text:
This story was produced in partnership with KVNF Radio in Paonia, Colorado.
Each year, thousands of tourists flock to Crested Butte, a mountain resort town located along Colorado's Western Slope. This July saw more people recreating in and around town than ever. But Crested Butte is small. So small there aren't enough houses for the town's low-wage workers to rent. And short-term vacation rentals are gobbling up whatever housing is available, forcing workers out.
Melanie Rees used to have neighbors. Now, signs advertising vacation rentals mar the homes in Crested Butte's Meridian Lake subdivision. More and more, housing units are commercial lodging, not homes, she says.
"In all of these towns we have what is commonly being called now a rental crisis," she says. "The number of jobs available is pages long in our newspaper and we may have three or four for rent."
Crested Butte isn't the only Western town facing a housing crunch. Rees works as a contract housing consultant for the Colorado Association of Ski Towns. She has seen similar situations across the Rockies. When the recession ended, second home owners returned with en masse. They bought up property to rent out on sites like VRBO and AirBnB. This left the booming local workforce short on places to live.This summer, many workers took shelter in the town's surrounding campgrounds. Oh Be Joyful and Musicians' Camp were some of the hardest hit in the Slate River Drainage. Tent cities popped up. Rees says this kind of condensed camping has negative impacts not only on employees' performance, but also on the environment. "We don't have the systems in place for the outhouses and places for people to get clean so that will affect our water quality," she says.
That means other organizations have been forced to step up to address the problem.
Out at Musicians Camp, Zach Vaughter with the Coal Creek Watershed Coalition checks on the group's portable toilet. Generally, he says, the water quality in the Upper Slate is good. But recent water data has shown hits for e. coli and fecal coliform. That led the coalition to raise funds for a single port-a-potty. So far, they've collected more than 880 gallons of human waste—about 1,200 individual uses.
"As soon as that road melts out in the spring, there are people back here camping that are seasonal workers," Vaughter says.
For the time being, Vaughter says camping workers is more of a social issue than an environmental one. But the camping workers aren't only crowding out tourists: They're crowding out nearby towns, including a federal research facility.
Eight miles north of Crested Butte lies the town of Gothic. In the late 1800s, the town boomed with silver. Now, it's home to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Every summer, more than 150 national scientists descend on the town to study things like how marmots react to climate change. But this year, destructive visitors overran the area, says the field station's director, Ian Billick. "We have locations directly adjacent to us here at the research facility where people have cut vegetation down, there's human feces," he explains. "We've had scientists remove research plots because of the amount of human waste."
Even on an early fall morning, there's a steady stream of leaf peeping traffic from Gothic down to Crested Butte. And town employees are busy installing "No trespassing" signs along the roadway.
With the winter ski season fast approaching, residents aren't sure what to expect. After all it's too cold to camp. And the city's affordable housing projects won't be done until next year. Rees expects businesses will shorten their hours of operation, unable to find staff. And whatever employees they do have will be overworked. Maybe next year, she says, will be better.
This story was produced in collaboration with KVNF. Gloria Dickie is an editorial intern at High Country News.
Follow @GloriaDickie
So a lot of people have been asking about the fires. As a contractor, I was on the Soap fire in Idaho for a short while, and then got reassigned to the North Star fire in north-central Washington, a couple hours west of Spokane. That's where I am now.
The North Star is located on the Colville Indian Reservation. It's what is called a consolidated reservation and the tribes are known collectively as the Colville Consolidated Confederated Tribes. The only one that I'm familiar with is the Nez Perce. This was home to Chief Joseph.
Like everybody else on fire, I do this 90 percent for the money, 10 percent for the adventure, and zero for altruism. At 112 hours per week, it's a lot of money, no matter your hourly rate. I go out as the guy responsible for gathering EMTs, paramedics and supplies; assigning them to crews that are actually fighting the fire; and establishing and running a base camp clinic. Occasionally I go out with crews on the fire and stomp around, see flames, and throw dirt around. I enjoy that. But if I have multiple crews working in different directions, then I have to sit in one central location so I can be deployed to whoever needs help.
I guess these fires are making the news because I'm getting lots of queries and lots of reminders to "Be safe." I'm safe. I'm mostly in base camp. We're kind of expecting the fire to come right through camp, but we are on a huge dirt patch with a cinder block community center building. The media is probably making it a lot more exciting and dangerous than it is. A couple days ago when I was with a crew, I did get kind of concerned. We were surrounded by fire — several miles away — but there was a strong wind blowing it directly toward us. The sky looked like Armageddon. I thought that it might blow up. Literally. I expressed my concern several times, as did a few others, and to their credit, we stayed in a safe area until we really knew what was going on with the weather and the fire. Disengaging is always an option. The fire never needs to get extinguished. Refusing an assignment over concerns of safety is not only allowed, but encouraged at every morning briefing. There's even a protocol for it. Anyway, I feel that I am very safe and I'm impressed with management. So far, nine days or so into this fire, not one structure has been lost and we haven't had one injury. On this fire at least. That's a damned good record.
This is a really dangerous fire because of the terrain and the bone-dry fuel in abundance. In this case they are digging, bulldozing, and burning lines far from the flames so when the fire gets to the fireline, hopefully the lines will hold and the fire will just stop. They've spent a ton of time digging and bulldozing a line around every home that is out there in the woods. Just hot, hard, grimy, unglamorous work. Doesn't make for good media, especially since no homes have been lost. And if we do lose some homes, given that they are not very photogenic starter castles, I doubt if North Star will make the news.
My house got caught in a fire in Old Snowmass, Colorado, on my birthday in 2003. But to be honest, I typically don't really care if a forest burns down or if some soulless subdivision burns up. If somebody builds themselves a cabin in the woods and it goes up...oh well. I was on a fire in Idaho in 2012, and some senator or congressman or something was trying hard to push the fire bosses to work harder to save his cabin. The Halstead was a super dangerous fire — lots of beetle kill in extremely rough terrain, and mostly firefighters were digging line a long way from the actual flames so as to not kill any firefighters. But this guy seemed to feel that risking lives to save his cabin was warranted. He literally cared more about his cabin than he cared about lives. Anyway, the fire bosses didn't respond to his request. I never followed up to see if his cabin got toasted.
But I have to say, this fire is different for me. Part of it is the three firefighters that got killed in the next fire over, the Twisp Fire. That kind of put things in perspective. How unnecessary is that? It's just trees and houses. The media is reporting that the winds changed unexpectedly. Winds always change on a fire. How could a firefighter not expect that? But more than that it's the people here. By appearances, this is an impoverished area. But these folks have been here for generations, and this is their homeland. Their homes are single- and double-wides; there are HUD homes, junk cars everywhere and family cemeteries out back. They live in the same house that they used to visit their grandparents in. They make money from logging their forest. They eat from hunting. Their double-wides probably have more meaning to them than many of the suburban homes that burned up in Colorado Springs did to their owners.
But in addition, these are hands-down the nicest people I have ever met. They keep thanking those of us in base camp and God-blessing us as though we're the ones actually saving their homes. Some are local Natives. Some are whites from the much better-appointed town of Coulee Dam, 15 miles back down the road. It's not uncommon on a fire to have locals drop off cookies and socks and a few other things that, honestly, we never need. But this has been over the top. They've netted wild salmon out of the Columbia, cooked it up, and served it to us. They've made many pounds of plain fry bread and fry bread stuffed with meat. They drove six hours to Spokane and back to buy pounds and pounds of lemons, and are out front as I write this, making and serving lemonade. They have coffee ready to go when I get in at 5:30 a.m. They have hundreds of brand-new undershirts, underpants, towels, wash clothes, more socks, homemade cookies of every kind you can think of, hot spaghetti and meatballs, fresh fruit, watermelon from their gardens, bottles of water, more socks, handkerchiefs, tampons, skin cream, chapstick, even tents. Hell, I don't even know what else. Honestly, we don't need any of this stuff.
But they did bring us some stuff the firefighters actually need. I came in this morning and wondered out loud who made the coffee so early and this voice answered, "I did." Glo introduced herself as one of the volunteers from Coulee Dam. She asked if there was anything I needed, as she had collected over $2,000 in donated money and had more coming in today. So yeah, I need a shit load, but she'd have to go all the way to Moses Lake or Spokane to get it. She said, "No problem. Make me a list." So I made her a list. A long and expensive one. This morning. This afternoon, she and several other volunteers showed up with almost everything I asked for, in quantities larger then I asked. Turns out I'm not the only fire guy trying to get stuff and she told me that the Walmarts and Walgreens had been cleaned out of several supplies that I really wanted. But no problem. They had gone online to Amazon and were having the missing items delivered tomorrow. Tomorrow! I love it! Citizens getting done what the government can't.
There's no relief at all from the smoke. To get here, I drove in smoke, sometimes quite thick, for 12 hours or so. I haven't had many respiratory issues yet with firefighters or base campers, but I'm anticipating them and I'm stocked up on Albuterol inhalers. And as always, I'm maintaining my certification as a world-class blister guy.
It's been an extraordinarily light fire year nationwide, but crazy in Alaska early on and lately in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. It probably sounds like the entire Northwest is in flames, but it isn't. There's a lot of forest up here. The fire season is something like 75 days longer than it was 20 years ago. Something like that anyway. This fire and the fire just west of us — the Tunk Block — may merge within the next day or two.
Anyway, that's the North Star from my perspective. Probably not as exciting as what is displayed in the media. If you're interested in following fires, how much they've grown, how much has been spent, what's going on in the rest of the country, here are the two definitive sites: National Interagency Coordination Center and InciWeb.
