Besting the Blue Plateau
Plus, Get Paid to Hike, Don't Feed the Bears, the new Largest Dark Sky Sanctuary, and more
howdy
If you’ve been reading this newsletter or following me on Modern Hiker socials for a while, you know that I’ve had a somewhat fraught relationship with the sport of alpine skiing. Many years ago, I was sort of forced into learning how to ski quickly for Columbia Sportswear’s Omniten program (which I still consider one of the best-run ‘sponsorship experiences’ an outdoor company has ever done and had some of my genuinely favorite people on the planet involved). After that crash course, years of living in Southern California had limited my exposure to downhill.
But I married into a family of skiers, and a family of skiers who had a cabin close to Oregon’s Mount Hood and its several ski areas, so I wanted to put in some effort to learn (slash I was strongly encouraged to take up a mountain winter sport). The effort has not always been easy, for me or my husband. But I put a beat-up pair of secondhand skis to good use until last year, when I really hit a plateau.
We all go through these areas with new skills—maybe we can get the basics of something relatively quickly (this was not me) but we get frustrated that we can’t get into the advanced stuff.
Or maybe you’re like me, where you make slow but steady progress with a lot of swearing and yelling, and then you just sort of hit a wall and throw up your hands and ask yourself why the heck you’re doing this in the first place and isn’t it supposed to be fun or something?
Well, a few weeks ago, I realized I’d be heading to Bend’s Mount Bachelor for their Winter Pride celebration. Bachelor has a lot more ski runs than Mount Hood does, and those runs tend to be a bit higher on the difficulty scale. They do have some easy runs there but I kind of felt like I’d already done them and I’d be bored if I just stuck to those. So, after a nice powder dump a few days prior, my sister and I went to Timberline Resort, and I resolved to ski only on the medium-difficulty blue runs the entire day. No carefully planning out routes ahead of time. No stopping at the precipice of steep downgrades to scout out the best way down. Just ski, look for blue routes, and keep going. No thinking required!
And you know what? After a nip of My Little Ski-Helper (mezcal), it worked! The runs at Timberline are known to be on the easier end, but they gave me the confidence I needed to tackle the tougher stuff at Bachelor a few days later, where I not only had an absolute blast getting to explore new parts of the mountain and feeling like I made some progress in my skiing ability, but also felt like I’d truly earned the enormous piles of fried food I ate afterward, too.
So … I guess I need to budget for some new skis next season, right?
Your Parks
Your Places
Get Paid to Hike
I mean, we’re all kind of hoping for that in one way or another, right? Well, two lucky folks may get the chance to hike a few brand new trails that connect to the Pacific Crest Trail, then continue on the PCT all the way to Canada—and collect a cool $5k each. Hikers will start in Carson City, Nevada on the Capitol to Tahoe Trail, then to the Tahoe Rim Trail, and from there on to the PCT. All you have to do is share your story along the way!
The application window closes on May 31, 2024, and according to a story in Backpacker, they’ve only received a few dozen applications so far. Good luck!
Get Your National Trails Day Events Together
National Trails Day is an annual event organized by the American Hiking Society, where people get outside to their favorite spots and lend a few helping hands, horsepower, elbow grease, and other idioms for volunteer physical assistance. This year, National Trails Day is June 1st, and if you want to get people to show up, get your event organized and get it listed on the official National Trails Day website. Register your event here and get some promotional tools to help make sure you have a great day outside!
Meet me at the Outback
Want to grab that telescope and meet me at the Outback? No, we’re not getting a close look at a Bloomin’ Onion, we’re heading to the Oregon Outback—the huge southeastern swath of the state that was just named the world’s largest Dark Sky Sanctuary. The 2.5 million-acre area was officially named the Oregon Outback International Dark Sky Sanctuary, and there are plans to expand it to a size of over 11 million acres.
The area is sparsely populated and east of the Cascade Range, which means the skies are usually clear of clouds and moisture and terrific for stargazing—the Outback is considered the largest contiguous pristine dark sky zone in the Lower 48.
Wildlife Crossing
Wildlife and the Outdoors
When Mountain Lions are Neighbors
A new edition of my good friend and Walking Inspiration Beth Pratt’s book When Mountain Lions are Neighbors came out this month, featuring an all-new preface and full color photos. The book uses the story of P-22, the mountain lion who lived in L.A.’s Griffith Park for almost his entire life, as a jumping off point to show the different ways wildlife and humans can co-exist in urban settings. And more importantly, how these unlikely stories of survival can inspire real change on the human side of the equation. Pick it up directly from SaveLACougars or from your favorite local bookstore!
Did Rodenticide Take Out New York’s Favorite Owl?
Speaking of P-22, the mountain lion went through several fights with mange, which were made much worse by the fact that rodenticide was detected at high levels in his body. People put out rat traps to control rodent populations, but they often don’t realize the slow-working poison in those traps will travel all the way up the food chain, affecting many other animals along the way. In New York City, the eagle owl named Flaco that escaped from the Central Park Zoo and lived free for over a year, died recently. A necropsy found “potentially lethal amounts of rodenticide” in his system.
I understand we don’t want rats living nearby our homes and restaurants and things, but I do really wish we could find a better way of dealing with them than releasing poisons that indiscriminately damage entire ecosystems, you know? And like, hey, maybe New York can figure out a better way of dealing with its trash than just leaving it all over the sidewalks in enormous piles?
Please Don’t Feed Bears
Most of you probably know by now that you’re not really encouraged to feed wildlife, because you’ve, you know, listened to a ranger talk or read a book or noticed the hundreds of signs and warnings to NOT do that sort of thing. But the word still needs to get out, apparently, as this Los Angeles Times story from Kern County’s Pine Mountain Club demonstrates. The increasingly popular village is being overrun by black bears as habitat loss and climate change push more of the big guys into contact with humans. Of course, it doesn’t help that some residents give the bears cutsey names and actively feed them.
In related news, Grizzly Man is a documentary that came out in 2005.
One More Thing
Oh yeah, before I go …
As an Elder Millennial, I have a bit of a fascination with the progression of the technology behind the internet and also how we as people use that technology. If you’ve been around on the web for a while like me, you have probably noticed that the overall experience of being online has kind of been on a steady downward trend in most metrics. Usually this gets attributed to social media, but I enjoyed this essay in The Atlanticthat takes a more holistic look at what the web experience used to be like. It makes an interesting argument that by making the web better, we accidentally made it worse. And, you know, maybe having to wait for websites and compete with phone lines for web time was a good way of limiting our time on the internet itself.
Anyway, turn off the internet and go have fun outside.
Until next time,
Happy Trails.
P.S.
I am on the road for work next week and then heading to Vancouver, British Columbia for the first time to do a bit of exploring. Because this month has been a little jam-packed, I’m going to pro-rate a week of access / billing for all the paid subscribers after this post opens up to the free subscribers. Thanks for understanding!
I first learned to ski when I was about 13, on a trip with another family who were all avid skiiers. I took a single one hour lesson at Mammoth (luckily it was a solo lesson, as there were no other newcomers in that age range), and then immediately after they took me on a blue diamond at the top of the mountain. I went down those moguls mostly on my butt. But by the end of the day I was able to handle it! They gave me no choice but to keep up, and I think that's a good way to approach it. I think it helped that I was fairly young and already an avid surfer and skateboarder.