles away. At the center of the view is the 1.7-mile span of the Golden Gate Bridge. Climb Slacker Hill at dawn to see a fantasia of fuchsia and lemon hues play out between the water and the skies. On foggy days, you can watch the mist prowl over the bay like a great gray beast. The thickest fog obscures the bridge, but sometimes a single red tower bursts from the luminous folds, looking oddly out of scale.

Beneath those folds and towers, the span binds the Marin Headlands to their sister cliffs across the strait. There, a Spanish military outpost was established in 1776, built atop San Francisco’s ancient sand dunes.

For over 200 years, Spanish, then Mexican, then U.S. soldiers occupied the Presidio, keeping commercial development at bay. In 1994, the 1,490-acre former army base joined the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Today the Presidio Trust, a federal agency created to preserve the area, presides over 24 miles of trails; a 300-acre forest of Monterey cypress, pine, and eucalyptus trees; and hundreds of renovated buildings. Former army lodgings now house numerous amenities and attractions, among them the elegant Inn at the Presidio, one of only two hotels in the recreation area (the other being Cavallo Point Lodge); the innovative entertainment of the Walt Disney Family Museum; and the new restaurant Arguello, helmed by famed chef Traci Des Jardins, inside the restored Officers’ Club.

The Presidio’s forests are easy to get into, with paths connecting one intriguing place to the next. One standout, the Presidio Promenade, brings walkers to the San Francisco National Cemetery, where interred military veterans include buffalo soldiers, Civil War generals, and a Union spy.

The Presidio Trust also supports art programs all over the park. British artist Andy Goldsworthy has created four permanent installations in the Presidio. To see his work called Tree Fall, for example, duck into a historic powder magazine on the Main Post parade ground. As your eyes adjust to the dim light, shapes that could be mammoth tree roots emerge from the ceiling, giving the illusion of being deep underground.

“I see Tree Fall as a symbol of the Presidio,” says Alex Kenin, founder of the trekking tour company Urban Hiker SF. “The work is hidden in the Presidio just as the Presidio is hidden in San Francisco.” That metaphor arguably extends to the many quiet riches of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. “In each case,” Kenin says, “the curious are rewarded.”

VIA Magazine

MARINE BIOLOGIST MEAGAN Jones cofounded Whale Trust Maui, a nonprofit that studies the creatures’ behavior and communication patterns, in 2001. The group celebrates the 10th anniversary of its free, annual Whale Tales event this Feb. 12–15 in Kapalua, on the island’s northwestern tip.

Q What draws you to whales?
A As a kid, I felt a kinship with them. Later, when I spent time in their natural environment—observed their interactions, witnessed their curiosity and complex communication patterns—I was inspired to learn more and protect them. I love introducing people to the world underneath the sea. One of my favorite things to do is drop a hydrophone into the water and put the headphones on someone who has never heard whale songs before. I have a camera ready to capture the awe on the person’s face.

Q Why should we care about whales?
A With oceans covering more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface and containing 97 percent of all the planet’s water, humans depend on the health of this ecosystem for our food, water, and air. I remember the first time my dad experienced a whale. It rolled over and, looking at us, slapped its pectoral fin on the water. To this day, my dad believes that the whale was communicating with him. Whales remind us that we’re not alone on this planet.

Q What’s the most interesting research the trust is doing?
A For the past 45 years, scientists have been trying to understand the song of humpbacks. What does the song mean? Why does it change from year to year and span entire ocean basins? How do whales communicate over such long distances? Our research probes these questions by looking at the function of the song from different perspectives.

Q Best spots on Maui for watching humpback whales?
A On the southwest side of the island, protected waters coupled with a high density of whales provide the perfect conditions for spotting whales during winter. Make sure you look for the blow [spout] or the splashes that erupt when a humpback leaps from the water.

Q Can you recommend a great place outside Hawaii to see humpbacks?
A Southeast Alaska is one of my favorites. In one feeding technique, a group uses bubbles to coalesce prey—usually a group of herring—into a tight ball. The whales burst from the water all at once with their mouths open. The sounds they make during these feedings create a haunting cacophony.

Photography courtesy of Meagan Jones

National Geographic Traveler

When an old-timer talks about having visited Lake Tahoe’s North Shore four or five decades ago, memories often include nights spent in a lakefront cottage and days lazed away on a sandy beach. Ask this person’s grandchildren about their recent North Shore getaway, and their stories just might be the same.

While some Lake Tahoe Resorts have ballooned, man in Carnelian Bay, Kings Beach, and Tahoe Vista have not. A few are simply stuck in the past; others might just like things simple.

A classic day hereabouts begins before first light on the water. At 6 a.m., fishing charter captian Mickey Daniels meets customers in Carnelian Bay, as he has for almost 40 years. The motor surges, and Daniels’ 43-foot Big Mack II pushes out across the mirrored lake. “I enjoy watching people form new bonds out here, he says. His customers, in turn, enjoy their catches, which they may ask Gar Woods Gril to prepare later for supper.

The clarity of the water, “freakishly blue” according to one visiting teen, is what makes Tahoe so appealing – that and the lake’s 22-mile length. Formed by glacial scouring, earthquake faults, and volcanic flows, 1,645-foot-deep :ake Tahoe is the largest mountain lake in North America. Most people flock to the big beaches; few glean the pleasure of the littlest aercs of sand. Moon Dunes Beach (one of the lake’s only intact sand dunes) and Buck’s Beach are two of the most inviting. Another way to enjoy the big blue is from the deck of“The Saga,” a 38-foot 1930 wooden boat available for tours through North Shore Marina.

The day winds up with your personal catch of the day prepared by Gar Woods Grill, or old family-recipe Italian dishes at Lanza’s Restaurant, whose pine walls are hung with vintage photos of a place happily stuck in yesterday.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

San Francisco Chronicle

IT TOOK BAY Area writer Jennifer Woodlief more than two years to reconstruct one of the Sierra Nevada's worst tragedies, the 1982 avalanche at Alpine Meadows ski resort. In interviews reviving memories that most people would rather forget, Woodlief uncovered fine details about how the mountains of Bear Creek Canyon, 5 miles north of Tahoe City, defied expectations and roared on March 31. Her book, "A Wall of White: The True Story of Heroism and Survival in the Face of a Deadly Avalanche," was released last week by Atria, a division of Simon and Schuster.

At 3:30 p.m. on March 31, 1982, a storm had layered the region with more than 8 feet of snow over four and a half days. "It was the storm of the century in that it was so unusual, a unique confluence of events," Woodlief says from her home in Tiburon. By that afternoon, most resort employees had gone home, and most vacationers were snug in their cabins. Only a few people bustled around the resort, including a handful of employees clearing new snow off the roads and buildings. Inside the Summit Terminal Building, a few remaining ski patrol members monitored the storm. As the clock ticked toward 3:45, the workers pitted their need to finish tasks against their instinct to go home.

The next few minutes would challenge a prevalent local tenet of the time, the certainty that human beings can control nature's deadliest forces. Several of their names are now forever linked with resort history: Bernie Kingery, beloved rough-spoken mountain manager, often seen wearing a favorite leather and sheepskin hat; Beth Morrow, the reliable, friendly scribe who recorded radio traffic at Kingery's side; college student Frank Yeatman and his girlfriend, Anna Conrad; and the affable Jake Smith. Not far away, trudging through parking-lot snow, were Bud Nelson and his young daughter, Laura, and Dave Hahn, who'd left their cozy condos for some fresh air.

"It's fascinating to see how events played out, and who was where, when," says Woodlief, who conducted more than 100 interviews. "How someone called someone else in for a coffee break, and that saved the person's life, or how the life (of one of the patrollers) potentially was saved when at the last minute he went to Squaw Valley for avalanche control." The incidents that influenced the progress of various people put everyone into place at 3:45 to live or die. The three walkers paused to watch a snowplow, an action that put them directly into the avalanche's path. When Conrad dropped by the Summit building to greet Kingery, he lectured her for entering the resort in such a storm. She went into the second-floor locker room, a move that sealed her fate - but also saved her life.

At 3:45 the mountain let go. "The mountain unzipped itself all the way around," Woodlief writes. Kingery and others had worried about a slide in Beaver Bowl, but they hadn't imagined that three adjoining slide paths would release together, hurling down enough snow to consume the building where they worked. The slides hit the Summit building, the main ski lodge, several small buildings and two chairlifts, filling the parking lot with 20 feet of snow. Miraculously, workers near a maintenance building survived, but the snow buried eight others, including Kingery, Morrow, Smith, the Nelsons, Hahn, Yeatman and Conrad.

To this day, at any large local gathering, it's easy to find at least one person who scrambled into the canyon with shovels and snow probes to locate those lost. Tragically, at first all they found were broken and frozen bodies. After two days, when a new snowstorm moved in, enhancing treacherous conditions on the slopes above, the search was suspended. Three days later, searchers doggedly returned. Spirits soared when they found one person alive: Conrad, near death from dehydration and frostbite and trapped in a cocoon of debris. Miraculously, the wall of lockers had fallen over and created an air space for her beneath the snow. Nearby, they soon located the body of Kingery.

That avalanche not only extinguished lives but also devastated nearby communities - Tahoe City, Homewood, Truckee, Squaw Valley, Kings Beach - places where residents today still recall the odd squeaking sound the snow made that day in March, and the way the oversize snow-banks sloughed ominously onto the roads.