August 24 update:
Now we are the No. 1 priority fire. That means we are finally getting resources. We are getting lots of Army and Air Force medics that are not trained to actually be on a fire. We have a couple huge military trucks that do nothing at all except haul around these 100-gallons tanks of potable water. We have absolutely zero need for potable water. Every fire, including this one, has bazillions of pallets of bottled water and Gatorade.
Now there are also federal staffers in place who can go out and buy me the stuff I need to run a medical unit. Except these awesome civilians already bought me enough supplies for about 10 years. We also now have qualified civilian firefighters and aircraft. So life is good. We do now have boots on the ground, as they say. I think we're going to get out of this one without burning down a single home. That would be good.
Wayne Hare is a member of the High Country News board of directors. He lives in Grand Junction, Colorado, and is a part-time contract firefighter.]]>
$12 BILLION: Amount in coal royalties and revenues generated on federal lands over the past decade and split with states
$850 MILLION: Amount taxpayers lost from 2008-2012, according to a new report, because federal royalty rates are below market value
At the first of five public sessions to discuss the future of the federal coal program, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and other officials got an earful — mostly from its critics. A recent report found that current royalty rates shorted taxpayers, and many of the speakers called for higher rates. Several said the royalty rates should reflect the climate impacts of coal, which could make it too expensive to extract. Meanwhile, a bill introduced in the Senate could close loopholes that keep royalty rates low for companies. Four more listening sessions will take place, in Western cities from New Mexico to Montana.
-Elizabeth Shogren
In mid-July, an El Niño-fueled flash flood ripped down Tex Wash near Desert Center, California, wrecking a bridge and closing a section of I-10, the major artery linking Phoenix with Los Angeles. The closed stretch of road normally sees 25,000 or more cars per day, all of which were
shuttled onto a five-hour detour. The trucking industry was hit hard, as were the freeway towns that have come to rely on passing travelers. Yet, surprisingly, the event didn't spur calls for more transportation options linking Western cities, such as rail lines or even new highways.
-Jonathan Thompson
3%: Amount over a century by which carbon storage capacity could be reduced in Southwestern forests due to drought. "Three percent is not very much if it's five trees. It means something different if it's thousands of trees," says one forest ecologist.
-Cally Carswell
Are mountain lions becoming more habituated to humans? Or are they as aloof as ever? Colorado researchers are tracking the big cats to see how they're adapting as cities encroach further into their habitat. See the latest in the Wild Science video series, Mountain Lions on Colorado's Front Range.
-Dakin Henderson
"At night, they've come into town and maybe made a kill ... killed a raccoon or deer or something. They feed on it, then they slip back out to the open space."—Mat Alldredge, Colorado Parks and Wildlife researcher
The 2015 fire season hasn't broken any all-time records – yet
This year's fire season has been an odd one: The Southwest has burned less than the Pacific Northwest, California and Alaska, and more than 82 percent of the total acreage burned has been in Alaska. The 2015 fire season started off with a bang. As of the first week in August, 40 fires over 100 acres in size were burning in Western states. But whether this year sets any national wildfire records will depend on how fires unfold this fall.
-Gloria Dickie
You say
Dave Decker: "CalFire has been pretty good at 'managing' fires in my neck of the woods, so far this year."
Ann Snyder: "Southern Oregon is on fire again this year in forests that haven't burned often enough, nor been logged recently, so the fires are burning hotter, and with more people living out there, there are more people in danger."
Helen Nowlin:"Alaska's tundra is drying out, and quick!"]]>
A proposal released by the Joint Base Lewis-McChord, located about 250 miles southwest, outlines a permit application for a mountain helicopter training area in the Methow Valley. The off-base training area would be available for use day and night, 365 days a year and allow for up to 75 landings per month at seven proposed helicopter landing zones. Such training, the proposal reads, would make pilots proficient at things like pinnacle and ridgeline operations and climb-out maneuvers, at reduced costs, given shorter flight time from the base compared to training facilities in Colorado. But Methow Valley residents, like Super, say such training would have dire consequences for those who live and play in the valley.
"Most of our clients come from the city," Super says. "I can just imagine how disappointed they'd be if they got (to the backcountry), bed down for the night and all of a sudden helicopters touch down. You might as well camp next to Harborview hospital in Seattle."
In the scoping document, the base justifies the landing zones—which don't include any new infrastructure—as "vital" to national defense. "This training is critical to save the lives of aviators and the Soldiers they transport," the document reads. Combat operations in the mountains of Afghanistan led the US armed forces to prioritize the development of standardized high altitude training.
But the Methow's residents aren't convinced such training operations outweigh the safety and peace of the valley. After all, the military has been conducting similar training at the High-Altitude Army National Guard Aviation Training Site in Gypsum, Colorado, since the 1980s. Though the site is susceptible to scheduling conflicts and has higher associated travel costs, residents believe it's still more feasible.
One of the proposed landing sites is located within the borders of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, violating the 1964 Wilderness Act, which prohibits motor vehicles, including the landing of aircraft. Portions of Henry M. Jackson, Glacier Peak and Lake Chelan-Sawtooth Wilderness also appear to be included within the training area, according to an interagency letter of response. As if that weren't enough, opponents say, the majority of the seven sites are located either on top of or near hiking trails and campgrounds, including one less than two miles from the Pacific Crest Trail.
Shoni Pilip-Florea, a spokeswoman for the Forest Service's Pacific Northwest region, says the agency has since revised their permit application to exclude the landing zone in Alpine Lakes Wilderness.
But wilderness and recreation organizations also raised other concerns: over the potential impacts on wildlife (the mountain training area is located within the North Cascades Grizzly Bear Recovery Area); the risk of triggering avalanches; and the possibility of wildfire ignition from crashes. In the last five years, crashes have occurred at both Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, and in Colorado.
"It's rather unprecedented in terms of scale," says Ben Greuel, Washington state program director for The Wilderness Society. Although a proposal for a new electronic warfare range is currently being considered on the Olympic Peninsula, it's unheard of, he says, to have such a high number of military landings on public lands.
According to the base, the proposed action would mitigate for adverse effects to the natural environment, through rehabilitation and restoration projects, and by replacing or substituting resources.
While some have questioned the need for such expansion given reduced military action abroad, Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, offers a simple explanation: With the military downsizing and no longer fighting wars, bases are going to have to prove their worth in other ways.
"One of the best ways to compete is to say, 'Look at all the amenities we have — like high elevation helicopter training,' " Stahl says. "That way, when the budgets happen, they're not cut."
In order to get approval for such a project, the base, under the Department of the Army, will first need to complete an environmental assessment, by the end of the year. The base will then apply to the Forest Service for a special use permit. It's unclear how that will play out.
Although a master agreement between the Department of Defense and the Department of Agriculture allows for military use of national forest land, provided there are no suitable alternatives and an environmental analysis is conducted, according to Stahl, there is no official legislation authorizing such use. The only precedent for such a thing was set during World War II, when training was established at Camp Hale in White River National Forest in Colorado to prepare soldiers for the Italian Alps during a time of crisis.
And while there are some military training areas on national forest land in the United States, most were authorized under specific legislation by Congress — not by a general military use permit from the Forest Service. Still, Stahl fears it won't take much for the mountain training area to be approved. "I don't think anything is bringing this to a halt quickly, short of public outcry."
Gloria Dickie is an editorial intern at High Country News.
Follow @GloriaDickie]]>
Anders and her fellow crewmembers began to pull the hoses off their engine, certain that downvalley, their own town was safe. Pateros is bordered on the south by Lake Pateros, a reservoir on the Columbia River, and on the north by a high mesa topped with a 125-acre apple orchard belonging to the Gebbers family, Okanogan County's largest private landowner. For three decades, the Gebbers orchard had served as an impenetrable firebreak for Pateros. But that evening, the weather was unusually dry, hot and windy, and the Carlton Complex, which had started three days earlier as four separate fires, was moving with terrifying speed, covering more than an acre every four seconds.
As the Pateros firefighters joined the battle, their department chief, Jerry Moore, who was vacationing in Alaska, got a call from his son Eric in Pateros.
The fire, Eric said, had just jumped the orchard.
Okanogan County is used to wildfire. The nation's first smokejumpers plummeted into its forests in 1939, and in recent years residents have contended with some of the state's largest and most damaging burns: The 2006 Tripod and Tatoosh complexes, the 2003 Fawn Peak Complex, and the 2001 Thirtymile Fire, which killed four firefighters. But not even Okanogan County was prepared for the Carlton Complex.
In Pateros, there had been no evacuation orders, no emergency alerts. From Alaska, Jerry Moore called his assistant chief, who was working alongside Anders, but cell service was spotty and Moore could not get through. Moore eventually reached his captain, who was able to alert the assistant chief by radio: Pateros and its 650 residents were in danger.
When the volunteers heard the news, they piled into their rigs and barreled, sirens wailing and lights flashing, down the narrow, twisting road toward Pateros. They covered the distance in just 12 minutes, but by the time they reached town, flames were spilling toward the houses at the base of the mesa. Though the sun was still up, it was as dark as night.
The firefighters began canvassing the town, using their engines' loudspeakers to call on their neighbors to evacuate. George Brady, a local fur buyer and trapper and the town's mayor pro tem, was carrying a pile of 19th-century fur-company records to his truck when the Pateros engine roared by his house. He remembers hearing a voice crackle through the speakers: "Drop that shit and get out of here!" He did.
