By Scotty Craighead

Last night at seven, I was grating three types of cheese, cooking ten slices of bacon, slicing two avocados, and toasting twelve slices of bread. It was two hours before my Senior Prom, and I was preparing dinner for my date and two other couples.

Before finalizing the grilled cheeses, we headed outside for the classic pre-prom photo-op. I wore a completely black suit complete with hat and cane. There was only one exception, the tan moccasins on my feet. There was no question as to which shoes I would wear. Four years of high school dances have taught me that moccasins make the best dancing shoes.

The photographs consisted of the traditional group, couple, and glamour shots, and a particularly exciting guys-only photo on the trampoline. Girls did not partake in the trampoline pictures for obvious reasons. After the photos were over it was time to finish dinner. As Master Chef, I instructed everyone in constructing their own sandwiches of grilled cheese, bacon, avocado, and tomato. A minor timing miscalculation resulted in a rush to clear the table before our sandwiches lost their “cheesy freshness”.

While I would have liked to sit and bask in the glorious aftertaste of a good grilled cheese, members of our group rushed me off to the National Wildlife Art Museum, venue for the final dance of high school. It was a wonderful night of dancing. If you’ve never performed the Robot, the Invisible Ball, or the perennial favorite — Dirty Dancing — in moccasins, you don’t know what you’re missing.

This is the third installment in our series of videos for Return to the Outdoors, sponsored by Timex.

My favorite part of this video is Chouinard’s quip about sleeping bags. “There were years and years and years when I spent 250 days in a sleeping bag, probably.” Now there’s something to aspire to. Especially when you go on to found Chouinard Equipment, Patagonia, One Percent for the Planet, write a book or two, and help preserve huge swaths of South America’s Patagonia.

Chouinard is a hero, pure and simple.

The music in Yvon’s segment is by The Jason Spooner Trio. The introductory music is by Lucas Reynolds.

Some say anyone can ski in Alaska. They’re full of it. No, you don’t need to be a professional “athlete.” Nor do you need to hang it out daily on double-exposed near-death runs. But you do need to be a junkie. You know, the type that sits around drooling over ski photos in July. Or the geeked out freak sitting in front of his computer in May dreaming about snow, only a few weeks after a frustrating Valdez season in which there were more couch days than ski days.

When it’s snowing in Alaska you can’t fly. When it’s windy you can’t fly. When it’s cloudy you can’t see ten feet in front of your ski tips. So when it storms, you sit. Or pace.

Maybe the happiest ski guides in Alaska are the ones on Prozac. Come to think of it, guides and clients alike should make the little green pill standard issue along with shovel, probe, and beacon. At least during down days you’d actually use the pills.

Eventually, you put your skins on and hike into the ping pong ball. With no trees for reference you grope your way to the couloirs above the Tsaina Lodge. Two thousand vertical feet later you’re at the base of a coulior. Once inside, you can actually see — the rock walls giving you reference, security, and hope. A thousand feet later and you’re at the top.

With luck, a milky hole appears in the sky and you jump into the powder below, for ten seconds of joy before you’re confronted by the blinding whiteness of the glacier below.
Back at base more clients and guides stare at the sky hoping the clouds will burn off. Some are more realistic than others.

Those who’ve played the game longest know it’s worth the wait. But not all have the patience. Eventually one or two clients pull the rip cord and return to the lower 48. Veteran guides grin, knowing it often takes a sacrificial lamb to earn the favor of the Chugach.

This is a video I made for Nau’s website, to accompany their Spring 2008 clothing line. Looks like they won’t be using it.

Bummer. They meant well. They really did.

NOTE: After clicking on the picture, you might want to hit the pause button on the player and let this video load completely before you view it, as I uploaded it at a higher bit rate to improve the resolution. If you have a crappy connection (DSL or slower) and just let this video play, it’s going to hiccup worse than your grandma after her 3rd shot of Jaegermeister.

The images from this video come from the webcam at Craighead Beringia South, and were compiled by Scotty Craighead, son of Beringia founder Derek Craighead. Beringia is carrying out numerous vital investigations into the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and their website is definitely worth checking out. We are extremely grateful for the use of these 4,180 images, which allow us the unprecedented privilege of viewing the passage of an entire year in the Tetons.

Watching this video makes me miss summer, so I’ll be hastening its arrival by getting the hell out of Dodge. This town feels small, this room feels small, this 24-inch computer screen feels real freaking small right now. So I’m headed south, mañana.

Once again I find myself needing a break from paradise. What’re you gonna do. See you in a few.

David

This is our second in a series of videos for the Conservation Alliance and the Return to the Outdoors campaign, sponsored by Timex.

Steph gets after it. For more of her exploits, check out her blog or her book.

The music is by Immovable Objects, from San Diego.

