The Moulton Journal: Spring Break for Emily

It feels like springtime in Butte: cold mornings, warm afternoons, bright clear blue skies. We did pick up some snow last week and Paul groomed last Friday before heading off for a downhill ski vacation/family reunion. Emily is home from Boston for spring break, so RTD & I have a skiing buddy again.

The moose are feeding early:

And by mid-morning they seek cool shade:

The moose, too, are anxious for spring. As Emily and I left Walkerville for a morning ski, we saw a yearling moose skylined in a fenced mine reclamation area behind the houses. Next day, the Montana Standard newspaper printed this photo of a cow and calf on a stroll through a nearby uptown neighborhood:

It was a cold morning. About 14 deg F when we left the house in the predawn, and colder at Moulton. Though the trails were a little icy (especially on those steeper, west or south facing slopes on the Sluicebox trail), we had a good "combi" ski, and skated much of time:

Poor old RTD: just yesterday it seems, RTD (aka "the Fasty Pasty") zoomed ahead on those downhills, and raced alongside on the steepest of slopes. She still runs, but not so fast. Through dogs, we learn to appreciate the trajectory of our own lives, and our aged future. Here's RTD, doing her best to keep up with Emily on the road back down to the parking lot:

And what's prettier than Emily's rosy cheeks after a fast ski on a brisk morning?:

Maybe some afternoon we'll head to the Jefferson River and catch a trout for the grill ("hook 'em & cook 'em," as opposed to "catch & release"). It's that time of year.


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The Moulton: Montana's Finest Cross Country Skiing Area

Montana Standard photo: http://www.mtstandard.com/articles/2008/03/11/butte/hjjbjgiijjebji.txt

The Moulton Journal: Shifting Baselines, a Couple of Moose, and Skiing as Story

Shifting Baselines
It's a scary thought: all us skiiers are raving about what a great snow year this is. Yet, when you look at the last hundred years or so of data, it's really very average. But as humans (or Americans, anyway), we forget the lessons of history and only the recent past is our basis for comparison. Thus all of those so-called "drought" years from 1998 to 2007 are now normal, and the winter of 2007-08 looks exceptionally white and cold.

This is a good example of the classic phrase "shifting baseline," coined by biologist Daniel Pauly to explain how fisherman (and fisheries biologists) came to accept declining fish populations. In other words, it's all a matter of what you are used to. But no, it isn't: whether declining fish populations or global warming, there are real human impacts on the environment. If we do not appreciate their severity, we will end up like the Greeks or Romans or all those cultures that caused their own demise by ruining their environment [cf. Diamond (2005) Collapse].

But the snow is here, and I will get out there and enjoy it.

Moose
Since December, I've been seeing The Moulton moose cow and her calf separately. I thought that, as it seems to happen each year, the cow had driven the calf away or it had left on its own to stake out its own willowy territory. But this morning, there they were together again, feeding in the willow bottom near the Downy place (a mile or so below the parking lot), and bedded down as I returned:


Skiing as Story
Cross country skiing the trails of The Moulton is a performative act. It is something like Walter Ong and others thesis about Homer's Illiad and other oral traditions: they were never told the same way twice. Instead, the poem or song is stitched together from prefabricated parts, each with its own memorable thoughts, rich sensual metaphors, and other distinguishing features. And it's not a book that you read just once.

And so it is with a ski at The Moulton or with similar performances such as a hike through a familiar area. Each performance is a new story. In part, this is trivially true in a Heraclitean sense that "You can't step in the same river twice:" the snow, wind, temperature, light, wax, the pair of skis you're on, mouse tracks, and so forth are all different each time.

But in an equally interesting sense, each ski or hike is unique because of the way we stitch together familiar elements. Climbing across the ridge and skiing down the Buzzy Trail with its Single Jack and Double Jack is one day's introduction to The Moulton story, whereas another day might be introduced by way of a trek across the meadow, up the Orphan Girl hill, and down Wake Up Jim. Like Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, there is no one right order in which to read the chapters.

Sadly, I think, many residents of Modernity believe in and seek The One True Order. They seek the linearity of alpha-omega from beginning to end in an invariant way. They march into Iraq determined to transform diverse cultures that do not share "our" values into a democractic, "one nation under capitalism" neo-con version of Amerika.

