A Year Ago May 31:Grand Canyon North Rim

The Grand Canyon. Really f-ing huge.

Encountering things of such majesty really reinforces the small place that humans occupy in this world.

I suggest more people make a habit out of confronting their idle notions of self-importance

by gazing upon nature writ large and being humbled by their insignificance.

A year ago today we woke up outside Zion, ate a quick breakfast and hit the road. We were traveling back East along the Utah-Arizona border so that we could make it to Paria canyon where we had 2 of the 10 permits allotted for June 1 through 4.

Between Zion and Paria a little to the South is the Grand Canyon. Most people visit the South rim and approach from Phoenix or Flagstaff. We drove in from the North on a road with some of the most strikingly beautiful and varied terrain imaginable. The land around us fluctuated between red and white sandstone, then morphed into scrub brush fields, then descended through thick pine forest. Just outside the entrance to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon there were large meadows with the last (still large) patches of melting snowpack. And then you get to the canyon which is truly magnificent and more than I could describe.

Glen Canyon Dam. Makes me cry for the loss of the American soul.

What really boggles the mind is to consider that Glen Canyon/Lake Powell, Paria Canyon, and Zion are interconnected parts of the same canyon system as the Grand Canyon since they all have such different flavors. (It also boggles the mind that by calling Glen Canyon by that name instead of calling it part of the Grand Canyon system, Americans approved the hydroelectric dam that flooded it and created Lake Powell...seriously disrupting the complex ecosystem for miles in every direction)

The North Rim has a swell place called Roosevelt Point where this snazzy plaque sits. I wish this was closer to the visitor center so that all of the people who don't explore much of the park could see it.

We went for a short dayhike not too far from this point to eat a little lunch. It is truly remarkable how few people leave the visitor center loop. We only encountered 2 people--a nice middle-aged Israeli couple--on our 2 hour nature walk (hike is a bit of a strong word for it).

Jeff and I left the park and re-entered the wonderland that is Kaibab National Forest. Awesome fact: you can camp free of charge anywhere in a National Forest. We did just that.

Dinner: concoction involving 4 tortillas, 1 can refried beans, 1 chicken bag, 1 onion, a splash of olive oil, and half a jar of queso. My notes say it's good basecamp food and that cold beans are NASTY.

A Year Ago May 30: Wading in Zion

Riparian campsite behind trees at left

One year ago today, we woke up at our campsite along the riparian banks of the Snake River in Zion's narrows. We made quick work of cooking oatmeal, then packed up camp.

Diagonal zipper, check.

Neoprene turtleneck, check.

Ultramarine gore-tex, check.

Only XXLs left after a group of retirees hit the rental shop, check.

Not wanting to start the day cold and remembering that the river had gotten progressively deeper the day before, I put my superhot (literally and figuratively) drysuit with funny rubber gaskets on over my mostly nylon-spandex hiking clothes and cinched up my pack. The drysuits soon proved too hot to wear in the bright morning sun. Jeff took his off and I did an unsexy number with the top half tied around my waist. We crossed the river in thigh-deep sections with greater and greater frequency. I watched worriedly as Jeff never lost his goosebumps before the next crossing and he started getting pale. We stopped in the sun to eat some GORP and get jeff into his drysuit/full body windbreaker so that he would stop shivering and his lips would lose the blue tinge. I'm glad we did because we then had this 6+ foot deep crossing.

We noticed increasing numbers of people making their way up the river as we made our way down. (You can hike bottom-up as a loop without a permit as a dayhike). When we started seeing less-than-superfit individuals in their 60s, people in jeans or sundresses wading in the water, we knew we were almost to the bottom. As we walked up the paved scenicway to the trolley station, tourists stared in awe at our ultramarine suits and our packs as if we were astronauts returning from a deep space mission. Several made odd comments to themselves aloud as if they thought we were in an impermeable bubble. Sound may have gotten through, but I did feel worlds apart from the RV tour crowd after completing our backcountry hike.

The name "Narrows" seems like the canyon is really small. It is not.

We spent the night at a campground outside the park on the way to our next destination. (Most private campgrounds charge $10 to $20 a night for tent camping vs. $0 to $10 for a backcountry permit for 2 people for various lengths of time.) Our dinner that night was a dehydrated soup mix swiped from Jeff's parents.

