Fall colors have come to Sawtooth Valley. Mostly they’re a faded pastel, the result of soft freezes, or leaf blight, or the exceptionally rainy summer we had. It doesn’t look like anything fatal is going on, but normally bright leaves are seriously subdued, as if the willows and aspen have traded in their acrylics for wishy-washy watercolors.
Even if the hillsides and riverbottom are dull, they still announce the end of warm weather. NOAA is forecasting a warmer and drier winter due to a strengthening El Niño, but it will still get cold and dark. We’re building small fires in the wood stove every morning. We’ve already had a dusting of snow on top of the peaks.
The winter’s wood is cut and stacked. It’s hard to exaggerate the comfort that brings.
We’re hoping for a lot of snow in the form of some early wet storms that will form a solid base layer anchored to the underbrush. Then some cold weather to freeze it rock-hard. Then eighteen inches of powder.
It could happen.
Anything could happen, now that the weather’s turned chaotic.
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Before the first snow I’m determined to get to work on our skis, sharpening their edges and repairing their bases. You might think that sharpening skis is a poor substitute for controlling the weather, and you’d be right. We do what we can.
Last spring Julie and I started a regimen of skiing every day—usually the hill across the road—and the weather cooperated, for the most part. This winter we’ll try to do it again, conditions permitting. We won’t let a warm spell stop us, unless it brings avalanches.
We sleep better, breathe better, and feel better when we put skins on our skis and climb up the hill’s 700 vertical feet and ski down it. We feel better still when we do it twice. We’re still working on agreeing to do it twice.
The pain is tolerable unless you try to go up the second time as fast as you went up the first, or if you try a third time at any speed. We theorize that we’ll eventually get in better shape, or we’ll learn to like the pain, or both.
Julie and I talk about how there isn’t much to do in Sawtooth Valley in the winter unless you ski, but if you ski, there’s more to do than you can handle.
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The motorhome and backpack tourists have become pickup and camp trailer tourists-with-guns, now that various hunting seasons have begun.
Last week Julie saw a bunch of people in the Mountain Village parking lot wandering around in military-style fatigues, and wondered for a moment if there was a veterans’ meeting in town. She realized they were just hunters, not old soldiers, but it was an honest mistake.
Hunting clothes are getting more and more militarized, and more and more hunters carry assault rifles. Pickups and Sprinter vans look a lot like war machines, and they come in colors of desert sand or olive drab or World War II German gray. I have seen AR-15s and model 1911 .45s on the streets and in the restaurants of Stanley.
It is tempting to urge these people to join the Ukrainian foreign legion if they’re so keen on war cosplay, but that narrative isn’t the one they want to act out. Their enemies are elk, deer, and antelope. They shoot but they don’t get shot at, at least not on purpose.
On the back roads of the valley, hunters drive and stop, drive and stop. At every stop they roll down their windows and scan distant hillsides with binoculars or spotting scopes, looking for a four-legged target.
Four-legged might not be specific enough, especially deeper in the forest. Here in the valley, hunters have had their horses shot out from under them by other hunters who mistook horse legs for elk legs, or deer legs, or mutant antelope legs.
Julie and I bought a fluorescent orange vest for our four-legged Juno and we make her wear it during hunting season. She doesn’t like it, but if we put it in front of her and tell her she’s not going for a walk until it’s on, she will reluctantly put one front paw in one leg hole, and then the other front paw in the other leg hole. We tell her she’s a smart dog, pull the vest around her shoulders and buckle it, and the three of us head out onto the trails, making lots of noise as we go.
Lots of noise. Over the years, the Idaho Fish and Game has tried to introduce moose in the valley. They keep getting shot by elk hunters, despite the fact that moose don’t look anything like elk. We don’t look anything like elk, either, but we’re not taking any chances.
I may be too hard on hunters, but I’ve done my share of hunting, and have concluded that with age and self-consciousness, you cease to take much pleasure in killing your fellow creatures. You find more beauty in a live animal than a dead one, and you don’t get so excited about shooting something that you shoot the wrong thing.
Obviously, there are exceptions. Some people do get old without gaining empathy for wild animals, or the ability to look over their own shoulders, and they do lose their brains when they think they see a target.
