#Yaak Valley

[averyghe]

Wars brought T’kar to their end. Those of them who forgot the waves of chitin, ways of ancestral magic, and the shroom groves… T’Kar Rak’Kara people with the crimson shells have tried to enslave the farmers and the hunter gatherers, with their firearms, and ideas of supremacy. But the Forrest folk revolted, and so they burned the mushroom groves. Than the spirits and the wizards stood on the side of the people. Fire and wind, water and land, fought in a battle for several hundred years. With a vise Mafa looking in horror from they towers at how T’Kar are killing each other, and ravaging land. When the fight was over it was too late. After many of the mushroom grooves were burned down it was too late. There wasn’t enough oxygen for pseudo-crustaceans to live. And when they come to mafias for help they refused. As mafias don’t involve themselves in the matters of nature. They simply decided to wait until the natures restores by itself, even if it meant extinction for ones.

But here, behold, as the farmers of the Yaak Valley lead by the Knight of the Sun, and Khi-Char Emerald Wing are charging into battle with the forces of Rak’Kara empire… This battle will be legendary.

[THIS IS A CONCEPT FROM AN ABANDONED PROJECT]

[douglashockett]

Best Destinations for Hunting Trips in the US

America has a massive territory with diverse terrain and natural features that make the wild lands of the country ideal habitat for game animals. Currently, ample small game species and about two dozen species of big game animals such as moose and bear can be found in the US. This huge collection of animals makes hunting an attractive activity in the country, and there are numerous prime hunting areas scattered across the US.

While excellent hunting can be found in every state, certain states are more appealing to hunters due to the amount of game available within their boundaries. One of these states is Alaska, which is popular among big game hunters due to its large numbers of grizzly bears, mountain goats, elk, and other species.

Alaska is the largest state in the US, but it also has the lowest population, which means there are significant wilderness areas that are accessible to hunters. However, while Alaska has public hunting grounds that are larger than some countries, its rugged terrain and often hostile environment make it challenging for hunters to reach these areas. Usually, hunters who want to access the best hunting grounds in Alaska have to travel by float plane or boat. But the journey to these wild lands is part of the overall experience, and once hunters arrive at their destinations, they are likely to find the trip worth it.

Colorado is another popular place for hunting in the US. The state has various types of terrain, with vast forests and high plains, which contain large numbers of game animals. There are numerous choice locations to hunt in Colorado, and the type of game a hunter wants will determine where they hunt. For example, hunters in search of Elk should consider the areas south of Meeker or in the northern parts of Glenwood Springs, where the white river elk herd (a herd of about 40,000 elk) resides. Hunters can also visit places like Dominguez Canyon and Badger creek, part of the state’s 8.3 million acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, for a great hunting experience. Besides elk, other big game species found in Colorado include mountain lions, black bears, and moose.

Next up is Montana, which is the fourth largest state in the US, encompassing over 147,000 square miles. Because of its size, Montana has massive open forests, rangelands, and plentiful game. Hunters can expect to find big game species like mountain goats, sheep, moose, and deer, the latter of which are so densely populated in the region that they occasionally die in large numbers due to disease. Some of the best hunting locations in Montana are Bitterroot Valley, Gallatin National Forest, and Yaak Valley.

Wisconsin, meanwhile, has millions of acres of public grounds on which hunters can find big game like whitetail deer, elk, and black bear. Buffalo County, in the southwestern part of the state, features rolling hills, valleys, and woodlands, and is also a good hunting ground.

Finally, in Texas, hunting is a celebrated lifestyle, and the state has plenty of opportunities for hunting game, including bighorn sheep, turkey, quail, and dove. While most of the hunting grounds in Texas are privately owned, there are still over 1 million acres of public land that is accessible to hunters in the state. Some of the best public land to hunt on in Texas include Sam Houston National Forest, Caddo National Grasslands, and Lake Marlin.

[rjzimmerman]

I’ve respected what President Biden has done so far. He’s been an effective leader and generally has kept his word and delivered what he said would deliver. But.......he will do things that to me stink, just as did President Obama. (We won’t even think about wasting my time of #44.) This could be one of his first moves to do something that stinks. About a week ago, I posted a link to an essay by Bill McKibben about the Yaak Valley, and how the Black Ram Project described in this story from Truthout would really wreck the local ecosystem.

