Cover photo courtesy of Ammi Midstokke

I recently picked up Henry David Thoreau’s classic naturalist philosophy book, “Walden.” I suspect that most outdoors folks, knowing the transcendentalism of Thoreau is basically a rite of passage for any serious claimant of nature loving or minimalism, at least pretend to have read it.  

I wasn’t sure if I had, which is to say I probably had read enough meaningful quotes to pass. If I had read it, the meat of the matter had altogether escaped me, whether by my youthful inexperience at the time or a lapse in memory. Or perhaps Thoreau’s heady use of now-antiquated English lost me in the first paragraphs, much like the time I tried to read “The Federalist Papers.” (It was an ambitious response to the days of Covid, when Hamilton became the soundtrack of my life.)  

The summary of “Walden” is that contentment and meaning can be found in the mere act of survival. Thoreau was righteous in his arguments for such a life, considering volitional poverty a kind of freedom, but it was his deep connection to nature and his surroundings that brought him joy. For the two years he spent on the shores of Walden Pond, he wallowed in the simple pleasures of a well-made jacket, tending to his bean crop and the lost art of contemplation.  

Perhaps that is what’s wrong with the world: We aren’t spending enough time observing it or thinking about it. Which is decidedly different from consuming it through our usual means of bludgeoning by roadside advertisement, curated media feeds, and all the ways in which society screams our inadequacies at us with a relentless cacophony of not-enough.  

Which brings me to ask: Does anything bring us deeper satisfaction, connection or understanding than stepping out of that fabricated world and into the natural world? If we know this in our bones, why don’t we do more of it? What beliefs do we have that justify our collective suffering and destruction of the planet? 

Realizing this after a morning of busyness that mostly achieved nothing beyond a painful awareness of my vapid existence, I went outside to find my dinner and commune with nature. 

I spent the afternoon picking my way through the undergrowth in search of mushrooms. I found them, along with gratitude for the abundance of wilderness, and hundreds of new and independent thoughts that had been lurking just behind all the “productivity” of my morning. I discovered edible mushrooms growing along animal tracks, then discovered the paths of the forest creatures and their favorite places: fields of ferns and sun-kissed slopes, shaded ravines lush with moss, stony clutches turned by the curious snouts of boar. I felt a kindredness to them, a bittersweet reminder that we, too, are of nature. Only, too often, too far removed. 

Back home, the mushrooms were cleaned and baked in oil with herbs from the garden. They tasted of the complexities of the forest: millennia of soil and weather, the metallic tang of mineral, something earthy and rich and buttery. And as I put another log on the fire and watched it twist and dance, as if to call heat up from the Earth’s core in some ancient ceremony, I knew Thoreau was right. All we really need is food and shelter. The rest is superfluous at best. 

Ammi Midstokke lives mostly in North Idaho, where there are in fact no wild boars. Sometimes, she retreats to a stone cottage in the mountains of Greece to live off the land and practice contemplative knitting. 

The post The Lost Art of Contemplation  appeared first on Out There Venture.

It’s easy for us to pick sides and rest on the laurels of our conviction. And if that doesn’t make us feel good enough about ourselves, we can join the ranks of the one-uppers: vegans who don’t eat honey, homeschool parents who teach their kids Latin, and misanthropic conservationists. 

Mitch Friedman was some kind or another of that in his youth, following the then-popular trend of monkeywrenching and civil disobedience as guerrilla conservation tactics, and generally rousing rabble toward industries that were perceived threats to nature, particularly to old-growth forests. He’s got an arrest rap sheet that reads like a Greatest Hits list. 

I’m glad we have these people—those who chain themselves to trees, live in them, sit on the roads and try with all their gentle might to slow the seemingly inevitable destruction of our planet. Only it doesn’t seem to be working as a singular tactic. 

That shared observation is what I found refreshing in Friedman’s new book “Conservation Confidential: A Wild Path to More Effective Activism.” Friedman takes a long, hard look at conservation efforts past and stares into the necessities for the future.

 

After pissing off enough police to reconsider his methods, Friedman became one of the West’s most effective conservationists through what was then the unlikely and underused approach of collaboration. This requires other lost forms of art, such as empathy and listening, to gain perspective. When it comes to land management and the preservation of wildlife habitat in the face of progress, our only option is to make room for each other.  