The Carlton Complex destroyed 131 homes within the Pateros school district. The high school alone sustained nearly $2 million in damages. When the sun rose on Friday, July 18, the town's power was down, the water supply was drained, and the ground was still warm underfoot. Most residents had fled to hotels, campgrounds, and the homes of friends and relatives. City Administrator Jord Wilson, who grew up in Pateros and now lives in nearby Brewster, crammed dozens of people into his and his neighbor's houses. ("They took turns cooking breakfast," he remembers.) Carlene Anders, like many of the volunteers, was unable to reach some of her own family members during the worst of the fire. She knew that her teenage daughter, also a volunteer firefighter, was helping evacuate the town, but not until 10:30 on Thursday night did she learn that her husband, son and elderly mother were safe. Her mother's home — a family homestead that Anders helped build — had burned to the ground.
The Carlton Complex would burn for another 38 days, eventually covering a record-breaking 256,108 acres — 400 square miles of public and private land. It destroyed 256 homes and 55 cabins. Its heat and speed gave it a kind of whimsical cruelty: Some houses were reduced to blackened chimneys, while those next door were left untouched. That no one suffocated or burned to death in the fire was, in the months afterward, reflexively described as miraculous. (Robert Koczewski, a retired state trooper, died of a heart attack while defending his Methow Valley home; John Daniel "Danny" Gebbers, the 84-year-old patriarch of the orchard family, never fully recovered from a concussion he suffered while fighting the fire on his property, and died in October.)
The fire burned more than a thousand miles of public and private fencing, leaving orchards vulnerable to browsing deer. It killed 900 head of cattle. It cut short the summer tourist season in the county's mountainous northern end, forcing restaurants and shops to lay off staff or even shut their doors. It left the landscape littered with tons of burned cars, mattress springs, and other debris. It closed highways and interrupted cell and Internet service for weeks; during the height of the fire, reporters for the Methow Valley News filed handwritten stories while bathing in the river and cooking on camp stoves. It exposed economic divides usually obscured by topography and distance. Sandy Moody, who owns a bed and breakfast in the small town of Twisp and volunteered at the local emergency shelter, remembers a woman arriving in tears: Her family had just saved up enough money to fill their freezer with meat, and during the week-long power outage, everything spoiled.
State records obtained by the Methow Valley News show that firefighters and equipment were stretched extremely thin during the early days of the fire, and many county residents believe more could have been done to control the fire and protect homes. Alex Thomason, a local lawyer, is preparing to file an $80 million suit against the state Department of Natural Resources on behalf of 205 residents, charging that the department failed in its responsibility to contain the fires on its land. (The department, which led the early response to the fire, has defended its actions, pointing to the extreme weather conditions.)
It's not clear if more initial resources could have reduced the fire's costs. What is clear is that the Carlton Complex is an especially dramatic example of a disturbing pattern: Over the last two decades, wildfires in the continental U.S. have gotten larger, more damaging to homes and property, and more expensive to fight. That's partly because a century of fire suppression has created thick stands of trees and shrubs, and partly because more people have moved into fire-prone areas along the urban-wildland interface. But it's also because the climate is changing. As extreme heat and drought become more familiar in the West, fires are igniting more frequently and spreading more quickly. Fuel treatments — the deliberate burning and large-scale thinning of vegetation in order to slow fire spread — are becoming less effective in some places.
"You can classify fire systems into two types, fuel-limited and climate-limited," says Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist of the nonprofit Geos Institute. "The further we get into climate change, the more the system is going to tip toward climate- rather than fuel-driven fires, and the more the climate is going to overwhelm what we can do to minimize fire spread with fuel reduction."
In Okanogan County last July, an extremely dry spring and summer, combined with above-normal temperatures, had left the forests and shrublands parched. High winds further stressed a thirsty landscape. On Monday, July 14, when more than 2,400 lightning strikes hit northeastern Washington during a 12-hour period, the conditions on the ground were such that any spark or ember was all but guaranteed to ignite.
And the Carlton Complex didn't stay in the woods. Only about a quarter of the area burned was forested. Half was shrubland, where the effects of fuel treatments are short-lived; the rest was grassland, farmland, or sparsely vegetated. Prescribed burning and large-scale thinning can still help contain fires and reduce their intensity, and researchers are currently studying the effects of previous fuel treatments within the forested area burned by the Carlton Complex. But fuel treatments were never designed to insulate humans from wildfire, and they're even less likely to do so now.
In light of such changes, many Western fire researchers are urging us to treat wildfires more like we treat floods and earthquakes: not as adversaries that can be mastered, but as inevitabilities for which we need to be far better prepared.
Susan Prichard, a University of Washington forest ecologist who lives in the northern end of the Methow, spoke to her son's sixth-grade campout in September, shortly after the Carlton Complex was finally contained. "One boy said, 'So that was bad, but we're done with fires now, right?' I've spent my career trying to get people to understand the importance of fire, to understand its role in the ecosystem, but I got choked up when I had to say, 'No. No, we're not done with fires.' "
No one in Okanogan County expected catastrophe. Pateros' disaster plan was a generic guide distributed by the county, and the fire department lacked the detailed local maps they needed to check on remote residences. Mayor Libby Harrison, who had been elected only six months earlier and had little governing experience, resigned to help her own family recover from its losses; George Brady, mayor pro tem, whose family, home, and collection of historic trapping records escaped the flames, was sworn in to finish her term.
During those first surreal hours and days, the firefighters ate little and rested less, trying to help fire victims while still answering panicked calls about smoldering stumps and spot fires. The city council chambers were overwhelmed with donated goods and offers of help. Mayor Brady called on Team Rubicon — a disaster-relief organization founded and staffed by military veterans — which sent a 70-member incident command team and a mobile computer lab. For the next 17 days, the Rubicon crew led cleanup efforts and collected the documentation needed for federal emergency aid. "We told them we were going to flatten their trailer tires to get them to stay longer," Brady jokes.
Okanogan County, which is defined on the south by the Columbia River and on the north by the Canadian border, was one of the last places in Washington reached by white settlers. Even now, in good weather, the twisting drive to Seattle over the North Cascades takes three and a half hours; in bad weather, it is impossible. The county's 40,000 residents live in a handful of tiny towns, each separated from the others by long, narrow highway miles and a distinct sense of self. To many of those who move here from busier places, the isolation — even the insularity — is part of the romance, just like the salmon streams and snowbound winters and gentle meadows of blooming balsamroot. But the fire was a sprawling, complicated, and enduring disaster, and it required a countywide response. For a set of towns that knew each other as high school sports rivals, that wasn't always easy.
Anders was appointed to the Pateros town council after Brady's promotion to mayor, and she met daily — sometimes twice daily — at the darkened town hall with other local leaders. The county's lack of coordination was complicated by exhaustion, and by new fears: On Aug. 1, the Rising Eagle Road Fire, near Twisp, destroyed eight homes and interrupted a visit by Gov. Jay Inslee, who had flown in to see the aftermath of the Carlton Complex. Twenty-four hours later, a major windstorm caused more power outages. On Aug. 21, when heavy rains hit bare hillsides on the eastern side of the county, mudslides destroyed or damaged 15 more homes.
To manage its recovery, the county relied on an approach developed by a national coalition of volunteer disaster-assistance organizations: It established two local long-term recovery organizations and an overarching recovery group for the county as a whole. The groups included both local officials and ordinary citizens, many of whom volunteered their own time.
Anders, who stepped up to head the Brewster-Pateros Long-Term Recovery Organization, left her day-care business in the hands of her employees and volunteered for 72 days straight. "I just kept expecting someone else to take charge," she remembers. But she kept showing up, in part because she felt indebted to her town. In 2002, when her son was born more than four months premature, Pateros rallied around her family, helping Anders keep her business open and raising money to defray more than $3 million in medical bills. (Her son, who weighed less than two pounds at birth, is now a healthy 12-year-old.)
Though Anders had served on the board of the local ski school for many years, she had no political experience other than her brief time on the town council. Suddenly, she was coordinating hundreds of volunteers and a bewildering array of activities. "Just to get the acronyms right was huge," she says. In late September, a church in the nearby town of Wenatchee funded her position with the Brewster-Pateros recovery organization through the end of 2014. Soon afterward, the county received two large anonymous donations that funded staffing for both the local and county recovery groups, and Anders was hired to lead the countywide group.
Last November, when I visited Pateros, Anders seemed comfortable at the helm. Early one Saturday morning, she stood in a downtown parking lot dressed in jeans and a fire-department jacket, her hair in a practical ponytail and a smile on her broad face, welcoming a group of sleepy AmeriCorps volunteers from all over the country.
"Anyone here ever built fence?" Anders called out, grinning. Two tentative hands went up. "Whoo-ee," Anders teased. "I'm seeing a lot of faces going, 'OK, what am I in for?' " After dispensing encouragement, a few tips — "let the equipment do the work" — and thanks, she left the volunteers with Shane and Sarah Rinker, a young couple from the nearby town of Cashmere who had trained as "disaster chaplains" through their church.
"Look, this is a big, big deal," Shane Rinker said. "Some of the people who have been through this fire, they've lost heirlooms, they've lost their great-grandpa's shotgun, they've lost everything. They may say, 'I don't know why this happened.' "
He looked sternly at his charges. "You don't have any answers, so don't try to come up with them. Say, 'I don't know why this happened, but I'm so glad you're safe, and we're standing by you.' "
As Anders organized volunteers in Pateros, Mark Nelson shuffled through the ashes of the Carlton Complex, doing what he could to prepare his property for winter. Nelson, a 61-year-old carpenter with a bad back and an artistic bent, lives in the thinly populated hills above Brewster, Washington, about 10 miles northeast of Pateros. On this blustery Saturday, a group of volunteers from the Seventh-day Adventist Church was helping him insulate his carport with a layer of blueboard. The only remnant of his two-story wooden farmhouse was a pile of blackened boulders, part of its century-old foundation. "Last year, when I was thinking about selling the house, I asked a realtor if I should remodel it, and he said, 'Remodel it with a match,' " Nelson said, laughing. "I guess that's what happened."