Excerpt from this story from Truthout:

The Biden administration is a single regulatory leap away from green-lighting the logging of hundreds of acres of old-growth forest in Montana. If approved, the U.S. Forest Service’s “Black Ram Project” would authorize commercial harvesting on 3,904 acres in the Kootenai National Forest, including the clear-cutting of at least 579 acres of trees that are hundreds of years old. On top of potentially violating the National Environmental Policy Act, carrying out the Trump-era project would undermine at least three major Biden administration commitments: tackling the climate crisis, preserving 30 percent of federal land and waters by 2030 and preventing future outbreaks of disease transmitted from animals (or zoonoses) like COVID-19.

The Kootenai National Forest is in the northwestern corner of the state. Swaths of its land are still covered in 600- to 800-year-old subalpine fir, western larch and spruce trees, which ascend from the headwaters of the Yaak River. The ecosystem serves as a vital corridor for species such as wolves, lynx, wolverine, mountain goats and grizzly bears.

According to the Forest Service’s environmental assessment, the Black Ram Project was first publicly proposed in 2017, and is intended to “maintain or improve [the forest’s] resilience to disturbances such as drought, insect and disease outbreaks, and wildfires.” But the project doesn’t reduce the potential for high-intensity fires, Aaron Peterson, executive director of the conservation group Yaak Valley Forest Council, told Truthout.

Logging-as-fire-prevention grew popular during the Trump administration. In August 2019, for example, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana) introduced bipartisan logging legislation proposed to speed up the permitting process for cutting down trees in national forests “to protect communities from wildfires.” In contrast with the Indigenous practice of controlled burns, logging can actually make things worse. According to a 2016 study in Ecosphere, in forests where trees have been removed by logging, fires burn hotter and faster since the presence of fewer trees can promote the spread of invasive and highly combustible grasses, thus creating hotter, drier and windier conditions.

[tracesdelire]

La plupart du temps, elle planquait sa paranoïa derrière des lunettes d'aviateur et des boas lavande.

Smith Henderson, Yaak Valley, Montana

[thomschroeder]

© 2019 All Rights Reserved

I shiver, as I write this.

I’m shivering because it’s winter in my windowless unheated rat-shed of a writing cabin.

I’m shivering because I’m so nakedly, openly, revealing the earned secrets of my valley…

~ Rick Bass, The Book of Yaak

Ode to Winter #2

[fatehbaz]

As of mid-2019, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming are currently pursuing an end to federal protections for grizzly bears, while L!z Cheney (Republican, Wyoming’s sole representative in the House) is making headlines by insulting Indigenous peoples’ bear preservation efforts. After Wyoming attempted to remove grizzly protections, the outcome of the “Crow Indian Tribe et al. v. United States of America et al.” case reinstated some measures. Some of the plaintiffs: Northern Arapaho Elders Society; Crow Creek Sioux Tribe; Standing Rock Sioux Tribe; Pikani Nation, Hopi Nation Bear Clan; Crow Indian Tribe.

Referencing the case, Cheney, in mid-2019, said this: “The court-ordered relisting of the grizzly was not based on science or facts, but was rather the result of excessive litigation pursued by radical environmentalists intent on destroying our Western way of life.”

Technically, the grizzly’s US distribution is managed as 6 separate population segments, also referred to as recovery zones. In decreasing order of grizzly bear population strength, these areas are:

(1) Northern Continental Divide - about 800 to 1,000 bears  (Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, an extension of the crest of the Canadian Rockies, providing a contiguous corridor for Canadian grizzlies to enter the US) (2) Greater Yellowstone ecosystem - 600 to 800 bears (3) Selkirk Mountains - about 85 bears (4) Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem - about 50 bears (5) North Cascades region  - less than 20 bears

The crest of the Bitterroot Range and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is also technically considered a formal grizzly recovery zone, but management agencies and organizations formally say that there are no grizzlies currently residing here. This isn’t true, however: grizzlies do live or at least travel through in the Bitterroot Mountains. In October 2018, a grizzly was captured/relocated from a golf course near Stevensville, in the Bitterroot Valley. On 15 July 2019, a grizzly was tracked as it travelled through the Bitterroot Valley near Hamilton, eventually returning to the Lochsa-Selway region of central Idaho.

