Category Archives: Wanderlusting

The Homestead, Wanderlusting, Woodscraft and Lore

Cold Cookout Culinary Concoctions

skiersAnother annual cookout at the homestead and as usual there were plenty of creative ideas for outdoor cooking.  We began the day with a snowshoe trek up to the saddle and down the south side, looking for tracks and other sign.  A few brave souls tried skiing on the crusty snow and got a bit of thrill careening down the narrow old road with tree hazards strategically placed.  The upper meadow was smooth as white paper and for once we humans were the ones who left the story of our passing for other creatures to find.

While we were skiing my son and his friend Grant, newly returned from Namibia where he’d spent two years in the peace corps, built a fire and got the tea water started.  Grant mixed up a batch of barbeque biscuits and had the dough slowly rising by the side of the fire.biscuits

applePackets of succulent concoctions simmering away soon covered the grill and coals.  The usual mixed-  grill  dishes of meat and veggies in various combinations were the main course, but the deserts were what intrigued me.  Judy made a baked apple, filling the cored center with brown sugar and cinnamon.  Sharon split a banana lengthwise with the skin still on, then filled the center with peanut butter cups and melted it all slowly at the edge of the coals.  Grant’s biscuits were slow to cook in the cold temperatures, but the crusty outsides and warm fluffy innards were delicious.  When we are finished I threw Sharon’s banana peel on the fire and listened to it sing.banana

Looking forward to next year, I happened upon a great cookbook on a recent trip through Ennis.  Titled Over a Fire: Cooking with a Stick and Cooking Hobo Style, it is filled with intriguing ideas and campfire lore.  I’m planning to try the Fry Brownies made in hobo skillet.   Check it out:

Fry Brownies

Before leaving home, stir together I cup flour, ¼ cocoa power, ¼ cup sugar, 1 tsp. baking powder, ¼ tsp. salt and 2 tbls. Nonfat dry milk.  Add chocolate chips and walnuts if desired.  Divide mixture among six zippered plastic bags, placing ½ cup of mix in each bag.  Each bag will make 1 serving.

To prepare brownies, create a flat foil skillet.  Find a sturdy Y-shaped forked stick and cut off the forked ends to matching lengths, 4” to 8” long.  Cut two pieces of heavy- duty foil, extending 3” beyond the edges of the fork in all directions.  Wrap foil tightly around the fork and joint.  Use the skillet on a grate or tin can stove. (A portable frying pan was sometimes called a “banjo” in hobo terms.)

Place the pan over medium low coals or embers.  To one bag of prepared brownie mix, add 1 teaspoon of vegetable oil and 1 ½ tbls. Water; knead mixture in bag until blended.  Heat 1 tsp. oil in skillet.  Cut off a large piece from one corner of plastic bag and squeeze spoon-sized mounds of brownie batter into hot skillet.  Cook until bottoms are browned and tops are no longer shiny.  Flip brownies over, flatten as needed and cook until other side is lightly browned.  Let cool before serving.

Wanderlusting, Wayfinding

Wayfinding

When I was a child, hiking with my parents, we would stop every once in awhile and sit on a rock or downed log at the side of the trail.  My father would ask me where in the world I thought I was.   Unfolding the bulky topographic map and looking to the hillsides, I tried to match their slopes to the squiggly brown waves of lines on the map.

I thought about that on our recent hike to Cliff Lake.  I had borrowed my husband’s GPS and used it to mark waypoints and plot out our route.  I knew exactly where I was at every step–at least within a few dozen feet.  Aided by 7 satellites, my progress was recorded on the little screen that told me my direction, my altitude, the distance to the lake, the distance we had come and what my hiking pace was.  It even told me how long it would be until the sun set.  The one thing it didn’t inform me of was the giant mud puddle in the trail, which I walked right into, my eyes affixed to the little screen.

That managed to break the GPS’ spell.  I thought back to those pre-GPS times when you had to look around you instead.  Gene shared the trick of using your analog watch (yes, we old timers still wear watches with hands) to tell where south is.  Holding up your wrist and aligning the small hand with the sun, you could find south halfway between the hour hand and the minute hand.  A map could give us good idea of altitude, but knowing that we were walking through a forest of  subalpine fir gives us a rough approximation and finding treeline on the hillsides around the lake told us we were nearly 6,000 feet high.

Those watches came in handy again, by telling us how long it had been since we left the trailhead.  Years of hiking means we know we have a pace of about 20 minute miles–longer if we are going up steep paths or taking pictures or stopping to discuss the identity of wildflowers.  Shorter if we are a long ways from the trailhead in the late afternoon and we’re hungry or going downhill.  And having the map in our memory will tell us at what part of the trail the creeks must be crossed.  Simply listening for water will tell us how close we are to that crossing.

As for the sunset, my father taught me how to tell when it would slip behind the peaks and the air would chill.  Holding your hand out at arms length, the fingers horizontal, you place your pointer finger parallel to the ridge line and count the number of fingers between that and the bottom of the sun.  Each finger equals 15 minutes.