I note all this as a person who still eats meat. Being at the top of our particular food chain requires a certain amount of hypocrisy. It’s just one of the many hypocrisies necessary for us to function as card-carrying members of industrial civilization.
We do consider the Costco meat department the best place for modern hunter-gatherers to hunt and gather and head for home laden with serious trophies.
The rifle, the camo, and the new diesel pickup aren’t necessary when you can head to Costco and buy already-cut lamb chops or New York steaks and everything that goes with them. You can also avoid the empathic pain of looking your food in the eye.
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By November most of the hunters will be gone. Elk, deer, antelope and even horses will have departed for lower altitudes. There are a few late permit hunts, usually to reduce herds to what the southern Idaho desert can support. They often happen in farm fields, where on November mornings herds of elk graze next to cattle. The permit holder knocks down a cow elk, field-dresses it, drives his pickup out to it, tosses it in, and heads for the nearest town with a butcher.
On those same November mornings, home from a provisioning trip to Boise, with a full freezer and pantry, Julie and I load up on protein for ski season. Bacon and eggs and hot coffee, for a start. None of them are locally sourced.
If the snow is late in coming, we will find something else to do: get a few extra loads of firewood, or change the oil in the gasoline-fired sprinkler pump and the wood truck. This year I’m determined to clean out my files and tidy up my office, and I’m hoping to go through the garage and get rid of everything I haven’t used for ten years. That should free up a lot of space.
Until we can ski, we walk icy trails along the creeks feeding the Salmon River. We take pictures of frost patterns on frozen potholes and inspect unmoving waterfalls and rapids. They don’t move but they make noise. Somewhere under the ice is flowing water.
If October has an ideology, it’s Darwinism. If November has an ideology, it’s minimalism.
From the looks of our house, lawn, and garage, we have a few Novembers to go.
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Flood or drought were the only two choices on the weather menu in the northern hemisphere this summer. Some people apparently ordered both.
Except here. We kept getting gentle soaking rainstorms every time the forests threatened to dry out, and we avoided both fire and flood. Next summer we won’t be so lucky, if past El Niños are any indication. They tend to put us on the dry and hot side of normal.
Given this year’s temperature records in the rest of the world, next summer’s might put us on the dry and hot side of abnormal.
We’ve remarked on how clear the air has been this September, and how much like the good old days the weather has been. What was once routine is now freakishly temperate.
We try to avoid dreamy nostalgia. We pay attention to NOAA’s long-range forecasts, and sea-level temperatures, and the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold, how much methane is coming out of Siberia, how much smoke is coming out of Canada.
When CO2 in the air passes 420 ppm, you need to watch the forecasts. But if you want to live, you need to realize that past weather performance does not/cannot/will not predict future weather behavior.
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We have a facsimile of normalcy here, but the forces that have created it are anything but. When you walk through a quick rainstorm that leaves the world green, glistening, and refreshed, and then look at a weather blog and see that the wider world is full of dry reservoirs or flood-destroyed farmland, you experience a moment of cognitive dissonance.
People avoid that sort of mental pain by calling reports of climate disruption fake news, at least until they die of thirst or heat or their house and car or oxcart gets washed into the nearest river. In places other than Sawtooth Valley, reality cures cognitive dissonance, and often in unpleasant ways.
It also cures hypocrisy, eventually.
We have been lucky, but if we get ten feet of snow this winter, or if the valley’s forests catch fire next summer, or if the river floods, we’ll know we’ve joined the outside world and its inexorably rising levels of greenhouse gases. We’d prefer for that not to happen.
I try to maintain a sense of agency. I will wax my snow shovel and clear the roofs if they collect dangerous levels of snow. I will snowblow the driveway and the deck so we won’t get snowbound. I have already tried to fireproof our house by glading the trees in the yard and removing the willow bushes that shelter us from road noise. Better to be deafened than to burn.
But the events we can prepare for are dwarfed by the events that a human-altered atmosphere has in store for us, some coming season, some near year. When we look at the bigger picture, we can only note that humanity’s extended run of business as usual, with all its blessings and irritations, is over.