Nelson is familiar with fire: Almost every summer, he watches smoke rise from forest fires to the north. Last summer, he kept an eye on the Carlton Complex, and on the night the fire hit Pateros, he reckoned that the flames were still about two days from his house. He had heard no calls to evacuate. Shortly after 7:30 p.m., he went to bed.
When he awoke three hours later, his room was filled with light. He looked out the window and saw flames pouring over the nearest ridgeline. He scrambled out his front door and into the driver's seat of his Plymouth Voyager, wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and carrying his ancient white housecat, Fluffy. A wave of intense heat, moving ahead of the fire, ignited the grass and shrubs around him. He started the car, knowing he had just seconds to escape.
Blinded by the thick smoke, he soon ran off the road and stalled out in a meadow. Barefoot, cat in arms, he hobbled back toward the road. There, from a small crest where the air was relatively clear, he saw that the flames had already overwhelmed his house. A young doe emerged from the smoke, followed by five quail and a pair of chukars. The animals stood nearby as Nelson crouched on the dirt, shielded his cat as best he could, and braced for the fire to pass over them all.
The speed of the Carlton Complex, combined with some fortunate geography, probably saved Nelson's life: He and Fluffy waited out the flames in a shallow dip in the road, where the air was relatively cool. (Days later, on the next rise, he would find a handful of pennies that had been blackened and twisted almost beyond recognition.) He escaped with second-degree burns on his arms and buttocks. Fluffy suffered only a wounded ego — though when they finally made it to the hospital, she got her own room.
More than three-quarters of the households affected by the Carlton Complex were uninsured or significantly underinsured; Nelson's home had not been eligible for fire insurance. He lives on disability payments. Since returning to his land late last summer, he had been camping in his carport, the only building still standing on his property. He salvaged the woodstove from his farmhouse, and bought a sink and a mattress with emergency funds from local churches and relief organizations. He bought dimensional lumber, and began to divide the carport into rooms. He added an old television and a single battered chair.
In November, the Plymouth Voyager that Nelson and Fluffy abandoned on the night of July 17 listed on a nearby hillside, its frame a black and empty shell. Still inside were Nelson's boots, which he'd grabbed when he left his house but hadn't had time to put on; the heat of the fire had melted their soles to the floor. The day before the fire hit, he had loaded the cargo space with paintings — his own, his mother's, his late wife's — but all that was left of them was a pile of ash and broken glass.
Like almost everyone else affected by the Carlton Complex, Nelson was still talking about his experience. As he walked toward help that night, he said, embers sparkled across both sides of the valley — red, yellow, even blue. The flickering carpet of light against the black sky was, he said, spectacularly beautiful. He'd like to paint it, he said, but he hadn't done so yet.
Instead, as the temperature dropped, he was spending a lot of time drinking beer and looking out the window of his carport. He had always loved the view from his property, but he had come to hate the black clouds of dust and ash that still rose on windy days, coating his shoes and Fluffy's paws, along with every surface of his makeshift apartment. "Sometimes," he said, "I'm really tempted to leave."
In her pickup truck, which functions as a mobile office, Carlene Anders keeps a copy of a graph showing the emotional phases of disaster. First come the initial highs of survival and community cohesion, followed by a jagged drop into disillusionment, followed by a slow, unsteady, and indefinitely long rise toward recovery and reconstruction. Along the way are "trigger events," such as anniversaries, that remind survivors of the disaster and its costs. When I returned to Okanogan County in May, 10 months after the fire began, the county was still climbing toward recovery. "We're not even close to getting people back to where they were," Anders said. "The volume of loss is just too great."
Directing the county-wide recovery organization still required about 80 hours a week. Anders' husband, Gene Dowers, a postal worker with his own heavy schedule, had long since taken over all the household chores. (In the spring, he had joined the volunteer fire department, in part to see more of his wife and daughter.) Anders and her colleagues had testified to the state Legislature and met with the governor in Olympia, and they had hosted visits from members of the state's congressional delegation and their staff. They had attended hundreds of meetings and put thousands of miles on their vehicles.
"I've gotten a whole college degree in the past nine months," she said. "I've had to come up 100 percent in politics, 100 percent in disaster recovery, 100 percent in just about everything you can think of."
Forty-two families who lost their homes in the fire — and who had been uninsured or underinsured — were still waiting to rebuild. Volunteers from a small Amish congregation in Montana had just poured foundations for four of the first 11 homes, and volunteers from the Mennonite Disaster Service as well as Methodist and Presbyterian church groups would soon arrive to help with construction. For Anders and her colleagues — who had raised money for materials, dealt with county inspections, and frequently pitched in with their own muscle — the groundbreakings were a milestone.
The cavernous emergency distribution center in Pateros, which for months had been filled with clothing, baby equipment and other essentials, was almost empty. Distribution center organizer Cindy Cook reported that most people were stopping by to pick up tools, or large furniture and appliances for their rebuilt homes. Some wanted camping gear so that they could guard their new homes during construction. "People are starting to come in and say, 'I got to take a shower in my own house!' " she said.
Memories of the fire, however, were still fresh: Cook and her husband, John, who live outside Brewster, near Mark Nelson, were trapped at home during the worst of the fire. Cook recalled watching her husband as he stood atop their woodpile, garden hose in hand, while 60 feet above his head, the fire-heated air roiled as if it were boiling in a pot. "We had put some things in the truck, thinking we would be able to evacuate," she said. "But after I saw that, I thought, 'This is about survival.' "
Though the Carlton Complex left a lot of bare hillsides, there is plenty of fuel still in the area, and given the dry winter, warm spring, and hot summer, the county could well see more severe fires soon. So as Anders and others nudge the recovery effort forward, they're preparing for future disasters, too.
The county has implemented a reverse-911 system for evacuation alerts, and is encouraging more homeowners to not only build with fire-resistant materials but also clear brush and prune trees within a 200-foot "ignition zone" around their homes — steps which repeated studies have shown do more to protect individual houses than large-scale fire-suppression or fuel treatment efforts. (The Cooks had followed the national Firewise guidelines for landscaping and construction, which almost certainly made it possible for them to save their home.) The county conservation district has coordinated efforts to revegetate burned, mudslide-prone slopes.
Just as important as such concrete measures, Anders says, are the formal and informal networks built after the fire — within the county and without. "When we have to get a helicopter here, when we have to get the Red Cross here, we'll know who to call, and we'll be calling people we know intimately and personally," Anders says. "That is really the key — having that spiderweb of contacts that you can access right away."
Relationships at the most local level have changed, too. "You think you know your neighbors," she says, "but you don't know them until you're sitting across the table from them and they're telling you about the pictures that they lost, the insurance they didn't have, all the things that are bothering them.
"We know each other like we've never known each other before — and I can tell you, these people will cover each other for decades. There is generational support in these relationships."
The cultural contradiction at the heart of the rural West — stubborn individualism combined with a deeply ingrained expectation of government support — may have met its match in large, destructive fires like the Carlton Complex. While many in Okanogan County still treasure their independence, many now recognize the value of interdependence, among their communities and beyond county boundaries. And though questions linger about last summer's state and federal firefighting efforts, there's a growing sense that wildfires are no longer just someone else's responsibility. Modern wildfires require more of everyone—not only of federal, state and local governments, but also of homeowners and neighborhoods.
Since 2009, the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture have been developing a new wildland fire management strategy — usually referred to as the "Cohesive Strategy" — that emphasizes community preparation. "We've evolved from saying 'We can get it done' to recognizing that shared responsibility is absolutely critical," says David Calkin, a Forest Service fire researcher. Community preparation not only protects homes but may also relieve persistent local and state pressure on the Forest Service to fight essentially untamable fires — which would, in turn, save money, reduce firefighter risk, and allow fires to finally regain their place in the ecosystem.
This summer, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., is preparing to introduce legislation that would, among other measures, build on the Cohesive Strategy by providing financial assistance to counties that protect existing houses and prioritize development in areas with lower fire risk. At the same time, Western governors, including Inslee, are calling on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to change its criteria for individual assistance so that wildfire victims are more likely to qualify for aid. (FEMA did fund repairs to public highways, bridges and other infrastructure damaged by the Carlton Complex, but rejected a request for funds to help individuals and families, in part because the fire affected relatively few people over an extremely large area.) Both Inslee and Cantwell support using money from FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund to fight very large wildfires, a reform intended to end the practice of emergency "fire borrowing" from the Forest Service's fire prevention and forest health programs.
Behind each of these efforts is the same basic argument: Big, fierce wildfires will be with us for the foreseeable future, and reducing their human costs requires preparation and coordination — at every level.
Few in Okanogan County need convincing. "The kids at my day care are still playing fire," Anders says. "Even if they were just 2 years old at the time, they know where they were. They're playing games where they pack up their suitcases and go to the hotel because they've lost their home." The adults are also on alert, she adds. "When we go to do a fire drill, by golly, it's a fire drill. My employees want to know where the car seats are, where the keys are, where the backpacks of supplies are."