Here’s a map displaying how grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide and Greater Yellowstone ecosystems wander extensively outside of the recovery zones, wilderness areas, and undeveloped land. (These regions, where bears wander, are displayed in the cross-hatched area, in this map from the US Forest Service.)

From the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee:

Here’s a look at current (2018) grizzly distribution in the Yellowstone region.

You can watch a neat and oddly satisfying animated map GIF of the past 30 years of Yellowstone-area grizzly bear range expansion : [x]

People familiar with the Yellowstone to Yukon (Y2Y) concept would recognize these habitat corridors in the Northern Rockies. There is contiguous forested mountain habitat from Alaska, Yukon, and northern British Columbia which extends along the Canadian Rockies crest and eastern BC’s Columbia Mountains, through Glacier and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, through northern Idaho’s cedar-hemlock forest, and to Yellowstone. The corridor also provides home to wolverine, fisher, mountain caribou, Rocky Mountain elk, moose, Canadian lynx, mountain lion, black bear, etc.

Some of those habitat corridors:

[netbros]

Few Hikers Do the Pacific Northwest Trail. Should It Stay That Way?

Few Hikers Do the Pacific Northwest Trail. Should It Stay That Way?

Montana’s Yaak Valley was one of the most remote places Emma Vigers had ever set foot. Tucked into the corner of the Idaho state line and the Canadian Border, this heavily forested region offered the type of solitude Vigers had been looking for in a thru-hike. She was just a few weeks into her trek along the 1,200-mile Pacific Northwest Trail, which connects the Continental Divide in Montana to…

[msarki]

Why I Came West: A Memoir by Rick Bass

Why I Came West: A Memoir by Rick Bass Hardcover, 256 pages Published July 3rd 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN: 0618596755 (ISBN13: 9780618596751) Edition Language: English Literary Awards: National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Autobiography (2008)

Either way, the story is again a question of fit, and of being shaped — going on a journey to escape the old ill fit, or riding into town and seeking to discover or establish one’s new fit.

The life story of Rick Bass is atypical for most of us. His is a teaching moment for those who want to listen and learn. Count me in as one of the above.

…To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one’s life…There may be different reasons for and ways of living a life, but certainly for me, those two criteria — engagement, and the passion of desire — are high on the list…There’s nothing wrong with hunger, I think, or passion, or desire — on the contrary.  It’s gluttony, I think, that’s the sin.

Rick Bass writes in Why I Came West, a memoir how he eventually put his every energy into his activist-environmentalist work instead of his love for writing fiction. Reading this memoir made me feel that Bass had somehow lost himself in the process.  And because environmental rewards are slow in coming, he feared his persistent frustration and anger would take over him, and his daughters would not know the real man he wanted to be.  Bass has lived in the Yaak Valley in Montana for over twenty years. He ventured out only when necessary to get a living, or to fight in his attempts to protect what remained of this wilderness natural area.  To imagine Bass driving into the big cities again after living in the woods for so long was unnerving.  Fighting in front of our United States Congress seemed to me only to be an exercise in futility.  In this memoir Bass is aging and wondering what he should do with what remains of his life and time with his young daughters.  It is sad to think after all these years that he did not make a difference. Our own prospective travels around the country are patterned around the idea of seeing what remains of the magnificence of our country before it is too late.  Corporate and personal greed continues to rape the land in unsettling and unimaginable degrees.

Just as the forest is being taken from us, so too — like an echo, or perhaps a foreshadowing — the language of the forest is being taken from us — insidiously, slyly, steadily — and we are being given instead, are accepting, unthinkingly, the language of machines, and the language of the sick and the diseased.

