Category: Outback Notes

This is not the desert. This is not the desert at night. This is a city in the forest at night, 7000 feet above sea level. Winters are cold. Summers are closer to the sun. Long before us, they cleared the trees and made a city here, a concrete well between deserts. This mountain divides ...

I admit to a conservative streak in my nature. One problem with that is a tendency to paint the past in golden hues and promote visions of a world that never really existed. And it’s probably accurate that if we are ever to learn anything, and carry that knowledge forward, we can’t do it by ...

On a recent research trip into the Nevada outback, Nugget News editor Jim Cornelius and I had occasion to stop for a few minutes in Silver Lake, Oregon–to pay our respects at a monument in the local cemetery. Ten feet high, unprepossessing, the monument was erected in 1898, to remember the victims of Oregon’s most ...

Few topics in wildlife conservation are as fundamentally polarizing and explosive as the topic of wolves. And like most subjects in our “Breaking News” zeitgeist, the hyperbole shills on all sides of the wolf issue seem to work in feverish piques, pandering to our baser emotional responses, and often ignoring outright any evidence contrary to ...

I am sentimental about sawmills. That’s especially true around Christmas because the Sierra Pacific sawmill, at one time the second largest of its kind in the United States, was also the principal private employer where I was raised–in the sparsely populated northeastern corner of California. My stepfather worked at Sierra Pacific for over twenty years, ...

One frustrating aspect of living in an outdoor paradise is the perpetually nagging notion that—no matter how much you do—you are missing out on something. That’s nowhere more true than in central Oregon, which is known worldwide as a playground for outdoor adventure: from skiing to mountain biking, from climbing to bird watching. And, of ...

“Lord, let me die    but not die Out.”                         For the Last Wolverine, James Dickey A few weeks ago, on our way to the End of Summer Concert and bbq at the Camp Sherman Store, my wife and I crossed paths with a ...

Before the Milli fire started getting that strange look in it’s eye, filling the sky with smoke and causing the evacuation of Crossroads, my wife and I were pleased to host a couple of through-hikers attempting the Pacific Crest Trail. Because of the fires in Central Oregon, numerous trail closures, and active measures by our ...