I’ve hopped the Divide and traveled south of home, landing in Gunnison for a few weeks of concentrated writing, trading five consecutive weeks of winter storm warnings for a rolling sage brush chaparral. From the bench where I write, I can see across the valley through floor to ceiling windows to watch cars speeding toward Mt. Carbon and Crested Butte. The highway groans with restless hearts, I think, as I imagine people in their private…
If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to prepare for and survive disaster. I’ve spent over twenty years living at elevations above 8000 feet in places threatened by fire and flood and I’ve had a bit of practice making evacuation’s hard choices: what to take and what to leave behind. During the 2003 Overland Mountain Fire—then the largest fire in Boulder County history–I loaded a bed and food for my dog,…
He who binds himself to a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise. —-William Blake I’ve been pining. Every day, I wake and think of some distant thing to lash myself too: PR events related to the paperback release of Rough Beauty (radio and print interviews, new website and blog, readings); an end of summer…
For this post, I excerpt the prologue of my memoir, Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living, a Colorado Book Award Finalist, out in paperback on June 4th. The passage details the cabin fire that claimed all my possessions and most of my writing two months before I turned 40 in the Spring of 2004. The challenges of high altitude spring have been much on my mind as my corner of the Rockies has expierenced…
On the coldest morning of the season, when the day dawns just above zero and the expected high is only 5 degrees; on the same day when the windchill will plunge to the minus double digits, and I’ll drive home through pockets of swirling snow so thick, the road disappears, River begins to blow out his coat. It began as a net of fur coating my hand whenever I pulled on his ears and ruffled…