Dear Sundog: My wife and I are climbers who now have a baby and a toddler. We’ve started to get back into climbing and take the kids with us to a nearby climbing area. Sometimes we go with other parents so we can share childcare while the adults are climbing. We get a lot of dirty looks and even some comments from others about how our kids are disturbing the peace. But we can’t always coordinate with other families, and of course climbing takes two people, so we can’t climb and watch the kids at the same time. The best solution appears to be bringing our nanny who usually takes the weekends off but could be persuaded to come with us on the weekend, but I’ve never seen or heard of anyone doing this, and I wonder why not. —Kids For Climbing

Dear KFC: Never would Sundog suggest that some enthusiasts give up their passions merely for having procreated. The mores of yesterday in which children stayed in children’s places (usually with the wife) have all been obliterated, especially since the pandemic. People take their kids to bars, fancy bistros, even the goddamn symphony. And I can empathize. Parenting in America these days can be lonely: most of us don’t live with or near extended family that makes up the “village” upbringing that’s been part of humanity for millennia. Parents are reminded that just about everything is dangerous: see the legally required merchandise like bike helmets and car seats that didn’t even exist when we were children, and the risk-of-death labels on everything from plastic bags to peanut butter to five-gallon buckets. A brief flicking through cable news assures us that strangers should not be trusted; people don’t know their neighbors; all of which results in a generation of parents understandably afraid to let their kids out of their sight. So I commend you, KFC, for dragging your kids to the cliffs, because unless you’ve cracked the code of truly Ěýwho will watch your kids for you, then the well-known alternative is staying home or at the playground which gets unbearably dull pretty quick.

But I fear you may be taking a good instinct a bit too far. When your kids are old enough to climb, then by all means take them. But when they’re still toddling, they seem a danger to themselves and if they—like 100 percent of small children— make a lot of noise, then they’re also a nuisance and danger to other climbers. If you absolutely must expose the kids to climbing, take them to the gym. As for your babysitter idea: if you’re fortunate enough to be able to afford a trustworthy nanny for a whole day, then by all means hire them—and leave them at home with the kids. Who knows, maybe mom and dad will find a place for a quick roadside bivy in transit to the crag.

To review, here are some places that are good to take toddlers and babies:

• Ski resorts
• Cross country skiing
• Floating class-I rivers
• Climbing gyms
• Any outdoor concert, regardless of genre

And here are the places you should not take them:

• BASE jumping
• The opera
• Congressional hearings
• Backcountry skiing
• The crag

And just to show that Sundog isn’t just some kid-hating grouch who wants them out of my sight, let me weigh in on a hotly-debated question that you didn’t ask: should I bring my kid to the brewery?

I give a whole-hearted yes. Consider that the brewery may provide the deepest sense of contentedness the parent has experienced since the birth of the child. The parent is drinking alcohol. The child is…somewhere, out of eyesight, out of earshot. The brewery has generously provided a fenced outdoor enclosure, perhaps even toy bulldozers and a sandbox, harmless banjo players picking tunes that cause the child to dance about and don’t include obvious obscenity or ideations of violence. Ya gotta just let Dad gulp down his mosaic hop IPA or whatever. Those things are strong. They make him feel good. This is how they do it in Europe, I heard that somewhere. Celebrate.

Readers respond: Should hikers blast music on the trail?

The issue with amplified music is more akin to overly bright lights beaming into my eyes or trash left behind. These are impacts that dramatically impact mine and others experience and dramatically changes the environment. No one has that privilege without group/community consent. There are several alternatives to listen to electronic music without forcing me to participate without my consent. It’s a clear invasion of privacy and disregard for the other.

The solitude of the landscape exists for all of us, not him, not any single specific person.
Second, we all have freedoms, but those freedoms are restricted when their exercise harms others. The right for me to wave my arms ends before I hit someone’s face, right?
People who blast their music are destroying the silence for everyone. They are doing temporary damage to the environment. They make it difficult or impossible for others to enjoy the experience they came for.

Has it occurred to you or the person who asked this question, that perhaps hikers were blasting music because they were in an area inhabited by bears or other animals? Blasting music is a great way to make your presence known to others who live there. especially other animals who will tear you apart when surprised or when they feel threatened.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com

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Dear Sundog: A few years ago I bought a groover for river trips, thinking it a necessary bit of group gear. My river friends didn’t own one, and we always had to scramble to borrow/rent/steal one for each trip. It was expensive, like $400, once I got the accompanying seat and rocket boxes that fit into my rowing frame, but I didn’t mind as I thought it would make me the “good guy” who supplied something essential for our trips.

