February 2012
11 posts
The Famous Origins of Rotarun Ski Area
In 1964 my grandpa Art and his buddies drafted the bylaws of the Rotarun Ski Club for the purposes of founding a community ski hill in Croy Canyon outside Hailey, Idaho. The men were granted a 99-year lease from the local tycoon, J. George Arkoosh, who owned the land upon which the small mountain sits. Arkoosh owned the Comet Mine, and the Tulenide No. 1 Mine, and a department store.
Land...
Cuisine d'altitude: Sauerkraut
Robin went to brunch, so Max and I snapped into action and started brewing five gallons of sauerkraut. Max and I have a backlog of ill-conceived projects to accomplish. Whenever Robin goes to a movie, or to fancy brunch, we watch her through the Venetian blinds as her car disappears over the horizon and then we set to work building homemade barbecue smokers, pipe rests, and blueprints for...
WatchSlope Report: Mt. Hood Meadows
It snowed four inches overnight and snowed an inch an hour all day. It was strange, rimed snow. It was fast and drifted and I couldn’t get a feel for it. The light was poor and the wind was howling. I skied in Heather Canyon and on the Starlighter side. The mountain had an unfriendly feeling. At moments the air at the top of the canyon was sickly strong with fumerole...
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Cuisine d'altitude: Curried Chocolate Cake
I baked Robin one of my famous curried chocolate cakes in my small dutch oven for valentines day. The cake is curried with whiskey and jalapenos and cardamom and cinnamon. Robin’s eyes winced and watered when she tasted the cake. From love, she said, not from the hot peppers and whiskey.
I do not bother with top-shelf bourbons that purport to have smooth or drinkable properties. I...
Trip Report: Gunpowder Crk. Hot Springs
Me and Max woke up with an itch to hike to Gunpowder Crk. Hotsprings to soak in an ancient cedar log inside an ancient cedar forest.
Don’t go looking for Gunpowder Crk. Hotsprings. I manufactured the name Gunpowder Crk. Htsprngs. to hide the site from you and to ensure me and Max do not catch sight of your unsightly naked body at Gunpowder Crk. next weekend.
Max becomes inordinately...
Cuisine d'altitude: Ski Queen Meatballs
When I was visiting with aunt Liz last weekend I happened to casually mention my recent interest in Ski Queen cheese. Then aunt Liz said, “oh yeah, Ski Queen” and she pulled a recipe for Ski Queen Meat Balls out of her buckskin fanny pack. When I was young and reading a lot of Paramahansa Yogananda this sort of miracle would happen to me all the time. I could hardly take a step...
Book Review: Aunt Liz Went Dog Sledding!
If I was at a party in a Woody Allen film and someone asked me about my literary influences I would tell them about a book my aunt Liz made for me when I was a small boy entitled Aunt Liz Went Dog Sledding!
Liz lived many years in a miniature village called Kotzebue, Alaska, above the arctic circle. This is what it is like this time of year in Kotzebue. It is -29 degrees and the day lasts 3...
Trip Report: Home Pasture
Me and my sister traveled to Idaho, which is our natural home, to invigorate our health and to visit our large and fascinating family. Max and Robin and Levi waved goodbye from the door of our little house in Oregon. We were sad we would not see them for a few days.
I am known to get a stupid and wild glint in my eye when I enter into Idaho and come upon a slope of Idaho’s quick, arid snow....
Trip Report: Sandy River Steelheading
I finished my chores early so I took myself to Bi-Mart to buy a 2012 Oregon fishing license and a Salmon-Steelhead-Sturgeon tag. To celebrate getting my license and tag, I took myself to the Sandy River to work on catching a steelhead, the most pure and athletic fish in all god’s creation. The Sandy River was named by Lewis & Clark. By the time Lewis & Clark got to the Sandy River they...
January 2012
27 posts
Cuisine d'altitude: Dutch Oven Focaccia
Bread making is especially puzzling to the young set. The amount of work required to make it, and the absurd lengths of time needed for kneading, proofing, rising, etc. make it a kissing cousin to bygone time killers like quilting—religating it mostly to religious families, hobbyists, and fearsome folkies like Ronnie Gilbert. The French realized centuries ago they could buy bread at the...
Sandy Glacier Crevasse, Mt. Hood
This is the bergschrund under the Sandy Glacier Headwall I suppose. Or a gigantic crevasse near about. I don’t know what lodge the photo makes reference to unless Timberline is meant. Maybe the Wy’east Climbers Cabin, which was maintained by the Nile River Yacht Club, which was a ski club, naturally.
