a simple place

Aspen in Northern New Mexico

October , 2007, 4:36 am

The sun won’t rise for another hour or more, and it is pitch black beneath the trees. My headlamp illuminates only a small circle of steeply rising trail. The world is reduced, constricted by my limited senses. I hear mostly the crunch of my feet as they slide ever so slightly with each step on the small stones that litter the steep path. Above the sound of my footsteps a small stream comes and goes as the path approaches then veers away from the edge of a ravine that I cannot see. The birds have yet to wake in the forest. When I stop, all is still silent except for the sound of my breath and the hushed rustling whispers of the Aspen trees.

An hour later the sky is beginning to talk to the mountains at the head of the larger valley, and the forest is filling itself with the hesitant gloom of dawn. It is a barely lit world still hiding in the early morning shadow of the mountains to the east. I turn off my headlamp when I realize that I can see better without it, and then I watch as the ghostly forms of trees make their way towards me out of the dark. They whisper to the wind and the birds. As I orient myself a strong wind blows and it sounds like a thousand paper birds lifting themselves into the air on a thousand wings of parchment.

I make my way off trail for a place that looks directly down and out the gorge I have been hiking along. It is a tiny ridge that juts out into the gorge. The stream is now hundreds of feet below, it’s mutterings hidden by the morning whispers of the Aspen. The ridge is narrow, rocky and covered in trees barely taller than I can reach – their trunks just large enough to wrap my hands around.

Still hidden behind the 12,000 foot horizon at the end of the valley, the sun is trying to burn its way through the last shreds of low clouds to reach the muted forests around me haloing the clouds in the bright yellows and pinks of a welding flame.

A knife-edge of sunlight cuts across a stand of aspen on the ridge behind me – a thin blade of light thrown out of a sliver of space between the clouds that are rushing by above throwing shards of sunlight into the shadowed dawn on the mountainside. They flash over the trees like the backs of golden fish; brilliant at the surface of a murky river for just a moment, and then gone.

Now I have hiked to the meadow the head of the gorge. The clouds have closed over entirely and the meadow floats above a sea of gold parchment aspen, their rustling butterfly wings muted against the grey sky. There is just myself and the valley, and the aspen are speaking. Closing my eyes I am sitting in a storm of paper butterflies.

When I open my eyes, the clouds break once more and the trees burn a screaming amber against the running dark clouds. A smell of fresh dirt, melting snow and panicky earthworms hits the meadow. Clouds descend below the ridgeline above the meadow and curtains of rain are closing out the distant mountaintops.

Perhaps I should run.
Or not.

**
A silent monochrome.

Over the last five years vast stretches of aspen forest have turned into ghosts. The leaves fall, but they never grow back. The suckers that normally sprout into new trees from aspen roots don’t appear. They speckle pine and spruce hillsides like the patches of grey hair that remind us of our mortality. When the spring returns they become forests of everlasting winter, empty trunks stark against the clear mountain skies.

Researchers have named this condition SAD, or Sudden Aspen Decline Syndrome. Mass aspen deaths have been documented throughout the Rocky Mountains with increasing frequency since 2003, and on the drive from New Mexico into southwestern Colorado dozens of patches of bare forest dot the landscape. If you didn’t know about SAD, you might not guess the scope of the problem. When I drove through the southern Colorado’s Animas valley, where the famous Durango-Silverton Railroad runs, the waves of color sweeping back and forth across the valley were astonishing. It didn’t seem like a scene that would make you worry about the future of aspen. On every other bend, campers full of happy tourists were stopping to take pictures of the scenery – holding their cameras out in front of them like they were trying to read the small print on the back of their cameras.

The San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado where the Animas Valley lies has actually been hit hard by SAD. By 2007 these mountains had already lost more than ten percent of their aspen forests. Even the Animas Valley, where everyone was taking pictures, had patches of forest silenced by SAD. In the big picture ten percent is not an insurmountable loss, and it may not be surprising that people don’t notice when this much forest dies off. If one out of every ten of our friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues suddenly failed to wake up one day it would shake our world. But the forest is not most people’s world, and so it is easy to drive through the mountains and be completely unaware that ten percent of the forest has not woken from the previous winter.

July 6, 2006, Pioneer Mountains, Idaho

It isn’t yet dawn. The birds are starting to make their declarations, and the wind is gently flapping the sides of my tent. My breaths cloud the air in front of me, and I can see nothing outside the screen yet. The last two days have been mostly filled with rain, and my back is sore from driving. When I finally hiked into this valley yesterday afternoon the sky was gloriously welcoming. I am wondering if the welcome will be rescinded today.

Something walks by my tent, gently disturbing the gravel. It is the slightest of sounds, like the barest wisp of cloud passing low to the ground on an overcast day. I hold my breath listening for something more but hear nothing. A moment later there is a splashing in the stream. Then it is gone.