Avalanche-control procedures have progressed over the years, and now Alpine Meadows has an additional option for handling hazards - Plan E for evacuation. That plan has never been used, according to Larry Heywood, who became Alpine Meadows' ski patrol director in December 1982 and stayed with the resort for the rest of his career. When the tragedy occurred earlier that year, Heywood was a 32-year-old ski patroller. He says the March storm presented conditions that were extremely difficult to assess, a never before seen pattern of wind and snowfall.

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"I always wonder if, were that same sequence to occur again, I would have recognized the danger," he says. "I don't know the answer to that. The sequence hasn't occurred since then."

Occasionally, in some houses around Lake Tahoe, you'll find a faded 1980s photo of Kingery, his favorite hat hugging his ears. No one who was around in 1982 has forgotten the Alpine Meadows avalanche.

Jennifer Woodlief: Discusses "A Wall of White." 7 tonight. Book Passage Bookstore, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. (800) 999-7909. www.bookpassage.com.

Excerpt from 'A Wall of White'

"In the biggest avalanches, the snow is preceded by a massive air blast, a shock wave caused by the force of the avalanche slamming faster and faster against nothing more than the air in front of it. The buffeting effect is analogous to, but much more powerful than, riding in a convertible on the highway when an 18-wheeler whizzes by in the opposite direction. Displacing enormous quantities of air, creating winds of hurricane force around it, the air blast can be destructive beyond its boundaries. Anything in its way - buildings, vehicles, trees - is blown apart rather than crushed.

"The air blast is immediately followed by the screeching of the wind - wind vicious enough to toss trucks, implode buildings, and obliterate anything in its path. Then there is the sound of the snow mass itself, a noise that, as described by the few people who have been that close to an avalanche and survived to talk about it, sounds like a freight train passing inches away from their ears. The train sound is indeed the sound of snow moving, but it is also the noise of whatever that snow has destroyed and carried along with it as it travels down the mountain - trees and rocks, certainly, but in some cases, also buildings, power lines, and people.

"And that movement down the mountain is fast, faster than anyone expects, faster than any human could outrun, or, except in the rarest of instances, even out-ski. That movement, in a massive slab avalanche, can reach speeds of more than 200 mph. At high enough speeds, the snow is basically sucked ahead into a powerful vacuum, and the resulting pressure imbalance can actually cause the snow to accelerate more quickly than gravity is moving it." - Jennifer Woodlief

San Francisco Magazine

IN THE BLACK OF NIGHT on Nov. 1, the cemeteries of Michoacán hum with life. Women in woven shawls bow their heads over lumpy graves; men in cowboy hats flash gold-toothed grins in the dark; children dart through shadows, giggling between bites of sweets. Tourists do their part snapping photos, sidestepping unmarked graves, kneeling at marked ones to admire offerings meant to please the dead. And the dead? They're lurking, for this is their chance to greet family and feast on foods they love. I'm here at Lake Pátzcuaro not only to learn from this ritual, but also to better get to know my 15-year-old nephew, Spenser.

This part of central Mexico, the volcanic highlands around Lake Pátzcuaro, is home to indigenous people who speak the Purépecha language. After the Spanish arrived in 1522, the willful Purépecha resisted attempts to alter their lives, and now their traditions, although firmly Catholic, are grounded in their pre-Hispanic past. Our home base for the week is a Spanish colonial hotel on Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, the main square of Pátzcuaro, a mid-size town right off the shores of the lake. Our balcony overlooks a patchwork of red roofs and bright adobe walls. Rooster calls echo every morning. It's hard to leave the plaza, for vendors from dozens of crafts villages have set up for the week to sell pottery, figurines, wooden sculptures, weavings, guitars and more. One block is devoted to sweets shaped like skeletons, skulls and coffins, bought by families to decorate graves. Although the cultural extravaganza here is alluring, on Nov. 1 we head into the country to see the goings-on in Michoacán's scattered cemeteries.

Above the lakeside village of Tzintzuntzan lie giant foundations of a ceremonial site that was central to Purépecha life before the Spanish conquest. From afar, it looks like a blocky bunker. Up close, we see slim petroglyphs tapped centuries ago into the massive stones. On Nov. 1, Tzintzuntzan becomes festival central as Mexicans arrive from all over to see the candlelit offerings the townspeople construct over gravesites in order to welcome back their dead. This is our first of three cemetery visits in one night. Crowds clog the path connecting the ruins to the Catholic church plaza below. They buy food and crafts. I buy a shot of tequila at a roadside stand, while Spenser drinks lemonade. Teenagers swat a ball of fire with sticks in an ancient game that, according to some interpreters, pits the powers of darkness (the players) against the sun (a cluster of burning twigs). Inside the church, a priest gives blessings for a small fee.

At dusk, we venture into the cemetery, where families are picnicking around headstones decorated with food, candy, drinks and flowers. Some offerings are elaborate, their candles cuffed with luminous paper wings. Others are spare, a sprinkle of flower petals in the shape of a cross. In the twilight, I snap dozens of images with my camera flash respectfully turned off. Spenser, a keen photographer, uncharacteristically quits after taking just a few pictures. Is he bored, I wonder, or queasy about intruding? I watch for clues he's having fun, but gather little.

Our guide, Henry Wilds, discourages us from tasting the street food we see here, but some in our tour group ignore him, and gorge on smoked almonds and a steamy stew of rice and chicken. Tzintzuntzan will have a late night of dancing and feasting, but we leave it behind for the quieter doings of Cucuchuchu. The Day of the Dead is practiced in a million ways in Mexico, from "Discos for the Dead" in cities, to single-night Thanksgiving-like feasts at home, to the quieter cemetery vigils around Pátzcuaro. Wilds, a Day of the Dead junkie who has attended more than 30 festivals here, prefers the quiet ones. "There will be a lot of people here in Cucuchuchu, soon," he whispers as we tiptoed through an archway into the stone-walled cemetery. Grave offerings here are simple - arched or squared-off frames clad with marigolds and other flowers and footed with food baskets topped with hand-embroidered linens. Knee-high candles warm the cemetery with winking light.

When a family welcomes Spenser and me into their circle, I plug away at conversation, relying on budding Spanish and facial expressions to convey my sentiments. Spenser doesn't want to practice his Spanish yet and wanders off. He's more an observer than a talker anyway. I've learned to connect with him in other ways - a glance, a shrug - and settle into silence.

In many parts of rural Mexico, villagers illuminate roads and paths with kerosene lamps to make sure their hallowed kin return safely to the graves, for lost souls can cause trouble on Earth. At our final stop, the village of Arocutín, lanterns extend for blocks, as do tour buses bearing visitors to an eerie midnight bell ceremony. Tourists - mostly Mexican, but also North Americans and Europeans - cling to the lighted church, which sags with age, but I abandon the light to wander among the graves, where I find families huddled around campfires, laughing, telling stories, scolding children - as if it's market day. I think that if we could see their ancestors' faces, we'd find them chuckling, too. That's how scores of Mexicans imagine their departed - laughing, playing jokes, as if content with where they are.

Alone in the far corner of the graveyard, I face a problem: how to start a conversation when no one has invited me to speak? Should I ask, "Who's buried here?" What if a mother answers: "My son, who died last week," and starts to cry. The woman I ask in fact responds with, "This is my husband. He died 10 years ago." I do not look away from the yellowing photograph of that once puffy, earnest face, as I might have done before coming here. Instead, I soak it in. I have never been comfortable talking about the people I know who've died - friends, family - even distant acquaintances.

On the Pátzcuaro square, vendors may be suggesting a sweeter way to handle death. They sell sugar or chocolate skulls and upon request will squeeze your name in loops of frosting onto the skull's forehead. By nibbling the skull labeled with your name, you metaphorically eat your own death, incorporating death into life. "Mexicans are better friends with death than we are," Wilds likes to say. I hope I'm absorbing some ability to sit someday more comfortably with death.

Where is Spenser? He is on his own. After the bell song, we find each other in front of the church, where an old woman beckons us into a courtyard. Over a steaming cauldron, she extends two cups of brown ponche, a mixed fruit and alcohol drink I've read about, and waits for us to taste it. Spenser and I lock eyes. Floating raisins look like bloated bugs. We want to receive her gifts, yet don't want to get sick. Spenser takes the first gulp. I wash mine down, too, joining the two of us in fate. Rather than churning my gut, though, the liquid comforts me, like a mellow apple cider.

The next evening, Wilds takes us to a "secret" cemetery (whose name no amount of bribery would release), where friends of his are in vigil. Right away, Spenser darts away. This time I don't stalk. A seated woman motions me to kneel beside her. Soft as dough, great arms billowing over an apron of lace, she queens over baskets of fruit and the Frisbee-like loaves called "bread of the dead." To my surprise, she tries to give me a banana. "I can't take food from the dead," I say. She meets my refusal with a resolute face. In the end, I'm given loads of fruit, candy and bread. When Spenser reappears, his cheeks are riding high. "They gave me so much food," he says with a laugh. He unzips his backpack to reveal a bounty, breaking off hunks of bread and passing them around to the rest of us. We savor the bread's sweetness, praise his kindness. I realize that while my intention with the trip was to introduce Spenser to indigenous culture, instead, he's given me a gift - his trust and friendship, and the memory of his generosity, which mirrors the selfless sharing demonstrated by our Purépecha hosts.

