In the American West, water is never just water. It is inheritance, leverage, and law. It has been bought, sold, diverted, fought over, and rationed. “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you,” Wendell Berry once wrote. In the West, that’s...
If you go north long enough, eventually you’ll go south. But if you go west forever, you’ll never go east. That simple geographic truth has stuck with me—and it turns out, it’s a pretty good guide for how we move through life. Some paths take us somewhere new. Others...
Wouldn’t it have been something—to have had an empathetic companion at every milestone? Not someone to fix it or tell us what to do, but someone attuned. A quiet witness with enough steadiness to say, “This is hard. You’re doing better than you think.” From our first...
One afternoon not long ago, I stood beside a pond. The light was soft, and the water mostly still—except for two ducks gliding toward each other. Unaware of the another, they just followed their own meandering paths until something changed. One veered slightly—maybe...
Two weeks ago, the sun stood still. June 21—the solstice—marked the year’s longest light. I’ve started calling it Great Feeder Day. It’s not on any calendar except my own. But it should be. Because that same date in 1895 marked something rare and extraordinary: the...
I once fell thirty feet off the Red Slab in Rock Canyon. I say “thirty” because that’s where I stopped—but it began as a fifteen-foot drop. I was leading, and my last piece of gear hadn’t held as expected. What saved me was my belay partner and good friend down...