I wait for more footsteps, another splash, a sniff or snort, but the only thing I hear is the flapping of the tent and the arguing of birds. Whatever it was it has moved along in silence without telling me or anyone else where it was going.

Imperceptibly, the sky is beginning take on color.

**
I chose to hike into Surprise Valley, because I liked the name and wondered what the surprise was – not a bad reason. Unlike most of the roadless areas I visited, it wasn’t too difficult to find good trail information about the Pioneer Mountains of south-central Idaho. The Pioneers, the White Clouds, the Boulders and the Smoky Mountains are part of a large stretch of mostly unprotected mountains that surround the Sawtooth Wilderness east of Boise.

The Pioneer Mountains form the end of a twenty-five mile wide peninsula of mountains that juts out into the vast potato growing plains of southern Idaho. Within this stretch of mountains are places that would rival Yellowstone National Park if they had fewer cattle. Surprise Valley sits in one of these areas. It is a secluded patch of mountain that is just over a sky-rending ridge from Copper Basin, an eight-mile long, four-mile wide valley reminiscent of Yellowstone’s Lamar valley. Copper Basin is one of the places in the menagerie of mountains around the Sawtooths where re-introduced wolf populations recently made a comeback. Just as Lamar Valley was the perfect place to reintroduce wolves into Yellowstone, when the wolves wandered into Copper Basin they must have realized that this was an ideal hunting ground – a place where elk herds would naturally come down out of the mountains and congregate in the open. Wolves are also known to only persist for a long period of time in areas with low road densities, basically less than one mile of road per square mile.  The majority of the mountainous regions in central Idaho have road densities of less than one. To put that number in perspective, urban areas can have road densities of over six miles of road per square mile. Even compared to other forest areas, central Idaho has relatively few roads – with the exception of the border area near Canada, most of the Cascades Mountains in Washington state have more than two miles of road per square mile.

So when the Copper Basin wolf pack migrated in from another reintroduction area in 2003, they probably thought they had found a good thing. The pack beat the odds and established itself within a couple years, but the biggest battle they had to face was not the battle to find prey, but the battle for acceptance by the ranchers of their right to exist in that high mountainous country. In 2005 the Copper Basin pack lost that fight when a rancher found a dead calf and attributed its death to the wolves. Soon afterwards Wildlife Services shot five of the six adult wolves in the pack from an airplane. That left the pack with one adult and six pups. In 2007, the pack was down to three adults. In 2008, there was one more confirmed cattle kill by the wolves and the last three adults were shot.

The Forest Service currently allows over six thousand head of cattle to be grazed in Copper Basin. The grazing allotments here go all the way to the rockline, and the Forest Service hasn’t re-evaluated these cattle leases in over forty years. Between 2005 and 2008 the forest service reported seventeen “confirmed/probable” cattle kills by wolves in Copper Basin. Supporters of wolf protection rightly note that cattle frequently die on the range and are scavenged by wolves, which can make it difficult to assess actual wolf kills. In this case, the forest service had collared several individuals in order to confirm that the wolves were in fact preying on cattle. In response to the seventeen cattle deaths, twenty-two adult wolves were shot by Wildlife Services. It is a sad math – a math that reflects the way we normally account for differences between our needs and the needs of wildlife.

Much of this was on my mind as I hiked the trail to Surprise Valley. The trail starts out as a steep switchback that climbs out of Fall Creek valley and into a narrow canyon that rapidly closes in around a low Aspen forest. I hadn’t studied any topographical maps too closely, because I wanted to find out what the surprise was by experience rather than by reading. Just when it seemed to me as though the little canyon should be about to end in a shut out or box canyon, I came over a short ridge and found myself on the edge of a huge meadow buzzing with insects and hanging precipitously over a drop down to the larger valley below. The meadow is surrounded by ragged, sawtooth-shaped peaks, and a broad valley winds its way from there up the high ridge to the south that ends in a blue alpine lake just a few hundred yards short of the divide.

Standing on the edge of that lake I thought about how difficult it is for our country to make public decisions about wilderness issues.  As I looked down the valley in front of me, I tried to imagine what it was like to travel through these mountains in the days of Lewis and Clark when there were wolves and grizzly bears everywhere. The pioneers that followed hunted the wolves and bears relentlessly until both species faced extinction in the lower 48 states. Today many people, including some people who live in those areas, favor the idea of returning these predators to the wild. Yet the basic conflicts between the predators and people remain the same.

When I was standing there, the wolves on the other side of the ridge had already been shot, though I didn’t know it at the time. Unlike the animal that passed my tent before dawn, the Copper Basin wolf pack’s coming and going had been well-documented and professionally orchestrated.