Special Equipment:

• backcountry permit (for top-down hiking only in order to camp roughly halfway down.
  
• Sturdy hiking pole or stick, at least 5' for testing pool depth and sturdying yourself on rocks in the current. The river moves quite forcefully.
  

drysuit in action

• Wetsuit or drysuit, check with ranger beforehand to determine if necessary. Early in the season, the snowmelt makes it very cold. These can be rented at Zion Adventure Sports outside the south entrance of the park.
  
• Neoprene booties/rock guards. Jeff's dad is big on flyfishing and we borrowed these from his equipment stockpile. While not entirely necessary, they did make the trek much more enjoyable.
  
• Waterproof stuff sacks. I am fortunate enough to have a completely waterproof pack--purchased in part because we knew we were going to do some canyoneering and would need to float our packs. It is the most wonderful piece of equipment. If that's not for you, definitely get some waterproof stuff sacks because your pack will get very wet and a dripping sleeping bag is pure misery.
  

human waste bag with snazzy inner drawstring bag (gray) and connected outer ziplock bag (silver)

good article on poop adversely affecting camping conditions.

• Human waste bags. These are issued by the backcountry ranger when you get your permit. Since there is no place in the canyon where you could dig a cat hole far enough away from the river, and even if there was such a place there would only be one and it would be like a minefield, they ask that you minimize your impact by carrying it out. The double lined bag is opaque, comes with toilet paper, a moist towelette and a packet of enzymes akin to kitty litter which made it very hygienic and in fact more pleasant than the alternative. Packing out your poo is a hard concept for many to wrap their heads around--we saw partially buried bags, negating the purpose and exacerbating the problem--but in general I think people need to get over themselves and their personal hangups and consider what the implications of their small actions have on the environment. I was certainly squeamish when we started out, but it is positively liberating to know that you have visited a beautiful place without harming it.
  

A Year Ago May 29: Starting the First Hike!

Not the expected start to our hike of the Zion Narrows.

A year ago today, we woke up at 6, packed up camp, and parked ourselves outside the Zion Backcountry Office to get permits as soon as they opened.

We had been denied advance permits for some other places, and we wanted to be certain we got out here! As it turns out, waiting 90 minutes before the office opens that early in the season was a bit excessive. Only 3 other people showed up before 8:10, and they all wanted permits for different sections of the park. However, the forced downtime provided us the opportunity to read a few relevant sections of guidebooks together and sample our GORP.

When the office opened and we told the ranger we wanted to hike the narrows, he asked a few questions and quickly realized we didn't actually know what we were doing. He explained that the Narrows just opened for top down hiking a few days prior, the water temp was 50°F and would be chest deep in a handful of places, waist deep 30% of the time, thigh deep 50% of the time, and below knee the rest of the time. Consequently, we needed some wet- or dry-suits which could be rented down the street. We also needed a shuttle to take us to the trailhead since top-down is a one way hike.

Snowpack: the reason why the water was so cold.

Equipped with this information and our permits, and lucky to have gotten such an early start, we went to make necessary arrangements and pack our bags. At noon we were in a shuttle van with obscenely attractive drysuits accessible in our packs. At 1, we were hiking through a boggy meadow and following the Snake River as it started to carve the canyon around us.

The canyon grows around us!

We wore our regular hiking boots and had neoprene booties in them to keep our feet warm. Walking through a river for 6 miles and reading topo maps in reverse is extremely disorienting and tiring. 20 minutes before we hit our campsite, we crossed a 4 foot deep pool and I got very cold very fast. Wet, without sunshine warming me anymore, kind of out of shape...I got pretty cranky at that time. Thank goodness we had tasty chicken pesto pasta to look forward to.

A Year Ago May 28: Santa Fe to Zion

White sandstone features more prominently in Zion than in other related canyon systems.

One year ago today, Jeff and I woke up in Santa Fe, checked out of our motel, and went to get some breakfast at Cafe Pascual.

Jeff, jealous of my delicious red chile sauce the night before, ordered huevos rancheros with red chile. I decided to try something new and got papas fritas with tomatillo d'arbol salsa, and subsequently began a love affair with tomatillos.

