Occupation of Independence

 Here I am again at the edge of a plateau-like mountain , at the end of summer, and at the border between the inland northwest and southwest in northern Utah .  As usual, hunting season is about to begin.  Surprisingly, I rather like hunters as camping neighbors, probably because they don't make gunfire sounds very often and they drive so slowly! Still, I try to escape camping neighbors.  Physical obstacles can be used as screening devices, but in this case I almost screened myself out.  Sometimes, it's a game of inches. I had to back out of this mess.  It was pure dumb luck that I made it. Oh sure, there are lots of golden aspen at 8200 feet of altitude at this time of year: But this sort of thing is best left to weekender-leaf-peepers and RV newbies .  My main interest is the last copse , on the left side of the photo: For years I fluttered my eyelashes at this last lonely and forlorn copse of aspen, on the edge of the plateau before it descended...

The last few years I have watched myself become indifferent to "spectacular" red rock tourist scenery and desert scenery of the type that northern snowbirds coo over.  In contrast I have become intensely appreciative of clouds, rain, soil, grasslands , and trees with leaves.    This is reassuring.  We could think of our ageing-selves as large and old trees, with only a thin layer on the outer diameter made of living cells.  The vast interior is just "dead wood."  But we still have the living cells! All of this is a preamble to today's post.  Driving south and east in Idaho I revisited a favorite canyon -- favorite because it is a Vermont wannabee . People who don't live in the intermountain West probably don't realize how appreciative you can become of real trees, rather than the monotonous bark-and-needle type. Elk season starts in a couple days.  The deer can still afford to be brave: We are on the northern edge of red rock Utah .  A...

 I rewatched the movie, " Gandhi ," recently.  It certainly was an uplifting movie, even if a bit too hagiographic for my tastes.  After watching the movie and perhaps reading Tolstoy  or Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," you might be tempted to wonder why such ideas have not been tried more often in human history. But we should not forget that Gandhi's methods were partly successful because they were employed against the British Empire , and Britain had a culture of late Victorian idealists and moralists.  What if his methods had been used against Hitler ?  Hitler has been quoted as wondering why the Brits simply didn't kill Gandhi.  Or imagine Gandhi's methods being used against the Roman Empire, etc. Gandhi's Salt March How successful would a Palestinian Gandhi be against the murderous Zionist regime of Netanyahu?  That gets to the point of today's post: what is going to happen to the Gaza Aid Flotilla , currently near Tunisia , I believe?...

  Southeastern Idaho .  Once again I want to write about other outdoorsmen being charming.  They deserve the compliment.  My little dog and I were biking towards another celltower mountain.  We were surrounded by grand ridges of sagebrush, volcanic rocks, and isolated copses of yellowing aspens.   I noticed a familiar pickup truck parked along the side of a dirt road that was becoming so steep that I needed to rest, anyway.  So we looked around for a man.  There he was, on the sagebrush ridge, with a beautiful young German Short-haired Pointer .  He had her half-trained for hunting birds: Hungarian partridges in their case.  Her name was "Spud", appropriately enough for an Idaho dog with an agronomist owner. We must have chatted for 20 minutes.  He looked like he walked off a Cabela's catalog .  I told him how much I admired the " GSP " and had even considered getting one before I got my current miniature poodle mix....