GRETEL MARYSDATTER ENCK

The cat that I inadvertently locked in the closet woke me at 4 am to beg his freedom. In my awakeness, I lay in bed and listened...

The Mississippi Delta is shining like a National guitar I am following the highway down the river Through the cradle of the Civil War....

I don’t have a hill out my back door…at home. But I do at work. And although I’m back in the office three days a week, and I do take...

Snuck in a sweet Sunday hike today with one of the finest humans I know. We drove up into the Davis Mountains to Madera Canyon, part of...

Tom Waits admonishes us to get behind the mule in his macabre tale: Shovel of dirt upon a coffin lid / And I know they'll come lookin'...

I think you know by now, dear reader, that I like to plan everything and my plans don’t always materialize as intended. This has...

A good hike has its own value in physical exercise, sunshine, and being out among the precious living things that comprise our world....

Hike #4 came about on the occasion of needing to go down to Big Bend National Park to pick up my new government ID card. We get new ones...

Rebecca Solnit, one of our time’s great thinkers, writes about the blue of distance in her Field Guide to Getting Lost. “The world is...

Yesterday’s hike was to the Chimneys in Big Bend National Park. 4.8 miles round trip, elevation change of about 400’, easy trail both in...

When I spent that summer in Juneau, people joked that when you land in Anchorage you are just a half hour from Alaska. When I took flying...

Because I don’t have enough else going on, I went out yesterday west of El Paso to find another airmail navigation arrow. This one is on...

Based on my recent success with Albuquerque arrows, I took another look at the third relatively nearby Texas arrow that heretofore I had...

If you've been following along, you know I have a slight obsession with historic concrete airmail arrows strung about the Intermountain...

I am experiencing a few remarkable and grateful weeks of looking back at this time last year: a sparkly and volcanic time of my own...

For many years I felt like I was trying to get back to the person I was when I was seven: happy, carefree, unselfconsciously confident,...

My story of the Spiral Jetty ostensibly begins after meeting Terry Tempest Williams and hearing her read during my March visit to Marfa....

Somehow in my obsession with the sparsity of the west Texas landscape, I'd forgotten how satisfying I find a hike to a mountain lake....

The third good thing I did in Marfa this time, in addition to the poetry and the flower quest, was to go looking for those dang 1930s...