PDXpersky

Landscape artist. Inquiring mind. PDXpersky.com.

[pdxpersky]

Wood chips are flying, and I am in the splash zone.

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Mondays are hard. Sunrises are great.

[english-idylls]

Dessins pour le calendrier de La Belle Jardinière by Eugène Grasset (1896).

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Mute Swan - A Private View.

Early This Morning Along The Weaver River Bank.

Cheshire, England   September 2015.

Nikon D300 VR 70-300 f4.5 - 5.6G   Shot at 180mm f32 1/100th sec.

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Good morning

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Rest.

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Dear Reader

The goal of Trail-A-Week was 52 essays. In August of 2015, I realized that I wouldn’t be a writer until I let my bones show. I’d already understood – gradually, after 24 years of …

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Early light

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The River at Dawn

It will be a long day indoors. Before the sun shakes out its hot wool blanket over the entire Northwest, I am risen to seek what fresh air may be found. In the 5am dark, we drive east on a faint bl…

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Familiar Things

At last, a summer that doesn’t blister the skin. We have our hot days, but they come and they go. A weekend prickly with white-blue heat, a few sweater-cool mornings, then a whole week of those bel…

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A Good Place

We have journeyed to an island where the beauty of the visible – not small – is eclipsed by the enchantment of fragrance. I am safer than Odysseus ever was – and anyway my Penelop…

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Hamilton Mountain

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Between Two Tides

It’s far too hot to hike. Portland is having one of its moderately awful summer heat waves, and although it’s a perfectly good Wednesday afternoon and I’m restless, at least 15 Fahrenheit degrees b…

[pdxpersky]

I learned today that my heart's home, Northern California's Smith River, has been threatened for the past four years by a proposed Panamanian strip-mining operation for nickel.

The Smith, you see, flows federally protected through California, but no such protection exists for it in Oregon's Kalmiopsis Wilderness, where the North Fork's headwaters lie.

A California Senator rallied support to ask the BLM to place a temporary mining moratorium on the area - which they did - and Congress to consider permanent protection. That last hasn't happened yet. It's nothing like guaranteed.

Today I have written the BLM, the president, and my senators to ask for my land's permanent protection, and CA Senator McGuire to convey my thanks and encouragement. The river and those of us who love it could use your voice, too. Here is the contact information I used today, if you would like to take a few moments to help:

[email protected] https://www.merkley.senate.gov/contact https://www.wyden.senate.gov/contact/ [email protected] https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact [email protected] (Michael Barnes, Oregon BLM)

More information: http://smithriveralliance.org/action-alerts/ http://kalmiopsisrivers.org/north-fork-smith-river/ http://www.triplicate.com/…/Local-…/Feds-block-mining-claims http://yournec.org/content/two-year-ban-mining-wild-smith

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Primary

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Off-Trail

The idea was long walks. Really long ones, like the entire Wildwood trail in one day. Walks long enough they could reasonably be called longwalks, one word. Jeremiah and I have been talking about t…