Copper Basin aside, the wolf population in Idaho as a whole still appears to be increasing every year. Between 2001 and 2006 the estimated number of wolves in the state had increased from 261 to 663. By 2008 another 140 wolves have been added to the estimate. From a biologist’s perspective I know that the recovery numbers are good. Yet even knowing this, as I recall looking out over a valley that the Copper Basin wolves may have peeked into, I can’t help but compare this with so many other similar outcomes where the needs of people outweigh the needs of wildlife. Surprise Valley and the larger Fall Creek Valley below it are the only valleys in the Pioneers where cattle are excluded, and so the wolves that wandered into Copper Basin found themselves in an area where they were forced to compete directly with the needs of people. It is a losing proposition for the wolves, and the fate of the Copper Basin pack still saddens me.

This is one of two little sketches I did yesterday while waiting for friends at Bouldin Creek Cafe …

I did another drawing of a dream last year. This drawing is also tied to a children’s book I hope to write sometime.

This is an excerpt from the book I am writing about National Forest Roadless Areas.  The book will include bits of my journaling and this is from when I was in the Mallard Larkins Pioneer area of northern Idaho.  You can see more about the project here:  www.nelsonguda.com/roadless

July 24, 2006

It is early morning.  Somewhere off beyond the mountains, the sun has been lighting the landscape for more than an hour, but here in the heart of northern Idaho the forests are still places of shadow.  The lake we pitched our tents near is dead still as if the darkness from the surrounding woods is swirling down into its depths, opening the forest and readying it for the creatures of the day.

As the lake siphons the silence out of the forest, I study the multitude of shapes taking form out of the darkness.  The forest here is old.  Un-burnt, uncut, it is an old that speaks softly and goes unnoticed.  Further to the west, the old forests of the rainy coast drip centuries off the end of their branches like the condensed Pacific fog that feeds their towering forms.  Those forests, with their massive cathedral-like proportions, cannot help but convey a sense of age.  But here in these narrow, rumpled watersheds of northern Idaho, the trees are neither massive nor overwhelmingly tall.  Here it is the mix of forms, sizes and species that, like an old bookstore, holds its story close within its covers.  Yet, it is nothing more than a community that has been free to grow with its own disruptions and continuities rather than one laid flat by the homogenizing, landscape scale disruption of clearcut logging and massive fire.

Finding this spot is like discovering the forgotten inner pocket of an old, rarely used winter coat – a place so unlike those around it that it feels as though it must belong to another era.  I woke early to watch the forest ‘come to life’, and now I find myself reflecting on what a silly phrase I chose to consider this moment in time.  This place has been in life, day and night, through seasons upon seasons of brutal summer heat and bitter winter cold. It is only me that has come to life here, and the forest is the one who is watching, waiting and wondering what I will do.

I turn back around to watch the first shrapnel of morning light explode out of a reflection of the rock face two hundred feet above the far side of the lake. Meanwhile the meadow where I am standing is ablaze in a cacophonous mist of wings searching in desperation for a last meal before the sun rises above the trees and sends them back to rest in the greenery at the water’s edge.  They land on every exposed surface – my face, my eyelids, my ears, my nostrils – I count twelve on the back of my hand and then after I have shaken them off I count eleven more within less than a second.  I reflect on the unfortunate fact that I left the bug repellent in the car.

Redwoods in the fog

cities, noise, silence…     This weekend I spent the day visiting a new friend who lives outside of Austin on the Pedernales River.  She has a beautiful place, and it reminded me how much I miss when I am living in the city.  In particular, I miss silence.  It is so easy to not think about silence, because in the city you are always, always surrounded by sounds.  The next morning was a Sunday and it was quiet for the city.  And yet, the difference was stunning.  To me, the difference between a man-made quiet and a natural quiet is stark.

Several years ago I was backpacking in the Redwoods, which is a place of unbelievable silences.  We had come there from several days of backpacking on the coast, and the difference was stunning.  It was so different that the silence was almost erie on our first night sleeping in the redwoods.  That feeling didn’t last long.  The redwood forests are one of my favorite places on earth now.  Later I wrote this piece to describe how I felt.

Living Among Giants

It’s a calm summer evening and sunlight is filtering sideways through the immense columns of the forest.  Far above, the canopy breathes a silence that settles across the ferns like a hush of reverence in the halls of a cathedral.  All is still except for the specks of dust that are circling through two hundred foot tall shafts of light.

It’s no surprise that this forest feels like a cathedral.  The thousand year-old redwood trunks rise from the ground like living extensions of the Earth’s will, shredding the curtains of sunlight into shimmering gossamer strands that drift slowly through the air until they disappear among the ferns into cool quietness of the forest floor.

Aside from the redwoods themselves, the forest here has none of the grandeur of the American west.  It is a place so unlike the forests of the giant Sequioas, that it is hard to believe they are cousins.  Both are immense, but the Sequoias are muscular trees that grapple with the land – clinging to the slopes of the Sierras through a sheer force of will.  They and everything about them have a massive intensity of presence – a presence that pushes constantly against the senses reminding smaller creatures like us of the insignificance of our stature.

