Wolf Wars

Wolves are a hot button in Alaska, where “aerial predator control” (i.e. shooting wolves from airplanes) is practiced and game management is a way of life. Right now, state biologists are butting heads with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on their right to kill wolves on an Aleutian island to protect caribou calves.

This prompted me to learn more about wolves, so I’m reading Wolf Wars, by Hank Fischer, which is about the extermination of wolves in the Rockies in the late 19th century and their reintroduction in the 1980s. What is truly fascinating is the public hatred for wolves in the early 1900s. Not just among ranchers and hunters. One Colorado newspaper described the Custer wolf as “not merely a wolf, but a monstrosity of nature-half wolf, half mountain lion-possessing the cruelty of both and the craftiness of Satan himself.” (So much for objective journalism.)

Two main events in the 1880s and 1890s induced this bad rep for wolves-the near-extinction of bison and the boom of livestock. Both human-caused. Hunters slaughtered hundreds of thousands of buffalo a year for their hides (and tongues). At the same time, ranchers filled the Yellowstone region with cattle. At this point, the wolf population was still healthy because trappers wanted bison, deer, elk and beaver.

Once they had no more natural prey, they began to stalk livestock. Ranchers were so pissed, and influential, that Montana passed a bounty on wolves in 1883-$1 per wolf.

Around 1915, federal agencies jumped on board. The National Park Service began exterminating wolves (poisoning them, shooting them, crawling into their dens to destroy entire families) to protect ranchers’ stock. “Park Service rangers killed the last known den in Yellowstone Park in 1923.”

I understand why ranchers hated wolves for preying on their cattle. But how did this hatred spread to the rest of society? But to blame the wolf for disrupting natural balances? “The most obvious explanation for why people exterminated wolves still seems best. It was self-interest, plain and simple, not malice or ignorance. If a pack of wolves today killed 25 percent of a rancher’s livestock, we’d still destroy them. If wolves threatened the existence of big-game populations, we probably wouldn’t tolerate it; witness the struggles over wolf management in Alaska” (22).

It’s not that I believe wolves should rank before humans — ranchers have businesses to run and families to feed. (Sport hunters!?!? give me a break!)
But the wolf’s annihilation in the Rockies was the result of a political process. Which was the result of economics, as usual. We will always act in our best economic interests. But hopefully this doesn’t mean clearing the planet of amazing wild animals.

“Wintery Mix”

You become well acquainted with the weather forecast “wintery mix” growing up in Hershey, Penn. But now I live in Colorado, where precipitation falls in variations of power: dry, champagne, light, dust, wet…sometimes it “=pukes, which means wet heavy snow, but not often. (Aside: skiing in Whistler this season the resort weather report actually read “chunky puke, go apres as soon as possible).

that's definitely NOT powder...

Yet, despite the usual luscious snow here, the last two storms are more reminiscent of central PA (or coastal B.C.). On Tuesday, it dumped more than half a foot of wet cement overnight. Wednesday morning, the only two boughs of the (already sad) tree in our yard had been broken and peeled entirely off the trunk, like a naked banana. Other trees were bent in half, huge clumps of snow slabbed off power lines and branches overhead, the snow eclipsed all but a dot of light on traffic lights (the ones that hadn’t blacked out) and I had to walk on sidewalks through what seemed like coconut 7-11 slurpee.

Today, I went for a run with my neighbor and my roommate’s puppy. It was drizzling when we started, and rain/sleet/snowing when we finished 30 minutes later. Looking out the window, I can’t classify the current particles: slower and thicker than rain but not fluffy enough to be snow. That’s springtime in the mountains in Colorado.

And while they may not label it a “wintery mix,” it definitely looks familiar…

Eggplant Pancakes

I know they sound weird, but I’m licking my fingers right now after polishing off a whole plate. Honestly, if you tasted these fried platelets, you might not even know they were eggplant. They taste like tender, seasoned fries and look like delicious potato pancakes you may encounter at a fancy brunch. Here’s the secret recipe:

skin eggplant

baste in egg

fill plastic freezer bag with flour, season with salt and pepper (just a lil)

add oil in pan

frizzz-y it up!