As Friedman discusses in his book, balancing the needs of ranch owners with the habits of roaming wolves requires deep listening and problem solving, and sometimes the culling of a wolf. When we exist in a space of all-or-nothing, we cannot come to a solution, only blame. Allowing wolves to roam and cattle to range means the occasional lost cattle or lost wolf. So how do we collaborate to minimize both and live in some realm of … let’s not call it harmony … but sustainability? (I hear someone in the back whispering, “tofu.”) 

It’s not just the wolves. It’s who uses our trails and how they are used. I’m a fan of seeing an e-bike make nature more accessible to a recently-replaced knee. Are they appropriate everywhere? If we want private landowners to place land in conservation, how do we uphold their personal values and needs to support that? If we want logging to stop mowing down old-growth and essential ecology, where should our timber mills source the wood products we all use? If we want to keep driving our cars at highway speeds around the clock, how do we protect animals (and drivers) from the harm of collision—not to mention interruption to essential wildlife travel paths? 

The breakneck pace of development in the western world has come with a blind sense of abundance that has scarred landscapes and dramatically reduced native wildlife populations. We can do better, are obliged to do better, but we cannot do it by taking sides. Rather, we must do it by listening to all sides. And this must include the voices of the trees, the rivers, the flora and fauna of our precious planet.  

Ammi Midstokke has allocated her garden as a spider-habitat and established a spider corridor from her kitchen to the outdoors. Some spiders even make it there alive. 

The post Mitch Friedman’s Conservation Confidential: Finding Empathy and Collaboration in Modern Conservation appeared first on Out There Venture.

Cover photo courtesy of Chris Ashenbrener

On the morning of May 18, 1980, Chris Ashenbrener was pouring concrete on the edge of Lake Pend Oreille, far from his stomping grounds in the Cascade Range. Hours after he began, the sky began snowing ash. Ashenbrener retreated to his tent and watched as confused birds navigated the darkening skies, then eventually turned on the radio to hear a voice on the other side telling people to stay indoors. 

“Of course, I thought the Ruskies were coming,” Ashenbrener recalled. But it was just Mount St. Helens, making good on her recent and frequent promises. 

When St. Helens erupted in all her might, she blew out her side with such force that miles of forest around her were flattened and her once-proud summit was amputated of 1,300 feet. Fifty-seven people died, hundreds of homes and structures were lost, nearly 200 miles of road destroyed, and geological history made. 

Lawetlat’la, or Loowit, as the local Indigenous Peoples refer to her, had long been a moody mountain with evidence of prior eruptions. She is unplacated by her occasional tantrums and remains the most active volcano in the Cascade Range. When she reopened to climbers in 1987, she was one of the few volcanoes of the range Ashenbrener had not climbed. 

His interest in climbing began more than a decade earlier, though he’d say he preferred traverses to bagging peaks. After pursuing the usual path of the wayward but being maternally influenced (see: reluctant completion of a degree prior to hitchhiking around America), Ashenbrener gave up his attempts at using mind-control to get picked up by drivers and went to law school. He didn’t really intend to practice law, but meeting classmate and fellow outdoorsman, Ted Gathe, made the years of education worth it. 

The pair and various friends had been exploring the Cascade Range since the mid-1970s, when Ashenbrener moved to Spokane. Raising young families and launching their careers, most of their adventures involved cramming in as much mountain as possible somewhere between Friday and Monday, preferably with some use for their skis along the way. Mount St. Helens was no different. 

The mountain reopened to climbers in May 1987. Ashenbrener remembers it being the weekend of Bloomsday, making the decision to bail on the running race to climb instead. It was also the last weekend climbers could summit without a permit (which has been required since 1986). For the growing alpinist community of the Pacific Northwest, it was a festive affair. 

Trails had not been marked or restored, so parties were approaching from all sides. Gathe and Ashenbrener decided to begin in the lowlands, but the soft snow would slow their approach. They remedied this by bringing their Nordic skis. This got them thinking they should bring their alpine skis, too, for the descent would be long and epic. Of course, they also needed crampons, rope, ice axes, lunch, and the usual layers of mountaineering, packs, and the debris of a day out in the wild. 

