A few years back, after attending a local storytelling festival, I wondered in this post what would happen if I released a story into public domain. I resolved to work up the nerve to let go what some might imagine to be my intellectual property, to “breathe it out” into the common atmosphere, where anybody [...]
Saturday, June 13. As I was coming up out of Crossfire I heard voices. Much has happened lately in our small, southeast Utah town, so I was curious about who might be coming into the canyon. I saw a woman on the rocks above me, well off the trail, turning back in response to a [...]
From time to time, someone asks why I don’t write about the meaner, nastier side of nature, especially the predator-prey drama. Until I go on that man-eating African lion-hunting trip or bag me an Alaskan grizzly or happen to be on hand when a puma takes down a mule deer buck, I just don’t have much to offer on [...]
Wilderness Interface Zone is happy to announce the arrival of its spring photo gallery, now showing in the photo box in the upper right-hand corner of the page displayed on your screen. It’s a little late, I know, but flowers, tree leaves, migratory birds, and torpid amphibians and reptiles have only emerged in abundance here in San Juan County, Utah over the last three weeks. [...]
April 13, 2009
Why do I still do this? Why, at my age, do I follow as if I were nine years old unmarked, unpaved trails away from what I know into the wilds of what I don’t know? That’s how this striving creation—part light, part water, part air, part earth, and all aspiring flesh—shows itself [...]
As I walked out of a nearby canyon last week using the same trail where I reported having an encounter with a curious coyote, my nose detected gases given off by putrefaction. Somewhere nearby, bacteria were at work breaking down formerly living tissue to simpler matter, dispersing an organism’s worldly goods to its biological heritors.
To this we must all come. [...]
One of the reasons I moved from Utah County to San Juan County was to provide my oldest son and youngest daughter greater exposure to nature. Household circumstances have resulted in their being confined to the house more than is natural for children in general but is even more unnatural for children of an outdoors-type [...]