The Lucky Ones

I was lucky enough to spend a week in the glorious boonies recently after nearly a month of nose-to-grindstone writing. First I took my wife and two boys into our family cabin for a couple days of off-the-grid skiing, animal tracking, and snow-fort making. 

We had to ski the last mile to reach the cabin, so everyone carried a backpack with their clothes, sleeping bags, books, etc. 

Award season: Travel Journalist of the Year. Sort of.

It’s been a good year for writing and photography awards, which means I have some new certificates and plaques to figure out what to do with. The biggest plaque came from the Society of American Travel Writer’s Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards (three times fast!), the most prestigious in the industry. The SATW were kind enough to give me a bronze award for their 2012 Grand Award — Travel Journalist of the Year. Gray-haired people seem to appreciate this one the most, since they actually know who Lowell Thomas was (in short: the man). Though I submitted skiing, paddling, and non-sporty stories as part of my year’s work, the judges seemed to most appreciate my off-the-beaten path cycling adventures. Here’s what they had to say:

Goodbye Mom

My mother, Karen Van Auken, died recently. It was sudden and unexpected and terribly sad. My mom was a sweet, gentle person, a lover of nature who found her greatest solace in the forests of her home state of Minnesota and the mountains of Montana, my adopted home. My mom’s father was from Whitefish and his greatest material gift to our family is the cabin we all share on the border of Glacier Park. Just like me, my mom loved it there more than anywhere else. 

Mom always used to take me for walks in the woods as a kid in state parks and the old family farm back in Minnesota. They were never very exciting, we just walked quietly. I can’t say they were my favorite thing as a child, but now looking back I’m so grateful to my mother for those walks. They showed me that the natural world is often the best place, that it can heal our wounds and enrich our lives if we just go there quietly with our hearts open. 

Finding Kishenehn

November’s wan light drained from the sky as I walked alone into a forgotten corner of Glacier National Park. As night grew from the shadows, noises in the forest grew louder. My head jerked at the sound of a branch brushing my pants. A foot of fresh snow obscured the tracks of an oversized carnivore on the trail that led me into dark timber. Everywhere was blackness, the world reduced to my headlamp’s bobbing orb of light. It seemed inevitable it would suddenly be filled by some variety of toothy creature.

I checked the pepper spray canister in my pack’s side pocket. Then I remembered the propellant in pepper spray doesn't work in temperatures below freezing. It was 20 degrees.

"Well, this is exciting," I thought to myself.

Standup Paddleboarding the Great Bear Rainforest

"Whoah! What was that?" Derek Nixon yells, as the telltale pfffft of air blasting from nostrils sounds from somewhere disconcertingly close to us. The rest of our group has stroked ahead to the sheltered waters of a nearby cove, leaving Nixon and me behind on our standup paddleboards, alone on open ocean. We turn toward the noise and see a large brown whiskered head sticking up from the water's surface, maybe 50 feet away. Another pops up beside it.

Steller sea lions. Big ones.

The pair size us up through inscrutable black eyes for a moment before sinking back into the sea.

We pull our paddles from the water and wait for the heads to reappear. Our 14-foot-long boards suddenly seem very small—the only thing between us and the 1,000-foot-deep ocean and the creatures that live in it. The surface is still. The windless air smells of wrack and saltwater. In the distance, a raven cackles; it could be laughing at us, or maybe just warning us to stay away from sea mammals with large brown whiskered heads.

It's the second day of our paddleboard journey into the Great Bear Rainforest, a place that lends itself to magical thinking, and already I'm starting to get the sense that the animals are trying to tell us things.

