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 […]
Life + Outdoors
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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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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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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, […]
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Humboldt Gardeners in Their Own Words, Part 1
This is the first in a series of Q&As with Humboldt County gardeners. Eureka’s Gisela Rohde of Eureka kicks it off. She’s lived in Humboldt County for 27 years and has been at her current garden for five and a half years. When I asked her how she’d like to characterize her occupation or avocation, […]
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Do You Hear What I Hear?
A strange phenomenon descended upon the Arcata Community Center Saturday morning as the fourth weekend of youth basketball got underway. It was … quiet. Once, when play ceased on both courts, there was a moment of pure, breath-holding silence. It was downright eerie. Sure, during each game you could hear the players calling to each […]
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Lost Coast Triology: Part Three
If you really desire to fall of the map, head down to Sinkyone State Park. It has an almost mythical quality to it, starting with the drive in. From the north, narrow paved roads give way to one lane of dirt a few miles from the rustic visitor’s center at Needle Rock. The muddy strip […]
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Loud Pavement
On a clear and breezy Friday around rush hour, Gerridina "Dinie" Lean was finishing the last of the day’s chores. The sun was beginning its descent behind the hills and a few more horses still needed to be fed. On Lean’s 42-acre Tompkins Hill ranch in Fortuna about a mile from Highway 101, the Ferndale […]
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White Pavement
Fhyre Phoenix awoke in the middle of the night, brain ablaze. He had an idea for saving the world! Again. But this time, he thought, the solution was one that ordinary citizens could enact with ease. There was just one minor, niggling obstacle. So let’s hark back to where it all began: in the letters […]
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Getting to Know You
Spring is the worst time to leave a garden, but that’s what I’m about to do. My publisher is sending me on a mad dash across the country from February through April, with just a few short stops at home to catch my breath and do my laundry. I’ll be on the road talking about […]