The more one reads of this book the less fun it is. Bass has obviously sacrificed a good part of his life to protect and save what amounts to 1/4 of the Yaak Valley land mass. The majority of his neighbors do not approve of his efforts.  False reports about him have been printed in newspapers.  Bass has sacrificed his blossoming career as a fiction writer in exchange for this environmental activism.  One cannot imagine the sacrifices he has made and the relationships that have suffered due to his diligent efforts in convincing Congress to act and declare a small portion of the Yaak Valley a wilderness.  

One of the fine things about living in the woods is that you often (and quickly) forget how you might appear to the outside world — a forgetfulness that is proportionate, of course, to the reduction of your involvement with that world.  Among your neighbors, there’s no need to try to represent yourself as being something or someone you’re not…    

Rick Bass has detailed an important history of his twenty-one year quest to designate a portion of the Yaak Valley as wilderness.  An exhausting process, Bass goes on to prove how tired he is, how burned-out he feels, and how important it is for him to return to his other life of writing and enjoying his family.  It is time to pass the baton to another younger person with energy Bass no longer has at his disposal. So what was proving to be a convincing argument over how taxing and frustrating the fight for wilderness designation can be turns out to be a vision of hope, of alternative measures enacted to bring opposing factions together instead of separating these warring nations further. The demanding work Rick Bass has done for years to protect our wild lands is admirable.  He has my greatest respect and my solemn wish for him to live what remains of his life in peace and tranquility.

…Many have told me that it is my passion, not my ideas, that frightens people, but if I had any of it to do over again, I would have been twice so rather than half as much…  

[shellcreekphoto]

Want to know a couple more of my favorite elopement locations? Wyoming & Montana! These are two huge states with vast open areas & impressive mountains. The national parks in these areas can really draw in a lot of people, but there are so many national forests & other public lands outside of the national parks. In Wyoming you could look into places like Grand Teton National Park, the Teton National Forest, Yellowstone, Pinedale, the Wind River Range, the Medicine Bow Mountains, or the sand dunes. In Montana, look into locations such as Glacier National Park, Makoshika State Park, Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, the Beartooth Range, or the temperate rainforests of Yaak Valley. These are just a handful of the places these states have to offer & I’ll be in both state this year! Need help deciding on even a general location? Contact me because I offer free consultations to go over more info, answer your questions, & get you pointed in the right direction so you can plan the elopement that you want! (at Glacier National Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CZTGUTzL9IV/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hummingzone]

Grizzlies are roaming farther and wider. What does that mean for species recovery efforts?

Grizzlies are roaming farther and wider. What does that mean for species recovery efforts?

Grizzly bears haven’t yet patronized the fast-food joints of central Idaho. But they have started wandering so far from the recovery areas set up for them 30 years ago that the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee may need to rethink the way it works. “The bears of the Selkirks and Cabinet-Yaak (recovery areas) are expanding into the Kootenai Valley and beyond,” Idaho Department of Fish and Game…

[rjzimmerman]

The Yaak Valley Forest Council is an advocate for keeping the Yaak "wild” by turning it into a “Climate Refuge,” a sanctuary for wildlife and old forests. But turning around the US Forest Service’s approach to old growth forests is a challenge. Consider that the US Forest Service is an agency of the Department of Agriculture, which is now headed by Secretary Tom Vilsack, who had the same role under President Obama. Vilsack wasn’t climate-change or environmentally friendly under President Obama.

Yaak Valley. Credit: Anthony South, Yaak Landscape Photography, Yaak Valley Forest Council

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

[The “Climate Refuge”] idea is threatened by the Kootenai National Forest’s plan for what’s called the “Black Ram” project in the Yaak Valley along the Canadian border. Blueprints for “active forest management” on more than 95,000 acres would allow a patchwork of commercial logging on about 4,000 acres that’s expected to yield about 57 million board feet of timber, as well as trail and habitat improvements and the removal of underbrush that could fuel wildfire. The project was at the verge of final approval when environmentalists began pressing the Biden administration to stop it and recognize the area as a tool in the fight against climate change.

Black Ram is just one of dozens of U.S. Forest Service decisions that would allow clear cutting, commercial logging, pipeline construction, road building and reservoir creation in national forests across the country. And Peterson’s group has joined a nationwide coalition of conservation organizations fighting to preserve not only the Yaak Valley, but wild forests across the country.

