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March – April 2023

Click here to read and download the March-April issue of Rocky Mountain Outdoors.

JOURNEY TO GREENLAND WAS SUCCESSFUL (or at least the Zoom was)

On Tuesday, February 21, 2023 at 7 PM, Maryann Gaug delivered a Zoom presentation on her travels to Greenland in 2019. We anticipate additional Zoom presentations in the spring. If you have not yet received an invitation to join, contact Steve Cochrane and he will send you the necessary link.

BookBaby

BookBaby is a full-service, print-on-demand (POD) publisher that specialize in both e-books and print books. You can solicit as much or as little help that you need from their staff. On the high end of services, they can edit your book, lay it out, design its cover, print it, market it and sell it online. On the low end of services, they will just print your book from a pdf file. The quality of their print books equals, and in some cases surpasses, offset printing, and an author can print as few as 25 books; offset printing only makes economic sense when printing at least 500 copies. POD publishers like BookBaby are a real service as they will print a single copy of one’s book, package it, mail it and process the transaction without any involvement of the author. BookBaby pays up to 50 percent royalties on printed books and up to 85 percent royalties on e-books sold through their service. BookBaby also partners with Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Ingram and others in marketing books. They have an easy-to-use online calculator for determining the cost of one’s book. Click on BookBaby for more information.

January – February 2023

eastward view from White Rock Overlook, White Rock, New Mexico — Looking Eastward over the Rio Grande from White Rock Overlook. A great spot for a sunrise shoot – yes?

The first Rocky Mountain Outdoors of 2023 has finally arrived. Click here to read and download the pdf.

Onward into 2023

By Virginia Parker Staat

Happy New Year to you and yours!

As I write this, we are having the season’s first hard freeze in Texas. Our streets are lined with tropical plants wrapped or draped in colorful sheets and beach towels and looking like enormous Christmas packages. It’s our attempt to save the plants from freezing. It rarely works if the freeze lasts more than 24-hours.

Waterfalls and Voyageurs

Text & photos by Maryann Gaug

Split Rock Lighthouse; Lake Superior; Minnesota — Split Rock Lighthouse

Driving down a forested hill, the ocean appeared reaching to the horizon. Wait! Not an ocean, but Lake Superior! I’d never seen this largest of the Great Lakes. Once on the main north-south highway along Minnesota’s North Shore, my exploration started. I had with luck reserved five nights in three different state park campgrounds, giving me plenty of time to hike to waterfalls, past cascades, and to explore historic sites in between. My journey would cover 110 miles of Gichigami’s shore, the Ojibwe tribe’s name for the lake.

In a Flash

By Virginia Parker Staat

“To write short nonfiction requires an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens, so to speak, until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.” ~ Bernard Cooper

How do we describe flash nonfiction? Author Carol Guess believes it is where compression meets passion. Lee Martin says it’s all about voice. In his article When Flash Nonfiction Strikes You, Michael Cohen writes, “Flash creative nonfiction is somewhere between the lyricism of poetry and the narrative potential of prose.”

Hunting Season Has Begun

A book review by Virginia Staat

“Welcome to my world, the world of a forager! It is a world filled with free, nutritious, and delicious fruits, flowers, roots, tubers, shoots, nuts, mushrooms, and foliage, all within walking distance of your front door. ~ Mark Vorderbruggen, Ph.D.

They call him Merriwether. Friends dubbed him with the nickname in honor of the famous American explorer Meriwether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It is a fitting moniker. Meriweather is a research chemist with a M.S. in medicinal chemistry and a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry. He is recognized as an expert in wild edibles and medicinal plants, having spent his life foraging and learning the correlation between foraged foods, their nutritional and medicinal values, and how to use them to optimize health. He holds sixteen patents and is a master gardener.

So why are we going to Los Alamos???

One of the things we like about Los Alamos is that it offers a delightful variety of attractions and activities, practically something for everyone. Details on organized field trips are being worked out, and we’ll also be suggesting things you will want to do on your own. The 2023 conference is a group effort, with Don Laine and Linda Haehnle as conference co-chairs and Virginia Staat taking the lead on setting up workshops.

Of Days Past

By Richard Holmes

I can still hear the crunching sound of tires on white gravel as the car slowly turned into the long driveway toward the stone farmhouse. But my preoccupation was with the tree. Was it still there? Was it the same?