• Project Hail Mary: A Novel

  Fun book, would read again.

  (tags: adventure survival friendship science-fiction space scifi humanity astronaut extraterrestrial )

• Playing the Long Game: A Memoir

  Probably should have bought it used or gotten it at the library, but worth it learn about Christine’s story, her relationship with Portland, more about women’s soccer.

  (tags: soccer canada portland thorns nwsl )

• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI

  Sad story, great book. Looking forward to seeing the movie although I’ve heard it’s better done as three 1 hour sittings via streaming.

  (tags: history crime corruption fbi oil oklahoma greed )

• Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

  I loved this book: definitely made me want to buy a boat and sail up the coast to Alaska. The writing is great, the history was interesting, and the storytelling was top notch. Seems like a fun trip to do some day. Quotes:

  • Page 118: on the difference between Americans & Canadians: "This blunt distinction fitted nicely with a subtler one made by Russell Brown, a Canadian literary critic. Trawling a broad net through American and Canadian fiction, Brown suggested that one essential difference between the two cultures lay in the characters of Oedipus and Telemachus. In the States, a society founded on revolution, the mythic hero was the runaway son, the patricide; Oedipus as Huckleberry Finn. Escape, rebellion, the cult of the new life at the expense of the old, were the commanding American themes. Up north, in a society founded on the refusal to rise up against its parent, the mythic hero was the loyal son of Odysseus, Telemachus; the voyager in search of the lost father. Americans broke with their ancestral pasts, whereas Canadians honored theirs."
  • Page 363: "Alaska was regarded as an inexhaustible treasury of natural assets, to be looted for the nation’s benefit. One of its great attractions was its remoteness; and things could be done there that would not have been tolerated in Washington or Oregon. Young men could run profitably wild in Alaska without damaging the social fabric of their staid hometowns. In the dog days of peacetime, Alaska held out the promise of all the noise and excitement of a major foreign war."
  • Page 431, a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion."

  (tags: travel exploration alaska sailing navigation ocean )

• The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond

  A bit of a letdown compared to the passion and writing that was in The High Sierra (by KSR). Would not recommend, still on the hunt for a book or two about the Alps, Pyrenees, and Dolomites.

  (tags: history travel germany switzerland mountains geography italy austria alps )

• The High Sierra: A Love Story

  Really enjoyed this side of Kim Stanley Robinson. I grew up hiking around Mammoth Lakes and did some time in / around Yosemite and Tahoe and have dreamed about backpacking around above the tree line. Some day. Should be required reading for anyone doing hiking in the High Sierra.

  (tags: nonfiction geology mountains hiking walking backpacking glaciers yosemite naming )

• Behind the Bears Ears: Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape

  Picked up our Southwest roadtrip, 400 pages of what could have been dry reading but is really well done. Quotes:

  • Page 15: "Although this never stops journalists from trotting out the ‘rewrite history’ meme every time a new one is found. In following with Betterridge’s Law, anytime you see the clickbait-y headline ‘blank could rewrite history’, put your money on ‘but probably not.’ Footnote: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by teh word ‘no’. It’s named for British tech journalist Ian Betteridge, although the observation that egregious editorizliating should not be taken at face value is about as old as journalism itself."
  • Page 317: "And here’s where the local community has good reason to despise the legacy of Cerberus. Meth addiction – drug and alcohol abuse in general, for that matter, is a big problem in any impoverished community in the United States, regardless of the dominating ethnicity or presence of churches or whatever all else, because the root problem is socioeconomic. It’s the same in rural communities as it is in inner cities. Substance abuse and base violence are more strongly linked to economic distress and disparity than to any extraneous variable, like skin tone or local culture, because in our country we teach people that poverty is deplorable. In addition to brown air and burning rivers, that’s another fun spinoff from the legacy of consumerism."
  • Page 389-390: "This type of community is a scary idea to some people. It’s often the basis of what nowadays is called identity politics, where people vote or otherwise get political in sole accordance with perceptions of their own and/or favored candidates’ cultural identity, and it’s almost always a defensive reaction against manufactured illusions of invasion. At best, that’s how you get segregation. At worst, fascism and genocide. The thing is, being members of a community doesn’t require a whole lot of scarifice, and it doesn’t require sacrificing one’s own cultural identify. On the contrary, a diverse array of individual and cultural contributions is exactly what makes a community great in the first place. The alternative is like a stew with just one ingredient."