They skied in through the trees and over the mushy terrain. As the slope steepened, they stashed their Nordic skis and switched to climbing boots, now only sinking to their knees. With their alpine skis and poles dangling off their packs and looking like traveling trinket salesmen, they made their clunky way across the snow.  

It was a perfect blue-sky day and the sense of celebration was real. As the men pushed toward the summit, which was now just a mile-wide rim of ice and snow, a helicopter approached them, landing nearby. It was ABC News, who had grown curious about the amount of stuff the two were schlepping up the side of a volcano and wanted to interview them for the evening news with Peter Jennings. The crew commented that the pair were the only ones carrying skis to the top. In fact, they were not.  

Mountaineering legend Kathy Phibbs also climbed the mountain that day with her skis, while wearing a red dress and a pillbox hat. Five women from Women Climbers Northwest joined her and danced the Can-Can at the top (they only made the Seattle Times). Phibbs’ pilgrimage of summits in skirts, specifically that one, sparked the annual Mother’s Day Climb on Mount St. Helens that continues to this day.

 

If Ashenbrener and Gathe were more a spectacle than the broads doing Broadway on the rim, it was the accidental result of their testosterone-fueled ambition and “Grapes of Wrath laden journey,” as he refers to it. Clanking with a flea-market load of equipment, they slogged their way to the rim while questioning their life choices. Now, they had the added pressure of getting back in time to see the evening news. The crampons and the ice axes were used in a final push, but the rope stayed in the pack. 

Upon cresting the rim, the gravity of the mountain’s history struck Ashenbrener, who recalls it looked like a “mountain with the top completely sliced off with a machete.” Along the newly formed rim were dozens of climbers peering into the crater, stepping too far out onto frozen ledges and cornices. Other climbers yelled warnings at them while Ashenbrener worried for their safety. Hundreds of feet beneath them, the crater steamed. A new lava dome had already risen out of the crater’s floor. Beyond them, where her belly had split open and poured forth, nature had been decimated.  

When Mount St. Helens erupted, 24,000 megatons of thermal energy were released, 7,000 of which occurred in the initial blast. (In a morbid comparison, this is the explosive equivalent of approximately 1,600 WWII atomic bombs.) Entire swaths of forest were flattened, thousands of acres of trees left like charred toothpicks fanning away from the mountain. The rivers of lava, snow, and mud (known as lahars) carried millions of tons of debris down the Toutle and Cowlitz rivers, wiping out bridges, lumber camps, and homes along the way. Thousands of large animals were killed, entire species of small and large mammals as well as amphibians, extirpated. 

By the time Ashenbrener made it to the rim seven years after the eruption, only patches of fireweed had begun a brave return. Stretching miles before him still lay the carnage of a landscape turned shades of gray-brown. He was struck by a sense of geological fascination and wonder, by the power within the Earth to make a whole mountain disappear. 

Not wanting to miss the evening news, the men rearranged their boots into their overloaded packs and donned their skis. “Forever, I will remember the sound of clicking into our bindings and pushing off,” Ashenbrener said. “We seemingly sailed off the top, over the heads of the climbers.” It was validation of the day’s gear-slog. In turn after turn, they descended 5,000 feet of snow, from one kind of crunchy ice to softer grains until they reached their Nordic skis, quads aflame with the burden of their descent. It’s one thing to ski down a volcano; it’s another thing to do it with a pack full of 1980s climbing gear. 

The two raced back toward civilization in search of a bar with a TV on and a phone to call their families and tell them to watch the news. But that night, Jennings was busy reporting about presidential candidate Gary Hart’s tryst with Donna Rice and the men were bumped from national evening news by a woman after all.  

“We are fortunate here in the PNW,” says Ashenbrener with charming optimism. “We don’t have cyclones, typhoons, hurricanes, flash floods. We just have the Big Burn of 1910 and the volcano of 1980.” Would Ashenbrener climb the iconic route again? “No,” he said, “I don’t do things twice.” Perhaps that is because some things can only be done once.  

Ammi Midstokke lives in North Idaho, where the hills don’t explode. This season, she’ll be traveling to the Peloponnese to climb another less volatile mound of rock. 