I’ve been wondering that as long as I’ve known Tom Bie, the founder and editor of The Drake, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this month. Some would say The Drake is Powder Magazine for fly-fishing; I’d say it’s a mash up of the Surfer’s Journal, David James Duncan’s novel The River Why, and Mad Magazine, with just enough Maxim to give it a little newsstand zing.

In any case, it works. The Drake is one of the few niche magazines in the outdoor world which was started on a shoestring and a decade later, is still toughing it out. (Hooked on the Outdoors? Blue? River? No such luck.) There’s no secret to its success. The stories are solid and the pictures unique. Moreover, it was the first fly fishing magazine to celebrate the sport’s legions of young zealots — the “trout bums” that in the years since the Drake’s inception have turned the fishing industry, or at least fishing media, on its ear. Most importantly, as Tom describes in his introduction to the current issue, The Drake has been focused not on the how of fishing, but the why. Which I can appreciate, because I’m still pretty dubious on the whole point of the sport.

This is partially because my dubiousness pisses Bie off, which I find entertaining. He likes to say, “If I could only get a rod in your hand, you’d be a hell of fly-fishing writer.” To which I respond, “Maybe when I’m older and I can’t ski and climb anymore, I’ll be content to stand around all day in ass-deep water, flicking my wrist.” Tom has always bristled at the idea of fishing being something you turn to after you’ve wearied from other sports. “That just means you’ll be an old, shitty fisherman,” he says. To which one can only respond, “Yeah, but it’s fishing.” Such conversations are particularly rewarding if I’m able to invoke, at least once, the term “fish pole.”

Of course, you only have to go fly fishing once to know it’s hard. Which I understand is part of the reason people do it. And I suppose you also do it because it’s a quiet and solitary sport, it takes place on bucolic creeks and rivers, and there’s the thrill of choosing the one correct little fake bug out of all the zillion little fake bugs in all your little plastic boxes. Most of all, it seems to me, fishing affords the 21st century urbanized Everyman the only chance to enjoy the primordial thrill of engaging in a life or death struggle with an animal lower on the food chain, something not even hunting affords, unless you stalk deer or elk bare-handed, delighting in the spasms of your prey as you wrestle it to the ground so your pal can take a picture of it in a headlock before you let go and watch it bound back into the woods. “Nice one, a 600-pounder!”

Seriously — fly fishing’s weird. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it in the pages of The Drake. In spite of my own smarminess towards the sport, I usually end up reading the mag cover to cover, seeking out the nuggets, like these, from the 10th anniversary issue:

Then it starts getting easy. Reaching over the slack water, I bounce the fly off a big rock at the base of the plunge and throw a quick downstream mend. Four more browns in a row, all wild and fat and bright and eager, before it finally shuts down. Apparently, seeing their comrades struggle and disappear from sight gives them no pause. Out of their tiny minds, every one of them. (”Case of the Mondays,” by Dave Lawton.)

Only later — weeks later — did he concede, sheepishly, that he’d been casting not to a fish, but to a drip falling from a crack in the roadway above. He’d convinced himself at the time it was a fish — in much the same way sailors convinced themselves that manatees were mermaids. (”Faith is a Kind of Habit,” by Hal Clifford.)

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Phish pretty much peaked on October 8, 1995, at the Adams Fieldhouse in Missoula, Montana. (”Magical Mystery Tailwater Tour,” by Tom Bie.)

Notwithstanding the quality of the writing, part of the reason I appreciate The Drake is that I witnessed its arduous birth. Tom Bie was one of my first housemates in Jackson Hole. In fact, his offer, from one struggling writer to another, of a room in the house he was renting, was one of the reasons I moved to Jackson Hole in 1998. In our rambling house on Redmond Street, Tom lived in the basement, in a large room lined with fake wood paneling, lit by bare bulbs, and overflowing with mounds of dirty clothes and back issues of Powder and Mariah (the precursor to Outside), everything coated in white hairs from Tom’s yellow lab Trask, including Tom. At that point, Tom was the sports editor at the Jackson Hole Guide, worked the graveyard shift driving a cab for Buckboard Cabs, lived on grilled American cheese sandwiches and frozen waffles, and tried to get as much skiing and girl-chasing in as he could between shifts. But it still wasn’t enough, because Tom is ambitious, impassioned, and highly literate — especially when it comes to fly fishing — his first, and (just ask any of his ex-girlfriends, or actually, don’t) overriding love.

Tom started The Drake by calling his heroes — Pete Fromm, William Kittredge, and David James Duncan, and convincing these luminaries of outdoor lit to contribute articles to a magazine that didn’t exist, edited by a young skid they didn’t know. Such was the power of Tom Bie’s love for both fishing and the written word. He also convinced me to write something for the first issue of The Drake, though I’d never lifted a fly rod above my head. It’s still the only thing I’ve ever written about fly-fishing, and it turned out okay, mostly because Tom Bie is a damn good editor, and knew immediately to chop the lame last third of it off.