But the redwood forest is different.  Underneath these towers the forest is subtler.  It is a place with a reverence for small streams and cool mossy rocks.  The hills are low and unimposing, their attention focused on the unhurried meanderings of salamanders and the silent flight of sparrow sized owls.  The birds often sing so far above the ground that the silence is as soft as hummus littered floor, the wind tempered to a whisper.

I think it is this smallness that imbues the forest here with spirituality.  Out of this quiet humility rise the tallest creatures on the planet.  It is a living embodiment of the connection that we all seek at some point in our lives, a living link between the little-noticed and the incomprehensibly grand.

- Redwood National Forest, July 2004

happiness, comfort, pleasure, contentment…

The other night I saw a video that made me think of these things, and it reminded me of a piece of journaling I did in Ecuador several years back.  I was there teaching a conservation biology class in the paramo, the high elevation grasslands in the Andes. Our living quarters were very far from what most Americans would consider comfortable, though they were comfortable by the standards of that area.

On Comfort
Fifteen, November 2003

Cold.  It’s cold up here.  Off in the distance I can hear an owl, or at least I think it’s an owl.  Whatever it is it’s making a long wavering call, like the quavering sound of a cold person’s voice.  Maybe it’s a cold owl.

I’m sitting in bed wearing gloves, socks, long underwear and a hat, writing by the light of three candles and a dying headlamp.  The walls of our cabin are made of thatched paramo grass with plenty of holes big enough to let in a breeze strong enough to blow out a candle or flip the pages of my notebook.  Not exactly most people’s idea of comfort, especially for a skinny guy like me who retains heat about as well as a nudist in a snowstorm.

But what is comfort anyway?  Why do we focus so much attention on comfort?  Up here in the Andes comfort is not the same thing that we seek at home.  At home in the states, comfort would be a house at the perfect temperature for sleeping, a meal cooked with ingredients from around the world, a cat on the lap.

Here in the paramo, comfort is laying down after two hours hiking, having clean underwear and fleece socks, raiding a dwindling chocolate stash.  But even some of these comforts are beyond the reach of most of the people that live here.  For the alpaca herder over the hill, comfort is sitting down with a cup of coffee-flavored sugar water around an open-pit fire in the middle of a soot-darkened, dirt floored kitchen.  And what is comfort for the alpaca that he herds?  Perhaps comfort for them is sitting on a particularly spongy bit of turf on a dry night after a week without rain.  The alpacas’ ancestors evolved in parts of the Andes that are much drier than Ecuador.  Wet winters kill alpaca here.  I can’t imagine laying outside all night with four inches of wet fur hanging off me and the temperature dropping to near freezing.  No wonder they die.

Seeking out comfort surely has an evolutionary advantage – a warm, dry place to sleep is certainly better for survival than a sleepless night in a cold swamp.  But comfort must have its limits.  How many machines do we need to make our life easier and more comfortable?  How close to the perfect temperature do our houses have to be?  Do we always need to be surrounded by music at all hours of the day?  Do we really need to be dry for every minute of our life that we’re not swimming or bathing?

“Be careful not to confuse comfort with happiness,” I once read.  I’ve remembered that quote for a long time, but I don’t remember the source.  Up here in our paramo camp those words come back like the clouds that blow in suddenly and obscure everything from view, chilling you to the core when they come in the evening.

Morning has come now, and the mountains across from camp are floating on a sea of silver.  I’m still cold, but it just doesn’t matter.

“Be careful not to confuse comfort with happiness.” is a quote I heard years ago, and since hearing it I have always aspired to live by it and to regularly try to measure my life by it.  So the other day it was interesting to have that quote brought to my mind again when I was watching a TED talk by Matthieu Ricard, a buddhist monk who gave up molecular biology for buddhism and moved to Tibet decades ago. Matthieu Ricard has since written numerous books about happiness and started several non-profits dedicated to helping less fortunate people in the Himalayan region.  His talk is beautiful and inspiring, and it made me think of a slightly different way that you could think of that quote…

“Be careful not to confuse pleasure with happiness.”

But coming back to where I started…  one of the things that I’ve always appreciated about Buddhism is its effort to remove the importance of the material world in order to achieve happiness.  Comfort is part of that material world that we are always seeking – myself included – and yet I’ve found it to be surprisingly unrelated to happiness (most of the time).   In most sects of Buddhism, after learning to disconnect from the material world,  they teach that you should go out and use that knowledge to help others.  That has clearly been Matthieu Ricard’s goal.  Here is his talk that got me thinking about all this again…

This video won’t embed, so here is the link to the talk:

Matthieu Ricard on the habits of happiness