We all have things we pursue for delight. My second most greatly revered passion is wildlife observation. Many people kind of chuckle when it comes to thinking about people like me. Yet people like me chuckle, for a different reason, and we all know it is a grateful, not cynical chuckle.

I can sit for hours reading a book, or playing dominoes, sharing the high country sun with a herd of elk off my shoulder in the meadow just beyond my car camp. Walking a ridge top in step with 400 elk in a valley bottom for 15 or 20 minutes will make the oldest of souls a child if but for those moments. Seeing thousands of elk driving into Jackson, WY in the winter is almost like seeing their Caribou cousins to the north, perhaps the greatest spectacle of ungulates in the world. Many people have seen more than a 125,000 Caribou at a time. Driving diagonally across central Wyoming if you don't see at least a thousand Pronghorn ("Antelope") you are more than likely not looking very hard.

I've stumbled out of the Maine North Woods to a rocky and timbered lakeshore to have an almost completely submerged, and as yet unnoticed, massive Bull Moose explode out of the water, sending my heart racing and me and my heavy pack stumbling back a couple of steps towards where I'd stumbled in from to this encounter of almost prehistoric invigoration. Gallons of water poured off of his paddles with deafening volume, louder than any flowing water for hundreds of square miles. I found having Otters bob up and down in the deep and swift current of the Snake River for a half an hour right in front of you while you eat your lunch can make even the cold chicken paste of an M.R.E. taste like something entirely better. Thirty Five Thousand Sand Hill Cranes in Colorado's San Luis Valley should humble anyone indeed.

Nature comes to move me this way to balance civilization's tug towards the mounting mayhem and megalomania of our culture that is the megalosaur of the exploding megalopolis. People are more often than not quite good wherever you go. From my experience the sad side effect of being in a city is that with more people comes a higher concentration of assholes. People may judge a city and all of its people from one negative experience after perhaps thousands of positive ones on the same stretch of concrete. From September 11th the world learned stereotype of geography rarely translates into broader reality. People are great, but it is great to get away from those that an old trail walker told me "just ain't people." It is not just the less than desirable elements of society, among other things it is also the sensory overload of our ever more global community of consumption that drives some of us to try and turn the clock back several thousand years. Sure, we take the convenience modern technology and material and the safety it affords us, but we leave behind far more that we need to get away from, from time to time in any event. For the cost of a Caribbean vacation you can outfit yourself for years of marvelous memories out past where the gravel ends. Forests are for frolicking, high-country humbles, rivers rejuvenate, streams soothe, meadows may move us, and among so many other things alluring alpine ascents can doom us to endless and appreciative alliteration.