Since that first issue, which I helped distribute around the hinterlands of Idaho from the back of my truck, Bie has published one or two issues a year, relying solely on word of mouth to make the magazine grow. In the meantime, he’s also been the editor of Paddler, a senior editor at Skiing, and the editor at Powder, all magazines that improved dramatically under his helm, especially Powder. If you’ve liked the “new” Powder that has existed in the past few years, it is due to Tom’s diligence and influence, which is really sort of amazing given how bad Tom is at meeting deadlines and replying to emails and phone calls. Tom is the perfect example of a particular progeny of Jackson Hole, where he lived for almost a decade — he’s a lazy, outdoorsy workaholic, coasting by on talent, enthusiasm, competitiveness, a good ear, and a refusal to let crap land on any page he’s responsible for.

Now, Tom lives in Fort Collins, Colo., makes fly fishing movies, and packages fly fishing content for a web media company. But his first love and priority is The Drake, which is now thicker than just about any other outdoor publication out there. Advertisers are lining up to get into its pages, because it’s good-humored, heartfelt, and honest. If you haven’t already, check it out. The Drake is a hell of a good read, even if you don’t plan on buying a fish pole before 2028.

Three intrepid journalists/pro googlers from Jackson Hole head to Casper to hear Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama speak, and perhaps to imbibe a little more Kool-Aid. Here’s a quick look at their Wyoming road trip, the candidates, and a few of the folks they met along the way.

One man had never attended a Democratic event before in his life; three teenagers – too young to vote – had skipped school to drive two hours from Sheridan; a middle-aged mom hoped Obama would sign the sticker on her hat.

They were among the thousands gathered under the yellow flourescents of the Casper Rec Center gym on Friday, the eve of the Wyoming caucus, to get a glimpse, a handshake or an earful of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

“Politics are always something distant that we can’t really get excited about in Wyoming, ’cause it’s something you just see on the news,” said 15-year-old Megan Jenkins. “It’s always happening somewhere else. And it’s finally happening here and it’s really cool.”

Obama spoke from a small platform to a packed gymnasium full of what his introducer had referred to as an audience of “Democrats and Republicans, Independents and I-don’t-give-a-damns, ranchers and roughnecks, retirees and students, moms and a lot of other fine folks.”

While he seemed a bit worn out – who wouldn’t be after a year of kissing babies and shaking hands – he spoke and answered questions from his Wyoming audience for over an hour. One of my favorite retorts was, “What do people think Senator Obama is gonna do at 3 in the morning? I’m gonna answer the phone.”

Later that day, I attended Hillary Clinton’s event across town in the even gloomier Casper College Gymnasium. People waited for over an hour for her to appear. (Reports indicated that she was delayed schmoozing and signing following her speech in Cheyenne.) And when she walked in, decked in a blue suit that matched her banner “Solutions for America,” it seemed that the health care and union workers cheered the loudest. Like Obama, she knew how to please her crowd. “You’ve heard me say it before,” she said. “It took a Clinton to clean up the mess after the last Bush.”

Seeing both candidates in person was magical, for this feels like a defining moment in history. But both events were completely different. During Obama’s poetic preaching, I called my father - a registered Independent - in Baltimore, MD and held the cell phone high. He was in the midst of tuning a piano – one of his many jobs as a musician. “I love you, Dad,” I shouted as cheers erupted for Obama. “Call you later.”

During Hillary’s speech, I did the same.

“It just didn’t have the same feel,” Dad said into the phone during her speech. “She’s trying, though.”

During her speech, Hillary stood on a raised stage and looked out over her audience, many undecided (at least those I interviewed in line beforehand) on which candidate they supported. Unlike her opponent, Hillary spoke specifically about Wyoming.

“The first [change] is in energy, something Wyoming knows a lot about right here in Casper, one of the centers of the energy revolution of the 19th and 20th century,” she said. “We have to have more emphasis on creating the kind of renewable energy jobs that are going to put us in stronger position when it comes to our security. … Clean renewable energy has the potential to revolutionize our economy.”

When finished, she didn’t answer questions, but signed posters and shook hands.

One man got her to sign his ratty olive-colored sweatshirt.

“She signed it here,” he said, pointing to his arm. “And she signed my sticker! I want Clinton to win because of her stance on the war and on health care.” He then bounded away holding several signs and cheering.

Hope Yates, an 11-year-old Casper resident who stood in line in the wind with everyone else at sunset, said her main reservation about Hillary is that she, Hope, wants to be the first woman president.

“Plus,” she said. “Obama is way cooler.”