Public Lands Stewards: Reintroduction

  It has been barely over a month since I began the internship with Mt. Adams Institute. After spending a winter in Bozeman, MT, I became accustomed to so many luxuries that I didn’t realize how detached I was becoming to the natural world around me. I slept in a...

Public Lands Stewards: I am Wild

On one of our very first patrol trips, my partner Emma and I headed up to the Pyramid Mountain Trail. You access the trailhead via Shady Pass, a steep, gravel road that takes you from my home district, Entiat, up over the mountains and down the other side to the...

Public Lands Stewards: Turning a New Leaf

September cast a sharp visible distinction on the color wheel of the alpine basin where I’ve spent a good portion of my time as a Wilderness trails ranger intern for the Chelan Ranger District. Fields of bear grass in the meadows above Lyman Lake slim their bulbous...

Public Lands Stewards: Working in Paradise

As a Wilderness trails ranger with the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, I have the great privilege of working in the Glacier Peaks Wilderness. Now that I’m more than a third of the way through the season, I’d like to share some highlights. As its name suggests, the...

Public Lands Stewards: To Fit a Place

“When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one,...

Public Lands Stewards: Lyman Lake

The Lake Chelan area that we have been working on has a large number of trails, from short hour-long trips to destinations that can take 3 days of hard work to get to. A significant amount of our time is spent on one 30-mile stretch of trail and its branching...