The post The Day Mount St. Helens Reopened  appeared first on Out There Venture.

There was a time in a previous life when I traveled to faraway places, because my only real responsibility was a basil plant I could easily replace. The wide, wild world of Patagonia and the Himalayas and the Alps awaited me, and Greta Thunberg hadn’t yet dismantled the guiltless glamor of air travel.  

Then I became a parent and I had to have a real job and live in the same place like a grown-up. I hear the nomad life is en vogue again among parents, but it wasn’t an option for me (single mom and all that). I needed to find a place where I could meet the needs of my wild-wilderness heart and still show up for work on Monday.  

Having grown up off-grid and bordering state land in North Idaho, I was remotely aware of the abundance of public lands here. We harvested moss to stuff between the logs in our cabin and picked enough thimble berries to make pies so sour, only cups of sugar could help. Our creek water was “clean” because no one lived above us to contaminate it—although I just assume we got immune to giardia as the thing dried out every summer and we never filtered a drop of it. 

It was not until I returned to North Idaho as an adult that I had the opportunity to explore a backyard as rugged, majestic, challenging, humbling, and untamed as any other place in the world I had been. Only now, these places were accessible within a few minutes’ drive to a trailhead.  

As a working parent on a budget, the country to which my child and I had access allowed us the most fantastic family adventures I could have hoped for. We traipsed to Harrison Lake for alpine scenery when my kid’s legs were too short for long distance. We hiked into Caribou Lake when it was frozen over and camped in the snow. We summited peaks together, splashed in crisp lakes, saw fish and bears and mountain goats and a world of wonder that shaped our lives and healed unthinkable wounds.  

We went hunting for mushrooms and huckleberries, learned how to orienteer with map and compass, and explored the streams and lakes of the Panhandle National Forest until our two-person family grew to four and we just got a bigger tent. The foundation of our new family was built on stewardship of the lands and resources we use, and a recognition that we are of and reliant upon nature. 

The memories made through the connection to these places remain the silken strands in the tapestry of our family. They are the stories we share at the dinner table. Accessibility to and preservation of these lands is how we cultivated our values of conservation and our reverence for the wild places. Which is exactly why a framed map of the Kaniksu National Forest, replete with pins in the places we’ve been, still adorns our dining room wall.  

Ammi Midstokke is the Literation columnist at Out There Venture. She considers public lands her backyard. She hopes you do, too. 

The post Lands of Wildness  appeared first on Out There Venture.

Cover photo courtesy of Ammi Mdstokke

After years of semi-successful gardening with a low bar, I consider myself a connoisseur of radishes, interbred squashes and edible weeds. The latter being a speciality of mine because weeds are what I most effectively grow. Though I have read many gardening books, I’ve retained very little. If I plant a garden based on companion planting, an aphid plague appears. If I focus on aphid mitigation the next year, some mold appears. And it does not seem to be true that, despite the book’s title, carrots love tomatoes. 

I have decided that the simple foundation of a garden is what supports the amateur gardener in having a less devastating, or expensive, annual experience. Here are my Basic Rules for Winning at Gardening: 

1. Keep out critters. When you’re building your garden, it’s the critters that can destroy months of hard work in a single night. If you have deer, make sure your fence is high enough. If you have rabbits, make sure your fence is narrow enough. If you have raised beds, line them with chicken wire. If you see an aphid, use Neem Oil spray and buy a bunch of ladybugs. If you see slugs, they will make condos out of your cabbage: Sharp mulch, such as pine bark and eggshells, is a great deterrent. Some people call it a garden; I call it a vegetable fortress. 

2. Have the right ingredients. Soil, water, and sun: These are the three ingredients of every plant. Some need more or less, but remember, we’re beginners, so we’ll start with the less finicky frisée before we get to specialized salads. The best gardening investment I ever made was an automatic watering system (known as “my husband”— then he replaced it with a drip system). It was amazing to see my plants still thriving in August long after I cared about gardening anymore. 