Back home, like Wilds, I've become a Day of the Dead junkie. As for Spenser, his mom reported he grew an inch during his week in Mexico. My mom, who lives near them, said when she asked Spenser about the trip, he talked a blue streak.--

If You Go

WHEN: It's best to arrive in Pátzcuaro for the Day of the Dead a few days early in order to enjoy the town while the crafts booths are up, and to see any parades, arts shows or public performances offered. It's easy to book day trips from your hotel or the Tourism Department office on the Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, or plan your trip in advance with a tour company like Adventure Travel Institute, www.adventuretravelinstitute.com. For more information, visit www.michoacan-travel. com and www.visitmexico.com.

It's important when traveling in countries involved in the drug trade to be aware and cautious at all times. Don't travel alone in the dark; use a guide in remote regions. Don't accept suspicious rides, and be aware of your surroundings and who's around you. There has been drug activity and violence in Michoacán, but shortly after being sworn into office in December 2006, Mexico's President Felipe Calderón sent troops into the state to clamp down on gangsters and drug dealers.

HOW: The closest major airport to Pátzcuaro is the Morelia International Airport in the state capital 30 miles away. Cab trips, about $20, take about 45 minutes along the fast toll road to Pátzcuaro. Regular local buses leave from the Morelia bus station about a mile and a half away from the airport.

WHAT: Pátzcuaro is full of shops and great restaurants, so it's easy to get anything you need. Be sure to see the dramatic Juan O'Gorman mural of the Spanish Conquest inside the Biblioteca Publica on the Plaza Gertrudis Bocanegra, and visit the Museo de Jose Maria Artes Populares on Arciga street. Try Argentine fare at hip Mistongo a block up Dr. Coss street from Plaza Vasco de Quiroga, or enjoy regional cuisine at El Patio, where there's upstairs dining on balconies overlooking the plaza. For day trips, boat across Lake Pátzcuaro to the island of Janitzio and climb the interior spiral staircase of the José Maria Morelos statue for views of the whole lake and its islands. Take a cab or bus to the nearby village of Santa Clara del Cobre to see the region's famous coppersmiths at work.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

San Francisco Chronicle Magazine

ON DEC.. 20, 1996, Bay Area teenager Harley Augustino and his dad, James, a 48-year-old developer and political activist, lost their way on cross-country skis in a brutal Sierra snowstorm. When darkness fell, they carved out a snow cave and huddled in it. Every half hour they stomped around outside the cave to warm up. Snowflakes soaked their hoods and faces; the bloated sky hung so low it seemed as if they could almost touch it. If they could just sit out the night, Harley thought, the storm would clear and they’d ski to safety.

Two and a half years later, on May 31, just after midnight, Portland resident Amy Horne began hiking up Mount Hood’s West Crater Rim route. The excursion came after weeks of education and training. Clad in layers of new fleece and storm-proof outerwear, the 44-year-old research director felt a mix of excitement and dread: Yes, her guide was one of the best in the area, but this ambitious climb would test her physical skills beyond anything she’d ever done, and she was nervous. Ten hours later, as she crossed a snowy slope, the mountain roared and an avalanche crashed down on her.

On March 23, 2003, Nicole Chupka, 38, a French and math teacher from Carmel Valley, and her friend Judy Rowe skied up a ridge near Donner Summit’s Castle Peak above a Sierra Club hut where they planned to bunk for the night with friends. At 4 p.m. she reached the top of her desination ridge and prepared to crank some turns, but the snow that had looked so alluring from afar was instead stiff as glue. On her fourth arc, Chupka’s body veered left while her right ski zoomed straight ahead. Her right hip twisted weirdly and collapsed, tumbling her into the snow.

Incidents like these are all too familiar to people who study mountain accidents. “You could write a textbook on each one about what not to do with your winter vacation,” said Laurence Gonzales, an author who for 35 years has explored the origins of sports accidents. In his recent book “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why,” Gonzales probes both the causes of accidents and the strains of human nature binding their survivors. While bad weather triggers many winter accidents, something more fundamental often puts people in the path of disaster: “We tend to act on auto-pilot,” Gonzales said recently from his home in Illinois. “The more hazard you are exposed to without getting hurt, the stronger the auto-pilot. We do what we’re rewarded for doing; we avoid what we’re punished for doing. All mammals behave that way.”

When you pair that auto-response with variable conditions present in the backcountry, where unfamiliar features and threatening storms can easily disorient weekend warriors, the risk factors soar. Simple mistakes that in milder weather cause nuisances are now the currency of death. Here, three very different incidents share themes that help us understand how to survive, or better yet avoid, tempting fate in the winter backcountry.

“We shouldn’t have been there”

That Friday afternoon 11 years ago, the Augustinos thought their three-hour tromp would be a cinch. “The weather was fine,” said Harley, now 29. “Usually when there’s a big storm, it hits San Francisco several hours before Tahoe, but there was no rain in San Francisco that morning.” Forecasters had predicted bad weather. But the two had hoped to finish their tour before it hit. That didn’t happen. “We were on a ridge when the storm rolled in,” Harley recalled. “It was just snowing. My dad and I were used to that: It’s nice to ski in the snow.” But when they about-faced to return to the car, they descended the wrong way into unfamiliar terrain.

Amy Horne and her group were on a section of Mount Hood that was very familiar to their veteran guide, but loads of fresh snow and unseasonably warm May weather put the group on a dangerous slope a little later in the morning than they had planned, and this spurred disaster. When Horne had joined a Mazamas club mountaineering class two months earlier, she’d figured she was in safe hands. The mountaineer who would guide her graduation ascent had climbed the West Crater Rim route 14 times. But disaster needs only one wrong decision. Unstable snow conditions and a few judgment lapses formed a fatal collision. Investigators later said plenty of avalanche hazard warnings and clues existed that day, according to a report published in the American Alpine Club’s 1999 volume of “Accidents in North American Mountaineering.” The weeklong cycle of storms had mantled the mountain with new snow, a U.S. Forest Service sign warned of avalanche hazard; and the team’s slow pace put them on an exposed slope after the day’s heat had transformed an underlayer of snow into a stream of slippery granules. Why didn’t Horne’s leaders order a retreat? The accident reports didn’t clarify the details of the guide’s decisions, but Gonzales suggests that the answer lies in human instinct. “People do not believe they can get hurt themselves,” he said. “They don’t believe in their own deaths.”

Risk takers are wired to seek the positive results they’ve had before, despite the dangers. If trouble hasn’t found them in the past, they believe it won’t again. There were 100 climbers on Mount Hood that weekend day, according to investigators. Many later admitted choosing to leave their avalanche beacons (devices that send and receive locator signals through snow) in their cars. A few reported they thought an avalanche couldn’t occur on such a nice day. From her home in Truckee, where she moved a few months after the avalanche for a new job, Horne reflected recently: “We shouldn’t have been there.”

Nicole Chupka, too, shouldn’t have been on Donner Summit slope on that afternoon in late March. A few hours earlier, when she and Judy Rowe had announced to their companions that they planned to make just a few quick turns before supper, one friend had warned that he’d noticed blustery winds outside, indicating an impending storm. The storm would have been only a minor nuisance had Chupka not made another mistake: She forgot that on warm spring afternoons in the Sierra, melting snow coalesces into heavy slop. When the friend tossed them a two-way radio, Chupka joked: “This will be fun to have.”

“It’s telling that when he gave her the radio, she concluded unconsciously that nothing bad could happen,” Gonzales said. “It’s what psychologists call the ‘confirmation bias.’ It’s a deep part of our neurological system. All of the behaviors flow to that one conclusion. We are all suffering from this. It takes an intellectual effort to not do it.”

Later, lying awkwardly in the snow, Chupka imagined that her injury was only slight, despite the pain in her right leg. “As soon as I moved my leg, I felt the pain,” she said recently. “It felt like I was being electrocuted.” Rowe used the radio to call the hut. It was Chupka’s good fortune that two friends there were medically trained, one a doctor, the other a physical therapist. Thinking she might have dislocated her hip, Chupka hoped that with help she could just pop it back in and return on her own to the hut. “I had major denial,” she recalled.

Outfitted for survival

Once the weather plays its cards, the knowledge and tools people carry, and the actions they take in the first hours of trouble, are critical. Cotton clothes do not contribute to survival. Horne and Chupka wore storm-proof outerwear on top of moisture-wicking synthetic fabrics such as fleece. James Augustino was similarly dressed, but Harley wore cotton jeans, a school letterman’s jacket and a hooded sweatshirt. Wet cotton conducts cold and fails to insulate, according to survival experts. After thrashing about in the snow for several hours, Harley was soaked. “We found a tree well, and my dad got some branches to cover us a little bit,” he recalled. “We wrapped around each other to stay as warm as we could.” Their outside exercises warmed them only temporarily. One of Harley’s socks got wet and froze, encasing his foot in an icy cocoon. “It was the longest night I can remember,” he said, “except that the next two nights were even longer.”

The snowstorm churned over the Sierra Crest all night. “In the first morning, the powder was up to my hip,” Harley said. “We plowed through it. Then our equipment started to fail. My left ski kept falling off. My pole broke that second day, and my dad’s boot was coming undone. Luckily we had some duct tape. It’s something I usually carried in my pack.” When the second night arrived, they made a cave in another tree well. “Snow was getting heavy on the branches,” Harley recalled. “We would be huddled together, and a huge clump of snow would fall on top of us.”