On June 28 of this year, a grass fire on the northwestern edge of Wenatchee spread quickly into town, destroying 29 homes and severely damaging several businesses. Anders and other members of the Pateros Volunteer Fire Department worked through the night to try to save a fruit-packing plant and a warehouse belonging to an orchard-supply company, scaling ladders to break out windows and douse the buildings' interiors with water. The weather was extremely hot and windy, just as it had been during the Carlton Complex, making every spark a threat. At one point, when Anders and a fellow firefighter stopped to rest, a two-inch-long ember landed on her companion's rubber oxygen mask and started to melt it.
Mark Nelson spent the winter on his property outside Brewster. The weather was relatively mild, so his carport remained livable, and he more or less got used to the soot. Every day, he cut and split downed timber for firewood for as long as his back allowed, then switched to reading, though he found that the trauma of the fire had diminished his attention span. As the weather warmed, he slowly built a small porch on the end of his carport. He even went looking for a telephone pole that, on the night of the fire, had toppled toward and almost broken through the windshield of the fire truck that rescued him. He sawed up the pole and turned it into a replacement support for his neighborhood's mailboxes.
When I returned to visit Nelson in mid-May, his burned-out Voyager had sunk even more deeply into its meadow. But a carpet of green grass had grown on the valley floor, and Nelson was delighted. "Don't you know what this means?" he said. "Every time I walk across it, it cleans my shoes. You have no idea how fun it is."
The weeds were coming back, too, and there wasn't as much native bitterroot as there had been before the fire. He hadn't yet seen any mountain lion, bear or skunk tracks on his morning walks. But there were plenty of songbirds and plenty of quail, and many of the enormous poplars that once shaded his farmhouse had survived. A skinny ponderosa pine that he'd given up for dead had recently sprouted fresh needles.
Nelson didn't plan to apply for one of the new houses being built by the recovery group. Other people needed them more, he grumbled, and he was pretty comfortable. "I think I'll stay," he said. He waved at the view from his porch, still stunningly expansive despite the lingering traces of soot. "I could never replace this."
This story was funded with reader donation to the High Country News Research Fund.
Michelle Nijhuis, a longtime contributing editor of High Country News, writes from White Salmon, Washington. Follow @nijhuism]]>
Yet the two trees adopt the same strategy when drought hits: Unlike pines, they leave their stomata open. Those tiny pores on their leaves allow the trees to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and photosynthesize. But the atmosphere demands water in return, which escapes through the tree's stomata. During drought, the process creates extra tension in the plant's tissue, since the trees have less water to give and the parched atmosphere is especially thirsty.
This is when juniper's investments in building tough tissue pays off; the tubes that transport water through the tree can withstand an increase in tension. Aspen, on the other hand, become vulnerable. Their tubes are more likely to collapse – like a straw does when you're trying to suck the final drops of soda, but just getting air instead – which can eventually lead to the tree's death.
A few years ago, Bill Anderegg, a forest ecologist and now an assistant professor at the University of Utah, figured out that this was what was killing aspen in his native Colorado. (Around 2004, aspen throughout the Rocky Mountains began mysteriously dying in droves, a phenomenon that was dubbed "sudden aspen decline.") But he noticed something else curious about their pattern of death. There seemed to be a lag between the drought and its consequences. Tree growth would slow for a few years, but often they wouldn't start to die until three to eight years after the drought.
"There was an interesting paradox of trees being stressed and dying from drought in completely wet soils," Anderegg says. "Which prompted me to ask the question: How widespread are these legacy effects?"
It turned out they were quite widespread, according to the results of a study Anderegg authored in the journal Science this week. Using data from a global tree ring archive, Anderegg measured tree growth following severe drought at 1,338 sites, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere and outside the tropics. Growth is a good proxy for forest health, Anderegg explains, and it's also the primary way trees store carbon. That's important because, globally, forests take up about a quarter of anthropogenic carbon emissions. Their continued ability to sequester carbon at that level is critical to blunting the most severe effects of climate change.
With a few exceptions, tree growth slowed for two to four years after severe drought, with the most enduring effects appearing in arid environments – another indication of the troubles Southwestern forests are likely to face as the climate warms.
"It does seem like species that took more risks during drought seemed to recover more slowly," he says, like aspen, which don't close their stomata and conserve water. "Which does indicate that there's some role of this damage to their hydraulic systems that could slow their growth in subsequent years."
Scientific models of the global carbon cycle – which are important for projecting climate change – don't account for this slow-down in growth. "The models assume there is no lag, so as soon as climate is better, so is growth," says Nate McDowell, who researches the physiology of tree death at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico. That means that models may overestimate the ability of ecosystems to store carbon – and underestimate the severity of future climate change.
If droughts do become more frequent and severe, Anderegg says, as climate models predict, "this suggests that more forests are going to spend more and more of their time recovering, and become less good at taking up carbon."Anderegg estimates that in Southwestern forests, the lag could amount to a 3 percent reduction in their carbon storage over a century. That may not sound like much, but when it comes to squirreling away the emissions we stubbornly keep spewing, we need all the help we can get.
Plus, the meaningfulness of such numbers is a matter of scale, notes Adrian Das, a forest ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in the Southern Sierra Nevada. While we don't know what the precise effect of that reduced carbon storage might be, locally or globally, "these changes can translate into really large absolute numbers," he says. "Three percent is not very much if it's five trees. It means something different if it's thousands of trees."
Cally Carswell is a High Country News contributing editor in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Follow @callycarswell]]>
Thanks to its size and the remoteness of much of the state, Alaska has had to take a highly targeted approach to fighting wildfires. In the 1980s, the state established four zones of fire response, depending on whether the events happen near human settlement, whether there are valuable natural resources in the area and how likely the fire is to spread. The state's population hubs, like Anchorage and Fairbanks, are designated as "critical" zones and receive the most protection — which often means fire suppression.
In a concerning twist, the study's authors found the steepest increase in area burned has been in the highest tiers of protection. Fairbanks, the most populated area they looked at, was the most glaring example: on average, 12.4 percent more acreage burns there each year than the previous one.
The reasons for that increase are likely complicated and include the region's logging history. In Fairbanks, in particular, the landscape was basically denuded in the 1900s, thanks to the gold rush. Miners cut down the region's forests to build homes and mining infrastructure and to burn to heat the frozen soil for digging. In the 100 years since, the forests have grown back and slowly gone through their natural succession, from the relatively fireproof willows and birches to the flammable black spruce.Monika Calef, the study's lead author, used to live in the Fairbanks area, but moved away after one too many close calls with wildfire. "It's all old trees," she said in an interview with HCN. "There are lots of dead trees and litter on the ground."
In the paper, which will be published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Earth Interactions, Calef theorized that the forest "is probably now approaching its peak flammability," after being completely logged.
In addition to the logging history, the new study also noted three other factors that are likely causing more fires in Alaska. First is the role of fire suppression. Whether suppression increases fire risk remains a source of controversy, but Fairbanks' fire troubles may indicate that the state's firefighting strategy has left heavier fuel loads in areas where fires are fought aggressively. Second, as Alaska's population has increased, human-started fires may be contributing to the growing burned area near places like Fairbanks.
Third, and perhaps the biggest driver, is the changing climate. Alaska has been warming more quickly in response to global climate change than in the rest of the country and the past several decades have been marked by warmer, drier conditions. Those changes were driven in part by shifts in large-scale atmospheric forces that prevented the delivery of the usual summer rains. Previous studies found that these forces were driving an increase in fires throughout the boreal region, which also includes Canada and the northern reaches of Europe and Asia.
But the increase may not spell failure for Alaska's wildfire strategy. Although inhabited areas have seen the most rapid increase in area burned, fires still burn a relatively small portion of the populated zone. For example, the zone that receives the least fire response has nearly seven times more of its area burned each year. That's in part because fires in the critical zone are typically put out in the early stages, when attack is most effective. The state's fire managers have also been working on other fire prevention strategies whose effects may not yet be shown in Calef's data, including clearing brush.
Calef's research clearly has implications for Alaskans, but it is also relevant on a more global scale. In the past, Alaska's forests have acted as a carbon sink, pulling greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and slowing the planet's warming. If that pattern is reversed (and there's some evidence it may be starting to), then the forests could instead begin to release the carbon they've stored into the atmosphere and contribute instead to more warming. And that warming could feed more burning, which could feed more warming and so on.
While that cycle would eventually stall out for lack of spruce forests to burn, Calef says that by then, the fires would already have released huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere: "That would be catastrophic."
Kate Schimel is an editorial intern at High Country News. Follow her @kateschimel]]>
You can walk for hours without a real view.
What you get instead is this light tricksy and shifting. Is a running whisper of questions and speculations. Things that might be one thing but, at the next step, turn out to be something else. Logic, grammar, straight thinking far from mind. Up ahead, through the tree-crowd and the green-gloam — Bear? Stump? Sasquatch? Gone when you get there.
Here in the damp upper corners of America — Oregon, Washington, maybe Vermont and Maine — we wonder about things. We wonder.
Down in the blazing desert states, I seem to remember, things were clear, horizons unmistakable, black and white. The hot, bright West produces more than its share of absolutists, untroubled by doubts or hesitations. Government bad, death penalty good. God with us. War now. I recall the razor-sharp distinctions. Me right: you wrong. Convert. Or die.
Was that really me? Hard to feel it, so long ago.
It seems that desert religions have engulfed half the world and more: Muslim, Jew, Christian — heck, even Mormon. Some days, disturbed by my own hard-edged memories, I fear their seared visions of moral clarity. But then I recall that for every haranguing jihadist, there's a quieter, subtler believer, probably just off-camera. For every absolutist, there's a Sufi, scholar, nun … or simple follower, seeking (and giving) loving kindness. I've met them, too.