3. Start small and pace yourself. It’s true that I dedicated a significant portion of my life each spring to nursing seedlings and drafting gardening diagrams and scouring seed catalogs. By July, I’d be tired of weeding. By late summer, I could hardly bother to water. Consider what parts of gardening you love (harvesting and eating) and which parts you loathe (critter control) and plant your garden accordingly. For example, this spring we’ll dedicate much time to building a new garden, so we’ll purchase starts at the farmers market rather than try to grow them.  

4. Consider the comfort of raised beds. These are amazing when it comes to managing pests, but also lovely for their accessibility benefits. The deep soil allows for dense growing, so you get more garden out of small spaces that are easier to maintain. After much research on metal versus wood, I opted for metal beds this year for their low maintenance, easy movability, and durability. 

5. Grow what you like to eat. Aside from the mental and physical health benefits of gardening, not to mention the potential decrease in your summer lettuce costs and plastic waste, there is nothing quite like wandering into your yard to pick food for dinner. So grow the things you love and slowly expand from there. Just remember, you can only eat so many tomatoes. 

Ammi Midstokke lives on a sunny slope in North Idaho. Her new garden fence can withstand moose, hurricanes and foraging Sasquatch. This summer, she’ll be growing some new radish varieties and maybe even some beets.  

The post 5 Basic Rules for Winning at Gardening  appeared first on Out There Venture.

By Ammi Midstokke 

Once, my friend Larry told me that if I want to be a good writer, I must learn to read poetry. But we all know Larry is crazy, and so after I stumbled through a few New Yorker poems like a kid trying to sprint through tires in gym class, I set them aside and declared myself an aficionado of complete (if not run-on) sentences. 

Then I went to Oahu and I listened to some poems by the very souls who wrote them, and it was as though the broad gates to an unapologetic world of perspectives flung open and invited me in. I sat rapt and wrapped in their words as my head and heart filled with stories of birds, of battles, of battered ecologies and the oppressed, and the dead-and-dying languages, and I fell asleep that night with whispers of them all in my dreams. 

I sipped, like hot tea, the poems of “Green Leaves” by Eric Paul Shaffer, stuck in one titled “Whales at Sunset.” Shaffer carried me through a sunset, the sound of waves, the distant viewing of whales—things written about as often as they have happened, but somehow individual, precious in their uniqueness. I am on the beach, I hear the waves, I see the whales. “Centuries ago, the sea seethed / with the play of whales. Now the ocean blackens with night,” Shaffer writes. 

I feel the loss, the rage, the hopeless resignation to the truth that humanity is as humanity does and because I am reading a poem, I too am human. The only balm to this tragedy is the beauty we occasionally, accidentally, impermanently produce. But the animals and trees and oceans cannot read our poems.  

Back in the Northwest, I see the world in a different kind of broken prose and pause. Each observation has a new depth and curiosity to it, as though perhaps we don’t need as much context to understand the complexity of a wondrous thing. It is spring and will become summer and I am watching nature in the punctuated, spaced lines of poetry. 

It brings a childlike curiosity to my observation of flowers, the shades of green in different flora, and suddenly I am so careful, so careful to not tread on the yarrow or the lupine as I weave my way between the shade-crowded pines and find safe soil on which to step. In a world where we are losing tolerance for anything longer than a TikTok, poetry may save us from ourselves, guide our return to the senses and sensible. 

It is more forgiving than trying to drag my ass through “The Overstory” or “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” which I have only read because they are a social-literary rite of passage and cause to nod knowingly at parties with conservationists, but not because I particularly liked them.  

Ah, but poetry! If you’ve ever met a poet, you know they are in a sophisticate class of their own, a group of people who love being misunderstood as much as they love being understood. The message they all share, the one imperative we learn—whether we understand the allusions or not—is to slow…the…eff…down…and pay attention. 

If we were a world of poets, surely we’d find more commonalities than disagreements. We’d argue over comma scarcity perhaps, and the only harm that would come would be a forced reading of William McGonagall and overconsumption of herbal teas. 

As for me, I’ll take another stab at it. (Reading, that is, for the true scourge of humanity would be proven should I ever try to write the stuff.) The poets of today are activist troubadours on pages, with messages so powerful we can only take them in tiny doses. It is a medicine in which we are of desperate need. 

Ammi Midstokke will spend her summer seeking the poetry of the people, from the indigenous wise ones to the biologists, the broken hearted to the proud, from Frost to Vuong and beyond. 

