Hiking a Mountain

Between giving an all-day workshop on Thursday and holding an 800-person event on Sunday, this week at work was one of the busiest of the year. I went home early twice and still managed to put in overtime.

Saturday was my one day to myself.

So what did I do?

Hiked a mountain.

Because relaxing is for the sane.

Stratton Mountain is a premier skiing resort in New England. It stands at an elevation of 3,940 feet with a prominence of 2,410 feet. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes for me to climb, which I am quite happy with for my first mountain. But it also gives you an idea of why I decided to spend my Saturday climbing it; it's not that big.

However, it is quite beautiful, as evidenced by these views.

Toward Bromley Mountain.

View from the summit.

As anyone who knows me might imagine, I was terribly excited to climb my first mountain. The exhilaration of nature!

I'm sure I looked like a tourist holding my camera, telling everyone I met that, "This is my first time up a mountain!" No one was impressed. I didn't care. The excited Minnesotan me couldn't help it! It's flat where I come from, people. FLAT!

I nearly ran up the fire tower at the top... until I realized that I hate heights and the wind was a-rockin' that thing. At which point I proceeded very cautiously and with great fear. But then this:

Panoramic view from the top of the fire tower.

After a brief lecture on how one usually climbs a mountain "with a buddy," one man was nice enough to offer to take a picture of me at the top of the tower just to, "prove that I did it."

PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN.

Now I need to make myself a punch card and climb Bromley, Magic, Equinox, and Aescutney. After that, who knows where these two legs will take me?

My First Mushroom Hunt

My cultivation of oyster mushroom has paid off!

I went on my first mushroom hunt today.

I felt a little silly running around the woods like a kid in a candy store all on my lonesome, but that's what I was. A kid in a candy store (where candy means mushrooms and store means forest).

I can currently only identify two kinds of mushrooms: shiitakes and oysters. I gained this knowledge over the summer cultivating mushrooms at Herbal Turtle Farms. I was fairly sure that if I stuck to these two kinds of mushrooms I wouldn't poison anybody, but it was still no guarantee I was going to find anything edible. After all, I don't really know what grows here.

But the search was on!

I came across these on two dead logs.

These beauties are white oyster mushrooms.

Perhaps 'beauties' is the wrong term because they're awfully dirty and rain soaked, but I love them because I foraged them.

Now I can check wild mushroom hunting off my 'become a true mountain woman' list. It's a long list, but this is a delicious start.

How Fracking Gave Me Faith in Democracy

I'm probably the first one to jump on the bandwagon of apathy toward democracy and the democratic process in this county. So many of us are disillusioned with a system that we perceive as running more on the interests of lobbies and power-mongering politicians than the concerns of the public. Our voices seemingly drown in the Mariana Trench of money and red tape that is Washington.

But not all democracy runs this deep, as it were. I'm here to tell you that, yes, in fact: local democracy works.

I'm from a small-town community in Southeast Minnesota called St. Charles. I didn't like living in a town of 3,500 people as an angsty teenager. No surprise there. Nothing cool ever happens in a town that small.

Downtown St. Charles, city-data.com

Then the citizens of St. Charles successfully shot down a frac-sand mining company and the mayor who adamantly supported them.

Admittedly not the sort of thing that's 'cool' by the standards of angsty teens, but very inspiring for a fresh college graduate thinking that the entire political world had gone down the crapper and there was nothing to be done about it.

Fracking is essentially a method of mining natural gas or oil deposits from bedrock. A mix of sand and chemicals is pumped at a very high pressure into a well, riddling the rock with minute fractures from which gas, oil, or other compounds can then seep out.

Click here for more info if you're more of a reading kind of person.

Click here for more info if you're more of a video kind of person.

The cost of fracking in terms of natural resources and the health of those living in the mining area is enormous. It drains wells, lowing the water table. It pumps toxins, carcinogens, and radioactive material into the groundwater. Plus, the gas that doesn't get brought to the surface leeches into the groundwater.

People then drink this water.

Video: Fraking Hell: The Untold Story

Are our energy needs more important than the water we drink?

My town didn't think so.

Minnesota Proppant, a company that mines the specific size and shape of sand needed for fracking, wanted to set up a large operation in the St. Charles Township, one mile outside of the high school. The mayor was eager to accept the proposal to create new jobs in the town, especially after the North Star Foods plant which was a major employer in town burnt down in 2009.