The funniest part: the eggplant was well past its prime. So next time you want to give up on an overly ripe vegetable (or fruit, think bananas foster) batter and fry it instead!

**I can vouch that it works great for zucchini too

Making skis slippery

I don’t normally look to Wired as an authority on skiing, but I learned a lot about ski tuning from this article about waxing racing skis.

Key Points of Interest:

The base of every pair of skis in unique, even 10 pairs of Fat Luvs fresh from the factory, depending on factors like how the ski was cured.

The base has a specific structure or fingerprint, like “the treads of a tire.” Its job is to shed the melt water that’s created with the ski slides over snow as quickly as possible.

Wax penetrates through the pores in the skis and is lovingly applied in multiple layers (Ok, I knew that.) But listen to this…Once a ski is deemed fast, it gets another special coat of wax:

“Instead of the standard wax, a fluorocarbon wax is used. The negative charge of the fluorine ions in the wax help to repel water and dirt more effectively, much like Teflon (a fluorocarbon resin) does.”

The base is finished in a layer of pure fluorocarbon (powder or solid) just before race-time based on the temp and moisture level of the snow. Fluorocarbons are “insanely slippery,” which is why these racers are so damn fast on flats.

Is Candy a Gateway to Alcoholism? Uh oh!

The media was full of fascinating news today, helping me interpret my sweet tooth and associated cravings. This article from LiveScience tells me that a sweet tooth in children may be linked to alcoholism later in life.

“Both activate many of the same reward circuits in the brain…” Though there is no direct link, apparently kids who are unhappy (and have family history of depression and alcoholism) are more drawn to sugary drinks than happy children. We developed a taste for sweets so we’d be attracted to high-energy foods like fruit, but evolution didn’t take plan for refined sugar.

Takeaway: I really like candy (even though I’m an adult). I hope this doesn’t turn into an alcohol addiction, but would that be any worse for my teeth than Skittles and Blowpops?

Stout Month

It’s that time of year again at Mountain Sun in Boulder. You can choose from about 10 malty black stouts like Coconut Cream, Dropkick, Coffee Imperial Stout, Oak Aged Yeti. Being stouts, many of these have 7 – 8 percent alcohol content. I sampled three– Stoked Oak, Nihilist (an 8 ouncer) and Oak Bourbon Stout.

I came home and did a little research on the origin of stouts. Stouts have been around since the late 1600s, named for the strongest or “stoutest” of the brews. Stouts are an outgrowth of porters, called porters in 1721 because street and river porters liked the dark beer. Imperial stouts have an alcohol content of 9 percent or higher because they were made in the 18th century to be exported from London to Russia (to tolerate the cold Baltic temps without freezing). Difference between stouts and porters? Stout is a stronger porter than other porters…but apparently this is a controversial topic among brewmasters.

Back to Stout Month…Nihilist might be my favorite. But I will surely be returning soon for the signature special barrel this year, Girl Scout Cookie Stout, which is mint chocolate and allegedly to die for. It’s hard to imagine two more sacred things coming together, thin mints and beer!

Friendsick

If you live far from home, you don’t constantly miss your family. It’s too hard, so you become kind of numb to their absence and only sometimes feel pangs (especially when I’m sick or nostalgic). I talk to them every week to bridge the distance and see them on special occasions a few times a year. This all seems very normal too me.

But it sometimes shocks me how much I miss old friends. I forget to actively miss them on a regular basis, because the holes they leave in your life are filled by other friends (unlike family). Then I see them and the friendship is rekindled and when I say goodbye, the loss of their company is fresh and sharp again!

Last weekend I reconnected with my good friend from California (well, Moldovia, but she lives in Cali now.) We skied together in Vail and relived our many shared memories, which I had stashed away. Now I miss not only her, but that whole part of my life.