The post Reading Is Activism  appeared first on Out There Venture.

By Ammi Midstokke 

Cover photo courtesy of Ammi Midstokke

Sometime around a decade ago, recovering from a divorce in which I lost everything but my kid and my bike (the stuff that matters), I found myself at the Whitefish Bike Retreat in Montana on one of my first and few breaks from parenting. Back then, it was just the lodge, owned and operated by legend Cricket Butler, who let me stay there for free, sent me out with a bike guide, and subsequently became a friend. 

Time passed, and as it did, with the imperceptible shifts of slowly built trails, campground expansions, and a PR campaign run by every cyclist who ever passed through, the tiny retreat became something more. Something embedded in the fondest memories of riders from all around. While the retreat added a sauna, a kid’s pump track, a skills course, more trails, a cabin, and booked out months in advance, my own life took on new shape. As did my riding. 

I returned every year at least once, sometimes for the spring bear grass, sometimes for the autumn larch. The sound of the front door always took me back to that first day—a kind of hope and peace were gifted to me there, and then met with a playfulness I had lost.  

Whitefish has other trails beyond the system linked to the retreat. There’s the Whitefish Mountain Resort trails with lifts running all summer, the beloved Spencer Mountain, the Tally Lakes area, and more. It’s a community that has rallied to create and protect trails, a town that teems with bike-covered cars all summer and fall. But the sheer number of ridable miles means there are seldom crowds. Still, I was always drawn back to Lion Mountain and Dollar Lake and beyond for the ridiculous grin I wore the whole time. 

The trails there are built for play—the climbs gentle, the corners banked. There is a section that serpentines through a canyon at just the perfect grade to promise the kind of zen moments that make us one with our bike and nature. There is a mile descent toward Beaver Lake that, in October, is first glowing with larch and then on fire with birch. It is impossible to roll that section without giggling with joy. 

I rode those trails with boyfriends in summer when the soil was perfect and with girlfriends in winter on our fat bikes in the silence of heavy snow. I celebrated my 40th birthday there, broke up with a boyfriend there (I guess at 40 you realize you don’t have time to fuck around anymore), napped with my toddler nephew in the hammock, rallied with my dad and brother there, and met other kindred spirits.  

Eventually, I brought a husband there. We brought our children and their bikes. We rode through years, new bikes, new trails, new friends. We kept returning because it always felt like coming home. 

There are trails on which I know the camber of each corner, how they smell in one season or another (petrichor in spring, sweet decay in autumn), when to let go of my brakes, when to make sure they are working. I don’t know if it’s because the place became symbolic of my freedom and my transitions, or if it is just how damn fun the trails are, but it is a place to which I will keep returning. Some trails are simply old friends you want to stay in touch with. 

Ammi Midstokke lives on the Syringa Trail System in Sandpoint, Idaho, and regularly communes with others by bike and foot. This spring, she’ll be making some new trail friends and visiting old ones throughout the Pacific Northwest. 

The post Whitefish Bike Retreat—Repeat  appeared first on Out There Venture.

The landscape of understanding around mental health is rapidly changing. Where we once were limited to hushed discussions about distant cousins having been checked into asylums, we’re now having more open conversations about the states of our minds.  

Perhaps most importantly, we’re beginning to understand that not being mentally ill does not exactly mean we are mentally well, and that caring for that wellness might need to be an intentional act. This is no less true for those diagnosed with mental illness.  

These days, we’re a society inundated with the unknown impacts of social media and screens; plastics that affect our hormones; information about crises and tragedy occurring real time and globally; the visceral, felt reality of climate change; and yeah, navigating Costco. I’m not sure our brains are evolved enough to handle any of that, not to mention all of that on a Tuesday.  

The World Health Organization suggests that mental wellness is a state of being in which the individual realizes their own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to their community. Perhaps the problem begins right there, because the “normal stresses of life” sounds pretty damn vague and nothing feels normal about life’s stresses right now (see: pandemics, politics, microplastics).  

With that in mind, it is a great time to reevaluate your own mental wellness and maybe set up a bit of a toolkit for support. First of all, grab a copy of Dr. Brown’s book, “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.” As a person who struggles to participate in nonsense, understanding the importance of play for the sake of play, fun for the sake of fun, and the benefits of laughter was a game-change in my own self-care strategies.  