This is exactly why we need the disorder, diversity, and complexity of nature and wilderness. It is a counterpoint to our daily experience of culture and technology, it challenges us to surrender our rational linearity, and it helps us discover the beauty of our relationship to the earth.

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The Moulton: Montana's Finest Cross Country Ski Trails

The Moulton Journal: A Winter's Tale

This morning, our world of sin is blanketed with the most amazing snowfall--light, feathery little bundles of interlocked flakes; four inches deep on the front sidewalk, but easily swept away with a broom. There is not a breath of wind, and walking along the flanks of Big Butte I was mesmerized watching this fluff fall from the sky, drifting down at less than a meter per second.

Yesterday dawned cold and clear. Here's the view west, with the sun just beginning to light the higher peaks of the Pintler:

The -14 deg F temperature at The Moulton made for slow skiing, but on such a day it is a joy to be outside. I warmed quickly skiing up the main access road from the parking lot, and it felt good to linger here and there where the sun lit up an opening in the trees. Breath, perspiration, and snot freeze on contact with the frigid air; cold fingers pry into the lingering soul:

The cow moose that has been hanging out in the willow bottom near the parking lot moved down the valley. Did even she feel the cold last night, or has she some intuition of deeper snow to come? Poor man that would presume to know the mind of a moose. Here she is, just a mile or so above Walkerville:

On a cold morning such as this, warm vapors rise from the Berkeley Pit (the world's largest toxic lake) and form the notorious "Pit Fog." Here it is, like brute matter brought to life, towering over the town:

The Moulton Journal: Last Ski at Mill Creek?

The Moulton area just north of Butte/Walkerville has picked up some snow the past fewe days, so my every-other-day trek over to the "Mount Haggin Skiing Area" near the Mill Creek pass might be over. It will be good to get back to the challenging and varied Moulton trails, and why drive 25 miles when you can drive 5?

The snow in the Mill Creek pass area is very good, and though it's about the same elevation as Walkerville it is typically about 10 deg F cooler. Typically, green Swix kick wax (0 to 10 deg F) is about right for an early morning ski, but here's Roly-the-Dog (RTD) posing on a recent "extra blue" morning:

The cooler weather on the Big Hole side of the Continental Divide has not deterred the pine beetle invasion. Entomologists tell us that it takes a week or so of c. -30 deg F weather to suppress the pine beetle population. These cold spells were common up until the late 1990s, however since then Global Warming has really kicked in. Our annual precipiation is about the same as the longterm historical average, but overall temperatures average consideralby warmer, and extreme cold spells just don't seem to occur at all. Here's a view of dying lodgepole pines along the flanks of Sugarloaf Mountain. Given the rapid spread of the beetles, probably the trees that are still green will be dead within a few years:

Wednesday of this week was downright balmy. The Mill Cr pass area received several inches of fresh snow, early morning temperatures were near freezing, and RTD & I paused while I corked some purple wax into the kickpockets of my skis. This also gave me a chance to photograph a tiny "snow spider"--they are common in the winter when it warms to near or above freezing, and must have antifreeze for blood:

Here's RTD posing for a "first tracks" pic on our way up the Little California loop:

Up along the level, top-most portion of the trail, a big cow moose dashed across the trail just a hundred feet or so ahead of us, making me glad that RTD is well behaved about such things. Moose can get downright pissed over dogs that chase them, as Dave & I found out when my little hound, Nellie, chased a big bull moose in the Highlands. It turned on her, and luckily we were not far from Dave's truck.

Going Elkless (Almost): Elk Hunting near Butte, Montana

There I was, combing the hills several miles from the road on the last day of elk season. I had grown entirely too smug about elk hunting, having shot bull elk four-out-of-five years that I hunted them, and having shot several cows within a mile or so of the highway. Not this year.

Season began with me at a conference in Washington, DC. Of course, conditions were perfect with cold weather and eight inches of fresh snow. The second week, I was complacent. My friend Don was coming to hunt the following week, and so I roamed the hills and even passed up a shot at a cow. Well, it wasn't a good shot, and as my friend and now-retired colleague Dennis Haley counseled, "Hunting elk in timber is a percentage thing. If you are patient and get into them six or seven times, then you will get the good shot you want. There's no need to take those "iffy" shots."

