Occupation of Independence

 For a western camper, the ultimate experience in the outdoors only happens a handful of times per year.  So writing about it makes more sense than writing about anything else. It rained a couple times during the night.  In the morning I awoke to a different planet.  Since I was on the top of the mountain near an inland town, the clouds seemed like dense ground fog on the Pacific Coast .  Walking around in 100% relative humidity is not something that happens often.  It isn't just the imagination that sees the air as a thick vaporous, analgesic unguent.  So tangible, gentle, and kind! There were even puddles on the road, if you can believe a 'whopper' like that. She can't believe it! And yet there were brighter spots in the sky.  The amperage in the solar controller confirmed it.  Soon it became sunnier and I was walking around in a state of calm euphoria . If that isn't great enough, maybe the rain had wrung the smoke out of the sky. ...

  This is an interesting time of year, depending on your altitude .  You might have seen your last 90 F day .  You have killed off another summer.  You want to 'dance in the end zone.'  But in fact, it is a bit too early to celebrate.  One or two surprisingly stubborn heat spells are to be expected.  That is what makes it so bittersweet. It was a good summer for me.  I saw no forest fire smoke until the middle of August.  There were even a couple rains in July.  Even better were the big skies of eastern Oregon and Idaho : Central Idaho Early summer in eastern Oregon A summer chiaroscuro for the little one. While cleaning up my cache of summer photos I found a neglected video, showing how nimble bears can be when climbing:

 I found the experience of finding the spring (in the last post) so satisfying that I should try to explain it.  Long-suffering readers know that I like to bring in a historical perspective when camping and traveling.  But is that completely correct? A proper historian uses documents and occasional inscriptions in stone as their inputs.  They can also team up with an archeologist .  These are severe limitations obviously.  Even if there are lots of documents about a certain topic, most documents are official and therefore biased, legal, or commercial, so they are full of people's names, dates, facts, and figures.  That is fine, as far as it goes. But what was it like to experience the historical event for people directly involved?  What were they thinking and feeling?  For some reason, I made a real effort to imagine what it was like to find a spring or find water when digging a well for early settlers in the 1800s . What visual clues were ...

The Salmon River is certainly one of the best in Idaho .  It made me almost wish my miniature poodle was a Labrador retriever so that she would have jumped in the river and swam her heart out.  But she wouldn't even get her feet wet. We ran into a good ol' boy in a pickup truck who told us about a spring, up the road 'a piece.'  The road was fairly smooth, just as he said.  The first clue were the marshy and tall plants that stood out from the surrounding sagebrush . I got off the bike and walked towards the possible spring.  Sure enough, I could finally hear it.  What a marvelous sound!  Could there be any more authentic western experience than jumping on my horse (aka, mountain bike ) and looking for and finding a spring?  Nothing is more precious than water in this gawd-forsaken, barren wasteland . My little dog wanted to celebrate the occasion, a ways downstream: I can't think of anything better to do with my time than looking for a spring....