  (tags: history nonfiction utah southwest native-americans arizona colorado bearsears )

• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition

  Fascinating / great book. Highly recommended for anyone that lives in the Western United States to understand where your water comes from, who’s using it, and maybe most importantly, who decided who gets to use it.

  Quotes:

  • Page 29, loved the description of the rivers from the past: "Soap Creek Rapids, Badger Creek Rapids, Crystal creek Rapids, Lava Falls. Nearly all of the time, the creeks that plunge down the ravine of the Grand Canyon will barely float a walnut shell, but the flash floods resulting from a desert downpour can dislodge boulders as big as a jitney bus. Tumbled by gravity, the boulders carom into the main river and sit there, creating a dam, which doesn’t so much stop the river as make it mad. Except for the rapids of the Susitna, the Niagra, and perhaps a couple of rivers in Canada, the modern Colorado’s rapids are the biggest on the continent. Before the dams were built, however, the Colorado’s rapids were really big. At Lava Falls, where huge chunks of basalt dumped in the main river create a thirty-foot drop, waves at flood stage were as high as three-story houses. There was a cycling wave at the bottom that, every frew seconds, would burst apart with the retort of a sixteen-inch gun, drenching anyone on either bank of the river – two hundred feet apart."
  • Page 212: fascinating to know that there was a possibility of diverting water from the Columbia to the Southwest. "Fifty million here, eighty million there, a hundred million here, and soon one was talking about real money. In the 1960s, Dos Rios Dam could have been built for $400 million; today it might cost $3 billion or more. A diversion from the Columbia River to the Southwest could have been built for $6 billion or so in the sixties, and there was so much surplus energy in the Northwest that a few million acre-feet of water removed from a river that dumps 140 million acre-feet into the sea might not have been missed. Today the cost seems utterly prohbitive, and Washington and Oregon would probably resist the engineers with tanks. The opportunity was there. But the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau squandered their political capital and billions in taxpayers’ money on vainglorious rivalry, with the result that much of what they really wanted to build does not now exist, and probably never will."
  • Page 332, on California: "Everyone knows that there is a desert somewhere in California, but many people believe it is off in some remote corner of the state – the Mojave Desert, Palm Springs, the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. But inhabited California, most of it, is, by strict definition, a semidesert. Los Angeles is drier than Beirut; Sacramento is as dry as the Sahel; San Francisco is just slightly rainier than Chihuahua. About 65 percent of the state receives under 20 inches of precipitation a year. California, which fools visitors into believing it is "lush", is a beautiful fraud…. There was hardly a single tree growing in San Francisco when the fist Spanish arrived; it was too dry and wind-blown for trees to take hold. Today, Golden Gate Park looks as if Virginia had mated with Borneo, thanks to water brought nearly two hundred miles by tunnel. The same applies to Bel Air, to Pacific Palisades, to the manicured lawns of La Jolla, where the water comes from three directions, and from a quarter of a continent away."
  • On ownership of the farmland in California… this was a big theme in the book and it’s eye opening to say the least: "In August of 1981, the California Institute for Rural Studies released a report on property ownership in five water districts within the service area of the State Project. Most of the districts are in Kern County; most of the farms are neighbors of the McCarthy Ranch… The CIRS report corroborated what the Department of Water Resources had taken unusual pains to point out: that the majority fo the farmers receivering project water were small farmers…. but those farms owned less than a third of the total acreage; the other two-thirds, which amounted to 227,545 acres, was owned by eight companies. The largest of the farmers was Chevon USA, the main subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of California… In second place, with 35,897 acres, was the Tejon Ranch, one of the great land empires of California. The principal stockholders of the Tejon Ranch are members of the Chandler family, which owns the Los Angeles Times — the strongest voice for water development in California for the past eighty years. In third and fourth place were two more oil companies, Getty and Shell… The presence of Getty (and Chevron USA) in the service area of the California Water Project again pointed up the architectural brilliance with which the project was conceived. They pay a severance tax to California on oil they pump off Long Beach, which is immediately put into a fund that makes annual interest-free "loans" of $25 million a year to the State Water Project, which delivers doubly subsidized irrigation water to their formerly worthless land."
  • Page 434 on the Bureau: "The Bureau is like one of these crooks with money earning interest in twenty different banks – it has to spend the money on something. It is all borrowed money – it belongs to the people of the United States – but the people of the United States don’t know that. The whole thing is a machine, a perpetual-motion machine that keeps churning out dams, which the politicians and most westerners are reflexively in favor of, and the whole business is running the country into the ground. The people who support these boondoggle projects are always talking about the vision and principles that made this country great. Our forefathers would have built these projects!, they say. They had vision! That’s pure nonsense. It wasn’t the vision and principles of our forefathers that made this country great. It was the huge unused bonanza they found here. One wave of immigrants after another could occupy new land, new land, new land. There was topsoil, water – there was gold, sliver, and iron ore lying right on top of the earth. We picked our way through a ripe orchard and made it bare. The new generations are going to go down, down, down. With projects like the Narrows, we’re trying to pretend that things are as they always were. "Let’s just go out and find some money and build a dam and we’ll all be richer and be better off." We’ve been so busy spending money and reaping the fruits that we’re blind to the fact that there are no more fruits. By trying to make things better, we’re making them worse and worse."