James Augustino had studied backcountry survival and knew about snow caves and hypothermia, a deadly condition in which low body temperatures impair mental abilities and shut down the body’s organs. Similarly, Rowe and Chupka had learned about the mountains from past experiences, and Horne had studied mountain survival during her hours of class. The knowledge helped them make important decision in the early stages of their ordeals. “We tend to remember what we practice the most,” Gonzales explained. “We tend not to invent new strategies on the spot. Although that’s not true of everyone; some people just freeze.”

Horne’s mind did not freeze. While the avalanche spun her through a dangerous boulder field called Hot Rocks, she remembered her lessons. Finding herself being hurled downward feet first, she released her ice ax, as teachers had instructed. She also kept snow away from her nose and mouth by punching into the snow that was tumbling in front of her face, so when the avalanche stopped, the snow wouldn’t block her airway.

Chupka’s friend Rowe was prepared with a lightweight snow shovel she used to dig a shelter in the slope. The cave’s protection became increasingly critical as time passed and night descended. The doctor and PT at first couldn’t locate Rowe and Chupka. They returned to the hut for extra sleeping bags, food and clothing, and asked two others there to ski out for help. Four hours after the fall, the two medical experts finally reached the women. Confirming that Chupka probably had a broken femur, they carefully wrapped her in a sleeping bag, slid her onto an insulating foam pad and propped her against a backpack. She refused to get into the cave because any big movement caused shooting pain. Everyone hunkered down to wait. They hoped rescuers would come quickly. What arrived first, however, was a snowstorm.

Thinking forward

Tools and resources are critical to survival, but what often makes the biggest difference in the end is attitude, researchers say. In all three of these survival cases, the victims reported unusual optimism or clarity. These are manifestations of two habits of the mind, according to Gonzales. Some minds are able to focus on the positive; others cannot. Those that do are more likely to survive (as long as they are not entertaining delusions of safety). Another factor is the tendency for perceptions to warp under stress. During the long wait in the chilly cave, the Augustinos maintained good spirits. They joked about football and yearned for Mexican food and beer. “There wasn’t any talk about not surviving,” Harley said. Being optimistic wasn’t so much a conscious choice, he said; “we just did it.”

Horne’s experience was different. While tons of snow tossed her 1,250 feet down the mountainside, she experienced a mental acuity that even now intrigues her. “My thoughts were like banners in Times Square. I thought things like, ‘All I can do is the best I can in the moment, and I’ll see how this turns out.’ There was no point in panicking. I could easily have thought, ‘I’m going to die,’ but I didn’t. My sense of it is that the organism, my self, was so focused on surviving that emotion was a luxury I couldn’t afford. So I was completely calm and analytical.”

Horne’s experiences fit a known pattern, Gonzales said. “There’s a fairly large body of work on perceptual distortion under stress,” he said. Much of it was done with police officers involved in shooting incidents. “Nearly 100 percent of them reported extreme perceptual distortions, including time slowing down, tunnel vision, and odd perceptual points of view. A whole complex of perceptual distortions goes along with tense situations.”

Chupka’s thoughts, too, remained optimistic. “I wasn’t going hysterical or crying,” she said. “I had no fear. My mind was completely present. I’ve gotten into Buddhism since then, and I can say it was the most present I’ve been. I didn’t think I was going to die.” Like the Augustinos, she focused on the business of getting home.

Twins: luck and fate

Amy Horne’s battle with the mountain ended within minutes. “I stopped. I went, ‘Oh, phew.’ ” Then there was a powerful jolt. “I opened my eyes. I could see sunlight coming through the snow, which meant I was near the surface. I dug myself out to the chest. I was going to stand up, but an ache started and I realized I was hurt. I had no idea if I was the only one alive or if I was alone.” In five minutes, a Portland Mountain Rescue team member reached her. One of her climbing partners was alive nearby, but partly buried. The other lay somewhere invisible beneath the snow. An hour later, searchers using probes recovered his body.

Horne was lucky. During the slide, she missed hitting massive boulders; once she stopped, she didn’t suffocate. Terribly injured, however, she was flown to a Portland hospital. Later she learned that the taut rope connecting her to the two other climbers had crushed her pelvis.

The Chupka rescue was trickier. Blinded by fog and snow, neither Chupka’s group nor Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue Team skiers dispatched by the local sheriff’s office to find her could see each other’s lights. Finally Chupka and her friends spotted a flare. “We were excited,” Chupka said. “They were with us in minutes.” It was after midnight, and Chupka and the others shivered uncontrollably in the early stages of hypothermia. The rescuers transferred Chupka to an emergency sled and guided her down the slope to a waiting snowcat.

When someone reports a person lost in Lake Tahoe’s backcountry, the sheriff’s office dispatches searchers on skis and snowmobiles as quickly as possible. Because lost people usually aren’t discovered missing until late in the day after someone doesn’t return home, rescuers are accustomed to overnight missions in bad weather. However, the Augustinos’ storm was worse than most. It hammered 8 feet of snow into the Sierra. Avalanche hazards prevented an immediate search. On Dec. 23, Harley left the tree-well cave to gather pine boughs in order to spell a “Help” sign on the snow. He felt OK, but he’d noticed that his dad’s speech was slurring, indicating advancing hypothermia. “I don’t remember a panic; it was like I knew what was happening; it was going to happen. I held him and tried to keep him as warm as possible.” His dad’s clothing was better insulated than Harley’s, his feet weren’t freezing in wet socks like Harley’s were, yet he was dying. When James stopped breathing, Harley tried CPR, “but I knew there wasn’t a whole lot I could do.”

Harley eventually emerged from the shelter. “Right when he died, the snow stopped, the sky opened up, and I could ski on top of the snow for the first time.” He crested a ridge and spotted Interstate 80, a snake of gray about 3 miles away in the cottony landscape. He skied downhill toward it, and promptly fell. Now it was 3 p.m. and he realized that if he weren’t smart, he’d spend yet another night out. “I remember wondering if my father had lived a full life. Obviously, he died before his time. But I had a lot more I needed to do and be in my life.” He climbed to a clear knoll. A half hour later, a rescue helicopter zoomed in and picked him up.

Aftermaths

Horne spent four months in a wheel-chair and two years in physical therapy. She used the recovery time to process the accident’s trauma. In a quest to examine every detail, she interviewed people involved, scoured incident reports and wrote and rewrote her recollections in diaries. “It’s a story like too many others,” she reflected. “An accumulation of little mistakes that at other times didn’t matter, but this time did.” Today, she said, she has finished that process. “I don’t want Mount Hood to be my life,” she explained. A senior writer now for UC Davis, she reports having little pain related to the injury. Outside of her busy job, she skies, rides bikes and hikes.

A weakened hip has kept Chupka from skiing since her injury. She does get outside for snowshoe and backpack trips; however, Buddhism is her new focus.

Augustino, too, has experienced a renewal. “Losing my father really opened me up emotionally,” he wrote last year in a letter to Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue Team members. “I cried a lot of tears that following year, and I learned to trust and accept my emotions.” Augustino finished college, and in the spirit of his dad’s activism, became executive director of a Santa Barbara group that helps low-income residents organize for political action.

“I read on the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue Team Web site that most, if not all, of these accidents are preventable,” he said. “Unexpected things happen, but there are a lot of things we could have done. We had a cell phone, but left it in the car. Maybe we couldn’t have gotten coverage, but maybe we could have. Now I always tell people where I’m going, and when I’m coming back. Even on summer day hikes, I bring two days of food and more water than I need.”

Why would people who know better err when the stakes are highest? Gonzales believes the tendency is reinforced by messages of American culture. “We’re sold these complex ideas that make us drop our guard,” he said. “The first is we have the right not just to live but also to be comfortable and have fun experiences.” It’s a recent idea, in the grand scheme of things, he said. “The other idea is that everything is safe. You take these attitudes into the wilderness where you’re given a false sense that it is Disney World or something, and it’s not. Your cell phone, your avalanche beacon, your GPS can give you an idea that you are in control: You’re not.”

The good news is that people can change, he said; it just takes practice. Everything people do involves a calculation of risk for some amount of reward. “There’s a scale: Watching a DVD at home is at one end; risking your life in an avalanche is at the other. You have to ask yourself what are you trying to get and how much risk are you willing to pay for that kind of reward.” If life is the ultimate cost, he said, people taking such risks might rethink their choices.

The wilderness trials of Horne, Chupka and Augustino changed their lives. “In many ways my life started on Dec. 23, 1996,” Augustino said. “Ten years later, I at least know that I have given this life of mine a good shot. In many ways, I have had it easier than most, and I’ve tried to do the best with what I have. I am thankful that I was given another chance.”

Freelance writer Laura Read lives in North Lake Tahoe. Her husband, Doug Read, helped found the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue Team 32 years ago. She has been involved in the team’s education and search dispatch operations for 12 years.

All Photos Copyright Laura Read

San Francisco Chronicle

IT'S A SCHOOL WITH NO computers, televisions,  cell phones — no light switches or toilets. If you want food or water, you're pretty much on your own. The classroom is the great outdoors - and the course is survival.

In today's tough economic times, when people are contemplating living with less, survival classes are attracting plenty of students who believe the primitive world offers an embarrassment of natural riches that not only can make the difference between life and death but also can expand personal growth.

"Five years ago, I founded Adventure Out. It was just me with a few friends helping to give surf lessons and survival workshops," says Cliff Hodges of Santa Cruz. "The company grew to 20 employees, and now we run programs all over the state. Now every class fills up with a pretty long waiting list."

