Namibia's Magnificent Beast

Oh dear: Rudi has thrown another wobbly. This time his tantrum is directed at a folding canvas bush chair that he is booting across the African desert. "Why can’t one goddamn bastard of a thing ever work as simply as it could?" he howls to no one in particular. The rest of us scrape stew from our bowls and watch the Southern Cross hover in the starry chaos. We have walked 125 miles across Namibia in the past ten days. We’re used to this. We make sure Rudi is nowhere near his shotgun. Someone pries open a tin of guava halves and we eat dessert.

It was meant to be a simple walk. Rudi Loutit, an African of French and Scottish parentage, worked this desert as a park ranger and wildlife researcher for three decades—a tenure that began 15 years before Namibia’s independence in 1990. Along with his late wife, Blythe, he founded Save the Rhino Trust (SRT), and their work has helped stall the black rhinoceros’s free fall toward extinction, a fate that 20 years ago seemed all but certain. Now at age 64, with the rhino population stabilizing and the Namibian government on the verge of declaring a vast chunk of habitat a permanently protected park, Rudi—a sort of Ed Abbey, Jane Goodall, and Crocodile Dundee combo—got the idea to go for a hike.

Read the whole story at National Geographic Adventure. Photo by Per-Anders Pettersson

New York Times: Owyhee River

AS a young man drifting in desert, I acquired a valuable bit of wisdom: when you come across a cave, you should go inside, and, if possible, spend the night. This chestnut has served me well through the years, and came in handy this spring, when my friends and I were on another of the haphazard, marginally safe expeditions that we undertake each year when the West’s sudden snowmelt floods its valleys with cold current.

• • •

At the Three Forks launch ramp, after a couple of hours of drinking beer and bouncing across dirt roads, we concluded that the raft was overloaded and jettisoned some supplies. Items that remained on the raft included an iron-wrought set of regulation horseshoes, two bottles of top-shelf bourbon, a small cedar chest of Brazilian cigars, and a 94-quart ice chest packed with five cases of beer. Items left behind in the truck were fleece jackets, paddling gloves and my tent. Photos by Jeff Pflueger.

Read the full story.

Walt Whitman with a Handyman Jack

Or something like that. Photos by Aaron Fallon.

The West Will Rise Again

The March issue of Outside Magazine runs my story on the Udall family: former secretary of Interior Stewart Udall, his son Tom and his nephew Mark. Both Mark and Tom are US congressmen, running for Senate in 2008 in New Mexico and Colorado, respectively.

At right, photo of Stewart Udall by Kurt Markus.

LIKE THE BEST AMERICAN SAGAS, this one begins on the Mississippi River.

David King Udall was born in St. Louis in 1851 to English immigrants venturing upriver from New Orleans. Mormon converts, they had been called to forge a holy civilization in the West, so they crossed the ungrazed grasses of Nebraska in wagons pulled by oxen. "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them," said the Book of Isaiah, "and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as a rose."

Baby David made the journey in swaddling clothes. The child who would one day sire a political dynasty peered out from his bonnet as the wagon train climbed the jagged Rockies and descended into Brigham Young's settlement on the Great Salt Lake. He would indeed make the desert blossom, ingrained as he was with a belief that the land's bounty was to be nurtured and shared. As a teenager, David caught a man drawing water from the town canal out of turn. "He and I had words and finally came to a hand-to-hand tussle," he wrote later, "in which it happened that I, being a husky youngster, threw the fellow into a deep hole in the ditch."

Read the rest here.

The Dropout In Your Inbox

The October issue of The Believer runs my true account of my metamorphosis from desert dropout to blogger on the Howard Dean presidential campaign, and subsequent pandemonium. Drawing by Tony Millionaire.
Sorry: the comments section is broken, and I don't know how to fix Moveable Type.

The Ballad of Route 89

I have a new story about driving 1700 miles from Canada to Mexico on a two-lane highway in the April issue of National Geographic Adventure. It's online here. Plus a radio interview with me on National Geographic World Talk and a photo gallery by Jeff Pflueger.

