(first posted on Patreon for subscribers)
The past few weeks I have been on the road traveling from Tuscon, AZ after finishing my Signal Fire Wide Open Studios trip, to Durango, Colorado. I met with a new sweetie there. We spent a week and a half canning roadkill deer meat, processing pine nuts we had harvested together a month before when we met up in the remote depths of Nevada, making apple and pear butter from local fruits, concocting batches of deer chili, rendering pork fat for cooking, making deer jerky from the best cuts, pressing medicinal mushroom tinctures for resilience and longevity, planting wapato and camas Gabe collected earlier in the year with the intention to spread their ranges elsewhere, and more. I worked on getting some pieces finished on ground shots land capsules including working on a digitally designed zine, a learning curve that still feels slow for me.
Wapato, Sagittaria latifolia (Alismataceae)
Camas bulbs Camassia quamash (Liliaceae) that Gabe has been replanting across the west.
you can follow Gabe and his wild-tending work on instagram at @plumsforbums
in Nevada
We decided to take a trip to California to do interviews, study plants, harvest acorns and madrone berries if it’s possible, and eventually make our way back to the desert for the winter.
We stopped in Paonia, Colorado to visit a friend, Nikki Hill, who is a botanist. We recorded two podcast episodes, featuring my sweetie Gabe and Nikki together talking about invasive plant politics and science (hint, they think invasive plant propaganda is bullshit), wild-tending in the west and more. We stayed at Small Potatoes Farm, a cute tiny organic farm up in the hills above the town proper. Scotty, the farmer, was awesome and welcomed up in his tiny home to make food together, and we did some deer meat/fresh carrot trades. I got to visit Elsewhere Studios, a neat artist residency in Paonia that features some pretty unique architecture and hobbit like buildings to work within. I met up with Carolina, the other half of Piney Wood Atlas, a project featured on the podcast this past summer. Carolina, aside from co-running Piney with Alicia Toldi, is also the program manager for Elsewhere. She gave me a tour after meeting for bagels in town.
Gabe and Nikki inspecting hardy almonds
Nikki
In Paonia, Gabe collected a hearty variety of almonds to replant elsewhere, a couple different varieties of walnuts to replant and eat, too. Collecting seeds and nuts to replant is a new way for me in some regards. At least as a priority right now in this semi-nomadic way I’ve been living. Gabe is really focused on the re-planting aspect of wild-tending and seed collection and eyeing places to replant by reading the landscape. I’m enjoying that new collaboration. It involves an eye for detail that surpasses the eye I thought I already had.
We then ventured to Moab, Utah and camped around Canyonlands National Park and on BLM land in the Bear’s Ears area a couple nights at a spot I’ve camped several times before. Going back to places in layers gives me time to think about where I was then and where I’ve been since, and what state of mind I’m in now. I reflect on what I was wanting in my life, and how in a lot of ways, I have what I asked for and more.
We stopped to visit Emily of Sundial Medicinals at her herb shop in Moab, who was one of the first guests on the podcast. She gave us tea, and we gave her pine nuts to munch.
We then drove to Great Basin National Park and camped three nights, cooking roadkill turkey, pine nuts in salt water, wild rice and delicata squash on the fire. The pine nuts were more abundant than when we were there in September, practically raining on the ground and the weather was divine. We enjoyed 60 degree days and cool nights by the fire. We collected more Piñon pine nuts, rose hips, juniper berries from the Juniperus communis that we found sweet like candy, up at high elevation. We were camped in a riparian area, among Mountain Mahogany, River Birch, Willow, Cottonwoods, Aspens, Piñon Pines, Utah Juniper and more. We pumped water to drink from frigid cold springs, collected firewood every evening for warmth and cooking. It was so nice to have a companion in it all, too.
We woke the morning we were to leave to snow falling and cold temperatures. We waited until the last minute to do some planting back, and did it in the snow with a traditional digging stick and trowel. We planted wild onion and camas bulbs in places where Gabe felt they would thrive. The idea is to plant gardens everywhere for futures humans, for future birds, for future bears. If we all did this wherever we went, what would our world look like? Gabe’s teacher is Finisia Medrano, whom you can learn more about here.
We ventured deeper into Nevada with the storm blowing all around us, snow, rain, swirling fog and dark clouds. We drove route 50, ‘the loneliest highway in america’ a route I have driven many times, and mostly alone.
We stopped at a hot springs at the center of the state, Spencers Hot Springs, a spot I went to the first time I drove through Nevada with my friend Hanah, and was struck then by the immense silence to the point that it made me uncomfortable. Now, I revel in it, I crave it, I’m glad to know places like this still exist.
Here we soaked in the night, with the fog, snow, and mist looming overhead, only seeing lights from cars in the distance on occasion from the highway that was 6 miles away. Silence. Eerie silence with saltbush and shadshale, desert hares, wild donkeys on the periphery of our camp.
Yesterday we drove from there to the eastern Sierras through the shock of flashing Reno at dusk. We’re currently at Sierra Hot Springs, Gabe is up planting Biscuitroots (Lomatium and Cymopterus species in the Carrot family) and Yampah (Perideridia species in the Carrot family) at a ‘biscuit scab’ we found this morning. Perhaps it is a garden that native peoples planted who once lived here by the hot springs. It is actually quite likely. The valley is full of Camas, the hills are full of Yampah, Biscuitroots, Sedges, other food and material plants. It would have been a wonderfully abundant place to live. It still could be.