Wilderness survival schools have been around since the 1960s, but interest began swelling during the Y2K scare. These days, people have access to plenty of survival material. They're watching survival television shows. They're reading survival books, such as "Survive! Essential Skills and Tactics to Get You Out of Anywhere - Alive" by Les Stroud, host of the Discovery Channel show "Survivorman." They're checking out survival schools online and through word of mouth.

What neophytes are quickly discovering is that survival schools are not just for Rambo anymore; they're for Bambi, too.

Most good schools teach that wilderness survival is not only about making a fire, capturing food and building a shelter, though those skills are important. It also requires an intimacy with natural systems. Students learn how things work in the environment around them, and how they themselves fit into that environment.

"We'll track the animals, but we'll also relate them to the ecological context," says Josh Lane, the creative mentoring specialist at the Shikari Tracking Guild in Santa Cruz. "There are so many mysteries at play on the landscape. If we see coyote tracks, we ask, 'What is it about the landscape that causes them to move in that way?' It seems to make a real tangible difference for people who are looking for that connection and wanting to feel it. They get immersed into nature, and they see quickly how alive that connection can be in their lives."

Sensitivity trumps toughness

The paradox is that the most powerful ingredient of toughness is not muscle power, but sensitivity. "Wilderness training always builds character," says Jon Young, Shikari's founder. "You have to face your fears. Learning to pay attention to the birds and animals around you brings you right to your edge. If you're used to a temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, then a constant temperature of 62 degrees is going to feel intense, uncomfortable.

"And there's the edge. Your sense of touch, the humidity, the cold wind will take you outside your comfort zone. You slow down, pay attention with your eyes and your ears. You have to be a participant with much more consciousness. Being in touch with nature directly on a consistent basis is going to build the character needed for survival."

The lessons taught in survival schools can give students the kind of shakeup that might save their lives in any situation, not just the kind of trouble that occurs alone in the wilderness.

"We live in a fishbowl culture," said Laurence Gonzales, survival columnist for National Geographic Adventure. "Every morning we get a reward: The coffee goes on, and there's the croissant; it's lunchtime, and there's the sandwich. We get rewarded no matter the stupid things we do. That's great, until things go wrong." If all you do is watch "Dancing With the Stars," he says, you're not taking advantage of human intelligence. "It's not what's in your pack that makes the difference in survival; it's what's in your heart."

"Survivorman's" Les Stroud agrees. Since college, he's taken numerous survival courses, even lived a primitive lifestyle for a year in a remote part of Canada. "Most of what you need to survive is mental," he says. "When it's 3 a.m. and that cold chill is rippling down the spine, it takes more than a fire to get you through the night."

Wilderness survival schools vary wildly. Some teach what to do when things go wrong, and how to use available equipment to stay alive. Some teach only primitive techniques culled from indigenous cultures. Some incorporate natural history lessons and mental awareness skills. Some go further to forge self-discovery or build interpersonal skills, recognizing that people facing hardships are not always alone.

The schools generally help students shed what they know about 21st century living and plunge them into the unknown, where they must match themselves with nature.

Starting a fire took days

"They drop you into the middle of the wilderness with nothing," says Gonzales, who took two survival courses while researching his book "Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why."

"The first thing we did was make fire. We broke a couple of rocks against each other and got an edge that was sharp enough so that we could strip bark off a tree branch." Gonzales then worked the bark into fibers and made a cord. With another branch and the cord, he constructed a bow drill, which he spun against a wood board with a notch in it until the friction produced a hot ember. "You put the ember into some dry material and blow on it, and you get fire," he says. Simple as the procedure sounds, it wasn't easy - it took him two days.

While the course taught Gonzales to build a shelter, navigate without map and compass and other useful skills, the most important lessons, he says, came from the practice itself. "Survival is not so much about technique; it's about the opening of your mind to possibilities."

Most of the American schools draw from indigenous approaches to primitive living. In Colorado, for example, the Boulder Outdoor Survival School presents seven-, 14- and 28-day survival skills and field courses in southern Utah based on lifestyles of the Pueblo culture. The school got some buzz several years ago when its instructors were consulted for the 2000 movie "Castaway."

Closer to home, in Santa Cruz, Adventure Out offers a one-day survival clinic as well as weekend and weeklong workshops in flint-knapping, bow-making, hide-tanning, tracking and other skills. A new program this year teaches about sea-foraging and edible plants during a backpack trip into remote parts of the Lost Coast. Shikari Tracking Guild presents a Saturday series in nature awareness and animal tracking as well as a weeklong course in bird language and a nine-month nature and survival skills program called Native Eyes.

Part of society too

Sometimes, individuals arrive at a wilderness training school and discover that it's not so hard for them to handle the wilderness alone; what's difficult is getting along when they return to society.

"We want people to realize that they are part of nature, and nature is their home - that they can trust nature, but they also can trust each other," says John Chilkotowsky, program director of Wilderness Awareness School, an outdoor school teaching survival, natural history and other courses in Duvall, Wash. "It's the opposite of what we call the 'sociopathic naturalist' syndrome, in which people think nature is good and people are bad.

"In our courses, students are learning difficult skills. When we put them out for wilderness tests, time and time again they discover that the way they survive and flourish is through their ability to function well in a community."

Many schools claim that students leave with a much greater understanding of themselves. "We're not a therapy camp," Chilkotowsky says. "But this experience is completely transformative. Part of that is that you have a bunch of people around you who are jazzed up about the natural world: They celebrate that nature is fully alive, the flowers are blooming, the birds are singing. That is an immense contrast to our usual experience of some folks who are habitually depressed, expecting nothing to bloom or sing in their day. There's something elemental in nature that invites you to be who you truly are."

A person can't survive a grueling challenge without clarity and connection, according to Stroud. A panicked person will never coax that ember to flame. "Maintain the will to live," Stroud says. "What's the first thing you do out there in any situation? You have to refrain from panic. Once you've been able to do that, the rest becomes the technical application of your knowledge and skills."

Nurturing will to live

A lost person can become calm simply by taking the first steps taught by most survival courses and in most books: "You assess your own situation," Stroud says. First, by determining which aspects of the situation are working in favor of survival, and which are working against it. Are you injured? Is nightfall approaching? Then, assess the external environment and the tools and options for survival existing in your surroundings - tree limbs, grass, loose dirt, fire-starting tools, etc.

The most important tool for survival is an internal one, Stroud stresses. If you can manage your mind, by keeping calm and nurturing your will to live, the odds of survival increase dramatically. "The will to live is in most of us - sometimes it's hidden away," Stroud says. "None of us wants to die." --

Resources

Adventure Out

www.adventureout.com

(800) 509-3954

Shikari Tracking Guild

www.shikari.org

(no phone available)

Boulder Outdoor Survival School (BOSS)

www.boss-inc.com

303-444-9779

Tom Brown Jr.'s Tracker School

www.trackerschool.com

(609) 242-0350

Wilderness Awareness School

www.wildernessawareness.org

(425) 788-1301

MIT Technology Review

In the bare-bones warehouse space of CrossFit West Santa Cruz, rock and rap music thrums over the clamor of some very fit people lifting big weights. Cliff Hodges, the 30-year-old MIT grad who co-owns the new gym, starts his day here around 8 a.m. But a few hours later in the parking lot outside, he'll meet up with customers seeking a different kind of experience from the workout junkies inside. Dressed for the outdoors, these folks are more interested in reconnecting with nature in the nearby forest. After loading into a company van, they'll wind upward into the Santa Cruz Mountains above the Pacific Ocean, park, and enter a stand of redwoods and oak on foot. There, the hum of traffic disappears; the aromas of evergreen boughs and dry grass fill the air.

Having grown up two miles away, Hodges understands these woods the way most people know their hometowns: this bush or tree shelters this type of bird or rodent; that animal uses the main trails, while others tread a fainter path. Rounding a corner, he kneels by the hoof prints of a deer, observing that the animal darted off the trail here onto a barely noticeable path that vanishes into the trees. He grins. "In class we'll spend a lot of time staring at the ground," he says. "It's what we call dirt time."

When he left MIT in 2004, Hodges thought he might spend much of the rest of his life working inside shiny-clean rooms as an electrical engineer, confining his dirt time to weekends and evenings. Equipped with bachelor's and master of engineering degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, he joined a company that developed flash memory for computers. But within three months, he decided the job wasn't for him. He missed the outdoors and realized that a college hobby--teaching wilderness survival--was something he wanted to do full time. By the end of the year, he'd left the engineering world and launched an outdoor school and guide service he called Adventure Out. "I was working on the business end and attempting to secure funding for about a month before I quit the job so I could hit the ground running," he says. The company was offering programs by the spring of 2005.

The leap from electrical engineering to launching a business didn't seem like much of a stretch to Hodges. "My business sense comes from the analytical education that I received as a student of engineering," he says. "MIT produces the best problem solvers in the world. Applying those scientific and methodical approaches to small business is easy in comparison to something as complex as device physics."

Hodges approaches wilderness training a bit differently from many established survival schools. While they may require students to abandon their normal routines for months, he offers shorter workshops, making the outdoors more accessible and less intimidating to deskbound city dwellers. Introducing a broad audience to primitive ways is one of Hodges's goals. "We need more people who understand that there is more to the world than cars and televisions," he says. "In the wilderness, our bodies get into a different pace. The body moves in sync with the wilderness. It's no longer about instant gratification; it's about ebb and flow."