Then last night I chatted for two hours with one of my best college friends who has lived in London the past few years. I’ve seen him several times, but not enough. But after a good talk, I felt close to him again, like I had my friend back. And immediately after hanging up, the sadness withdrawal of knowing I wouldn’t see him or talk to him again for awhile set in.

The swell of nostalgia is nice, because it proves these relationships are real and meaningful. But, in a way, these brief reunions add salt to the wound. It reminds me of how fragmented your life becomes as you grow up and how you can never recapture the intimacy of a specific time. Just like your childhood BFF, you grow apart from your closest friends as you make your way in the world. On the other hand, this unattachment allows you to meet incredible new fascinating people.

Either way, I will jump on any chance to see an old friend. Even though it leaves me with a heavy heart, it’s totally comforting and makes me feel whole.

Existential Outburst

I think about the meaning of life a lot, and what the point of building a career, investing wisely, following laws and living morally is. I have a hard time figuring it out, let alone articulating it, but the book I’m reading does a better job. Breakfast with Buddha, by Roland Merullo, is a novel about a middle-aged man driving from Manhattan to North Dakota to settle his deceased parents’ estate with (randomly) a guru from eastern Europe. He goes on a lot of tangents about meditation, spirituality, materialism, success, etc… He often riffs about food and Hershey and funny stuff too! I share this question with him:

“I have moments–watching wife and babysitter punch each other on daytime TV, or reading about two-year-olds left alone by crack-addicted moms, or hearing radio loudmouths fomenting hatred, or seeing thirty thousand dollars spent on our neighbors’ daughters’ sweet-sixteen parties while my sister’s friends in Paterson work for five dollars an hour–when I wonder if we have, in fact, started in on a moral decline that will end with our extinction, the flag in tatters run down the pole for the final time, the Great American Experiment lying in pieces like a beautiful broken vase, weakened from within and then smashed from without.”

I also wonder if we are speeding inevitably toward our demise, especially in assessing our nonchalance toward the potential cataclysm of climate change. And I think capitalism truly is the Great American Experiment, how we justify gross inequality, lack of health care, wars, and environmental crimes in the name of profit.

This bit on religion (another subject I wrestle with) also resonated:

“But when I listen a bit longer to the so-called Christians, it sounds to me as if their cure for what ails us is more and stricter rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and it has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.”

Thoughtfully and unpretentiously put.

Back from British Columbia

The last two weeks were an epic string of adventures from Boulder to Portland to Victoria to Vancouver to Whistler to Bellingham to Coeur d’Alene (ID) through Montana and back to Boulder. Every day held new and exciting sights, sounds, tastes and varietals of rain and clouds. To read a chronicle and see photos, visit our blog at
http://3chicksinacar.wordpress.com/

A New Year-A New Trip

My poor blog has not gotten much love over the holidays. I’ve been too busy eating Christmas cookies and skiing in Colorado (I’m in pink).

Top of Game Creek Bowl, Vail

Fortunately one of my New Year’s resolutions is to blog more! And to start this year, I’m making over this site into a travel blog. Assignment 1: cover roadtrip from Boulder, Colo. to Vancouver, B.C.

To say I’m excited is an understatement. Here are the ingredients:

Me
My friend Sarah
My red Subaru Legacy
Skis
Laaaaayers
Lonely Planet
Avery beer
Two weeks off
iPod full of audiobooks (including The Hobbit and Dave Barry’s greatest hits)

Our itinerary so far:
Boulder to Portland, via Boise
A drive on the Historic Columbia River Gorge Drive
A fun day in Portland
Ferry from Port Angeles, WA to Victoria, Vancouver Island-see whales
Explore Vancouver Island
Ferry to Vancouver
Epic fun in Vancouver-see the city, taste the nightlife, soak up Canadian culture
Ski in Whistler
Drive through B.C. to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
Meet up with my friend Clare
Ski at Schweitzer
Drive back to Boulder through Montana and Wyoming-feast on the crazy landscapes
Back to work
Look for job

Stay tuned for details and photos!