Up here, we hardly ever see it, that horizon. Unless from the beach (rocky crags and tangled forests at our backs) or from mountaintops (hard-won and temporary). Otherwise, our perspectives are closer, more changeable. Our sky is a fir-fringed scrap. And our idea of "bright" is laughable, a sun-break between clouds, flattering and then abandoning. We know gray. It is all scale, all spectrum. As many days and lights as you walk, that is how many versions you see.
The deity that fills this green-gray world is, perhaps, deities. It's tempting to see a spirit in each turn of the trail, stream by grove by dale. Such places murmur, and you wish to make friends with them, to propitiate each in its time: to shelter in a dry nook — listen at a bend in the river — tread silently among giants. It seems enough.
We have fewer churchgoers in Oregon than almost anywhere else in America. And more hikers. We belong here, we think, in this forest, this wet paradise. Cradled here, we rest in it.
Yet … sometimes we catch godlight flooding downward in beams through the moted tallness.
It will stop you, awaken strange hopes. You'll look up — straight up — where fragment blue might persist beyond the branchwork. You'll try to think what to think. It's all so very Baroque. So visions-of-heaven. Something is demanded.
Then gray will close back over, trail will pull you on, your glasses will fog with green breathing. The quotidian and the contingent. Here is your pack, your stride, footfall your next turning. Here the lungfilling smells, the soft incessant needlefall, the easy underfoot loam. Yes. Back to the embrace. Like being inside something. Cradled, nestled, you know the words. That reassurance. Void of demand, of edge, of view.
Except … except. …
That air, fog-distilled or shot through with the divine — that's our air. We own it, we made (or re-made) it. Thinned here, thickened there, poisoned, hydrocarbon'd. We're breathing it, this forest and I. All the world is. And I drove a car to get to this trailhead, whatever trailhead it is, I guarantee it.
I want to see clear, but I cannot. I want to act, but what is my action? Really. I just want to hike and be hiked. Simple. But then … I rage to slay the industries and march militant against tycoons and politicians. And voters. And non-voters. And all who drive and eat and pollute.
Then I want to be left alone, on my squishy trail, rain on my cheeks, lunch in my knapsack. I want to quiet my mind from impossible foes and fears.
O the godlight broken, O the cradle fallen from the bough.
Belonging is acting, is caretaking. Wipe the glasses. Shoulder the pack. Take a step. Action is not victory, is not glory. Does not need a master plan, a D-Day of concerted inevitability. Action is: one foot in front of the other.
This, our forest actually does teach. Take a step. Any step. Where will it lead? We wonder. Yet on we go.
David Oates writes about nature and urban life from Portland, Oregon. He is the author of five books of nonfiction and poetry, including What We Love Will Save Us.]]>
As HCN has reported, for seven of the last 12 years, wildfires have been so costly that the Forest Service ran through its fire budget in late summer, long before the season was over and had to raid other programs to keep fighting fires. The problem is so well known it's got its own nickname, "fire borrowing."
Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell warned a Senate committee this week that there's a 90 percent chance his agency will have to do that again this year. The drought and low snowpack across much of the West contribute to the forecast for a bad fire season this year. Tidwell said that with global warming, fire seasons could be expected to be longer — 80 days longer than they were just 15 years ago — and fiercer.
Saying that it's "past time to find a solution," he reiterated his support for the bipartisan funding bill sponsored by Sen. Wyden, D-Oregon.
Despite growing support across both aisles for this approach, the initiative faces a major barrier — Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
As chairwoman of both the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee and the appropriations subcommittee that decides the Forest Service's budget, Murkowski has broad authority over both the legislation and funding for the agency. And she's skeptical about the Wyden bill.
"It just can't be a blank check approach to fighting the fires," Murkowski said during the hearing. "It's just not sustainable."
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, agreed that opening up disaster funds to use for wildfires could be too expensive. "Paying for one disaster while furthering our current fiscal disaster doesn't make sense," he added.
Flake, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, have introduced another bill that would require the Forest Service to forecast its firefighting costs annually. It also would ban federal agencies from raiding other programs to pay for fighting fires. The change is in how they budget, based on annual forecast rather than an average of the previous 10 years. Environmentalists oppose this bill because it also would open up more timber harvests.
Despite the opposition, supporters of the Wyden bill see a couple of ways to prevail. They could introduce it as an amendment to another bill. Or they could negotiate with Murkowski to include it in a bill she plans to draft that would fix some of the problems she sees with the way the Forest Service manages its vast holdings.
Murkowski spokesman Robert Dillon told HCN that she is working with the sponsors of various firefighting bills to "find a path forward that responsibly funds wildfire suppression needs, while also addressing the problem of fire borrowing."
A Democratic co-sponsor of the Wyden bill said he hopes Murkowski's concerns about the impacts to Alaskans of unusually fierce wildfires will lead her to support that bill. "I don't know exactly when that will happen but my experience with these things is when you start to reach a certain critical mass it gets harder and harder to hold them back," Sen. Martin Heinrich told HCN.
Four Western Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors of the Wyden bill — Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo and Sen. James Risch, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, and Montana Sen. Steve Daines. Daines said he's doing everything he can to push the bill and hopes to get it through this year.
"We've got a great broad-spectrum agreement something has to change in the way wildfire is funded," he said.
More than 7 million acres of federal forest in his state are at high or very high risk of wildfire and need to be thinned and/or treated with prescribed burns, and yet the Forest Service thinned or prescribed fires on only 52,000 acres last year. Daines said the pace is far too slow to protect communities, wildlife and landscapes important for hunting, fishing and other recreation. "All of these critical Montana treasures are at real risk to wildfire," he said.
However, Murkowski and some other Western Republicans on the panel said the problem is that the Forest Service poorly manages its funds, overspending on fighting forest fires to the detriment of other priorities, such as arranging timber sales, thinning overgrown stands and setting prescribed fires to make forests less fire prone.
"It is looking more and more like the Forest Service is morphing into an emergency fire service," Murkowski said.
One of the experts she invited to the hearing made the case that the Forest Service still tries to put out too many fires, which drives up costs.
"We must allow more fires to burn to promote healthy forests resilient to wildfires," said Stephen Pyne, a professor of sustainability from Arizona State University. Pyne advocated that the agency focus more on prescribed fires and thinning to help forests return to their more natural state.
Although Murkowski has no schedule yet for drafting a bill, as fire season starts in earnest, the pressure to do so surely will increase.
Elizabeth Shogren is HCN's DC Correspondent. Homepage image courtesy Flickr user USFS Mountain-Prairie.
Follow @shogrene]]>
Complaints about pesticide drift are nothing new in Oregon communities abutting private timber lands, where the spraying occurs; the state's rules governing the practice are the weakest on the West Coast. But the high profile Gold Beach incident added urgency to rural residents' and environmentalists' calls for reform.State Senate Bill 613, introduced this February by Portland Democratic Senator Michael Dembrow and Lake Oswego Democratic Representative Ann Lininger, looked like their best hope. It would have required advance public notification of spraying, so that rural residents would know when to move livestock and pets, shut windows, and stay out of recently treated areas. Currently, the industry has a 12-month window to spray after notifying the Oregon Department of Forestry; it does not have to provide a specific date. The bill also would have forced companies to disclose the chemicals involved, and required the state to set buffers around homes and schools. As it stands, the state calls for 60-foot buffers around salmon streams and along stretches upstream of a drinking water intake, but nothing for wells or residences.
But SB613 died under industry pressure April 10 without ever receiving a hearing, even though it was weaker than rules in neighboring Washington. Going into 2015 with a freshly strengthened Democratic majority in the Legislature, "everyone was predicting the greenest legislation in 20 years," says Steve Pedery, conservation director at Oregon Wild. But when it comes to timber in Oregon – as with ranching in Rocky Mountain states, or oil drilling in North Dakota – alliances don't forge neatly along political party lines.
The first sign of trouble came when Eugene Democrat Chris Edwards, who has received far more in campaign contributions from the timber industry, according to the Oregonian, replaced Dembrow as chairman of the Senate Environment and Natural Resources Committee. There, the bill went into a work group instead of a hearing – and never came out.
Meanwhile, Clatskanie Democrat Rep. Brad Witt, who has received hefty contributions from timber and chemical interests, convened a competing work group in the House to come up with alternative proposals, but refused to consider advance notification on the grounds that it could tip off ecoterrorists who might attack sprayers. "It was impossible for me to make a call on whose safety (neighboring property owners or people making the aerial sprays) is more important," he told The Register-Guard.
The surviving bills call for what the timber and pesticide industries have argued for all along: increased penalties and strengthened oversight, rather than changing the rules. They would create a toll-free hotline to report incidents, funnel more money from pesticide registration fees to the state's Pesticide Analytical and Response Center, which investigates incidents, and instate new licensing requirements for helicopter pilots. "Part of the reason for the frustration for rural residents is that the state's response was poor," Salem Democratic Rep. Brian Clem, told the paper. The measures, many of which he introduced, would mean "better and faster investigations."
Pedery's not so sure. "It's hard to say whether it's better than the status quo. But none of those things do anything to address why complaints are actually happening."
And at least one, House Bill 3429, might make it worse by "effectively requiring" Pesticide Analytical and Response Center board members "to either currently be employed by the pesticide and logging industries, or have been employed by those industries in the past," thus compromising its independence, Pedery argued in April 15 testimony. "Oregon is supposed to be this great green Nirvana of the Northwest," he says, but "the politics around timber are still stuck in the '70s."
