Awe, Nice!

Welcome to Awe, Nice! where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors.

I've been turning my attention to wildland firefighters, several of whom I met this summer on the Stoner Mesa fire, which burned over 10,000 acres north of Dolores. I work as a hand up there on a grazing allotment. One of the people I met was Steve Nicholson.

Here, Steve shares an anecdote from the 2012 fire season, which as listeners may know, was the 3rd worst in US history.

Though he wasn't positive, he thinks it unfolded on the Wenachtee Complex, multiple fires which burned 56,000 acres in central Washington in September of that year.

He was a senior member of a hotshot crew charged, on that day, with cold trailing. Cold trailing is following the black of the edge of the fire, identifying hot areas, literally laying hands on the ground for hot spots, and making sure the cold edge is solid and cannot rekindle. This involves cutting down trees, clearing brush, and lots of digging.

The terrain was precipitous and rugged.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, a chute is a steep, narrow gully, often between two rocky walls.

Steve is now a division supervisor. He told me it's not uncommon to have close calls on hotshot crews, so after the incident, there weren't any real deep conversations. But, he said, it's not like someone would have walked away with a dislocated shoulder when the rock came down. It would have been a big deal.

Next week, Steve shares an elk-hunting moment, so make sure to tune in.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link and a donate button here.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

Welcome to Awe, Nice! where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors.

Sometimes I think I should call this show, Oh, No!

For many, the moments they recall have excitement and wonder, but also scary predicaments.

Over the next few weeks, I'm turning attention to wildland firefighters. This is partly because they deserve attention and partly because I met several this summer on the Stoner Mesa fire, which burned over 10,000 acres north of Dolores. I work cows on one of the Forest Service allotments that was right on Stoner Mesa. For weeks, my boss and I were pretty busy tending to the cows and trying to stay clear of the firefighters.

This week, I interviewed Doug Falconi, who was a division supervisor trainee on the Stoner fire.

He recalls the eastern Montana Ash Creek Fire of 2012.

2012 was an incredibly intense year for wildfires, the third worst in US history. 67,774 wildfires burned over nine million acres. In Montana alone, 1.2 million acres burned. The Ash Creek fire was the sixth largest, burning 250,000 acres.

Doug arrived as part of the only hot shot crew on the fire, when it was just 5,000 acres. As you might imagine, fire fighting resources were being spread thin that summer.

Just a mention of wildland fire vernacular – 'overhead' is the bosses above the crews.

This is the first Awe, Nice! moment that we're splitting into two segments.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link and a donate button here.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

Welcome to Awe Nice, where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors.

This week, we return to a conversation with Nina Hance, the backcountry guide from Montana.

Nina and her husband have had several encounters with grizzlies. Once they were mountain biking and were bluff-charged. She estimates the sow, who had cubs with her, was 500 pounds or so. While the incident was short, it had a lasting impact on her psyche, including regular nightmares.

Another time, she and Alex were hunting and were chased off while field dressing a deer.

Because of these events and others, she tends to flinch when she sees big dark objects, what might be a bear, but what might also be a stump or a rock. She's become hyper vigilant and often avoids being in the backcountry at dawn and dusk, especially in the fall when bears go through hyperphagia, seemingly ravenous, in preparation for their winter hibernation.

You'd think that at 10,000 feet, in a bit of a spring blizzard, grizzly bears would be the least of your concerns.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link and a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

Welcome to Awe Nice, where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors.

This week, I talked with Nina Hance. Nina is a backcountry guide certified by the American Mountain Guides Association. In the winter, she works for Beartooth Powder Guides as a lead guide.

Nina shared two events. Her first moment was during a guiding trip outside of Cook City. Cook City (population about 70) is near the entrance to Yellowstone National Park and not far from the Wyoming border. She takes us to Woody Creek Cabin, a 20 x 24 foot, single room cabin which served as the group's base camp.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link and a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

We're featuring another moment with Maine lobsterman Jon Tanguay. It occurred around this time of year, early winter-late fall, when his traps were all dozens of miles offshore, taking several hours to get to them and to get back home.

Some shorthand for a few things he mentions:

At the time of this event, the strings laid down between two buoys consisted of 20 traps. Four strings would be 80 traps and it would take about an hour and 20 minutes to get through those 80 traps.