The Biden administration, they argue,  should start using forestland as a tool for addressing climate change. And that effort should begin with reversing decisions and pending actions approved by the Trump administration, they contend. That includes Black Ram.

Reversing the Forest Service’s all-but-finalized decisions on Black Ram will have meaning far beyond the wildlands of Montana. Environmentalists and extractive industries alike see forest management decisions as a window into the new administration’s thinking about conservation and the use of forestlands to address the climate crisis. Something as seemingly simple as starting to value forests for their capacity to store carbon, as opposed to the wood products they produce, would amount to a seismic change in the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of Agriculture behemoth of a bureaucracy that has evolved over more than a century. 

[niachaniago]

Slide 1 : duh panas bet yaak 😥 silauuu 😵 Slide 2 : pake kacamata aja deh 😎 Slide 3 : eh gaya dulu ntar keburu dijepret 😊😁 . . . . #explorekualalumpur #exploremalaysia #explorelangkawi #skybridgelangkawi #skybridge #travelgram #travelphotography #traveling #visitmalaysia #langkawi #langkawiisland #pulaulangkawi #island #valley #ootd #outfithijab (di Langkawi) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7_LXk8HnUy/?igshid=1khf2mt76cxsk

[lapsang-lisait]

Yaak Valley, Montana, Smith Henderson

Ne dit-on pas que que les cordonniers sont les plus mal chaussés ? Eh bien il semble que cette règle puisse s’appliquer aussi à d’autres professions. Aussi, les médecins seraient les plus mal soignés, les cuisiniers les plus mal nourris, les coiffeurs les plus mal coiffés et les instituteurs les plus mal éduqués (gnark gnark gnark) … euh bon ok je m’égare. Par contre, ce livre démontre que pour les travailleurs sociaux la règle s’applique, elle s’applique même parfaitement bien à Pete Snow. En effet, on peut dire que cet assistant social est bien servi (et au plus près) concernant les sujets d’étude, entre son frère repris de justice en cavale, son ex-femme complètement barje, défoncée, limite nymphomane et enfin, cerise sur le gâteau, sa malheureuse fille qui s’enfuit et se prostitue aux quatre coins du pays. Sans parler de son propre cas, car il en tient lui même une bonne - de couche. En trois mots, irresponsable, alcoolique, paumé. D’ailleurs, comme dans l’histoire de la poule et de l’œuf, on ne sait pas trop quelle est l’origine du problème : est-ce parce qu’il est comme ça que tout ce qui lui arrive lui arrive ? Ou au contraire, est-ce à force de côtoyer ces marginaux, ces désespérés et autres illuminés qu’il a  fini par leur ressembler ? Ce point restera non élucidé mais la question est sociologiquement intéressante. Bref, quoi qu’il en soit il a du pain sur la planche le pauvre homme et comment voulez-vous avec tout ça qu’il fasse la différence entre vie professionnelle et vie personnelle ? Ben oui, voilà, c’est aussi ce que je pense : il ne peut pas, c’est impossible. Résultat des courses, il est complètement dépassé et il a beau se démener comme un diable, son action se révèle la plupart du temps peu utile, voire contre productive. Sans compter que dans ce coin perdu du Montana la misère sociale est grande et les épaves humaines - comme les feuilles mortes - se ramassent à la pelle. Aide-toi toi-même et le ciel t’aidera, je crois qu’il n’y rien de plus à espérer par là bas (et surtout n'en attendez pas trop des services sociaux) ... Donc voilà, si vous avez envie de faire des rencontres borderline dans les montagnes et forêts grandioses du Montana, vous pouvez entreprendre cette excursion dans la Vallée du Yaak. Pour ma part, j’ai commencé par partir relativement enthousiaste sur ces petits sentiers rocailleux mais j’ai rapidement trouvé que Smith Henderson, à l’instar de son héros, semble dépassé par son histoire et s’égare parfois dans des détours inutiles.