The kind of sand needed for fracking, minnesota.publicradio.org

I don't mean to suggest that the town blamed the mayor for wanting to bring us new jobs. We just plain didn't want to see our town turned from a sleepy, friendly place to raise a family into a hotspot for mining. We didn't want the enormous amount of truck traffic. We didn't want our state park to be ruined. We didn't want damaging silica particles released into the air for the town and school to breath. We didn't want our drinking water ruined.

We wanted our health and our community. Plain and simple.

So one committed citizen, Travis Lange, spearheaded a campaign to tell the local government that.

Awareness was raised, petitions were signed, documents were presented to town officials.

Predictably, they were ignored.

Town gossip had it that the mayor was ignoring the wishes of the community in order to cut a deal with the company and line his own pockets. Whether or not that happened to be the case, the voice of the town was getting drown by words like "money," "jobs," and "industry." Not bad in themselves, but bad when the cost is health and happiness.

But get this: as the town continued to voice its opposition to the facility, the local government gave in.

"[Mayor] Spitzer said the city's relationship with the township of St. Charles was too important for the council to consider the idea of annexation," as the Post Bulletin reports. The company's proposal was shot down by the town committee with a unanimous vote against frac-sand mining.

And suddenly democracy worked as it should. People came together as a community and spoke up, utilizing democratic tools like petitions. A town official listened to the community because he was afraid of making enemies and being voted out of office.

It was the first time I was ever proud of my hometown. Frac-sand mining, one of the things I find environmentally repugnant, brought my community together and gave democracy back to the people.

Who knows of democracy on a national scale is too large to ever be effective in the way it's meant to be, but who cares? Care enough about what's going on in your immediate vicinity, and you can change things. It's not longer the fantasy of idealistic do-gooders. It's the real world. First, care about the quality of your life and the lives of those around you. Then, speak up. Perhaps not always easy, but always simple.

Remember, you can only eat an elephant one bite at a time.

The Thing About Roads

Aldo Leopold writes in "The River of the Mother of God" that wilderness is destroyed by our love for unexplored places and good roads.

Maybe that's why all the roads in Southern Vermont are terrible and the trees so magnificent.

You see, I just moved to beautiful Londonderry, Vermont. From Minnesota.

And Minnesota may not be as flat as Iowa, but we're flat enough. And our roads may not be the best, but they're good enough. Here it's the mountains, the Appalachian trail, Green Mountain National Forest, and the worst roads I have ever seen.

I learned this while driving my boss's new car from work back to my temporary place of residence.

I'd only been in the passenger seat of a car for this drive. Once. That morning. I had a map, but I've never been good with directions. 

"Even if you get lost, my husband left enough gas in the car that you won't run out driving around in circles," she said.

So as she, her husband, and the owners of the house I currently reside in drove off for the weekend, I was left to stumble my way through the fifteen minute drive to relaxation and dinner. I turned out of the office parking lot and onto my private maze of winding mountain roads.

Relaxation, dinner, and a lake view through floor to ceiling windows.

I made it through the first turn without a hitch. I could recall that much from my trip into the office.

Maybe this wouldn't be so bad if I could manage to keep the speed steady over all the ups and downs of the mountain.

I went straight past turn two. Cross the bridge first and then turn. 

Backtrack to turn two after pulling out from a blind drive, but don't even manage to spot turn three. I was positive I was going the wrong way again when I came across some road construction that hadn't been there in the morning. Back to turn two.

Feel the car bump under me. Hope the tire doesn't get caught in a huge crack and pull me into the ditch.

But, no, I had been going the right way. Squeeze past the construction crew on a narrow road with no trace of shoulder.

I think I almost went into shock when I came on turn four and made it first try.

Go slow on the gravel. Watch out for those deer!

Then it was down the wrong driveway. And down the wrong driveway agai-- Wait! That was it.

Park the car. Be happy at getting only more than slightly lost.



I'm making a virtue of a necessity while I'm here and trying to prove that you don't need a car to get around in rural America. It's not going to be easy living on two feet and borrowed wheels in a town of 1,700 people. But it's good for the environment, good for my health, and good for the wilderness. It's going to be one hell of a walk.