Also, when he mentions hauling out, that is to say to bring his boat out of the water for maintenance.

I don't think there is anything like weather that can make us feel so small. I feel like those working outside often have a lot of awe-inspiring but also humbling weather stories to share. Lightening. Fog. Wind. Snow.

Maine gets some weather.

Mt. Washington, which Jon mentions, is the tallest peak in the northeastern US and just 14 miles or so from the Maine/New Hampshire border. As the crow flies, it was 100 miles from where Jon was hauling and then trying to get home. Mt. Washington has recorded wind speeds up to 231 miles per hour and windchill temperatures of 108 below zero, Fahrenheit.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link to his music and a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Jon Tanguay, for another segment from my native state. Jon lives in Harpswell, Maine. He's been lobstering his whole life, since he was going out with his uncle at age three. He said his parents told him his first word as a baby was "boat." He was lobstering on his own by age nine.

Many lobstermen pick up their traps in the winter, but Jon has been lobstering year-round since about 1998.

In colder months, lobster move off shore and lobstering becomes tougher, more expensive, more dangerous.

Regarding terminology, steaming is when you're headed to your location and not fishing.

In the winter, the commute, so to speak, takes about three hours.

A gang, which Jon mentions, is a group of strings of traps in a particular area. In this case, the gang consisted of roughly 400 traps in one big area.

So you know: adult pilot whales are about 24 feet long and weigh about four tons. They feed on shrimp, squid, mackerel, herring, cod. They use echolocation to find their meals.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link to his music and a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Terence Kenney. Terence has lived his life in Harpswell, Maine, and is the third of what I hope will be regular interviewees from my home state. This is the first segment talking with someone who works on the water. Terence recounts a rough scalloping trip to Gouldsboro, up the coast from Harpswell by about 150 miles if you're driving. It's theoretically less if you're traveling by boat, but remember, there are 4,600 islands off the coast of Maine. If you're captaining a 40-foot boat, in a big storm, in the dark, that number can be pretty daunting.

Matinicus Island, so you know, is about 22 miles offshore.

Terence also mentions Southwest Harbor, or 'sowwest' harbor, as he says. That's on Mt. Desert Island. Mt. Desert is home to Acadia National Park and the tourist haven, Bar Harbor.

Also, the scallop drag Terence was using weighs about 1,000 pounds. When you fill it with rocks and run it through the bow cleat, as he describes, it can serve as an anchor since it's so heavy.

Steaming is when you're going to your fishing grounds but not fishing. It's like the commute.

I feel like weather can be a lot more daunting when you're outside, and even more so on the water.

The storm that Terence recalled happened several years after the No Name Storm of 1991, also a Halloween event. That storm, which came to be known as the Perfect Storm and was written about and made into a Hollywood movie, claimed 13 lives, including six on the Andrea Gail, a fishing vessel lost off the coast of Nova Scotia.

Most of the time, Terence told me, scalloping is peaceful. Well offshore, you can go all day without seeing another boat, he said.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link to his music and a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

It's time for another Mini-Awe-Polis, a collection of observations, like hay in my jacket pockets.

Lately, after more than two dozen successfully recorded moments for Awe, Nice! I have been having some short and stilted conversations with people who work outside, who spend their lives outside. These are folks who have done incredible feats, witnessed cool weather events, been part of amazing wildlife encounters. Yet, they struggle to identify and articulate a specific moment of wonder.

I get it.

As a young adult, I remember thinking Maine was pretty ho-hum. Nice ocean. Nice hills. But bugs and rain.

Then I returned as a 40-year-old. I went with a visitor on The Cliff Walk, behind the recycling center, between the Harpswell peninsulas. I noticed the tiny plants and small animals that thrive under the conifers. I watched tide come up Strawberry Creek as if it were marching (Strawberry Creek is a misnomer, more an inlet than a creek, about as wide as I am tall, full of eel grass and opening up to salt marsh and mudflats and the Atlantic Ocean). I drove towards Land's End, a gift shop at the tip of Bailey Island, where I saw a moose swimming. A big bull moose swimming in Casco Bay is a pretty nifty thing to see. But I think it took leaving, then coming back, to say, Wow.

