This is my favorite picture of myself, though the image may be too telling. It was a piece of cake job, if you ask me, a junket, especially as a break from the hot, dirty work of cutting fire lines. I am sitting on the bank of Hot Creek at the foot of the Sierra …
Great to meet Roger Bergmann for breakfast at The Range in Bernalillo today, 50-some years after our Inyo Ecology Center days In California, where we learned the food was better in fire camps and spike camps than our mess hall 10 miles north of Bishop. I didn’t have any trouble recognizing the cheerful, Montana-raised Crew …
Online chatter among remaining friends from the Inyo Ecology Center in the early 1970s sent me to an official version of the conservation camp’s history and purpose. I was a Vietnam-era conscientious objector assigned there in 1971 and 1972, although I escaped the drudgery of firefighting and conservation work for four months to work for …
I woke up thinking of a stretch of Highway 395 in California, running up the Owens Valley between the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains, a ribbon of road on brown earth under blue sky. I once worked there, from Round Valley down to Lone Pine. I remembered how hard it was to leave it …
dream ranch 