Sarah Gilman is a contributing editor at High Country News. Follow @Sarah_Gilman]]>
In early April, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would consider listing the northern spotted owl as endangered, in response to an environmental group's petition. Federal biologists say they wouldn't expect management changes with an endangered listing. Meanwhile, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are revising the Northwest Forest Plan. The Forest Service's version won't be ready for four years. The BLM's draft, due soon, may allow increased logging.
In 1908, the government began giving counties with national forest land a portion of the logging receipts from that land. Those payments evolved into today's Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act (SRS). The second federal program, Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT), helps compensate counties with a high percentage of non-taxable federal land for lost property taxes. The two programs often make up a significant portion of county and school budgets, particularly in rural counties.
PILT, which first passed in 1976, is calculated based on a per-acre fee that's adjusted annually for inflation. This year it's $2.58 per acre. The formula also takes into account timber sales, grazing and recreation activity, as well as population, so more populous counties receive more money, up to a point. SRS was established in 2000 to compensate counties for falling timber harvests. The program later changed to include acreage and per capita income. That way, counties would have steady federal payments, regardless of the timber boom and bust, and counties without high-value timber would also receive compensation for federal lands within their borders.
But the formulas act more like guidelines than requirements, since Congress ultimately decides each year how much to pay counties. As part of Republicans' longstanding effort to cut funding for federal programs, Congress doesn't want to continue making those payments. Although PILT is permanently authorized, since 2012 Congress has funded it only for one year at a time. SRS is even worse off: It's not permanently authorized, which means it's more vulnerable to political whims and will expire in October, with no guarantee Congress will re-institute funding.
The uncertainty means that rural counties are stuck in an ongoing funding battle that makes it increasingly difficult to make long-term budget plans. Last year PILT and SRS provided $782 million in federal land payments. Without reauthorization of SRS, that number will fall to $505 million.
Part of the challenge is that counties with a long history of receiving high federal land payments tend to have created lower local tax rates as a result. And many states have restrictions on how quickly counties can raise taxes to make up for the lost land payments. In Custer County, Idaho, that amounts to a nearly 60 percent decline in the local budget. In Idaho County, Idaho, it's over 40 percent and in Catron County, New Mexico, it's over 30.
Some rural counties are already pressuring Forest Service managers toward bigger timber harvests to make up for the lost income. This new reliance on natural resource production will likely make revenue more volatile and less predictable as timber sales ebb and flow with market conditions. And it affects the kinds of economic opportunities available in these places.
For instance, if local governments receive the majority of their land payments from supporting extractive industries, it forecloses a lot of other economic opportunities that these rural areas could develop, says Mark Haggerty, a policy analyst at Headwaters Economics, a Bozeman-based progressive think tank. He thinks the key to successful federal lands payments will be a program that rewards counties for a range of activities on public land that contribute to the economy—from creating new wildernesses to attract tourists, to restoring fisheries and building recreational trails.
Revamping the payment system could help close the economic gap between places like Gallatin and Beaverton Counties in Montana. Gallatin gets only 2.6 percent of its budget from federal land payments, while in Beaverhead, it's over 16 percent. As the payment programs currently stand, if SRS isn't authorized for next year, PILT payments will get a boost of $271,000 to offset most of the SRS loss. Beaverhead County, however, will have a tougher time. Because of the population limit in the PILT formula, the county will not be able to recoup the $1.2 million loss in SRS dollars.
Here's a look at which places will be hit hardest by the expiry of SRS, and PILT, if Congress doesn't move to fund it again after this year:
Total current federal land payments to counties:
Percent of current county budget made up by federal land payments:
Projected change in payments to counties if SRS not reauthorized:
Sarah Tory is an editorial fellow at HCN. Follow @tory_sarah
Maps courtesy of Headwaters Economics.]]>
In his September order, District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson also stopped the expansion of Arch Coal's West Elk Mine into the Sunset Roadless Area of the Gunnison National Forest because the federal government had failed to take a "hard look" at potential contributions to climate change as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.Brooke's ruling was the first to require the government to calculate climate impacts when it approves extraction of fossil fuels from federal lands, as HCN.org reported.
Now, the agency will wade into uncharted territory as it tries to meet the court's requirement that it fully consider greenhouse gas emissions from future coal mining under the Colorado roadless rule. Burning coal emits more greenhouse gases than other methods of generating electricity. Additionally, coal seams in the North Fork Valley, where the West Elk Mine is located, contain a lot of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and the mines vent it through networks of wells, since the government does not require them to capture methane.
Forest Service officials say they will assess such impacts, but they are not yet sure how. The federal government has not required assessments of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel extraction from federal lands, nor has it established criteria for doing so.
"There is no uniform methodology," said Jim Bedwell, director of recreation, lands and minerals of the agency's Rocky Mountain region. "That's all very much evolving. It's in discussion about how to best approach these things."
Environmental groups criticized the government for trying to reinstate the mining exemption in Colorado's roadless rule, which allows for temporary road construction for coal mining in a 19,100-acre chunk of the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison national forests.
"We're deeply disappointed that the Forest Service is continuing to push what is destructive of beautiful roadless lands and damaging to climate and undercuts the Obama administration's commitment to reducing climate emissions," said Ted Zukoski, a lawyer for Earthjustice, who represents environmental groups in the case.
Forest Service officials said they were respecting the collaborative process that resulted in the 2012 Colorado roadless rule, which was a compromise between industry and environmental groups. President Clinton protected 58.5 million acres of forest land from logging and development under a national roadless plan, which as HCN reported withstood multiple court challenges. Colorado and Idaho are the only two states that have since adopted their own roadless plans.
"All we're doing here is following through on the previous intentions and reinstating this exception, if that's the way this plays out, so that at least we may be able to proceed with any leasing," said Bedwell.
Colorado officials and representatives of Arch Coal, which owns the one mine most likely to benefit from the provision, cheered the government's announcement.
Mike King, executive director of Colorado's Department of Natural Resources, said the future expansion of Arch's West Elk Mine "was an integral part" of the compromise between industry and environmental groups that resulted in the Colorado roadless rule. Without the expansion, the mine would be forced to close, he added. "Protecting those jobs in the North Fork and protecting the agreement that was made is critical to Colorado."
Public input received through May 21 will be considered in the draft Environmental Impact Statement, which the Forest Service plans to complete late this fall. A final decision would come about six months later.
On a separate track, the agency together with the Bureau of Land Management also will reconsider coal lease modifications for the West Elk Mine, which the court also struck down.
"We encourage the agency to move with all due haste in keeping with the importance of the Colorado Roadless Rule to the economies in the North Fork and the state as a whole," Arch Coal spokeswoman Logan Bonacorsi said in an e-mail.
Elizabeth Shogren is HCN's DC Correspondent. Follow her @ShogrenE.]]>
On a March evening in Portland, Oregon, Forest Service officials met with about 150 members of the public for a "listening session" as the agency begins the process of crafting a replacement for the plan. It expects to finish that work by 2019.
Many of those in attendance at the Portland session were members of the environmental group Bark, which insists that the current plan is allowing too many trees to be cut down, especially near rivers. Conspicuously absent from the meeting were the timber workers. The scene was a major contrast to the 1993 Clinton summit, when workers protested the loss of timber jobs by loudly rolling big log trucks through downtown Portland.
The industry had asked to have listening sessions in places close to homes of mill workers in Roseburg or Port Townsend, but that fell on deaf ears, said Bill Kluting of the Carpenters union, which represents workers in the industry. The first listening session was held at 5:30 pm on Tues., March 17, in a hotel near the Portland airport, and later sessions were conducted near major airports in Seattle and Redding. "None of our people like to drive into Portland, let alone that time of evening," Kluting said. "We have a petition circulating around advising them (the Forest Service) of how this whole program affects rural Oregon."
The original Northwest Forest Plan was a product of the long-standing conflict between timber harvesting and environmental concerns, often oversimplified as "jobs vs. owls." The conflict had exploded into a full-blown economic crisis just before President Bill Clinton took office in 1991, when Federal Judge William Dwyer issued an injunction that shut down logging in the Northwest's old-growth forests, throwing between 60,000 and 100,000 people out of work for the purpose of protecting the northern spotted owl, an endangered old-growth-dwelling bird that had been decimated by aggressive logging practices. Dwyer said the logging was illegally destroying critically important owl habitat and threatening to wipe out the marbled murrelet, several runs of salmon and other forest species.
In 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan, developed by a team of scientists after the 2-day summit involving loggers, environmentalists and other stakeholders, went into effect. Dwyer ruled that logging at a lighter level could resume, and lifted the injunctions. The plan, which guided the management of 24 million acres of land in Washington, Oregon and California, has often been hailed as a global model for protecting large ecosystems and conserving biodiversity, and it's considered one of Clinton's signature environmental achievements during his eight years in office. But under it, the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have never been able to sell enough trees to satisfy the demands of the timber industry, or to enforce its rules protecting river corridors and ancient stands of forest strictly enough to appease environmentalists.
In November 2014, the Forest Service briefed representatives of industry, local government and conservation on its intent to revise the Clinton plan, as required by the National Forest Management Act. Jim Peña, the Northwest regional forest supervisor, said the Northwest Forest Plan will no longer exist as an umbrella document that applies to all forests equally. Instead, its principles -- but not necessarily its specific strategies -- will be embedded into the planning documents of each of the 19 forest units.