Bighorn sheep hanging out on the park road.

We drove out of Santa Fe, through the plateaus of New Mexico and along the top of Arizona all the way to Zion National Park, roughly 625 miles. I bought an annual 5 agency pass so we didn't have to pay entrance fees at the other national parks, bureau of land management sites, etc.

The camping area in the park was full, so we camped amongst RVs at an all inclusive campground down the road.

We had eaten a quick lunch at a Wendy's along the highway and didn't want to spend more money on dinner when we had a trunk full of food. We set up our whisperlite on the aluminum picnic table at our site, put a can of corn, some tomatoes, and pinto beans that had been soaking in a ziploc and possibly fermenting a little into the pot. As an afterthought, we put some sliced onion in. The result: terrible. The flavors did not meld, the onion was raw, and the beans had certainly fermented. I had to fight my gag reflex with each bite. As I have said before, there are risks with experimentation and our household is hardly immune.

Worst mish-mash meal ever.

Fun Collection of Links

Stuart Firestein, Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia
...really looks like he's trying to take your pants off in photo 1

Hilarious photos on how to toast/drink like a good Swede, via Serious Eats, here. Tell me Hiroko Shimbo doesn't look like Edna from the Incredibles. Looking at the head angles captured in these pictures of visual contact for a semi-ceremonial drinking activity reminded me of one of my favorite videos [see 3:40].

I finished reading The World Without Us yesterday and my mind is still processing a lot of the possibilities of an ecosystem without our constant bombardment of stress. The book really made alternate utopian landscapes with minimal human impact stick with me. Naturally I was drawn to these images of a remote island in the Indian Ocean as a fascinating preview of what could be.


On another very separate note, many of my dear friends graduated from college last week. Spending time celebrating with them brought on a deluge of memories from last year when I was in their shoes. It terrified me somewhat to realize that it has been a full year since I finished college and went on that amazing backpacking-road trip. I've hardly shared any of the knowledge gained from that experience, and the time seems right to rectify that. For the next few weeks I will be revisiting my trip notes from one year ago, putting up some drool-worthy pictures, and posting lessons learned.

A Year Ago May 27: Off to Santa Fe

We bought a 10 pound bag of pinto beans, then parboiled and dehydrated as many as possible.
My father decreed, "well, with just the two of you, a tent, and that many beans,
this trip will definitely be a relationship test." Thanks, Dad.

One year ago today Jeff and I had prepped as much as we could for a timely departure. Around 10 in the morning, we left his parents' house with the trunk of the car stuffed in an orderly fashion with food and equipment to survive and enjoy the next 7 weeks.

For food, we had brainstormed the following potential on-trail dinners to meet several requirements--lightweight, healthy, and highly caloric:

• vegetarian chili
• pesto pasta
• polenta with tomato sauce

The requirement "highly caloric" seems to counteract the preceding stipulation that the meal be healthy, but there isn't necessarily a contradiction. Too often in our sedate city lives we lose touch with our bodies' needs and then underestimate how much energy we expend when hauling 30 pound packs 10 miles a day. Even in our substantially less active city-lives, Jeff and I have hyperactive metabolisms and we knew we needed to eat a lot while we were out so that we didn't wither away.

Moreover, many healthy foods like cheese, nuts and other natural fats are deemed so only when amended by the phrase "in moderation." We used a heavier hand with these in our food for the trip precisely because they contain too many calories for life in the cubicle, making them perfect for our needs.

Jeff had suggested having just 2 backcountry meals and I promptly protested that I would be too miserable to keep hiking if that was the case. While this seems trivial and childish, keeping morale up is crucial and adding variety to the food is a surefire way to do that for me. Included for other meals were oatmeal, granola bars, peanut butter, nutella, tortillas, blocks of cheddar & parmesan.

We also had the oppotunity to pilfer Jeff's parents' pantry. The canned goods we got from them would either be put sparingly into our packs or eaten when car-camping, thus helping to mix in variety and saving lightweight meals for the trail.