Quatrième de couverture : Dans le Montana, en 1980. Autour de Pete, assistant social dévoué, gravite tout un monde d’écorchés vifs et d’âmes déséquilibrées. Il y a Beth, son ex infidèle et alcoolique, Rachel, leur fille de treize ans, en fugue dans les bas-fonds de Tacoma, Luke, son frère, recherché par la police. Et puis il y a Cecil l’adolescent violent et sa mère droguée et hystérique, et ce jeune Benjamin, qui vit dans les bois environnants, avec son père, Jeremiah Pearl, un illuminé persuadé que l’apocalypse est proche, que la civilisation n’est que perversion et que le salut réside dans la survie et l’anarchie. Pearl qui s’est exclu de la société, peut-être par paranoïa, peut-être aussi pour cacher qu’il aurait tué son épouse et leurs cinq enfants. Au milieu de cette cour des miracles, Pete pourrait être l’ange rédempteur, s’il n’était pas lui-même complètement perdu…  

[la-princesse-de-cleves]

Si je tenais pour certain qu’un homme se rendait chez moi dans l’intention délibérée de faire mon bien, je m’empresserais de fuir. Henry David Thoreau

Il y avait des familles dont tu t’occupais parce que c’était ton job; tu leur venais en aide, tu mettais au point un plan d’action avec elles, tu passais voir si tout allait bien et tu les emmenais chez le toubib faire soigner leur foutue angine. Tu le faisais, point à la ligne. Parce que personne d’autre ne le ferait à ta place. Et puis il y avait les autres, ceux pour lesquels tu avais choisi de faire ce métier.

[...] Il n’acheva pas sa phrase. Benjamin était nu. Tout en os et en nœuds, blafard et squelettique, il lui rappela ces créatures qui vivent tapies au fond des grottes, araignées albinos, tritons et poissons sans yeux. Un garçon lactescent couvert de meurtrissures mauves et marron, plaques de crasse et cicatrices roses, renflement jaunis, toutes des couleurs ternies par l’absolue pâleur de sa peau. Il était nacré, blanc de perle, ce fils de Pearl. Les cuisses et le ventre tachetés comme un léopard, grêles d’auréoles brunes, le pénis asphyxié au milieu des jeunes poils pubiens comme une nodosité grisâtre. La vision de ce corps n’évoquait pas la chair, mais les minéraux. On s’étonnait presque qu’il fût mobile, que cet enfant translucide puisse sautiller sur place en serrant ses bras maigres autour de lui.

[...] et il sentait alors un vague sentiment de pitié l’envahir, mais nom de Dieu, ras le bol de les entendre chouiner. On aurait dit qu’ils ne pouvaient pas s’empêcher  de se transformer eux-mêmes en objets de haine, en aimants à cruauté. Il se demanda si la maltraitance était une chose qui n’arrivait qu’aux gamins irritants, ceux qui n’inspiraient que violence et rejet, à l’inverse des enfants adorables qu’on dorlote, qu’on gâte et qu’on engraisse.

[...] Quand il est allé regarder, a-t-il éclaté en sanglots en lui demandant pourquoi ? L’a-t-il quand même prise dans ses bras ?

Ou bien s’est-il enfoncé dans la nuit en courant ? A-t-il entendu ses propres sanglots étouffés et son chagrin résonner contre la paroi des montagnes ? Les martres et les lièvres se sont-ils enfuis, chassés par ses hurlements ?

A-t-il couru le long d’un tronc mort et est-il resté assis là en tenant ses genoux serrés contre lui comme s’il risquait d’exploser s’il lâchait tout ?

A-t-il sondé son coeur en s’interrogeant sur ce qu’il avait fait ? S’est-il demandé si l’univers n’était que cruauté ?

Et a-t-il descendu  seul les enfants dans la cave ou avec l’aide de Benjamin ? 

Ont-ils fait rouler des pierres et combien de temps leur a-t-il fallu ?

Continuaient-ils à le faire, encore maintenant ?

Est-ce pour cela qu’ils ont été choisis ?

Choisis pour ça ?

Ça ?

Yaak Valley Montana(Fourth of July Creek) Smith Henderson

[thatsnakeman]

Yaak Mountain fire lookout over valley Troy, Montana [OC] [11,892x3628] via /r/EarthPorn https://ift.tt/2HHsBFP