Mini-Awe-Polis 4
Awe, Nice!
Show notes coming soon!
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Bob Bragg
Awe, Nice!
Show notes coming soon!
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Forrest Van Tuyl
Awe, Nice!
Welcome to Awe Nice, where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors. This week, I interviewed Forrest Van Tuyl. Sound familiar? Forrest wrote Rockjack and he sent the instrumental version to me for the intro and outro. In a forthcoming segment, he’s going to talk about that song and the ranch structure that inspired it. For this segment, he shared a moment when he was working in way eastern Oregon, not far from the Idaho border. Sounds like amazing country and here he is to tell us about a long, keen observation. Forrest is married to Margo Cilker, who is a musician...
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Mini-Awe-Polis 3
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My name is Maddy Butcher. I live in southwestern Colorado and I’ve worked as a journalist for several decades. I like to spend time outside and, thankfully, I have spent many years working outside, not just playing outside. I think it’s important to distinguish between the two. In my experience, people’s perspectives, experiences, and philosophies towards the outdoors is different depending on if they are building a life where they’re working, if they become an important part of their outdoor world, or if they’re just passing through. So far, we’ve focused...
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Rae Nickerson
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This week, I interviewed Rae lives is persuing a PhD at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, but travels widely in the west. She studies large carnivores and specifically works on conflict reduction between wolves, grizzlies, and livestock. Rae has had several encounters with bears, some scary, some hilarious, like when a bear was trying to get apples out of the back of her truck while she was trying to sleep in the cab. But she picked another kind of encounter to share with us. Aside from all her work in the field and with producers, she also finds time to help the Western...
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Beau Gaughran
Awe, Nice!
Welcome to Awe Nice, that’s a-w-e-n-i-c-e, where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors. This week, I interviewed of Berwick, Maine. Beau directed , a short documentary about ranching for which I served as writer and producer. It’s done well at film festivals and is now online. Almost all of Beau’s work is outside, often in the backcountry. I’ve learned from him that you need athleticism as well as creative talent to excel at this kind of filmmaking. The moment that Beau chose to share doesn’t unfold outdoors, but it sure is worth hearing. One...
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Kim Kerns
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This week, I interviewed Kim Kerns. Kim is a fourth generation rancher in eastern Oregon. The country is remote. No Man’s Land. Services are distant, which is why her family and their neighbors banded together to organize a rural fire fighting entity, which you’ll hear about. I met Kim several months ago and we talked about dogs, mostly. Kim and her family have about a thousand sheep and hundreds of cows. They have eight guardian dogs, several stock dogs – those are mostly kelpies and border collies, and she also has Burt, an 18-pound Jagd terrier, who keeps down the pack rat...
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Sisto Hernandez
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This week, I interviewed Sisto Hernandez. Sisto lives in Arizona and I met him at a training for range riders. Range riding is a successful strategy for deterring wolves from predating on cattle and Sisto was teaching, sharing his insights from work with the reintroduced Mexican wolves. A few notes on some things Sisto mentions: - Traps aren’t metal contraptions, they’re fenced off areas of between five to twenty acres, built for holding cattle. - Tapaderos are leather fittings, sometimes rawhide, over stirrups that keep anything from getting wedged in your stirrup. That's...
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Sara Lowe
Awe, Nice!
This week, I interviewed Sara Lowe. Sara lives in central Wyoming where she’s a livestock investigator and a detective for Fremont County. Fremont is about 9,200 square miles, about the size of Vermont and has about 40,000 residents. At a last year, I got to hear Sara and a few other officers talk about the on-the-job stresses that bleed into their off hours. Sara’s moment of awe didn’t happen during her work, but because of her work. Because of her work, she’s spent years cultivating a way to generate her own sense of peace and calm. Heck, it was Sara who taught me about ....
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Summer Peterson
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This week, I interviewed Summer Peterson. Summer lives in Colorado now, but up to recently she’s been in central Utah as a farmer, a horse vet, and a competitive rider. By competitive, I mean, really accomplished. She was for years a semi-professional three-day eventer. Three-day eventing is dressage, cross country, and showjumping. The sport was originally conceived as a test for cavalry horses and riders, to gauge bravery, endurance, discipline. Summer calls it the triathlon for horses and riders. I felt so fortunate to be able to record this moment. The pandemic...
info_outlineScotty Calhoun is a fourth generation horticulturalist, raised in Rochester, New York, now living in Cortez, Colorado.
He talked with me about the knowledge he's gained from his forefathers. His great grandfather came over from Holland with seeds in his pockets. That man, then his son (Scott's grandfather), and Scott's father and, of course, Scott himself, all worked the farm in upstate New York. It's a business that still exists today, run by Scotty's uncle and cousin.
Scotty continued his horticultural journey with work at places like the Chicago Botanic Garden.
This work is a constant calculus of considering the weather, the seasons, the soil, the condition of the plants, the state of the equipment, and who is showing for work on any given day.
Scotty shares some thoughtful thoughts on, of all things, burlap. Burlap is essential and low tech. And when it decomposes, is it gone? Is all the burlap used by his family really gone? Or does it live on in the soil and in the plants themselves?