In a five-hour introductory course, students learn how to build shelters, start fires, purify water, identify edible plants, and build animal traps. Advanced two- and three-day workshops cover tanning hides, tracking animals, and making arrowheads using a stone-against-stone technique called flint knapping. One-week courses in desert and winter survival give students a chance to delve deeper. Adventure Out also offers classes in surfing, mountain biking, backpacking, and rock climbing. Hodges's gym, which he opened last spring, is a natural extension for him; CrossFit, a high-intensity strength and conditioning program pioneered in Santa Cruz, aims to prepare the body for unpredictable real-life situations. "We do functional fitness--sprinting, rowing, weight lifting, moving the body through three-dimensional space--so people are better fit for their outdoor activities and outdoor sports," he says.

Adventure Out programs have been featured in print media such as Fortune Small Business, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and San Diego Magazine, as well as on regional TV stations. Hodges estimates that 10,000 students have passed through his classes in five years--and more than a few claim he's changed their lives. "He's an incredibly talented individual," says George Cagle, a technical program manager at Microsoft who's taken three Adventure Out classes. "He teaches you how to become involved in the environment, to realize that you're part of the wilderness."

To people who know Hodges well, the switch from high tech to primitive tech is no surprise. Back in college, "he was capturing squirrels in the middle of the city, and taking roadkill and turning it into hide," says his MIT roommate, Kai McDonald '03, SM '05, now a managing principal at a Southern California investment company. "I remember going into the freezer one day and seeing a strange item wrapped in plastic. It was a deer brain, which he was using to tan animal hides."

As an undergrad, Hodges learned the tanning technique (rubbing hides with brain matter to preserve and soften them) on weekends at a survival school in New Jersey. By his senior year, he was eager to teach the skills himself. He had his chance during IAP. "It was the coldest cold snap that Boston had seen in a decade," he recalls, "and we had to import all of our materials to our class location, which was right in front of the dome. We built a debris shelter from sticks and leaves we gathered near Walden Pond. We also created fire by friction and practiced water collection. We purified the water by dropping in rocks we'd heated over an open fire."

Even today, some of the technological advances that excite him most are those that occurred more than 10,000 years ago. Take the bow drill, for instance. "It uses human power to generate a greater force than humans can generate on their own," Hodges says. "When you look at two sticks rubbing together, it's not that exciting; but these inventions laid the foundations for civilization." The drill is made by securing a natural fiber to the two ends of a simple bow, then wrapping the fiber around a spindle. Moving the bow back and forth to rotate the spindle rapidly against another piece of wood creates friction, which generates heat and ignites the wood. The resulting ember is then wrapped in dried grass and blown into flame. Hodges can ignite a flame in 30 to 45 seconds; beginners usually practice for days before producing an ember.

Hodges also employs traditional techniques to hunt deer, wild pigs, and other animals that he uses for food and hides. "For me there are huge elements of sacredness and history to using these skills," he says. "The thrill and pride I take in harvesting my own food is immense, and wholly incomparable to anything else. It is cultural preservation--maintaining skills that are vanishing." He spends about 100 hours making the tools needed for one hunt--the bow, arrows, and stone arrowheads. In November 2007 he captured his first black bear, a 450-pound record-breaker. California Fish and Game wardens told him it is the only bear on record caught using a stone point.

Though he has no plans to go after any more bears, Hodges has no regrets about the path he's on. "People ask me, 'How do you feel about tossing away your engineering degree?' I don't feel that I've done that at all," he says. "MIT taught me the sky is the limit. Everyone there is trying to create something that's going to have a positive effect in the world.

"There are a lot of people fighting for the environment by preserving open space or working on clean energy. My way is to connect people with the outdoors one individual at a time."

Adventure Sports Journal

In the early spring, when warm days melt snow crystals into a fine paste and frigid nights freeze them to a crust, Mother Nature extends an invite to skate skiers to stray from the confines of machine-packed trails onto an open canvas of boundless gliding and backcountry exploration — no groomed tracks, no trail passes, no limitations.

When the freeze-thaw cycle persists and the snowpack settles into a dense and supportive surface resembling frozen cheesecake, skate skiing provides the swiftest means of traversing a snowy landscape under one’s own power, allowing for speedy forays deep into Sierra canyons and across open meadows and frozen high-country lakes.

Though best suited to flat and rolling terrain, the gliding efficiency of a capable skier on lightweight skate gear can make a backcountry skier shuffling along on skins look like a gear-laden tortoise next to Apolo Ohno. Most backcountry skate skiers don’t seek out high-angle terrain, but when conditions are just right — a firm base with a sun-warmed top of buttery corn — moderately steep slopes are not beyond limits of fearless skinny-ski descenders.

Some adventurous skate skiers have been known to knock out multi-day backcountry tours of 30, 40, even 50 miles in a day; trans-Sierra tours like Mammoth to Yosemite and crest traverses such as Donner Summit to Echo Summit.

Neophytes, of course, are urged to start with something a little less ambitious and closer to civilization — for as I found out, there are lessons to learn.

The first time I tried skate skiing on a glossy crust of frozen snow, my husband, Doug, and I were in the Martis Valley next to Truckee. Before dawn he’d nudged me awake saying, “Let’s go skate on a meadow. Conditions are perfect.”

Perfect? The outdoor thermometer read 25 degrees F.; sunrise was an hour away. Nevertheless, into the car we went, wrapped in thick hats, gloves and extra sweaters.

At Martis Meadows, located between the Truckee airport and Northstar-at-Tahoe, the snow was a pre-dawn shade of cool blue, and beneath the plastic grooves of my cross-country boots it crunched slightly.Quite different from classic cross-country skiing, which employs a scissors-like kick-and-glide movement, skate skiing has a side-to-side momentum that mimics ice skating or in-line skating. The ultra-light skating skis are treated with glide wax from tip to tail, which makes them ultra fast. My first push off onto the smooth snow sent me into a whizzing glide that felt incredibly light and free.

However, my enjoyment was diminished by the icy chill of the air, because even though I had lots of warm clothes with me, I didn’t have exactly the right clothes.

Lesson #1: A wind jacket isn’t enough for these early morning jaunts. Wind pants are key so your legs don’t go numb.

Despite the frigid dawns, I became a meadow skiing junkie. One spring when we heard Lake Almanor was having warm days and freezing nights, Doug booked a motel room in Chester. Chester! I exclaimed. Couldn’t we go somewhere more dramatic — down the Sierra’s Eastside, for instance? But Doug had an inkling that Chester would be good, and so we went.

As we got started the next morning a cloak of fog snuffed out all the scenic features — the fluffy green trees, the big lake, the mountains — so we stayed close to the lakeshore. Slowly, the fog shriveled into curly threads that hugged the streams. We cruised up one creek into a nearby meadow. Sunshine lit up the sky, revealing a landscape awash in snow crystals. But the best reward was the long vista once everything cleared: In the distance, snow-domed Mt. Lassen boomed up from the forest like a kingdom from the Lord of the Rings.

Lesson #2: Don’t let the fog deter you.

One night a friend called to say she’d heard Anton Meadows above Tahoe City had a frozen crust. To reach Anton the next morning, we used the groomed trails of Tahoe Cross Country ski area, where we had season passes. Most cross-country centers contain a couple of flat open places that freeze and thaw in the springtime: Tahoe Donner has the Euer Valley, Kirkwood has Kirkwood Meadow, and the Tamarack Cross-Country Ski Center in Mammoth has snow-covered lakes.

On this particular morning, the slender shards of hoar frost sparkled across the surface as if someone had sprinkled a million diamonds there. Once we left the trails, we could ski wherever we wanted to go. I swooped between willows, scampered up hillsides, circled creek holes, and inspected rabbit tracks.

Lesson #3: Check out the meadows next to groomed ski center trails.

Doug and I bought a small camper, and now we travel often on Highway 395 to where the glacier-scooped valleys of the Eastern Sierra provide endless meadows for long days of skate skiing. On one early excursion into a canyon below Mt. Emma near Sonora Pass, Doug asked if I wanted to take a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my fanny pack. I said no. I had plenty of Gu’s, those 100-calorie packets of gooey carbs laced with caffeine.It was a spectacular tour. We skated up the canyon, following an open creek, dodging willow bushes and peering at transparent ice lips growing out of the snow banks above the rushing creek. We climbed a glacial moraine and scooted through an aspen grove. A couple of hours passed and I swallowed one Gu after another. We crested a knoll to see another irresistible glistening valley ahead of us. We flew into it, hooting with excitement and feeling free as eagles. Then, bonk. My energy drained away as if someone had pulled a plug. I had eaten all my Gu’s. I found Doug ahead sitting on a stump, nibbling his sandwich. He kindly shared it. Refueled, I zoomed back to the camper, where I took a nap.

Lesson #4: Always take the PB&J.Backcountry skate skiing can test all of your limits. Sun comes from all sides, so wear a good sunscreen, big hat and a long-sleeve lightweight wind-shirt. Carry extra water and don’t wear dark-colored, heat-absorbing clothes.

And then there are the survival issues: Travel with a friend, know your terrain, and leave a note on your car describing your route and when you’ll be back.

Lesson #5: Be prepared for anything.

The sweetest aspect of spring skate skiing is that it can be done anywhere. The snowpack simply needs to be gathering lots of sunshiny warmth during the day, and freezing hard at night. My favorite finds include a couple of meadows on Highway 89 between Truckee and Sierra Valley, any snow-covered alkali flat in Nevada, anyplace at all in magical Hope Valley off Carson Pass, and meadows around Tioga Pass and Crowley Lake, near Mammoth.