The Forest Service says it will retain such principles as protecting old-growth forests, as well as the diverse array of species that live there, but may make specific changes such as decreasing the width of protected corridors along rivers that flow through the forests. Environmentalists worry that if the Forest Service allows more logging within riparian areas, aquatic species will suffer, especially the endangered coho runs in West Coast rivers.
For its part, the BLM says it will release a new forest plan in late April for each of its 9 units, covering 2.5 million acres, all in western Oregon. The agency intends to provide the timber industry with more certainty about how many board-feet it can log, "which has been lacking lo these many years," said BLM spokesman Mike Campbell in Portland. In 2007 the BLM proposed to allow much larger timber harvests while scaling back environmental protections, only to jettison that proposal as an illegal artifact of the Bush administration once Obama took office.
Under the new plans, the timber industry expects to gain access to more timber than it has since the Northwest Forest Plan first took effect, said Ann Forest Burns, a vice-president of the Portland-based industry group, the American Forest Resource Council. She added that the industry's allocation has been half or less of the 1.1 billion annual board feet promised in the original plan. If the new forest plans fails to provide enough timber, she said, "we will ask Congress to change the law." That could include two 1970s-era mandates, the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act.
Andy Stahl, executive director of the environmental group Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said that if the Forest Service or BLM fail to provide enough protection for wildlife habitat in the plans, the agencies could face a new round of lawsuits. And it's not at all certain that either agency will be able to stand up for the Northwest Forest Plan's suite of controversial environmental regulations, or whether some important regulations will be dropped for expediency's sake.
"The Forest Service and its political masters want to cut more timber," he said in an interview at the Portland session. "To do so they need to gut the Northwest Forest Plan. The trick is to make the bad new plan look green, using words like 'sustainable' and 'collaborate.' "
Paul Koberstein writes from Portland, Oregon. He is the editor of Cascadia Times, an environmental journal published in Portland]]>
And it was: In June 2012, that forest and mountainside neighborhood ignited in the High Park fire. But the infestation wasn't to blame for the blaze, one among many in what became a historically severe fire season. "I think it's safe to say that there is no effect of mountain pine beetle on the area that's burning," says Sarah Hart, a forest ecologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "We're having lots of fire across the West; it's because it's warm and dry."
Hart coauthored a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing no relationship between the amount of forest killed by bark beetles and the number of acres burned in recent severe wildfires.
The conclusion is a departure from the conventional media and political narratives that have espoused the beetle-fire connection, even as scientists and forest managers debate the idea and gradually uncover a much more nuanced picture. And it's important, because those narratives are often used to justify logging beetle-killed forests.
Living in Colorado during the 2012 fire-season and reading headlines like "High Park Fire Follows in Pine Beetles' Tracks" helped inspire Hart and her colleagues to test the link in the first place. They knew there wasn't much scientific evidence supporting it.
Other studies on fire risk and pine beetles have been based on computer models or looked at just one or two fires, so this time the scientists looked at the whole West, comparing Forest Service maps of mountain pine beetle infestations to burned areas. They found that even though the total area infested by mountain pine beetle increased between the years 2000 and 2013, the amount of land that burned did not.
During the peak fire years of 2006, 2007, and 2012, only five percent of the forest area burned across the western United States had recent bark beetle infestations. The researchers suspect that beetles don't change the odds of burning because when it's extremely hot and dry, forests get so parched they will support serious conflagrations with or without beetle kill.
Fire researchers still have questions about how beetles affect other aspects of fire behavior that are especially important to firefighters – like how hot fires burn, how fast they spread, and how predictable they are. The recent study also doesn't negate the safety benefits of clearing dead trees – which are prone to topple – from around homes, trails or power lines.
Hart and her colleagues hope their paper will inform discussion about the underlying reasons for fire risk and inspire more effective policies for coping with it. Right now, conventional wisdom is still driving some restoration efforts. The 2014 Farm Bill authorized $200 million in taxpayer funds for projects, including forest thinning, meant to address the risk of insect outbreaks and wildfire on national forests. "Large landscapes of dead and infested trees pose a significant threat of forest fires, as evidenced by last summer's historic Colorado, California, and Idaho wildfires," reads a letter of support signed by at least seven Senators.
"For any manager concerned about whether their forests are going to burn or not," says Hart, "I think they should focus more on trying to adapt to changes in climate rather than changes to fuels from mountain pine beetle infestation."
And if she could go back and rewrite those 2012 fire headlines today, she says, she would go for the much less dramatic, but far more accurate, "Warm and Dry Weather Promotes Widespread Fire."
Sarah Jane Keller is a High Country News contributor based in Bozeman, Montana. She tweets @sjanekeller.]]>


text:
- 265Promote
Stationery Cards
Iron Woman 7by Karen Hallion Illustrations
Set of folded stationery cards printed on bright white, smooth card stock to bring your personal artistic style to everyday correspondence. Each card is blank on the inside and includes a soft white, European fold envelope for mailing.
On of the paintings in my "The Iron Woman: Beautiful Women of Steampunk" series.
"Beautiful sweetheART ;~} Valz
Wow! She rocks!
Love her!!! ♥
thumbs up!! :D
Very beautiful work...
I love it.
I love it.
wow love it!
i love this style, so much! great dress, and great title :D
cool stuff, great composition!
love the background!
very creative! :)
Nice work!
You have such a clean style! The background on this piece really adds to it.
so beautiful!
love this :)
Great job. =)
See More Comments

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Dealerships are set to unveil new models later this year. See the models that people are patiently waiting for.
Ford Motor Company
2013 Ford Shelby GT500: Many car manufacturers are going for fuel economy in their 2013 models. Ford is looking for speed. The Shelby GT500 can top the 200-mph mark, but it might hurt you at the pump.
you must be signed in to comment
You are currently Signed In


text:
The following information about your website activity on this browser is used to influence the personalized experience served:
Your profile is empty.
Nobody Beats a Lawley Deal, Nobody!
Please specify a search term
We know your time is valuable. We are sure you will find our site a fast and convenient way to research and find a vehicle that's right for you. If we can be of any assistance while visiting us online, send us an email and we will promptly reply.
Lawley Motors – Buick and GMC in Sierra Vista and Benson, AZ | Home Page


text:
On Being Three-Quarters of the Way Through 2015: A Resolutions Check-In
New Years Resolutions? Oh yeah… those.
1. Throw a fancy cocktail party
Done! We simmered, we muddled, we made it happen. We made an amazing cocktail called A Brief History of Thyme because we think we're just so funny (but I'll give you the recipe if you want it).
2. Read every Psalm
Done! Five a day for a month or so and 150 flew right by. Now I should really do it again…
3. Run a half marathon
What's that?! Done. Did it. Ended up running this half marathon in July instead of the one I originally planned to make room for the road trip in May, but it happened all the same. And my dad was there biking circles around me because dads are the best.
4. Record an album
It's happening. Oh boy is it happening. Coming at you soon. Maybe October… probably November.
5. Master my camera
This one feels far. Much further than the other ones, I think because it's so ambiguous. Will I ever actually master it? I can become better at it, but I won't necessarily feel I have reached mastery, at least not this year.
This is a lesson for myself: next year, only set goals with clear moments of achievement. Like a half marathon – either you do it or you don't. Ambiguous goals cause a little bit of stress because you're never quite sure if it's done.
6. Watch every Best Picture nominee
This is the one I'm still reaping the benefits of. Being able to talk to people about movies is so much fun for me – everyone has their opinions, everyone has their favorites, everyone's still upset that Lego Movie wasn't nominated (or maybe it's just me?). Just last week I had a conversation with someone about Whiplash, and The Grand Budapest Hotel comes up on occasion. If you're interested in what the nominees looked like this year, check out the Ultimate Guide to the 2015 Academy Awards.
7. Bake a Joy the Baker Recipe
Brown butter chocolate chip cookies? I messed them up big time. (I don't know how – let's not talk about it.) Vanilla cupcakes? Delicious. Thanks, Joy.
8. Read 3 C.S. Lewis books
I think this is going to be a fall thing. I HAVE at least three C.S. Lewis books, but I have only really read half of one. Actually, half of two. So, one…? Technically?
I'll probably have to crack down on these while I'm traveling in October and November. Maybe the colder months will make this easier. I have plenty of faith that this one will work out.
9. Hike Mt. Washington
But I've hiked so many other things! Come ON. I haven't done this yet and the hike-able weekends are dwindling… Perhaps late October. I will still hold out hope. This might be the one that gets away (until next year).
10. Pare my wardrobe down to 25 pieces
Let's be honest. I forgot about this one entirely. Let's get it done! Together, maybe?
What I'm Learning
One thing I have noticed, as I sift through these nine-month-old goals, is how these goals still apply – these are still things I value, things that are exciting to me.
I also have noticed my tendency to forget or minimize what I have accomplished.
I forget that there was a time when I hadn't read all of the Psalms. When I had never run a half marathon. Goals that feel so far away don't seem far away once you can cross them off of a list – in fact, they feel easy. I forget the work that went into them, the hours spent reaching them.
Setting goals, for me, means drawing the blueprints for the person I want to become. Imagining a wild, future world in which I can do everything I want to do. Imagining a future self.
And now, nine months in the future, I am that person. At least, technically I am. I don't feel any different, but I am different.
I'm not sure what I want to say about that.
Maybe it's that we should take more moments to look back on who were so we can realize who we are becoming. Things feel slippery and terrible sometimes, but goals, even September goals, allow us to envision a future self who will find those things easy. Doable. Done.
How are your resolutions feeling? Do they still feel like you?
Want more More Awesomer all up in your day? Subscribe!
Facebook // Twitter // Bloglovin // Pinterest // Instagram