Go outside in nature, but don’t always be a warrior about it. Your adrenal glands will thank you for the occasional stroll or, *gasp* sitting on a park bench. And while you’re staring at birds or the slow passage of time on the trunk of a tree, consider the well-established benefits of meditation. I’m not talking about joining an ashram. Just find a soothing voice on an app and tune into a guided session and out of your rambling mind. The Calm app is my favorite and I have an established one-directional love affair with my meditation boyfriend, John, there. 

Set timers for your screens—perhaps connected to electric shock bracelets, especially for news consumption and social media use. Or scrub the latter altogether. Your real friends will call you. This magazine is beautiful in print. Also, manage your self-talk. Erica Barnhart, professor at University of Washington, says most self-talk is trash-talk. “The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you have with yourself.”  

And don’t forget the power of human connection and support systems. Foster relationships that serve you, prune away those that do not. Have more conversations about what mental wellness looks like for you and how you can support it for others. With any luck, you’ll discover one of your friends also loves eating ice cream cones on a park bench. 

Ammi Midstokke maintains her sanity by drinking coffee and running far with her brown dog. This spring, they’re training for the Sun Mountain 50k in the Methow Valley.  

The post Mental Wellness Strategies  appeared first on Out There Venture.

Cover photo courtesy of Bri Loveall

Recently, a sad day had me feeling profoundly robbed of my sense of agency and rather disappointed in humanity. On such a day, even being human feels a shameful thing.  

Then I happened across a forester named Ethan Tapper using a vocabulary of optimism I’d long discarded. He talked about our ability to cohabitate with nature and restore forests, all while wearing a presumably naïve smile and petting plants like he was some botany version of Mr. Rogers. Whatever pine needle tea or wild ginger this guy was consuming, I needed to get my hands on it.  

So I asked him for a copy of his book, “How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World.” 

Really, what I wanted to know was how to restore my hope. I thought I knew how to love forests, but somewhere between my soft-hearted conservationism and my use of paper towels, there is a dissonance. Somewhere between my dedication to organic growing and the dogged immortality of tansy is a dream of a backpack full of herbicide. 

In Tapper’s book, he tells a story of buying 175 acres of logged decimation—probably for like twelve dollars, because it’s in Vermont and appears to be beneath a power line and next to a highway and all the good trees are gone. Invasive species have crept in. The deer are over-populated and chewing off the hopeful tree shoots. Various blights and plagues of generations are ever-present in the trees. The broad and lasting impacts of settlement in this country are evident even on his razed lands: in the plants, the animals, the way the soil responds to rains, what is resilient and what is no longer.  

Tapper sets about restoring it with tenderness, education, and humility. He even uses *gasp* weed killer. He admits that what is an accepted best practice today might be disproven tomorrow. He knows that his tiny plot of land is less than a drop in the bucket, but it is more than nothing.  

While I now feel compelled to go to forestry school because I suspect that loving a forest relies on a certain bit of education, what I am most inspired to do is more than nothing.  

There’s this cedar tree in my yard that has three extra trunks coming off the bottom of it, slowly sucking the life from the primary tree, and I cannot bring myself to fire up the chainsaw. I have anthropomorphized nature. I don’t want these spindly trunks to get their feelings hurt. The Ponderosas, though… they are the bullies of my coniferous world and I readily cut them down so the firs can recover. I know I must do the same to my cedar. And tansy, I’m coming for you…by whatever means necessary. 

At times, Tapper’s use of the word “legacy” felt redundant until I paused to understand the importance of it: the long-lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc. that took place in the past, or of a person’s life. It is not about having a library named after oneself. It’s about the seeds we plant, figurative or literal, and what they in turn grow to become. 

This is an agency we all have. Whether we become backyard radicals by replacing our lawns with something more meaningful than manicured, or we add flowers on our patios for bees to pollinate, or we put swaths of land in conservation: We can contribute to the hope of restoration. And that is something.  

Ammi Midstokke lives in the woods. This spring, she’ll be learning how to better love the little piece of forest she stewards.  

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