Remember back in January, before we sent SWAT Teams into restaurants after diners and before we jailed hairdressers or governors outlawed vegetable seeds? If those things don’t disturb every fiber in your body…well, they just should that’s all.
A Lifetime Of Adventure
RIR reader and contributor Rob L. Thornton has a poem published in the current issue of Dark Mountain. A signal accomplishment, and we tip our hat(s) to him. I stumbled across the Dark Mountain Project in February of 2016. I know the date because I wrote a piece about it titled Chasing Buffalo Down A Dark Mountain on Frontier Partisans. I was intrigued […]
A Strange Drunken Dream
As did you all, I read with great enjoyment Craig’s “Tickling The Wire” post, which set me to ruminating upon his observation that our bad-tooth, grisly-and-bubbling-infections-and-finally-death past is a mere camera-flash away from us. This, of course, set me to contemplating the wild, colorful career of Donald McBane. As one does. You see, Donald McBane should have died young […]
The Pandemic Please, With a Side of Vertigo
The seasons have finally turned here in the Cascades, which mostly means a ton of work. Spring in the mountains is a cranky bitch, like the old flatbed Studebaker I drove when chasing cows on the Fish Creek Ranch out of Eureka, Nevada. It took a full can of starting fluid every morning to get that motor to run but she would eventually cough and snort and whine and then finally crank in a cloud of black and blue smoke.
Badger Theory Blues
Not so long ago I bottomed out. It was a hard stoppage. If you’ve ever been out on the desert, driving too fast on nominal roads, and suddenly high-centered your rig in the rocks, you’ll have some idea what this felt like. There were some nasty scraping sounds as my skid plate dragged over the rocks, followed by a solid “kathunk” and a jaw-jamming loss of forward movement. Things on the backseat ended up on the dashboard. My seatbelt locked up like a parachute harness and there might have been some whiplash. It was all quite unexpected because I was actually at a dinner party.
Running Iron Podcast 15
Retired Special Forces warrior Greg Walker, author of 16 books and frequent contributor to Soldier of Fortune, Black Belt magazine, and Running Iron Report, returns to the bunkhouse for an hour of great conversation with Craig, Jim, and “Oil Can” Rathbun. The boys discuss a host of topics and listeners are in for a treat. From News […]
Over The Hills And Far Away
During her first week in London, Ceili took in a service at Westminster Abbey. As one walks through the west entrance of Westminster Abbey, one encounters a memorial stone embedded in the flagstones, a remembrance of one of history’s Great Men: It was a moment for her, as it was for me when I visited the Abbey in 1996. Winston Churchill […]
Billy Howe’s Cleopatra
“History is human nature writ large, and the better you understand the past, the better you’ll understand people in general, including those of our own day.” — James Carlos Blake * There is a pernicious movement afoot to push aside liberal arts education in favor of more “practical” education. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what is practical. I […]
Down Into The Mire — The Hard Men Of The War Of Irish Independence
There is nothing more stirring and romantic than a people’s fight for independence. Who cannot be moved by an underdog taking up the rifle to make a stand and be counted in the community of nations? And yet the reality of revolution — and the civil war that it seems must almost inevitably follow — is grim, violent […]
Radical Ranching
Cattle have long been the bogeymen of environmental extremists, blamed for almost every eco-horror imaginable, but people need to eat, and despite sustained misinformation campaigns by detractors, they like to eat beef. This year, the average American will consume 217 pounds of beef, and what’s missing from the traditional formulas, Hobbs says, is the long-term health and productivity of the soil.
High Drama in Little High Rock
On February 26, 1911, in a winter so cold across northern Nevada that temperatures dropped to ‑40°, four men rode quietly into the frozen maw of Little High Rock Canyon to investigate the carcasses of cattle recently killed and left in the snow. Little High Rock Canyon, in 1911, was as it remains today: a long way from anywhere. Closest to Eagleville, California, LHR is situated in the sagebrush, alkali, and basalt country of northwest Nevada. It is home to bighorn sheep, many species of raptors, deer, pronghorn, rattlesnakes, chukar, quail, coyotes, horned toads, and wild horses. Summers are blazing hot, and winters are unremitting.
Dreaming Up a Kitchen
Stuff that works Stuff that holds up The kind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall Stuff that’s real Stuff you feel The kind of stuff you reach for when you fall — Guy Clark * “When I finished, he just looked at me and said, ‘Good work’ . That’s what Guy said when he dug a song. Those are the words every songwriter […]