  (tags: history wyoming southwest rivers california geography water arizona desert oregon colorado )

• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

  Great book, full of adventure and grit and leadership (or lack thereof) and ingenuity.

  (tags: history leadership nonfiction england patagonia chile ocean )

• The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World – the sequel to Prisoners of Geography

  Really enjoyed this book: it was an easy read and I learned a bunch about places we don’t often learn about here in the US. Chapters (for searching in the future) included Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, UK, Greece, Turkey, The Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain, and Space.

  Found via a daily sync meeting with Marcelo from Reclaim. Sounds super interesting.

  (tags: world politics geography power )

• Wind River Adventures: My Life in Frontier Wyoming
  Found in a random used bookstore in Nevada, am planning on backpacking in the Wind River Range this summer. Fun book and the author painted a very respectful picture of the Native Americans he spent so much time with. Quotes:
  • Page 78, an Indian chief after meeting the POTUS: “Washakie no good talk. Washakie’s heart talks to great white chief. Washakie’s heart says he is glad, and asked Great Spirit to bless white chief and make his heart good toward the Indian.”
  • Page 227: “The Indian, when I first knew him, was far different than he is today. They they were proud, haughty, and independent; kings in their own domain with an empire for their hunting grounds. And until the white man said stop, they knew no ruler. The Indian, as a race, never knew what it was to be despised. Far from aspiring to be like the white man, he has looked forward with a feeling of dread to the coming of the day when he would lose his ethnic individuality.”
  • Page 229: His reflections on the American Indians, after being asked by an audience member if it was “… better that the white man has taken this country from the Indians” as he could “… see clearly the hand of God in the setting aside of the American Indian and the establishing thereon a higher and better religion and civilization.” His answer: “Friend, that is a pretty big question to answer. I do not know whether I can answer it or not but I will say this. If you look at it from a commercial standpoint there is no doubt but that the white man has made greater and more intensive use of this country than the Indian would perhaps in a thousand years. But if you look at it from the standpoint of right and justice and honesty and fair dealing, it takes on an entirely different appearance. Suppose there came from the west a race of people as much more numerous and powerful as we were over the American India and they swept us back into the Atlantic Ocean, setting our remnants aside on reservations here and there and establishing on the continent a higher and better civilization and religion — from their point of view. Do you still see the hand of God as clearly as you did before?”
  • Page 235, his concluding paragraph: “I believe I know the Indian and believe the Indian was a man before outrage and oppression made of him a savage. I have known him as a savage and as a fighting man in the pride and insolence of his strength. I have known him as a monarch whipped into submission…. I have smoked with him the pipe of peace and I have sat with him at his feasts and in his councils. And when I compare them all – the red and white race – calmly in my own mind, their vices and virtues, their sterling worth and their shortcomings, the Indian does not suffer by comparison. When you see an Indian sitting on a curb or standing on the corner with that faraway expression upon his countenance, indifferent to the fate or progress of the world, remember that the white man has taken his country and made him what he is today – a nation conquered and a people dispossessed. His pride is humbled, and his spirit is subdued. His heart is broken. As a race his sun is set.”