Lesson #6: Skate skiing is a great way to get deep into the backcountry quickly and with ease.

Sunset Magazine

In the 1880s, a Sacramento newsman compared Lake Tahoe's sapphire depths to bluing solution, so astonishing was the color. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) said Lake Tahoe's air was pure enough for angels. Clear sky and water still startle the senses here, especially when you spend the day close to shore on the 6 1/2-mile Rubicon Trail.

The footpath connects rocky points and sandy coves along an untamed shoreline that once intimidated mountain men. Today, the paths have been cleared and the steeper sections shored up. The most popular trailheads are at D.L. Bliss State Park and Emerald Bay State Park. It's 4 1/2 miles between those points; also, you can take the new 2-mile extension past Vikingsholm.

The Bliss trailhead approach is particularly sweet. Its crushed-granite path leads, after about 1/8 mile, to Rubicon Point, where the trail turns south. About 1/5 mile past Rubicon Point, you'll reach a place where dramatic granite cliffs descend 600 feet to a watery mosaic of blues – they continue another 1,400 feet below water.

A few steps around the corner juts a strange crowd of natural rock figures. Use your imagination to identify local favorites such as Frog Rock, Sleeping Lady, Gladiator, and Old King Cole. Across a ravine behind the formations is an osprey nest that's been there for years. A separate trail departs here for the remains of a small wood lighthouse.

About 1/2 mile farther south, the trail leaves sunny terrain for cooler slopes shaded by sugar and Jeffrey pines, Douglas fir, and incense cedar trees. You'll pass another rocky viewpoint before switch-backing downhill to the sandy coves of Emerald Point. Views encompass glacier-carved mountain peaks and the lumpy profile of Fannette Island – legends of ghosts and turn-of-the-century tea parties here enthrall visitors.

Continuing around the bay, you'll come to Vikingsholm, a 38-room mansion built in 1929 for a woman who wanted to replicate the stonework, turrets, and sod roofing of medieval Scandinavian architecture.

Save time for a 30-minute guided tour – they're available between 10 and 4 every half hour daily through the end of September.

About 8 miles north of the park, Tahoma Meadows B&B (530/525-1553) is a good place to spend the night – which you may well want to do once this region has cast its spell on you.

San Francisco Chronicle

LAST YEAR'S FALL IN North Tahoe produced a few weeks of blazing foliage followed by intense bouts of rain. During the downpours most people finished puzzles or played Clue or Scrabble. Not 17-year-old Matt Gelso. Bad weather rarely shuts him in. Through the gray days and heavy skies, the flame-haired teen continued to bicycle, rock climb and roller ski. He wasn't overdoing his sports, just preparing in his own serious fashion for the 2006 cross-country ski season. He had big dreams.

By the time spring arrived, in the midst of class camp-outs and other pre-graduation antics, Gelso was nominated to the 2007 U.S. Cross Country development team. He had worked hard in the past four years, to be sure, but now the most difficult training of his life was about to begin. Nomination is a first step toward joining the team. Nominees attend summer training camps. In early fall they sign a personal responsibility code. With those tests behind him, Gelso learned his nomination was official. He was now the youngest member of the team.

Back home, North Tahoe/Truckee locals cheered. Plenty of homegrown kids have joined the U.S. Alpine Ski Team over the years. But this was the first time a Tahoe-raised athlete had made the cross country team. To most who knew Gelso, it was not a surprise. In 2005, he won the Junior National Championship freestyle sprint. At the 2006 Junior Olympics, he won all three individual events: the freestyle (skating) sprint, the 10K skate race and the 15K classic race. In the 2006 World Junior Championships in Kranj, Slovenia, he placed 16th overall.

"His 16th place result at the World Junior Championships last year was one of the best Junior results that the U.S. has celebrated," said Pat Casey, Gelso's new Continental Cup Team coach. "The ranks of Junior skiing can be volatile. From season to season we see different names on the top of the results list. Matt's name has been on the top of the results list for more than one season, and of late he has been the overwhelming favorite heading into domestic Junior championships."

Gelso is simply faster and smarter than most cross-country skiers his age, according to Glenn Jobe, a North Tahoe Olympian who competed in the 1980 Lake Placid Biathlon 20K event, and who has coached Gelso at race events and during training camps. "Matt is the top junior skier in the U.S. right now," Jobe said. "I have no doubt he will go as far as he wants to go."

How far can that be? The U.S. Cross Country Ski Team isn't known for its champions. But true believers think that reputation is about to change. "The U.S. is now knocking on the door for a medal," Jobe speculated. But has the word "medal" ever shared headlines with "U.S. Cross Country skiing" in world competition results? Only once, and not in Gelso's lifetime. In 1976, Vermont skier Bill Koch won an Olympic silver. There was a bit of a heyday in the early '80s with skiers getting top spots internationally, but not since then has an American cross country skier been on the Olympic podium. As recently as 2002, U.S. Cross Country Ski Team press releases from Europe wilted under such headings as "U.S. Skiers Blanked on Sprints."

"In the early 1980s, the sport started being televised, and Europeans poured money into their teams," explained U.S. Nordic Program Director Luke Bodensteiner. But we didn't match that. Soon, American cross-country skiers were finishing in the 40th places, then in the 70s. "Some dead last," Bodensteiner said. It looked as if anyone who hankered to win for the United States, like Gelso, would have to schuss instead of stride. "That's when we decided we were putting our focus in the wrong spot," Bodensteiner said.

Cross-country skiers usually peak around age 30. Before the late 1990s, the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team was waiting until athletes matured into their mid-20s before tapping them. In 1998, the United States switched gears with a new program providing a longer training arc for skiers by starting their World Cup development earlier in their careers. "In the past eight years we've taken a lot of steps to get a handful of athletes up to the point where they are now, close to the World Cup podium," Bodensteiner said. Results were good. Last winter, U.S. sprinters produced the best international results in history for the women and in two decades for the men. And, for the first time since the classification was established in the 1980s, U.S. skiers made the "Red Group," a pool of the top 30 competitors in sprint and long distance. In February, the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association announced it would expand its support of cross-country skiing to impact the program for the 2010 and 2014 Olympic Winter Games. There will be better World Cup support, additional coaches' education and a renewed development program. It is this wave that pulled Gelso onto the Team, this wave he'll be riding, perhaps eventually propelling.

Can he hang in there for the four to eight years it could take to win a podium? With composure beyond his age, he doesn't boast. "For an endurance sport, it's necessary to give yourself time," he said. "You can't get world-class 50K endurance in even two years, unless you're extremely naturally gifted. ... It takes self-motivation."

He is used to long athletic trails. He's been drumming for success since he was 6 when he competed in his first swim meet. "He swam 100-meters four times back and forth," his dad, Matt Gelso Sr. recalled. "It was the longest race he'd ever done, and he was going to finish last, but he was killing himself in the race." That sort of drive very likely came from a high-performing mom, Kathy Gelso, who once was a competitive figure skater.

Swimming was good for "building his motor," according to Jeff Schloss, Gelso's primary coach in Truckee, but Gelso was even better on snow. "When he was 13 we took him to the Junior Olympics thinking this would be a good learning experience, but that he would finish toward the back," Schloss said. It's possible Gelso remembered what it felt like to swim in last place, because the back of the pack was no longer for him. In his first races, he surprised everyone by skiing in the middle of the pack. In the last individual race, he outperformed the rest of his own team, all of them older than him, and finished an astounding 11th. "That week I saw this young 13-year-old who was not intimidated by other kids," Schloss said. "On every race day, he learned from the day before." The red-headed kid had the makings of a champion. "To be the very best, it takes four things," Schloss said. "No. 1 is genetics. You have to have a big motor. The sport is so aerobically demanding." No. 2 is technique. "Matt has some of the best technique of any Junior in the country." Motivation is third. "It's not like football and basketball, where everybody's watching you. In cross country you are out in the woods by yourself for hours. If you don't have the inner drive, you're not going to make it. Matt will work out for hours without a coach watching him." Fourth is inquisitiveness: "The athlete has to be willing to learn. Matt will spend hours skiing past a coach and asking, 'Have I brought my arms in closer on the double pole? Is my skate push directed down the track?' He has a great, curious mind."

Jobe adds that Gelso's ability to think strategically also puts him out front. "Matt is a smart skier; he has strategy," he said. "When he goes out, he might be in 20th place, then 10th. Then he ends up winning the race. Other racers will go out hell-bent for leather the first lap, and then they can't maintain the speed. Matt gets faster as the race goes on, and that takes tremendous mental maturity. You have to be your own person."

Maturity, according to many who know him, is perhaps Gelso's crowning trait. "I am very proud of him as a person, even more than as a skier," his dad said. "That's what I admire about him most -- the quality of person he is."

As for Gelso, the new freshman at the University of Colorado is feeling the nip of challenge, one that few of his classmates can share. This winter Gelso will compete with the university ski team in the American and Canadian Continental Cup circuit, and he'll probably travel abroad for select international races. "When you are put up on a level like this, you want to promote the sport, and you want to do well for your country," he said. "Even on days when I don't want to train, when I wake up and it's raining and I'm tired, I could close my eyes and go back to sleep, but I don't, because it's what I need to do. It's what I do."

