There it was, corralled behind a thin rope inside a grassy expanse at Redwood Acres: the retired figure-conscious logger’s dreambike. No, nothing noisy or fume-spewing, chrome-boasting or rubber-laying – those kinds of bikes are for sissies. This was a deceptively delicate, spindly blond wood affair, stationary, with the playful look of an old Flexible Flyer© […]
Life + Outdoors
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Wilderness Rx
As I gaze back over the 15 odd "Off The Pavement" articles I have penned for the Journal, it would seem one big theme has emerged. I might define my overall interpretation of them as something like, the necessity of being outside.So if this theme has appealed to you, then you are in luck. This […]
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Bypass the State
My dad told me in 1956 that the Willits bypass would not be built in his lifetime. He died in 1980. Now it appears the bypass may not be built in my lifetime. Last Wednesday (Feb. 28) the California Transportation Commission derailed a $177 million funding plan for the bypass and gave that money to […]
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In the Dark
The power in Garberville first went off Tuesday morning, probably around 10 a.m. Within a half hour, the power had been restored. Then, shortly after 11, we lost it again, and this time it was gone for 28 hours. The PG&E hotline was scant on details, stating only that the outage was caused by "winter […]
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In the Dark (II)
It will always amuse me that people who live in a temperate rain forest are seemingly never prepared for what pours down from a February sky. As often happens on the North Coast at this time of year, our power went out on a particularly stormy afternoon last week, and wasn’t restored until two days […]
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Taming the Wildearth
In this ongoing series of Humboldt County gardeners telling it like it is, Eureka gardener and landscape designer Donna Wildearth (right) has stepped up to bat. She owns Garden Visions Landscape Design and she teaches at College of the Redwoods. "Between my business and my teaching," she says, "I feel happily immersed in the world […]
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Trinity Alps Rambles
When some of us think of the Alps, we envision long waits in our cars as fire crews remove logs that have trundled hundreds of feet down to the 299 from blackened hillsides that lead up to the vertiginous slopes of the remote Wilderness Area. What the uninitiated don’t know is that the Alps are […]
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Sunshine, Symbols and Remembrance
The sun came out Monday and everybody seemed drunk on it. Down in town, in Arcata, a man in one backyard had pulled off his shirt to bare his muscled pale arms to the warmth. A woman in her garden was in a tank top. Everyone dangled jackets and sweaters under their arms as they […]
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Scourge of the gophers
Welcome to the second in a series of interviews with Humboldt County gardeners. Today’s chatty gardener is Janet Sclar. She’s been gardening in Hydesville for six years, and she works as a farmer’s market vendor and does customer service and web design for her husband’s mail-order nursery business, Amity Heritage Roses. What’s the best thing […]
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Horse Mountain Snow Sense
You have got chains, right, Ben?" We had skipped town again, this time with cross-country skis, to take advantage of the recent cold snap — finally a benefit to the omnipresent Humboldt County winter precipitation. The joy of writing an outdoor column is that you always have a handy excuse to escape, nearly guilt-free, and […]
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About a Worm
A mid last week’s news that the fed-eral government has mandated in-stallation of fish ladders as a condition of the government’s relicensing of PacifiCorp’s Klamath dams, some of the region’s top fisheries scientists gathered in Fortuna to talk about a worm. They met for two days to swap information about a tiny, translucent, squid-shaped class […]
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Moon on You
Well, shall we start with the moon? It hovered, just past full, at the far end of the long corridors between rows of Old Town buildings, lighting up alleys and casting blue tones onto the already lamp-lit streets. You’d walk alongside one old brick edifice – perhaps darting inside to check out an art exhibit, […]