But now that I’m the proud owner of a self-contained portable toilet, I find that I’m just expected to carry it on my raft, unload and set it up each night, then break it down and load it back onto my boat each morning. In the past, when we rented a groover, we all took turns setting it up and carrying it. It’s not that big of a deal, but then, they start to stink after a few days, and now it’s a feature of EVERY trip I do.

What’s more, at the end of the trips, no one has ever offered to empty/clean it for me, so now I’m always stuck with that delightful bit of scrubbery at the Maverick truck stop. The thing feels like an albatross and I’m tired of hauling all my friends’ shit. Should I just tell them I don’t have it anymore and let them figure it out on their own? —Antagonized Shit ServantĚý

Dear A.S.S.: As a retired Water Sports Team Associate (aka “river guide”) I can see at least two sides of this conundrum. On the one, having dumped and scrubbed dozens of boxes of human excrement in my day, I can attest that it’s really not as bad as it sounds. As with most jobs, once you accept it as your lot in life, it becomes kind of … normal. On the other hand, any chore done with the esprit de corps of an expedition, with everyone pulling their own weight, devolves to a bummer when you’re the one stuck doing it every time. Your generous purchase for your friends’ enjoyment seems to prove the adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

You’ll have to take a hard line with your buds: request some volunteers to deal with the mess before the trip begins. If no one steps up, then your groover can call in sick, and the group can scramble to rent something. In this heady age of technological wonders one after the next gleefully promising to make your life easier, there is not yet, to Sundog’s knowledge an app or a bot that solves the age-old dilemma of disposing of feces. However with the surge of COVID-era newcomers to the sport of rafting (if you can call all-day bouts of beer drinking a “sport”) there has emerged a new service that Sundog has sampled and hardily recommend: toilet rentals which include the cleaning. In this new-fangled scenario, all party members pitch in 20 bucks or so, people share the duties, and at the end you just drop the hot pot on someone else’s doorstep.

Readers respond: Should a woman go on a river trip with a guy she didn’t want to sleep with?

As one of the early female outdoor adventurers, I would tell her this: If you are not already sleeping with a fellow adventurer, always bring your own tent and make it clear from the beginning that is where you are sleeping alone. Always. It sends a clear signal from the beginning. It’s easier to move in if you become interested than it is to move out. If it’s an adventure worth going on, you need the sleep. And if you are competent to go on an adventure, you can carry your own damn tent.

Maybe it is just where I live. It’s expected here to have sex after meeting for a hot tea at White Castle fast food restaurant. I can’t imagine being with a guy for 14 nights without sex being demanded. To watch football at friend’s house, I had to bring my own drink or have sex. Another guy would not make eye contact at Starbucks because he was mad I would not leave and have sex. I have not tried dating anywhere else.

Readers respond: Should a father teach his son to knock down cairns?

Hey Sundog, that guy who goes around destroying cairns is a selfish asshole! What if he kicks down a cairn, and someone gets lost and dies. You need to gow some balls and call that idiot exactly what he is, a totally self absorbed asshole!!

I so appreciated your comments on the wilderness fantasy in your cairn piece. I literally went to grad school to study history of the American West (after reading Mark David Spence’s ) just to wrap my smooth brain around the quagmire of myth and reality that is nature in America. In just a few sentences, you explained the whole sitch soĚýclearly and purposefully. I have always been a fan of your column and now am even more so!

Truth over purity.

We have thousands of Cairns here in PA and there purpose is not 100% clear. Some speculate they are some form of native American marker or maybe placed by our first settlers, or both. If it is not your property, you likely shouldn’t be modifying it one way or the other, or as little as possible with the allowed use of it.

I volunteer on an officially sanctioned trail crew in the Gila National Forest, including in the Gila wilderness along the Gila River alternate of the Continental Divide Trail. I must say that there are marked trails in the National Forest, including in wilderness areas, and in some cases we use rock cairns because traditional signs won’t work in some spots due to terrain.

In your article it sounded like you were saying it is OK to knock down cairns in National Forest or wilderness areas. I disagree. These cairns may serve the same purpose as they do in a National Park and can really help to keep people on the main trail.

In fact, in our area, where I hike extensively, I don’t recall ever seeing cairns that were not intended to mark a main trail or trail junction.

