Well, on our afternoon walk today, we had a little bear encounter. So much for those fancy-dan bird dogs of mine who ran right underneath the bear who was standing uphill from the trail “chuffing” at us. Standing! On it’s hind legs! A bear! A very dark, very big, bear-person who was not happy to see us at all. Luckily, the dogs came right back when I yelled at them to come NOW, and I made them heel as I backed away slowly, holding out my bear spray, wondering if I should pull the safety latch off or not. The…
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It’s mushroom season here in Montana and I’ve spent much of the weekend obsessively wandering the bottomlands along the Yellowstone in pursuit of the beautiful, fragrant, and elusive morel. It started on Saturday morning, when Maryanne’s friend Tice took us down to the sweet spot by the sewage treatment plant where her family has been hunting morels for years. A little backstory here, Maryanne and I have any number of friends who hunt mushrooms — big men, some of whom are known as famous outdoorsmen. Would they share their spots with us? Would they take us out so we could…
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Yesterday I went to see the documentary about Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides. It was extraordinary. I’ve known about Goldsworthy’s work for a long time — when I was a bookseller, I loved Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature, but I’d never seen his work in motion. In the movie, there are these extraordinary images of his art floating out to sea, or a long sinuous chain of bright-green leaves working it’s way out of a pool and flowing downriver. Goldsworthy himself was also inspiring. I’ve been having a terrible time getting any work done these past weeks — my…
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The Burning Season Sometime in the night I realized the wind must have changed, because through the gurgling of the swamp cooler I could smell smoke. It’s disconcerting to smell smoke in your sleep, and I might have been more worried but that even asleep I knew there are two large forest fires in the area, and the smoke just means the winds have shifted. And this morning, it’s true. The air is a hazy apricot and the usually-clear outlines of Livington Peak are a soft grey. There’s a big fire behind the peak — 300 acres by last afternoon’s…
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Rodeo Wrapup I’ve been meaning to blog about last week’s rodeo, but it needed a little time to sift its way through my consciousness (that and there was a big fat literary party last week that kind of threw me off my center for a few days — those things always make me feel like Sally Field at the Oscars — I still can’t believe the French editor had read my book, had remembered it, and had liked it. Of course, it would have been nice if he’d published it, but perhaps when the next one comes out). So anyway,…
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Well, we didn’t see a bear up in Suce Creek last evening, but we did come across a mountain lion. We’d had a nice hike; I was with my friends the Campbells — and had been talking a lot about bears, since Bill is the guy who has spent so much time filming them. Had our bear spray with us, but with four dogs, and general conversation, we weren’t really worried. After we got back to the trailhead, we grabbed a picnic table in the campsite — a really nice one up in the trees, a lot of brush around…
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Requiem for a Bear: R.I.P. Number 264 A couple of weeks ago I blogged about watching our friend Bill Campbell’s documentary Season of the Grizzly on Animal Planet (I’d give a link to the blog entry, but Blogger seems to have decided this morning that all of my archives are unavailable. I’ll have to work on that.) Bill followed bear Number 264 for almost a year and got amazing footage of her and her cubs (although, according to Shannon, the Yellowstone bear biologist who lives two doors down from Bill and Maryanne, Number 264 wasn’t a very good mommy, she…
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Snow on the Lilacs Good thing I didn’t plant the tomatoes on Friday, when the sun was shining, when it was 70 degrees and my apple trees were blooming and the lilacs were this close to opening. Good thing because today it’s snowing. Snowing like winter, big fat wet flakes falling outside my window, two inches on the lawn, and the poor lilacs are all bent over from the load. Everything will be fine, this is expected, it’s Montana after all, and although the official last frost date was yesterday, the 17th, everyone knows that if you put your tomatoes…
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To Blog or to Ski? Blogging has been hampered by the belated but beautiful snowfall we’ve had this week. I bought a season’s pass for Bridger Bowl this fall, but I haven’t gotten as much use out of it as I’d hoped. I thought I was going to be able to sneak out a little more during the week than I’ve managed, and I might have been more inspired to make the drive over the hill had our friend Bill Campbell not lured me up to Suce Creek for some cross country action earlier this week. I haven’t cross-country skiied…