In the next few years during holidays Gelso may be seen training along the hundreds of miles of groomed nordic ski trails looping the mountains around Lake Tahoe. If his red top frizz doesn't distinguish him on the snow, his powerful technique will. "You don't see a lot of exaggerated movement," Schloss reflected. "Instead, it's powerful, close to the body, and directing him down the track." What a thrilling track that might be.

VIA Magazine

IN THIS 6-MILLION-ACRE park, you can spot grizzly cubs beside their mothers, Dall sheep climbing across hillsides, and lanky moose plucking willows—all in one day. Area code is 907 except as noted.

To Do and See
Denali Visitor Center At the park entrance, nature exhibits reveal some weird truths: Did you know that wood frogs freeze and thaw during winter and that blood siphoned by biting mosquitoes aids the survival of plants? 683-2294, nps.gov/dena. Shuttle buses Step off the hop-on, hop-off shuttles at scheduled stops to hike on paths such as the Eielson Alpine Trail, which zigzags up to panoramic views of Mount McKinley. Mt. McKinley Glacier Landing On this “flightseeing” tour, you’ll soar in a fixed-wing plane among stonefaced peaks. 683-2359, flydenali.com. Canyon Run Plunge through icy rapids on a two-hour rafting tour along the forested Nenana River. AAA discount. (888) 683-2234, denaliraft.com.

Shopping
Denali Arts & Glass Studio This funky store in Glitter Gulch—the boardwalk of stores near the park entrance—is packed with sparkling glass assemblages and hand-crocheted scarves. 683-4527. Denali General Store Take home some essence of Alaska: packets of fresh smoked salmon and zesty wild game sausages. 683-2920. Three Bears Gallery Check out spooky Native Alaskan spirit masks and Aaron Barrett’s fantastical carved whalebone totems. 683-3343.

Eats
Black Bear Coffee House The Glitter Gulch hangout is the place to pick up a box lunch for the bus ride into the park. 683-1656, blackbeardenali.com. 229 Parks Restaurant and Tavern This hot spot in a wood-timbered house serves dishes made with ultrafresh local produce, such as chilled wild blueberry soup and roasted fruit tart. 683-2567, 229parks.com. Tonglen Lake Lodge The café at this upscale new lodge features scones with bacon and dates or apricots and ginger. 683-2570, tonglenlake.com.

This article was first published in July 2014. Some facts my have aged gracelessly. Please call ahead to verify information.

Tahoe Quarterly

You're five miles into a solo mountain bike ride in the woods near South Lake Tahoe's Kingsbury Grade, tooling up a long slope, when suddenly you feel a buzz in your gut. It's a sensation that someone—or something—is watching you. The feeling defies logic because you don't hear anything strange. If something were there, a hiker or a black bear perhaps, wouldn't you at least hear a grunt or a twig crack? Not if it is a mountain lion.

Most of us have been led to believe that mountain lions inhabit the transitional zones of the mountain foothills, where they hide in the brush and capture deer, their preferred prey. While that is true, they also like porcupines, beaver and even skunks—all of which, along with deer, populate the Tahoe Basin.

Field observations indicate more lions live around Lake Tahoe than many people think. And they are not just making fair-weather visits. Last February, Nevada biologists were informed that a young mountain lion was hanging around Incline Village. It was spotted three times by three different residents, including Jan Dyer, who lives near a brushy stream environment zone.

"It was not a kitty," says Dyer, who watched the large, long-tailed cat from an upstairs window. "It was slowly ambling its way through my yard. It sat down and swiveled its head. It was just before dusk, their normal hunting time, and I was able to observe it for some time."

Afterward, she found paw prints in her yard; mountain lion tracks are identified by oblong toe pads, an M-shaped metatarsal pad and typically an absence of claw marks. Dyer was captivated. "I felt very privileged to see it. It's their habitat. We live in their environment."

"They prefer the areas where the brush component meets the trees," notes Nevada Department of Wildlife spokesperson Chris Healy, pointing to the fact that Tahoe is not the cat's ideal environment. "We surmise the cat in Incline was basically caught by some snows."

Ideal habitat or not, mountain lions have been and are currently wandering the mountains around The Lake, though not en masse. The Incline Village sighting was only the latest in a string of interesting big cat incidents. In August 2005, a 90-pound mountain lion took a swipe at a dog (a Rhodesian ridgeback) on the South Shore. In the past 2 years, several North Shore residents have spotted lions in the Burton Creek State Park. A few years ago, a South Shore lion had an unlucky encounter with glass.

"One young mountain lion in the Zephyr Cove area jumped through a plate glass window," Healy explains. "We surmise—we don't know for sure—that this animal saw the reflection and went after it." The animal was collared by wildlife officials and monitored during the next year as it roamed between Highway 50 and South Lake Tahoe, Healy says.

The sightings don't mean Lake Tahoe residents and visitors should fear for their lives when they enter the forest. It only means people should be smart and alert, according to officials.

Mountain lions have rarely attacked humans; they usually avoid people. In fact, to date, there has never been a fatal attack in Nevada.

According to California Fish and Game Department spokesperson Patrick Foy, the reason for their disinterest in us "might be our bipedal nature—we stand on two feet and therefore pose a greater threat." If confronted by a lion in the wild, people should stand tall and shout aggressively. Don't turn and run. And be mindful that dawn and dusk hours are the most likely times for an encounter. Big cats usually stay out of sight most of the day.

In California, mountain lions have killed six people since 1890. The most recent three deaths occurred in 1994 and 2004, in El Dorado, San Diego and Orange counties, according to the California Department of Fish and Game. Nine non-fatal attacks on record with the California Fish and Game have occurred since 1986. The incidents have increased in recent decades, but so has human population.

However, wildlife incident reports—usually made when mountain lions exhibit threatening behavior or attack livestock—have recently increased dramatically. California statistics show that from 2001 to 2003, wildlife incident reports numbered less than 500. In 2004, the reports climbed to 717. The California Fish and Game Department does not have an explanation for the dramatic shift, says Foy, "but over the past 10 to 15 years, more people have left the city and moved into rural areas, bought a few acres, bought a goat or 2 and suddenly encountered a lion for the first time. The lions have been there for a long time, but the people have not."

Mountain lions are legally hunted in 11 western states, including Nevada. In 1990, California voters approved Proposition 117, banning the sport hunting of mountain lions and protecting their habitat. Since then, the proposition has survived a number of attempts to gut, amend or overturn it, including a 2005 state assembly bill, AB 24, which stalled in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

"We don't have evidence to suggest a dramatic increase in lions, but we do have evidence to suggest at least a gradual increase since 1991 when Proposition 117 passed," Foy says. California has between 4,000 and 6,000 mountain lions; Nevada wildlife officials estimate a state population of 3,000 to 5,000 mountain lions.

Wildlife officials say many people who report seeing a lion have actually spotted a deer, coyote or bobcat. A mountain lion is a tawny colored, shorthaired, big cat. It weighs between 80 and 150 pounds and is anywhere from 5 to 8 feet long, nose to tail. Its tail is remarkably long, extending to one-third of its body length. It has a smallish head, small ears, large paws and a light-colored underbelly. And it purrs. It also cheeps, chirps and, during mating season, makes horrifying amorous yowls that surpass the drama and volume of the most passionate domestic cat.

Mountain lions eat primarily meat, many times feasting first on the vitamin A–rich organs. They prefer deer and elk, although they will sometimes eat each other. They bury their kill in a cache and may return regularly to it for a number of days. On average, one deer can provide one adult lion enough food for a week.

The mountain lion kills as silently and quickly as possible. It stalks and then pounces. It has little long-distance stamina and must get very close to its prey before lunging. It leaps on the back of prey and, depending on its victim's size, usually kills by twisting or biting the back of the neck. Young males fight over territory and mates. Solitary by nature, lions define their territories with "calling cards"—tree scratches or scrapes in the dirt covered with debris and sometimes urine and/or feces. Territory sizes can vary from 25 square miles, noted in areas of California where prey is abundant, to 150 square miles in arid places where food is scarce.

Mountain lions have interesting range management strategies. When an adult dies, younger males compete for its territory. When the dominant cat wins, the others move on in search of the next vacancy.

The mountain lion seen by Dyer was probably one of these wandering males, according to Healy. "Young lions are kicked out by their mothers and are set out on their own to search for a home. Every time we get an incident, it's almost always a young male between the ages of 18 and 24 months."

How many mountain lions frequent Lake Tahoe? Fish and game representatives are reluctant to guess. However, Jack Spencer Jr., supervisory wildlife biologist with the

USDA/Wildlife Services, extrapolates from deer populations and his own observations that half a dozen lions live along the eastern Sierra Range from Stateline to Reno. "I caught 2 different lions last year in 2 different areas within a week's time. For every 400 to 500 deer, we most likely have a lion," he says.

But if encroaching development begins to cause deer populations to shrink, Tahoe's mountain lion numbers will decrease, according to Healy. Indeed, that is already happening.

"Deer herds are taking a major beating," he says. "With harsh winters, droughts and new development in the ranges, the number of deer has dwindled."

Regardless of the change in their numbers, visitors and residents in the Tahoe Basin should never underestimate the possibility of a lion among us. If you'd like to arm yourself with more information, visit the Websites below. Then maybe next time you feel a strange sensation in your gut signaling an untamed presence in the woods—the sensation of wildness that compels many of us to live at Lake Tahoe—you'll stand tall and confident, and perhaps be lucky enough to spy our silent, yet sometimes deadly, neighbor.