We drove out on I-40 through the feed-lots of Northwest Texas, into New Mexico and into Santa Fe. The drive proved less than fascinating and I fell asleep. This made driving more unpleasant for Jeff and we decided to think up ways to keep the passenger awake and engaging with the driver. Downloading podcasts in towns--This American Life, The Economist's week in news, Scientific American Science Talk and Selected Shorts from symphony space were our favorites--to listen to together and then discuss. We also made up geography games with the road atlas. That's a winner.

We arrived in Santa Fe, checked into a motel (one of the only places we either didn't have a relative's home or a decent campground), downloaded podcasts with my laptop, went to Whole Foods for GORP ingredients and uppity service, and then to dinner at The Shed.

Santa Fe seemed like a pretentious oriental rug and turquoise necklace pushing, faux-rustic town with few people and fewer things to do--until we walked into The Shed. The bar was packed, as were all of the elaborately interconnected dining rooms. Having only encountered New Mexican cuisine through the pages of Gourmet, I ordered blindly and came out with a serious win with Shed Pollo Adobo (Tender pieces of chicken roasted in Shed red adobo marinade, garlic and oregano. Served with a blue corn cheese enchilada & pinto beans. It blew my mind). Jeff ordered enchiladas verdes, a classic New Mexican dish typified by the use of green chilies.

We went to sleep happy, very very full, and excited for the next leg.

And So It Began

One year ago today I had just graduated from college, done a decent job of packing my possessions into a storage unit, and boarded a plane to Texas with Jeff to start our incredible backpacking-road trip around the Western United States.

I wasn't sure what to expect, having never been to Texas, having been bowled over with the simultaneity of life-changing events, and having not actually planned out much of the coming 8 weeks. We knew a few things: we had permits to hike in Paria Canyon June 1-4; we wanted to come down the Zion narrows; we wanted to go to Idaho, Yellowstone, and Montana; and we knew where friends and relatives with open stretches of bed/couch/floor/patio were located.

At the time, the extent of my backpacking was limited to five 4-day, 3-night trips through our college outdoor orientation program (2 more trips done on the planning side) in New York's Catskill Mountains, and one 3-day, 2-night trip in Haleakala Crater on Maui four months prior. I had been camping literally since before I could remember, but either car-camping or having my dad carry all our family's stuff. This trip, I knew, would require me to combine any and all outdoor know-how I had acquired and apply it firsthand as I was about to more than double my backpacking experience.

The World Without Us

I have been reading The World Without Us, and am probably 3 years behind all of the more committed environmentalists in doing so. In any case, I am really enjoying it in a kind of perverse way--"Oh yes! Humans have done and continue to do such terrible things without thinking they are terrible! Oh, make us feel intense shame so that we might change our ways, curb our inevitable impact, and live more harmoniously with all other lifeforms!"

The author, Alan Weisman, does a remarkably good (not perfect) job of looking at the many ways that we have interacted with/against nature, and interviewing field experts in order to share a vision of what might happen if all of a sudden humans disappeared from the planet. He examines how all of the changes we have made to our environment--land, air, sea--would either continue to affect life on earth for better or for worse, or get reversed and reclaimed by whatever is left. It's a fascinating thought experiment. In my case the book has the terrifying effect of making me see an overconsumption of plastic in what I would have liked to have believed was a pretty green lifestyle. [...the little exfoliating beads in our facewash are killing the plankton so vital to the health of the oceans!]

One of the first chapters examines what would happen to Manhattan if humans vanished. The Wildlife Conservation Society (same people who run the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium) was highlighted in that chapter for these tours in which the participants try to imagine what this overbuilt island looked like when the Dutch arrived a few hundred years ago. Strangely enough, I got an email the other day advertising an exhibit opening at the Museum of the City of New York for exactly this project, Mannahatta/Manhattan. It's running through October 12. I will be making a visit soon.

Lastly, check out this great quote from the exhibit description:
Mannahatta/Manhattan will challenge visitors to view the city of today as a place where the relationship between nature and people is at its most important and to understand that the principles of diversity, interdependence, and interrelativity operate in a modern mega-city much as they do in nature. In doing so, the exhibition will contribute something new to the history of New York—a view of its ecological origin—and in that contribution, shape the future as well.