I think, when my father asked me where in the world I was, he was not asking  for the co-ordinates of my position on the map, he was asking me how deeply conscious I was of the world around me.  It is not a question that can be answered by a GPS.

Field Notes, Wanderlusting

Erratic Journey

      Crossing the glacial moraine that dams Racetrack Lake above Deerlodge, we make our way to the trailhead at the lake’s inlet.  We are soon ascending through a hummucky, rock strewn forest of  lodgepole pines.  Sticks and stones won’t break our bones as we make our careful way up the trail, but climbing over deadfall and around the boulders will surely make our bones ache tomorrow morning.  We are traveling through a forest of erratics–rocks resting far from the source, carried from the high peaks with their sharp ridges on a sheet of glacial ice and left behind as the ice age ended.

We too are a group of erratics, most of us from other places, brought here by jobs or dreams of living just a bit closer to the bedrock, seeking out a place where we might be surrounded by space and wildness rather than the press of other people and commerce.  Only two or three of us grew up in the surrounding valleys and their stories of those ranching years and their knowledge of the flowers and birds helps ground the rest of us to our chosen homeland.

We think of rocks as steadfast and immovable, but each of these giant boulders is a monument to change.  Born in a liquid fire, they were expelled from the earth’s crust by a force of unfathomable power, cooling slowly over time, then squeezed and crushed and molded by tremendous pressures, thrust up in the violent collision of tectonic plates and rising thousands of feet into the sky.  Then they were sheared from their mother mountain by rains and freezes and broken by tons of glacial ice, scraping and filing their rough edges as they were carried down the mountain on the glacier’s back.  Even when the ice melted and these erratics came to rest in what would, aeons on become a forest, their stories did not end.  The seeds and spores of lichen and moss were brought by the wind from far-off places and began the slow process of burrowing down into the rock’s skin, breaking it apart, creating pockets of loose soil where grasses and then small bushes could get a foothold, maybe even a tree might reach its root tentacles down into cracks and crevices, feeding on the essence of the boulder.

“Stone is the face of patience,” Mary Oliver says.  Yes, these erratics are the face of patience, but their story is one of constant change, being shaped by powerful forces, no will of their own, no clinging to any one state, no concept of being a part of something bigger or broken apart from that, no sense of being a separate thing, no self.  Only a patient yielding to impermanence.  How can we imagine such a thing?

Wanderlusting

Discovery

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     Spring is here.  Last day of skiing–a season that started with a fizzle (lack of snow), ended with a drizzle (a downpour that washed out what little enthusiasm anyone had left for hitting the slopes).  The trees are budding out and the buttercups are blooming in the backwoods.

The irruption of snowy owls, who showed up last January in Polson for the first time in living memory, have headed back up to the Arctic.  They caused quite a sensation while they were here though, with people carrying 3 foot camera lenses and giant spotting scopes invading the hilltop subdivision where the owls had taken up residence.  Organized tours of bird enthusiasts came from as far away as Texas to gawk at the beautiful white owls sitting on asphalt shingled roofs.

I was one of the pilgrims who went to see the owls–and take the requisite pictures with my inadequate lens.  But, unlike so many other birdwatchers, I came away feeling a little deflated.  I have a friend who has spent years hiking and exploring in Alaska, always in hopes of seeing a snowy owl in the wild, with no success.  And then he had to do nothing more than drive an hour north to Flathead Lake, look for the knot of cars and people on the water tower hill, and there they were.  He didn’t even have to get out of his car.

I can understand my friend’s disappointment.  I felt it too, though I hadn’t hiked hundreds of miles to see a snowy owl.  Something was missing and it wasn’t just the incongruity of seeing those wild birds roosting near the white vent pipes in the subdivision.  It had something to do with the thrill of discovery.  The sense of wonder is muted when you don’t find something on your own, whether it’s a “wildlife viewing opportunity” like this or on a guided tour, nature show or in a zoo.  It becomes somehow a second hand experience.

Discovering a bird in the wild, or maybe a snow leopard in the Himalayas as in Peter Mathiason’s book The Snow Leopard, is not about checking it off your life list or getting the picture.  It’s about what you discover in yourself in the process.  It’s about the search, and the feeling of awe when you make that discovery.  To me, it’s like the difference between a flash of insight and connection when you’re writing and sitting down with a book, reading someone else’s wisdom.

Maybe that’s the reason a week later when visiting Yellowstone,  I didn’t mind not making it out to the Lamar Valley to see the wolves.  Mammoth was abuzz with the pack of wolves who were feeding on a bison carcass near the road and people were showing off their pictures.  But I was afraid the experience would be like the snowy owls.  Instead, I contented myself with savoring the sight of a merganser  swallowing a giant (5″) silver fish whole.  No one’s totem animal I know, but the sighting was mine and a thrill.

P.S.  There was an article today in the Missoulian (Thursday, April 19) that said there are now a couple of different apps for your phone that will report wildlife sightings in Yellowstone.  The only saving grace for such insanity is that cell phone coverage is spotty in Yellowstone.