  (tags: history wind-river wyoming )

• Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII

  Fast read, a great reminder of how far civilization has advanced in just 100 years.

  Quote: “Let me live to walk in beauty.”

  (tags: history military war cryptography native-americans wwii )

• Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

  Nothing special, quick read.

  (tags: science nature wildlife biology )

• Coming into the Country

  Bought sometime after the Alaska trip last year. Took a couple months to complete, it’s slow, but good if you want to learn about some of the recent history of Alaska. Random quotes from the end of the book:

  “… Death is as much a part of life as breathing. People in cities seem to want life and death to remain at a standstill… They seem to think the animals up here are smelling the flowers. They use the word ‘ecology’ for everything but what it means. It means who’s eating whom, and when… Uncontrolled fear and deep respect are two different things.”

  (tags: history travel nature alaska )

You can see part 1 here.

Day 9 – Tuesday, August 24th, 2021

Up early because the plan called for us to get from Anchorage to Whitehorse, a little more than 700 miles and about 13 hours, in a single day. We blew past a bunch of glaciers in Wrangell-St Elias National Park, slowed down for wildlife:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aaron Johnson (@ajohnson1200)

made it into Canada encountering zero hostility, and many many hours later, arrived at the same Whitehorse campground that we stayed at on the way up.

Day 10 – Wednesday, August 25th, 2021

According to the aurora forecast, both the evening of the 24th and the evening of the 25th were going to be good nights to get a glimpse of the northern lights. Greg caught a glimpse one morning on the way up (that I missed) but I was determined to see the green glow and so I set an alarm for 3am on both nights… and I set up my GoPro to take a timelapse from the top of the truck, which both nights, captured a couple of glimpses:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aaron Johnson (@ajohnson1200)

in both Whitehorse and the next night in Fort Nelson. The drive from Whitehorse to Fort Nelson was remarkable again for the scenery through Muncho Lake Provincial Park and Stone Mountain Provincial Park (both closer to Fort Nelson) but we didn’t stop anywhere to enjoy the views.

Day 11 – Thursday, August 26th, 2021

Up early to get on the road so that we could get through the 615 miles / ~11 hours of driving to our hotel in Jasper. Lunched on the tailgate of the truck in Dawson Creek, snapped some pictures of Mile 0 and the World’s Largest Beaver, and finally made it to our hotel in Jasper:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aaron Johnson (@ajohnson1200)

Day 12 – Friday, August 27th, 2021

Up early, gassed up, got coffee, and hit the road for the longest day of the trip (we drove almost 800 miles and made it home Saturday morning at about 2am). The drive through Jasper and Banff is called the Icefields Parkway and we easily could have spent a week or longer driving and camping through this part of the trip:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aaron Johnson (@ajohnson1200)

After driving for a couple hours… and here’s a horrible timelapse of said drive:

we got off the main highway and did a short 6 mile hike up to the Wilcox Viewpoint, which had views of the Athabasca Glacier, some bighorn sheep, and a number of other mountains that I’m going to come back and climb some day:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aaron Johnson (@ajohnson1200)

We originally had talked about trying to get to Canmore (near Banff) then spending the night somewhere in Washington, and driving home the rest of the way on Saturday but as so often happens on long roadtrips, we were exhausted and just wanted to hightail it home, so we did.

No regrets, I’d do the trip again in a heartbeat. Next time I’m going to have a tricked out Tundra (minus the dorkel) and take a couple months, spending extra time in Yukon / Kluane, Alaska, and Jasper / Banff, probably taking the ferry up, and then driving back.