Pantry Overhaul

We were in Texas last weekend for a wedding, and since returning have been absolutely terrible about putting together our usual list of recipes to make for the coming week and the closely related grocery list. Instead, we have been doing a massive cleaning out of the stockpiles and cooking up extra bits of ingredients just like these people tell me to.

It's a good practice to get into once a grocery-shopping cycle, and then on a larger scale once a quarter. By constraining yourself with the limited options of cooking solely out of your pantry, you give yourself an improvisational challenge. Some of our tastier and faster meals have come from these "mish-mash" happenings. Tonight, for instance, a delicious couscous with preserved lemon, a gouda-cream sauce, and a sprinkling of smoked paprika came together in just 8 minutes and was pretty fantastic if I may say so myself. Lord knows I wouldn't have thought to put those ingredients together if I kept stocking the larder with appealingly fresh spring asparagus every 3 days. Of course, on the practical side, cooking out of your pantry also ensures less waste, and saves you from spending more time and money getting new food.

By scrounging up a meal one day out of our average 10-day grocery cycle, we use more of the produce that is ready to be eaten instead of letting it go to mush and throwing it out. We're still not perfect, but we do try. This past week of scrounge-only meals has been like a deep spring-cleaning of the kitchen. It has opened up a lot of cabinet-real estate and breathed unexpected new life into our cooking.

Last night we ate Creamy Black Lentils--a perrenial favorite, and possibly the most often cooked dish in our household. I used the last of a somewhat ancient bag of basmati (10 months? certainly from the first or second trip to the grocery after moving in last July) to eat with the lentils. As I opened the bag and started to pour the rice out, I noticed that not everything was moving in harmony with gravity. Tiny beige things were in fact going the other direction. It could mean only one thing: weevils.

My parents have a terrible infestation in Hawaii as weevils love humid climes. Every bulk bag of grains that my dad buys--and, oh, there are many--is placed first in a ziploc and then inside a sealable tupperware or acrylic containers. This method works pretty well except for the fact that my parents don't properly close their lids.

Clearly I knew that I should store my grains in airtight containers, but I somehow hadn't gotten around to doing so. Weevils provided the perfect impetus to change our storage system. [Horrors! Imagine the waste!] I paranoiacally pored over my other grains--thankfully all clear, immediately transferred what I could to glass mason jars, and looked online to see where I could stop in the next day for more storage solutions.

Our cupboard is now pared down, bug-proofed, easy to look through, and prettily organized. Should you wish to do likewise, check out these great container/jar resources. I bought a bunch of fido jars from Sur La Table in SoHo.

Free/Cheap Organic Food

Is that an oxymoron? I've been reading oodles of articles about trying to balance a budget with Sustainable/Organic/Local/Ethical desires for food. Unfortunately, most offer few answers besides "grow your own"--not quite possible in our apartment, though we do have organic basil--and "buy beans in bulk." I did, however, watch the video below several weeks ago and the idea has really stuck with me. What if we could go urban foraging to decrease societal waste, supplement our diets, and have fantastic adventures?

Sky Full of Bacon 07: Eat This City from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

After watching that video, Jeff and I went on a long walk around northern Manhattan and I was looking at every unkempt patch of plants as a snack (and keeping in mind it might be a potential dog spot). It's one of my more far-fetched ideas, but I just might try some quadruple-washed urban greens.

In a similar vein, there's a new website currently in beta development called Neighborhood Fruit. This site will eventually have a map of both public fruit trees and private trees that you get permission to pick from and can save to your profile. Users will be able to pick fruit in the short window of the season when the trees go nuts and produce more than any single family could use--again, eliminating waste and making potentially organic produce a viable option for more people. Sadly, there are no trees currently mapped anywhere close to New York. If my urban foraging project takes off, I'll be sure to share my finds on the site!

A Meaningful Mother's Day Present

Parker Ranch, Las Californias

Instead of getting my mom more stuff to celebrate Mother's Day and her birthday and perpetuating the American way of excess, I adopted an acre of land in California in her honor by donating to the Nature Conservancy. It was a shockingly easy process, I'm not adding any clutter to my parents' house, and my gift furthers the environmental aims near and dear to both my and my mother's hearts. If you haven't gotten anything for your mother or if you want to support some of the most important conservation efforts and can't get out of the city to volunteer--check out their gift options here.

