Stick-with-the-plan Soup: The Backstory

On our big Western road trip, we invested a fair amount of funds in food. Mostly we just wanted better lunches than PB&J every day. The end result of our varied lunch endeavor was that we had to cut back a bit on other meals. This cut was most felt at breakfast, where we ate 'gruel' for weeks on end. We called it gruel because after a week of liking it, it got hard to stomach and we had to mask it with copious amounts of salt, nutritional yeast, and sriracha.

Gruel face.

So but anyway I am supposed to be writing about Stick-with-the-plan soup (which coincidentally also involves large amounts of salt, nutritional yeast, and sriracha). Before I talk ingredients, I have to talk Ed Abbey. Our trip was in the fall, which meant that the sun set earlier and earlier. So immediately after dinner, there was nothing more enticing than our sleeping bags... at 7 pm (8 pm if we really pushed it). Lying under the stars on the slickrock, we took turn reading out loud from Desert Solitaire and assorted stories by Terry Tempest Williams.

After about a week, we had grown to love Ed's cantankerous musings. We got a huge kick out of a line from his essay about The Moon-Eyed Horse in which Ed says to himself:
"But you're not clever, you're stupid, I reminded myself: stick to the plan."

This line especially hit home for us, because it was reflective of our lack of any planning whatsoever. We never found a campsite in advance, we never had a solid plan of future destinations, we never planned out our dinners. This lack of dinner planning combined with the random bits of food we had all brought from our previous trips and our aforementioned stinginess on breakfast and dinner led to some interesting meals. There were a few points on our trip (which for some wild coincidence happened directly before a trip to the grocery store) where we had to really scrounge for dinner in the depths of our food crate. What could we mix together to make an appetizing and filling meal?
The answer came to us in the form of Stick-with-the-plan soup. This soup/stew consisted of anything and everything that could potentially taste good together. Dehydrated peas, hominy, soy sauce, bouillon cubes, month-old cabbage, potatoes, rice, lentils, you name it! Bonus if cooked on a fire and some ingredients fall out into the fire because the pot is so full. We discovered that if you put enough salty ingredients in, it will taste delicious. Hominy not cooked, soup looks like sludge? No matter, it was still hot and filling. And it came about from having no plan.

Can you spot the soup?

Anyway, this is all to say that I named my Tumblr site 'Stick-with-the-plan Soup' because it is a smattering of trips and nature shots from my adventures over the last few years. Most pictures are from random wanderings, where there was no plan and yet it all worked out in the end. Just like soup. Ya know? 

So check it out!  I post pretty regularly with pictures of life at camp and of past adventures. As much as I want to update this blog with stories from camp all the time, it just ain't gonna happen. Until next time!

A public lands legacy

The summer before my freshman year of college, I spent three weeks on a Student Conservation Association national crew. I was placed in Wind Cave National Park and had a life-changing experience, but that's a different story for another day. Long story short, I fell in love with national parks and over the next few years I grew immensely appreciative of the value of public lands in general.

Fast forward to this year, when I spent the winter living at home in D.C. Now if you live in New York or L.A., being starstruck probably means you saw a famous movie star. In D.C. however, starstruck takes on a political form. 'I-just-saw-someone-famous freak outs' are justified for:
-the V.P. or Presidential motorcade
-any motorcade
-D.C. mayoral candidates
-D.C. mayors
-city council members
-recognizable hill folks
-basically anyone in a position of power in the federal government
-probably a lot more people

This blog post is about my adventures in almost debilitating sightings of D.C.,'s most important peeps. Each time I meet an important person, I revert to being a middle schooler and agonize over if I should go up and say a thing to them, or ask them a question, or just introduce myself and hope that they'll take pity on me and engage me in conversation about something other than the weather. No sighting has been more agonizing than seeing current Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, and then seeing former S.O.I. Bruce Babbitt only a couple of months later (the shock of the first sighting still hadn't worn off).

Here's my friend Caroline actually talking with Jewell. What the what!

I got up the courage to talk with Babbitt after the screening of a film about dams, in which he was an opening speaker. I snuck up to him as he was about to leave, and asked him about his relationship with Floyd Dominy (of the Bureau of Reclamation). I coasted on this conversation for days, let me tell you. Chatting about dams with the former Secretary of the Interior, could things get any better??

Turns out, hearing Babbitt speak at the Ansel Adams Gallery of the Wilderness Society about Obama's public lands legacy was even better. He wrote a op-ed for High Country News after his talk, but in it he didn't include my favorite anecdote from his remarks. Ready for it? Here's the gist of what Babbitt said:

Basically, Obama is in the same place as Clinton was at this point of his second term in office. That is, Obama still has not carved out an environmental legacy for himself whatsoever. Babbitt spoke about the tactic that he used to convince Clinton to create a legacy for himself. Babbitt sat down one day and pulled out two index cards. On one he wrote: 'FDR' and then a list of all the public land reserves he had created in office, and other environmentally conscious acts. He wrote 'Clinton' on the other card, and then wrote a much shorter list of Clinton's environmental accomplishments. Then all Babbitt did was give Clinton those two cards, and that was all the push that was necessary. He spoke of the following months, where Clinton apparently called up Babbitt regularly to ask if he had any other big tracts of land that he could make into a national monument. Because of this small push at the end of Clinton's time in office, we now have protected areas such as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument-- an almost 2 million acre tract of land in southern Utah-- larger than the land area of any other U.S. national monument. Here is hoping that Obama will get the same idea.

My promise to you, dear readers: Next time I write about public lands I will try to be more coherent, and next time I write in general it will be about life at CAMP!

Old dog, new camera

My dog has never looked at me the many hundreds of times I have tried to take her picture. The only reason I've gotten a picture of her looking into the camera is because my dad was standing behind me holding a treat (which actually works rather well sometimes, see below).

But joys of joys... I got a new camera! It's fancy and I don't know how to use it even a little bit (though this aperture thing is pretty fun), but for some reason Honey the dog does not seem to notice that it is also a picture-taking device. Huzzah! For your/my viewing pleasure: