Summer in the city

Dawg Music

David Grisman is one of my musical heroes -- a player rooted in traditional music who has  created his own genre, which has been described as incorporating strains of  Django/Stefan Grappelli style jazz and Grateful Dead folk-rock with traditional bluegrass.   Grisman just played  the Egyptian Theatre, which was one of many  Egyptian-themed movie theaters built across the country in the 1920s in the wake of the King Tut tomb discovery and a general Egyptian mania. So here's an audience of Westerners listening to a bluegrass/jazz/rock mandolin player from Hackensack, New Jersey by way of California under a panel of scarab beetles and Pharos. We finished the concert and had dinner at Bar Gernika, the Basque bar down the street.

Fingerlings

The lake at 9,700-feet in elevation was filled with very hungry Brook trout -- too many for the amount of food available. So we did them a favor and reduced the population by five. My friend Lee used his fingers as a stringer to carry our catch up to camp. A few hours later they were browning in olive oil with slivers of sweet onion.

From the ashes

Two years after the Castle Rock Fire raged around Sun Valley an explosion of wildflowers has risen from the still very black ashes. On this ridge north of Sun Valley, over an acre of hollyhocks (yep, they grow wild) stands four feet tall beneath the charred remains of the forest.

Alaska Terminal Polar Bear

I had finished a two-week raft trip down the Tatshenshini and Alsek Rivers  and was in the Juneau airport awaiting my flight home when I encountered the polar bear under glass. This had been my second Tatshenshini trip, and in just the 8 years since my first, the glacial retreat along the river was noticeable. Further north where the polar bears roamed, the ice was also thinning and shrinking, leaving the bears no where to go -- except perhaps to live under Plexiglas. The whole peculiar diorama of  this once-living bear now stuffed and framed by a trash can, courtesy phone, restrooms and a photo mural of its melting habitat seemed to say a lot about our  inadvertent  attitude toward nature.