Really, any organization that lures bears with doughnuts then puts auto-reporting GPS-GSM collars on them to determine popular migration corridors for targeted conservation is a worthy cause for my scarce charity-dollars.

More Budget Cooking Resources

Here are some of the more interesting bits of things I have read lately on eating well on a budget:

A new column on Salon.com called Pinched: Tales From an Economic Downturn has an article titled “Can we afford to eat ethically?” Siobhan Phillips, the author, and her husband decided to eat only sustainable, organic, local, ethical products and spend $248 per month (government allotment of food stamps for two adults 20-50) doing so. Phillips aims to determine whether one can eat mindfully on a tiny budget. In doing so, she might also vindicate Alice Waters, who along with her cultish hordes of locavores and organicists [gulp], has been suffering a lot of backlash for being out of touch with the economic reality of feeding oneself (and one’s family) in America. Frankly, I'm in the pro-Waters camp even if she's a little batty. It doesn't need to be a constant battle to feed a family good food, even if money is tight. In any case, Phillips' piece is well-written and includes some of my favorite tactics for keeping my own food budget reasonable.

Favorite excerpt:

“Frugal eating can also be a course in cosmopolitanism -- not the worldliness that comes from fusion cuisine at wine-paired prix fixes but the kind in which you learn more about how the rest of the world actually eats... It's more heartening to prepare a spicy biryani than it is to assemble the nondescript "bake" of economy cookbooks, even if both are built of rice and vegetables. And it's more pleasant to announce a biryani as you serve up plates, or to sit over its final forkfuls as you talk through your partner's day. You're not getting by, all of a sudden, so much as having dinner…

… A kitchen of cosmopolitan simplicity lets a cook employ the often repetitive offerings of farmers' markets and local production without going out of her mind with monotony.”

The comments associated are, predictably, either inane, off-point, or completely separate from the reality of this world. However, as with all public commenting forums, there are also some priceless gems of laughter: “I think we should all just eat canned spam, learn to clean a handgun and live by plunder. I want to live in a robotic future where we survive on calorie pellets dispensed from the government truck that visits our housing complex once per month.” Or this one, advocating squirrel gravy for budget diets: “One thing to add: there is free food all around. For example potential salads grow in sidewalk cracks and lawns. Squirrels and rabits and birds seem to be everywhere. Squirrel gravy with biscuits can be very very tastey.”[sic]

Similar popular experiments:

• Two Brooklynites eat for a combined $30/week. (They also write for Serious Eats’ Eat for Eight Bucks)
• Started 2 years ago(!), a blog that also chronicles an attempt to eat organically on the government-mandated food stamp budget

Funny thing is that one of the commenters on the Phillips article asks for advice on when it’s okay to scrape the mold off of cheese or jam and continue eating (a question, I ask myself time and again as we frequently have cheddar with fuzzy friends due to prolific use of plastic wrap—bad way to store cheese, you cheese-department-fiends!), and 15 minutes later I found this sweet new site Still Tasty: The Ultimate Shelf-Life Guide which answers the questions about how long different cheeses will last in the freezer, in the fridge, wrapped and opened, wrapped and unopened, etc. and if you have to chuck the whole thing if there’s mold on a corner. AMAZING! AND it has a robust fruit-ripening guide for those of us without orchards and berry bushes in the yard. Thanks, Still Tasty, I will be mining your site for advice for the rest of my forseeable future.

In other cheap cooking news, Depression Era relic/great-grandmother Clara Cannucciari who got pretty popular for sharing sensible cooking advice from that long ago time when (over)abundance was not the standard has gotten a book deal. I think her YouTube videos are hard to beat, but sometimes it’s nice to have bound pieces of paper for reference.

And then this Nutrition Studies grad student has a blog that delves into the nitty gritty behind popular (and up-and-coming) food trends and also gives helpful pointers on how to eat new healthy foods like coconut water and amaranth cakes. With a tag “Nutrition myths put to the test,” this woman is after my heart.

On a completely different, less healthy note… how awesome does this cake look?