Ski mountaineering camp, or how I learned to dance with mountain goats

Nothing about a winter at the local ski hill has prepared me for the gut-twisting prospect of launching into thin air off a ridge in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. "Ridge" doesn't even do it justice—it's more like the cutting edge of a granite ax. As we nervously remove gear from our packs, Clark Corey, our guide, nods at the exposed face plummeting away behind us and says, "Don't drop anything down there or it's going 3,000 feet." Anxiety drowns our chuckles. Skiing that face would actually be the easy way down. Instead, I've climbed here with four other skiers and snowboarders to descend a couloir called Resurrection, a snow gully that plunges like an elevator shaft between rock cliffs. Couloirs are prized by ski mountaineers, and until three days ago I'd never skied one. In fact, this thin sliver of snow is worlds steeper than anything I've ever skied before, and falling here would mean a long and violent tumble. Which, it turns out, is precisely where I'm headed.

One family goes big

High in a remote corner of the Swan Valley we roll around a bend in the trail — 11-year-old Silas, 7-year-old Jonah, and me on one colossal mountain bike we call the Teasdale Train — when suddenly it’s there, not more than 30 feet away: a grizzly bear on its hind legs. I grab the brake levers of our rolling 200-pound behemoth and, in a motion practiced countless times, whip bear spray out of my pack’s side pocket the instant my feet hit the ground. As the boys would later revel in telling friends and family members, “Then dad said the ‘S’ word!”

The bear, it turns out, is tiny — which is even scarier than being huge. As the kids stare wide-eyed at the bruin, I twist my neck from side to side and scan the greenery for sound or movement. There is only one electric thought in my mind: Where’s mom?

Walking on water: discovering standup paddleboarding

Shouldering a 10-foot standup paddleboard to the bank of the Clark Fork River in downtown Missoula, I suddenly felt imbued with the coolness of surfing. As a landlocked mountain junkie, this was an unfamiliar experience. A teenager asked where I was going and I felt a sudden urge to call him “brah.” The glances of passing girls lingered a bit longer than usual. Then I realized, man, these paddleboards get pretty heavy after a couple blocks.

As people on the river path oggled, I, in true surfer style, pretended to be too cool to notice. In reality, I couldn’t move my head — I had no idea how to carry that damn board, and angling it across my shoulder and head while holding it with one arm might have looked cool, but I was well on my way to rupturing every muscle in my neck.

What the Mountains Give

We didn't know we'd encounter two bears in a matter of hours, but Greg Fortin and I knew we were in for an adventure when we started pedaling away from Glacier Park's Avalanche Campground parking lot at 8:20 last Friday night. It was an absurdly late time to head into Glacier's bear-riddled backcountry, but, as a smiling old man once said to me when he saw me bicycle touring in a rainstorm, "You go when you can."

We only had 48 hours before backcountry permit officials, concerned we'd interfere with road crews plowing record snow off Going To The Sun Road, insisted we be back. The road crews might have been miserable, but we weren't going to let that magnificent, once in a lifetime June snowpack go to waste. We were going to ski. With tent, sleeping bags, skis, and food for two days in our bike trailers, we set off for the mountains.

Five minutes later an enormous, glistening scat pile appeared in the road. Seconds later came the bear. Neither of us noticed it until the moment we passed it, standing on its hind legs and staring at us intensely not 20 feet to my right.

Spring update

It's been an action-packed last few months here at Teasdale HQ, leaving precious little time for bloggerating. But rest assured that all is well, though future posts may be "skinnier" than the epics I was posting for a while there. 

Anyone interested in seeing my latest story from British Columbia's fanged and furry Flathead Valley should head on over to Sierra magazine's website (or buy the current issue, May/June 2011, at your neighborhood newsstand, assuming you still have one). 

www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201105/flathead-guardians.aspx

A friend and I biked and packrafted the valley, then climbed a mountain at the river's headwaters that was threatened with mountaintop-removal mining and slept bare on its summit (you can read more about that adventure here: aaronteasdale.blogspot.com/2010/02/flathead-celebration.html).

My sons and I are also featured in the current (May) issue of Outside magazine, in their guide to fatherhood. In it, I dispense what they call "essential advice for adventurous fathers." Which I guess means that if you're an adventurous father you'd better read it. Or you could just take your kids into the woods. That's my essential advice: get out there, as often as possible.

The article and images also live online here:

http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-201106-kids-adventure-travel-sidwcmdev_156151.html