Freedom is Your Way!

My story on wandering the Crimean coast of the Black Sea is in the April issue of Men's Journal. It's not online. Here's an excerpt:
Sure, the stinking heaps were a bummer, but ultimately they’d be easier to remedy than the condos, refineries and freeways that blight California. And more to the point: the Ukrainians just cast off the shackles of almost a century of dictatorship. Let them throw a little trash. Go ahead, drive your Lata onto the beach, slip into your banana hammock, start a bonfire, take a dump in the sand, crank up the techno and chuck a bottle out the window. One definition of freedom is simply breaking the rules and doing whatever the hell you want.
Update: This story is now online at Andrew McGarry Photography with many great photographs.
Photo by Andrew McGarry.

New York Times Magazine: The Big-Sky Dem

Check the New York Times Magazine of October 8 for my profile of Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer. Photo by Catherine Ledner for The New York Times

It’s fun being governor of Montana. Just watch Brian Schweitzer bouncing around the streets of Helena in the passenger seat of the state’s official S.U.V., fumbling with wires, trying to stick the flashing police light on the roof. When he spots some legislators on the sidewalk, he blasts them with the siren, then summons them by name on the loudspeaker. The men jump, and the governor tumbles out of the car, doubled in laughter, giving everyone a bear hug or a high-five or a soft slap on the cheek. Schweitzer, a Democrat in his first term, marches into a barroom in blue jeans and cowboy boots and a beaded bolo tie, and his border collie, Jag, leaps out of the vehicle and follows him in. The governor throws back a few pints of the local brew and introduces himself to everyone in the place, down to the servers and a small girl stuck there with her parents. He takes time from the backslapping to poach cubes of cheese from the snack platter and sneak them to the girl, who is now chasing his dog around the bar. “This is how you make friends with Jag,” he advises her. “Just hold it in your hand and let him take it.”

New York Times: Avalanche Country

Photo by Bonny Makarowicz.

From the New York Times, Sunday November 19.

"ARE you skiers?” asked the desk clerk at the Best Western. When we said yes, she explained that they had certain rules: no skis in the rooms, no beer bottles in the pool area, no bare feet anywhere in the hotel. Lastly, and this one she stressed with the weariness particular to a service employee required to enforce such a rule: lastly, there will be no cooking in the rooms.

My friend Jason Munzke and I had come a long way for this, a couple hundred miles up Highway 95 from Idaho to Rogers Pass in Glacier National Park in British Columbia, looking for what some call the best backcountry ski terrain in North America. “Anything past Kicking Horse, that’s new territory for me,” said Munzke as we sped toward the Kicking Horse Mountain Resort.

We climbed the big valleys of the Canadian Rockies, steep white peaks rising up on either side and creamy puffs of smoke drifting up from the pulp mill at Skookumchuck.

The Coldest Ride

Surfing in Alaska, from the November issue of Outside Magazine. Photos by Stephen Ziegler. Here's an excerpt:

JUST AFTER DAWN one morning, Fletcher and I are bouncing down a dirt road in a big rented Chevy truck, looking for waves. The windshield is a web of cracks, and the heater doesn't work, so we roll down the windows to defog.

As I drive, he doesn't talk about his family, his surfing, his sponsors, or anything else. We establish that we both live in trailers, his a double-wide in Orange County and mine a single-wide in Utah, and then we drive in silence, bumping across rocks and puddles to the slap-slap of the windshield wipers.

"How thick is that wetsuit?" I say.

"Thick."

Nathan Fletcher is 30, but by the lines on his weathered face you'd think he was older. He has a hardened yet innocent look, like a mug shot of a teen idol. He retreats into his hood. Maybe he's asleep. After a while he stirs and fumbles for his smokes.

"Want a cigarette?" he says.

"Sure."

We emerge from the forest and follow a sandy two-track out onto the beach. There on a gnarled stump is perched a bald eagle, its head the size of a softball. We watch it. We're on a glassy bay, mist rising from the evergreens and glaciers off in the distance inching toward the sea.

"Eagle," he says.

Read the whole thing at Outside.