Category Archives: outdoors

Always learning, even when I think I know

03 Thursday Nov 2022

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Cameron Lake, Waterton Lakes National Park, Canada

The air is still, so windless that the water itself hardly moves, reflecting sky and Rocky Mountains. Not so many people know about Cameron Lake, one of many tucked among the stunning peaks of Waterton Lakes National Park in western Alberta. The much better known Glacier National Park just south of the Canadian border gets a lot more press. To say nothing of the press of visitors.

My family visits Waterton often, and my first visit there predates my active memory. But there are pictures of little-kid me alongside Linnet Lake, pre-adolescent me at an uncle’s cabin in the tiny town of Waterton nestled among the lakes and peaks, teenage me on the trail to Bertha Lake. And there are dozens of adult me kayaking on Cameron.

Cameron Lake is famous for its winds. Smart boaters get an early start because the wind checks in late morning and gets rip roaring by late afternoon. Of course it’s almost always blowing away from the boat dock. And this lake only permits human-powered rigs. Muscle up and paddle hard. A float on Cameron is a workout.

But not on an early October visit in 2022. This year, the weather gods offered a boon, a perfect sun-drenched autumn morning and no wind. Also. a deep deep quiet. No sighing of the trees, no chatter from other boaters. And, for a short time, no jets overhead. Then a brief chitter of magpies. Then the world in stillness.

I like to say I know this place well. The lake, this day, said otherwise.

Prototyping and creativity

04 Thursday Aug 2022

Posted by in creativity, outdoors, Random, writing

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Sleeping in the van has made car camping easier, but since we’re talking about a mini-van rather than a slick Sprinter-type thing, it lacks a roof vent fan. Not wanting to open the windows and invite in the bugs on hot summer nights, I decided to make some window screens.

First thing I did was buy the wrong kind of screen, the kind of material used to make screens for house windows. Stiff. Unyielding. Must be kept flat or will kink up.

Second trip to the store, I bought soft mesh screen, the kind used in tents. Then I spent about a week trying to figure out how to attach it to the inside of the van. Soon I discovered I could attach it to the outside of the van with magnets, so I bought some extra strong magnets, sewed wide bias tape around the screen and inserted the magnets at the screen corners and midway along the edges. This worked about twice, but the neodymium magnets stuck to each other when the screen was not deployed and made storing the screens when we weren’t camping and deploying them when we were, a nightmare. Rare earth magnets really do not like to come away from each other.

I bought new screens, cut them to size, sewed bias tape around the edges to keep the mesh from fraying and then sewed in small wood dowels that sit in the door grooves and hold the screens in place. Magnets, not the rare-earth kind — hold the whole thing against the car. I keep them separately in a small bag. The screens wrap up neatly around the dowels when not in use. Deploying and storing just got simple.

The thing to remember about making things from scratch — whether it’s a work of fiction, a van window screen, or an original embroidery design — is that creativity is iterative. You start with an idea, you work on it. The flaws in your idea become apparent and you work to refine the design. It’s messy in the middle. But the only way to something better is through making something that’s going to end up in the trash.

Post script: There was also an unfortunate duct tape iteration, but I’d just as soon not go into detail…

Off my usual route

16 Saturday Jul 2022

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If you visit the Wikipedia page describing the Palouse, you get a much better picture of this voluptuous landscape than my little image, snapped from behind a windshield at 60 mph. It’s an experience to visit this area of western Idaho/eastern Washington in spring and I don’t think pictures can do it justice. To see these unique undulating hills, covered with wheat and the bright blooming canola fields had a profoundly gentling impact on my usually busy brain. We traveled through on our way home from southern Alberta, which also features rolling hills and lovely farms. But not like this.

We normally take a more spectacular route to get home to our little corner of the southern Willamette Valley in Oregon. We cross the jagged Rockies in southern British Columbia then run down through Bonner’s Ferry and Sandpoint Idaho. This time we dropped southeast of the Rockies, skirting Glacier National Park in Montana and then coming down the east side of Flathead Lake (who knew the ameliorating effect of the lake means a huge cherry-growing region in Montana?). We drove down to visit friends in Moscow Idaho, which is not on any of the major east-west or north-south interstate highways. It’s in the heart of the Palouse.