Here's AJ, crashed for a nap in the warm noonday sun after we climbed into a remote (and elkless) Pintler basin:

Meanwhile, I ate my lunch and waited for the tea to boil:

Don Kieffer arrived from upstate New York the first week of November. The weather was beautiful: warm, sunny, and lousy for elk hunting. Up high, the old snow metamorphosed, turning icy and crunchy. Down low, the snow melted away. But we had a great time hiking the hills:

Visiting some of my favorite elk haunts:

And of course enjoying a hot cup of tea come noontime:

As my old friend BAT (aka Bob Thomas) likes to remind me, hunting is a lot more than killing. Especially on those blue sky days when the weather is just too damned good for serious elk hunting, you can lie back and listen to the serenade of migrating flocks of snow geese:

And swans:

Don & I also saw a peregrine falcon, and visited the spot where indigenous peoples mined jasper for tools:

After Don left, I tried to get more serious about elk hunting, but still the weather was not conducive to it. Hunting at such times becomes a good excuse for hiking into spots that need to be visited from time to time, such as these logging-era cabins, probably built to feed the flume that sluiced cord wood from the Big Hole valley to the Anaconda smelter:

And when the elk are hard to find, there is the occasional moose; here, a cow and calf on a remote, windswept ridge along the Continental Divide (folks don't think of moose as mountain animals, but they are in Montana!):

And the occasional fool hen (this one, felled with a rock, made a welcome and savory supper that night):

Finally, though, right at the end of season, conditions turned favorable with new, quiet snow and consistently cold temperatures. I spent a day or two hunting a spot that I had hunted many times over the years with Brent Patch and Dave Carter. In those years, I had not learned the lessons of a good "black timber" hunter, and wasted a lot of time peeking into parks and coursing through open stands of lodge pole pine.

In the timber, you keep your nose to the wind, move slowly and quietly, and check out all those stumps and rocks that look very much like elk:

Two Butte boys, hunting a park along the ridge line, flushed a bunch of elk from the north-side timber just below the ridge. I smelled them out ahead of me, found their tracks, began repeating my mantra ("I will honor your spirit and use your flesh well."), and began still hunting. One mile into the chase, they passed through a stand of dense Douglas fir, meandered about, and I thought sure they would bed down. It took me an hour to track them slowly and carefully through a half-mile wide thicket, sometimes crawling on my hands & knees to be quiet and stay below the branches. I could smell them and knew they were not far ahead. They continued through and fed in a small park. This told me they were relaxed and not worried about a predator on their heels. Very encouraging.

And then there they were, heads tilting and ears twitching, bedded in some thick, snow-covered firs at the park's edge. In timber, one seldom sees a whole elk. Because of the roll of the slope, I could not see any elk shoulders or ribs, my preferred shot. I usually avoid neck shots, since if you don't hit the spine there is not a quick death. But the elk were just seventy yards or so away, and I had a good rest on a tree limb. She never moved from her bed:

An hour or so later, I had the carcass split into two halves, dragged well away from the gut pile where the coyotes and ravens would be less likely to feed on it, and covered with pine branches until I could return:

The heart, liver, tenderloins, back straps, and tongue I laid out on the snow to cool:

Together, they made a forty pound load in my little rucksack. By the time I reached the road, three miles distant, the load felt like one hundred and forty pounds.

At the Check Station, I learned from the nice biologist that there was a Forest Service road within a half-mile of where I killed the cow. The next morning AJ came along to help me, and his good company and a sled made for a pleasant down-hill drag:

"I will honor your spirit and use your flesh well." This promise began with a supper of elk liver and onions last night, the heart is ready for pickling, and there are already plans for barbecued ribs, grilled tenderloin, back strap schnitzel, and roasted tongue with huckleberry glaze. Elk are great animals, and deserve the honor of a great (and arduous) hunt.

Moulton Moose

The elk seem to have left the Moulton area for the season, and we've seen no lion tracks yet this year. But Emily & I did run into this moose cow & calf.