Ecotones
In 1900 my grandpa Patterson was born in a coal camp high up on the Arkansas River in the Colorado Rockies. A self-taught free-thinker, syndicated columnist and cartoonist (and no blood kin to me), my...
View ArticleRiding The Rim
With the Big Sandy Desert flatlands to the west, the Ochoco Mountains (Oh-Chee-Coz) and the sky-scraping Strawberries to the north, the rolling sagebrush Stinkwaters to the east and tall, glaciated,...
View ArticleSerendipity
I’ve lived in or just outside of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Annville, Pennsylvania, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, Clarksville, Tennessee, Geyserville, Yorkville, Boonville and, now, Prineville, Oregon....
View ArticleA Peak Too High
The first peak I bagged is called Poppy. It was at the head of our little box canyon and I must have been five or six years old when, tagging along with the big kids, I got to its top.
View ArticleHoly Cross Mountain
When Peg-Leg Barlow and his mule came down from his prospects up under Colorado’s Great Divide, he wasn’t old Peg-Leg anymore. “I’ve been beautified!” he cried while pushing through the swinging saloon...
View ArticlePaulina Peak
You get as old, beat up and worn down as I am and you appreciate it when some highway department kindly builds a road that allows you to drive to a mountaintop. In the USA, the road up Colorado’s Pikes...
View ArticleMountain Prairies
When, in 1767, Daniel Boone and his cohorts crossed through a gap in the Appalachian Mountains and laid eyes on the Cumberland Plateau, they knew the land was different. Here were meadows surrounded by...
View ArticleHigh-Low Country
Driving across the Grande Ronde River Valley was like being a backseat kid again and taking in the side window scenery along old US Hwy. 99 through the San Joaquin before the I-5, the Peripheral Canal,...
View ArticlePioneer Heritage
Over on the Snake River Plateau the old Immigrant Trail split into its Oregon and California forks. The first thing the westering bull-whackers saw as they came up near was a retired prairie schooner...
View ArticleSado-Medicine
After exiting her chair and opening the door of the examination room, the doctor pivoted around and glared at me. “Social Services?” She asked. “We don’t have any social services here.” With that, she...
View ArticleOregon’s Banana Belt
I bet you didn’t know that Oregon has a Banana Belt. Yup, up here the Crooked River country is famous as a land of sunshine and warmth, monkeys and ocelots. Yet we’ve been here a full roll of the...
View ArticleKilling GI Jane
I’m channel surfing when I happen upon some congressional hearings dealing with the systematic cover-up of the rape of female soldiers within the military. 3,553 alleged sexual assaults were reported...
View ArticleOccupied
When, in Vietnam, a friend of ours got his arm blown off, my holemate, the son of a cross-country trucker out of Augusta, Georgia, stomped, spat and snarled in disgust, “It don’t mean a goddamned...
View ArticleThe Great Missoula Floods
Not many rivers on earth have blasted through mountain ranges. The Bramhaputra River, which rises on the Tibetan Plateau and flows into the Bay of Bengal, cuts through the Himalayas and counts as the...
View ArticleAmong The Provincials
So one sunny afternoon up there the deputy rounds a bend and finds himself tailgating an ancient but sparkling clean one-ton pickup truck doing exactly 55mph.
View ArticleChaining the Land
About 30 years ago the master surveyor, the late Don McMath, told me about how, back in the middle of the 17th Century, Europe’s first large-scale scientific land survey took place.
View ArticleMisery Ridge
Abel is over from Portland. It’s a couple of hours past sunrise and, along with Trisha and Jeff, we’re standing atop a fat fingertip of rimrock overlooking a perfect horseshoe bend in the lower Crooked...
View ArticleNatural Wonders
When I learned that Oregon, in addition to having an official State Flower, an official State Bird, Fish, Gem and what all, also has seven officially designated Natural Wonders, it struck me as...
View ArticleChristmas Valley
Trish, Jeff and I are on a hike and we’ve just arrived atop the crooked, molar-toothed rim of a mile-round, 350-foot-tall basaltic tuff ring called Fort Rock, which is Christmas Valley’s literal...
View ArticleWits End
One nice thing about getting my second book, Turned Round in My Boots (Heyday) published, was that it got me re-connected with a half dozen of my old army buddies. All but one had been my compadres in...
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