I have lost count of my road trips to southern Alberta to visit family in Lethbridge and wander the trails in Canada’s best but perhaps least known national park, Waterton Lakes. I’m so glad we detoured off the quickest-there-and-back highways to see more of the region. I’m a western woman. Born in Saskatchewan. Lived 50 years in Utah, Washington, Alaska, Oregon. Not dissing the rest of North America or any of the other glorious continents. But I love this vast region. And I love getting more intimate glimpses of it.

I’m reminded of William Least Heat Moon’s moving book “Blue Highways”. So amazing to get off the screaming multilane interstates, slow down (though in Montana they don’t shy away from 70 on two lanes). With family ties in Canada and the United States, I’ve found myself thinking of the region not so much as two separate countries but as one salmon nation, a term coined by people who know much more about biodiversity than I ever will.

Nowness

05 Tuesday Jul 2022

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Last month Craig and I camped and hiked at Humbug Mountain State Park, which, though close to the highway, has a secluded feeling. A fine trail winds through big trees to the top of the mountain and while its elevation gain is 1,700 feet over three miles, the switchbacks make it seem less arduous than I’d expected. We hiked at the right time for flowers: wild iris, rose, rhododendrons, bleeding hearts, and many others I have no names for.

Being in the moment on that hike proved easy. The periodic views of the Pacific Ocean through the fir trees, the spring flowers, the sound of birds. So much visual and audio stimulation to keep the mind in the present.

Day to day, I find myself stuck in thoughts of what has happened and what may be about to happen. I’m not dissing the past and the future, but I have this feeling that savoring now shouldn’t be reserved for special times.

I wonder if my daily activities can include the kind of nowness of the hike. Maybe there’s value to paying attention to the folding of the laundry, the doing of the dishes, the weeding of the garden.

The farm boy who discovered Pluto

26 Tuesday Apr 2022

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Clyde Tombaugh was a Kansas farm boy in the 1920s who couldn’t afford college so he just did what he could on the farm in his spare time: Built his own telescopes and took meticulous notes about his night-sky observations. He sent his notes to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff AZ when he heard they were hiring and his notes got him a job. The Lowell Observatory is a private institution founded in 1894 by Percival Lowell, son of wealthy Massachusetts industrialists and educators. Lowell was convinced another planet beyond Neptune influenced its orbit and Tombaugh, using the 24-inch Clark refracting telescope (pictured above) found Pluto in 1930. It turned out that Lowell was wrong about Pluto’s influence on Neptune. Eventually Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in Kuiper belt. But the Clark telescope is still a remarkable instrument, still functional and available for viewing the night sky by the likes of you and me. Lowell invites folks up to the observatory on clear nights to get a closeup view of stars, nebula, galaxies. At our visit there this month, Craig and I saw the Orion Nebula using the 126-year-old Clark telescope. We also got introduced to the stunning Cigar Galaxy. Exciting research continues at Lowell. This is why we travel.

Keep getting up

14 Friday Jan 2022

Posted by in Exercise, learning, outdoors, Random

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I am the perpetually novice skier. I’ve been downhill skiing since I was 19. I’ve been cross-country skiing since I was 28. But years (heck, decades) can go by between outings. Every time I do go, the downhill slope looks as daunting as the first. Then I ski down it and a hint of muscle memory returns. Then again, a bit more. Every time on cross country skis, I freak out when the trail turns and drops. I can turn. I can descend, but not simultaneously!

I was feeling somewhat sad about this. How is it I am six decades along in life and still skiing only the easiest of runs. But after a three-day weekend of doing both kinds of skiing, I realized, this is me. Perpetually novice skier. So I will just enjoy all the best parts of it and laugh about the tumbles.

The best parts: three days in a cabin on a lake with the amazing Craig and the wonderful Isaac. Beautiful mountains, stunning night skies. Occasional encounters with people in an actual sleigh being pulled by a muscular clydesdale. Feeling that muscle memory return.