When I was younger, I was sure I’d been born into the wrong century. Everything I read about America in the 1800s made me wish I’d lived along that expanding Western frontier where people lived adventurous lives. My life seemed stale and predictable in comparison, with all the excitement sapped out of the West, buried […]
Steven Albert
Posted inSeptember 3, 2007: A Climate Change Solution?
The good and bad of peak-bagging
“Above this memorable spot, the face of the mountain is … a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles of detached boulders that seem to have been gotten ready to be launched below. But the strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found […]
Posted inWotr
Peak bagging and how to avoid it
“I could not rest until the topmost stone was beneath my feet,” said John Muir. That’s right, nature-loving boys and girls: John Muir was a peak bagger. Long celebrated for his founding of the modern environmental movement and his exuberant love for the small wonders of nature — “not a sparrow falls to the ground […]
Posted inWotr
Subdivision and me
As we signed the papers, I knew I was a hypocrite. But every time we watched the setting sun make the red and beige sandstone glow from within, every time my dog lit out after a jackrabbit it was never going to catch, and every time I found a new potsherd in an unexpected place, […]