Sometimes, I'm finding, the wonder for people who work outside every day, in the elements, gets lessened by seeing a lot (even during the course of a day) and gets tamped down by the need to get things done. Moments of awe might be acknowledged by a smile or a nod or a pause but there're nothing to write home about. Oohing and ahhing is something that tourists do. Celebrating them, sharing them is something instagrammers and weekend warriors do.

It's not that they don't see stuff.

From my informal surveying over the years, I'd say people who work outside, who work in challenging environments, are very attentive to detail. Last week, we brought cows down from the mountain and we were paying attention to the weather, how cows were moving (individually as well as as a group), whether the calves were tiring, how the dogs and horses were working, how the terrain was affecting our travel, where and when we could anticipate things shifting. Just a few details of many to consider every moment of every hour. The scene changes and we move on. I watched a bear, maybe 20 feet from dozens of cows, simply stop as he was walking along a downed tree and watch us.

Me, personally, I like to think I'm pretty observant.

As a kid, my parents, especially my mom, instilled a practice of curiosity and observation. Not just 'what bird was that?' for instance, but 'what is it doing?'

Summer field work during my college years taught me to distinguish between a worried, you're too close to my nest chirp and a less stressed, investigative chirp.

We were studying the mating patterns of Indigo Buntings, which seem to be monogamous, but, lo and behind, were not.

Like a lot of birds, indigo bunting males have a specific song that birders can identify. But with our work, we could identify individual males by their particular variation of that song.

Now, when I hear spotted towhees (which were the inspiration for Jody Chapel's Awe, Nice! logo), I do hear the sort of 'drink your tea.' But other times, it's 'drink your' or 'drink, drink your tea.'

Some other behaviors I've learned over time:

• When birds pop up on a branch and wipe their beaks, it's usually because they have been foraging.
• Birds like to poop before they take off flying again.

Field work taught me to think about animals, not just at that moment, but what might have occurred before I was watching them and what might happen next.

Still, like my interviewees, I tend to get used to what I see, hear, and smell. I can get weary in my observations. I think people who work outside often consider moments of wonder with kind of mental shoulder shrug. Wonder abounds. We're lucky and grateful to be out here. But also, it's just another day.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com. Awe, Nice! also welcomes your support. You can find a donate button here.

Music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, we return to a conversation I had with Matt Barnes. Matt lives here in southwest Colorado. He's been a rangeland scientist for years and has also worked as a ranch manager. In fact, this moment that we recorded is from a time several years ago when he was up in the mountains, working with cattle.

Between a close encounter with a grizzly bear (which we hear about a few segments ago) and this one, I can say, "Matt, I'm glad you're still here, man!"

Matt told me he got Lichtenberg figures on his thigh from the lightning strike – these are weird, feathering or fern-like marks formed by the transmission of electricity along the superficial blood vessels in the skin. They went away eventually, he said.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link to his music and a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Vicki Taussig. Vicki lives in Kremmling, Colorado. She narrated A Brutal, Beautiful Life, which is a short documentary directed by Beau Gaughran. I served as writer and a producer. We just learned it will be part of the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour next year, which is pretty exciting.

Vicki ranches with her daughter, Caitlyn, who was my first interviewee for Awe Nice.

Here, Vicki shares a moment with her draft horse team of Push and Pull, two big beautiful Percherons. The pair spent their whole lives together and helped the Taussigs haul hay out to their livestock every day in the winter, when the cattle were on various pastures within a few miles from the house. Temps regularly get down to 30 below in the winter and Vicki laughed in recollecting that the mares were more reliable than their tractor.

Vicki is not quite five feet tall, so imagine those gentle giants lowering their heads as she harnessed them each morning.

She said Push was the smaller of the two and the brains of the team. When they were ready to give that first effort, to get the sled going, Push would make all the motions of going but she'd wait until Pull, bigger and stronger, would take that first step.

It's moments like these that give me such joy for this project, even if it means grabbing a Kleenex from time to time.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link to his music and a donate button on our about page.

I want to thank the folks who have rated and reviewed Awe, Nice! on podcast platforms. It's great that the word is getting out about it. Thanks so much!

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.