Cuisine d'altitude: Seasoning Your Dutch Oven
If you’re the bewildered owner of a copy of my dutch oven cookbook, The Dutch Lovin’ Cookbook by Ian Harris, you probably know that the better part of all the avowals I’ve ever made about sturdy & proper cast iron cooking are a pile of horse. Indeed I wrote that book as a way of putting you off the scent.
Let me remind you that cast iron cookery and sourdough-keeping and...
Slope Report: Heather Canyon
Mt. Hood put on the robes of a powerful wizard and kept a puff of clouds gathered around its mystical shape all morning. I skied all the normal places, which were suffering from flat light and a deceptive fur of spindrift. I took a couple spills. A couple times I stopped in the pines to pee and to ask myself if I was really having a good time?
I responded to myself with a normal retort:...
WatchI built this roomy wilderness to go next to the campaign season.
WatchSlope Report: Mt. Hood Meadows. 4 inches new maritime snow on top of 100 inches base. Cold. Bright. Total cruiser. Mood: balearic/spiritual.
Slope Sighting: Waldorf mom and son wearing itchy sweaters, day-glo safety vests, bike helmets, yard-sale skis, and big smiles.
Film Review: The Hunt for Red October
Barroom-like submarine interiors; long moments waiting for torpedos to whir harmlessly past; crew, shiny from sweat, smoking cigarettes in the robotic lights of the control room; resonant sound of metal touching metal underwater, etc.
“My grandpa taught me to fish off that little island over there,” Alec Baldwin says to Sean Connery, nodding to a dark nose of land poking into a moon-dazzled bay....
Cuisine d'altitude: 8" Dutch Oven Reviewed
My kind parents gave me an old 8 inch dutch oven for Christmas that I’ve been eager to put into play. I made an apple pie to test its mettle. We had a stew going in the family 12 inch dutch so it was no problem to put a little apple pie to bake on top of it.
It doesn’t bear a maker’s mark. Probably old Cee Dub could I.D. this dutch from a trotting pack mule saddle at a...
Cuisine d'altitude: Ski Queen Cheese Reviewed
While my yuppie friends were sucking each other off at New Seasons, I was filling my cart sky high with cut-rate Sugar Bomb cereal at Winco. As I arrived a team of EMTs was shoving a dead shopper into their ambulance.
If you are one of my yuppie friends and shop at New Seasons, you don’t know about how Winco is like going down in the mine as it were. There’s a lot of slag to be...
WatchHippy turns!!!
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Yeasted Beer and Sour Cream Waffles
This morning Max popped out of bed when the sun was brushing its teeth. He whispered into my ear, “let’s make mom some waffles. shhh.” “My Famous Yeasted Beer and Sour Cream Waffles?” I said. “Shhh,” Max whispered, “yep, the yeasted beer ones.” “Let’s wake up the yeast,” he said.
We tip toed into the kitchen and woke up the yeast with a splash of warm water and brown sugar. “The yeast...
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Trip Report: Tilly Jane Deep Country
Matthew invited me to the Tilly Jane whereabouts for some dudes-only deep country skiing. I was excited to go. I packed my stuff and went to bed early. I dreamed about a mountain as big as the Ritz except it was fashioned out of Neptune-blue ice instead of it being a diamond.
I woke up at 4 a.m. and was at the Tilly Jane trailhead before the sunrise. I did some quick versions of old fashioned...
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Trip Report: Powell Butte Night Party
Max and me and Levi spent the day together while Robin was dealing coffee beans in her glassy office. The morning part was basically a normal dude party. We watched lurid TV shows, ate snacks but no meals, and did some ill-advised projects.
After our naps we felt pretty restless. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked. “Happy Meals?” Max replied. “No, not Happy Meals. Powell Butte. Let’s...
Not a Lost Shatter of Sunlight
All of a sudden it occurred to me that our two sons, Max and Levi, had not visited the great monuments of our family: Zahnor Edwards Park, the Great Shed of Grandpa Art, the Famous Slope of Rotarun, nor the Birthplace of the Father of Modernism, Ezra Pound. It is around the holidays that I well up with sentiment and desire to point out the marks our grand family–and the Modernists–made on the...
New Mexican Winter Egg Pie
I think quiches are really old fashioned and sturdy things and that is why I like to make them. Except I like to say they’re egg pies instead of quiches. After you’ve said “quiche” a few times you get pretty tired of it. You could say casserole. That’s hard to wear out. Or egg pie, like I do. I feel compelled to make egg pies because of the eggs Zelda lays, which are magic eggs. The yolks of...
How Illumination Point Got Its Name
Illumination Point, 9,500 ft., on southwestern face of Mt. Hood
In 1885, to pass the Fourth of July, a group comprising the Oregon Alpine Club made it their sworn duty to “illuminate” Mt. Hood with “red fire,” which I presume was a kind of flare powder. The try of 1885 failed since their “system of clock work and acids” was tampered with by an avalanche, causing the whole load of explosive...
A Woman Alone In a Pool Is In Fact Alone Within...
There was a time when you could hardly spit without hitting a french film that didn’t include a scene wherein the heroine swims laps in a dark swimplex, the water lit from within. Ordinarily the heroine is under some kind of powerful familial distress and is swimming as a way of ‘drowning out’ the roar of her situation as it were. Also it is presumed she is swimming–like one of Joan Didion’s...
The Maurers Visit Oregon in 1940
The Maurers visited Oregon in 1940. Notably, they
pulled fitful silver trout from Lost Lake
looked upon stupifying Columbia R. Gorge at Women’s Forum or thereabouts
lodged themselves in cluster of cabins; enjoyed healthful effects of alpine climate
stood dreamily on beach at Manzanita or thereabouts; dug clams halfheartedly; poked around wrecked, masted ship
ran in sunshine (young girl,...
Mt. Hood, 1938
Used to be Mt. Hood had a summit shack on it. I watched a documentary about the New York Cosmos FC last night. Sometimes it’s normal to think the past is out-dated. It’s not.
Had We Lived
This is a difficult thing to understand.
The S. Pole is a howling expanse. You have to use a sextant to understand you’ve arrived at it. These guys had been mushing for months and months and months over territory entirely indistinguishable from that of the S. Pole.
“This is the fucking South Pole?!” Amundsen must have secretly thought to himself. “At least there should be some small stone...
The Glow of the Holidays
You know when you’re in the office and you’re like, “well Johnson, it’s a good thing you finished that spreadsheet last week or we’d be in a heap of trouble!” and then you notice a strange tremor pass over Johnson’s face and then you go on to say, “you DID finish that spreadsheet didn’t you?” It was in this manner that I found out that Robin has always sincerely and secretly coveted those little...
Warbonnet Peak vs. My Teen Self
My hiking companions know that I’m quick to complain about the stifling forests of western oregon, with their mushroom infested, close hewn firs and ferns and deep greens giving onto other deep greens. Sometimes they will know me to mutter on about the bright white granite sand of the Sawtooth Range, which I consider to be my home range. Here is Warbonnet Peak, the tooth right of center,...
Midday Midwinter
Midday Midwinter. E.A. Wilson 1902
Today is the Winter Solstice. The fulcrum day. This haunting watercolor was made in the field on notebook paper by Edward Adrian Wilson in 1902 on the British Discovery Expedition with Robert Falcon Scott. That expedition traveled closer to the s. pole than any before it.
Sun. 22 June. Today is our actual midnight, the day on which the sun gives us least...
A Visit From the Christmas Mole
After I got home from skiing I set to work on a mole, which is not a small thing to undertake. I was reading some Diana Kennedy the other day, the grande dame of regional Mexican cuisines. She is mostly impenetrable owing to her poor writing. Which is a shame because her project has been one of the most adventurous and noteworthy anthropological endeavors of all time in my opinion. If she had...
Trip Report: Normal Beauty, Mt. Hood Meadows
Sun Valley has something like 2,000 skiable acres and 4,000 feet of vertical. That’s huge. And it’s crawling with posh people. One time I walked into the River Run lodge to get a band aid and Jodie Foster was wiggling her toes in front of the riverstone fireplace.
And the snow is crisp and dry and steep and generally the skier’s experience is world class. But skiing on Mt. Hood, a major...
A Beer Happenstance
When I was skiing today, I saw a small twinkle in the sky. It was a beer that someone accidentally dropped from the chairlift. I skied over to the beer. I picked it up and put it in my pocket. Then I skinned up a small ridge and found a vista to look out onto while I drank the beer. Who am I to turn my nose up at a beer that fell from the sky?
I started a blog today
Instead of cleaning the house, me and Max made some rings out of pipe cleaners and started a blog.