Sometimes they are a spiritual expression of presence.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com

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Dear Sundog: Developers in Moab are building a . They’re naming the cul-de-sacs Monkey Wrench Way and Hayduke Court. What a load of crap! Cactus Ed hated all real estate development in his beloved desert—and fought it his whole life. I’m sure he’s rolling in his grave, and I’m sure Hayduke would have blasted this place with dynamite. Wouldn’t it be right to at least go pull all the survey stakes and pour sugar in the bulldozer gas tanks? —Monkey Grinch

Dear Grinch: You’re right that Ed Abbey hated development and loved solitude. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit,” he wrote in Desert Solitaire. “I generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go.” His radical vision was not just for recreational parks—he wanted true wildness with no signs of humanity. But even as he railed against industrial capitalism, he didn’t actually want to go dwell in a cave and grow his own beans. He liked to drive to the edge of the wilderness in his Cadillac, drinking ice cold beer and tossingĚýthe cans to the shoulder, then stumble in a mile or so, see nobody, shoot guns, and go home the next day.

Sundog knows the sheer joy of such freedom, having emulated it for the better part of his youth. But as anyone who’s visited Moab in the past decade can attestwhen you get a weekend horde of 30,000 middle-aged men guzzling gas and booze, descending on the desert to do whatever the hell they please, the emptiness fills up quick. In the 50-plus years since Desert Solitaire, the economies of ranching and mining in southern Utah have effectively ended, replaced by the booming business of solitude, or rather, all the hotels, bars, cafes, grocery stores, and gear shops that get you to the brink of that solitude.

“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope,” Abbey once wrote. “Without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”

Which is just a fancy way of saying we need to be wilderness tourists.The irony of Abbey’s legacy is that he devoted his entire literary career to preserving the arches and canyons just the way he found them, and yet his books have contributed to their ruin, drawing more seekers toward that vast nothingness than decades of redrock-porn produced by the Utah Office of Tourism.

While I agree that Abbey might cringe at the bespoke subdivision, I’d say it’s not an aberration, but rather the consequence of his great success. Who wouldn’t read his sublime words of ravens and awe, canyons and eternity, and not want to spend a week at the gate of rapture? When Abbey quipped that “growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell,” he likely did not imagine that the next tumor would be his acolytes, rightly enticed by his version of the holy land.

No, Grinch, I don’t think monkey-wrenching the subdivision is the right path forward, and in the larger picture, clinging to Ed Abbey as an environmental saint is simply revisionist history. After all, who exactly was his unpopulated paradise for? On this point Abbey was clear: it was for white people. “Am I a racist?” . “I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals.” His proposed solution to the specter of a brown America? “Militarize our borders.”ĚýA few years later in the essay “Immigration and Liberal Taboos” he , “it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-genetically impoverished people.” What’s more, he argued, “the tendency of mass immigration from Mexico is to degrade and cheapen American life downward to the Hispanic standard. Anyone who has made a recent visit to Mexico, or even to Miami, Florida, knows what I mean.” He that byĚýsealing the southern border a “a force of 20,000, or ten men per mile, properly armed and equipped, would have no difficulty—short of a military attack—in keeping out unwelcome intruders.”

His solution to the crisis of the world’s booming population can be distilled to: birth control for brown people, awesome camp-outs for white people.

Abbey was no more tolerant of the people who inhabited his beloved canyons centuries before settlers like himself. Like so many Southwestern rugged types in boots and vests and bolo-ties, Abbey to the indigenous people of yore.Ěý“I think I would have loved to have been an early 19th century Sioux or Arapahoe or Cheyenne,” he said in an interview, “part of that great, magnificent horse and buffalo way of life. It must have been one of the glories of human life.”

As for their modern-day descendants? Beyond breezily describing himself one night as “drunk as a Navajo,” Abbey blustered in Desert Solitaire that the typical Navajo “works when he feels like it and quits when he has enough money for a party or the down payment on a new pickup. He fulfills other obligations by getting his wife and kids installed securely on the public welfare rolls.”

Decades later in the , Abbey claimed falsely that “Navajos became official wards of the United States Government, gave up their horses for pickup trucks and learned to extract every possible kind of Federal benefit from rich, guilt-ridden Uncle Sam.ĚýLike many other Americans, the majority of the Navajos depend for daily sustenance on that stiff, green, monthly check.”

So much bullshit to wade through here! In fact Native Americans are not wards of the state (although their reservations are held in trust by the United States), and do not receive any sort of for being Indigenous. In 1996 of American Indians received Assistance to Families with Dependent Children (aka welfare), a far cry from a majority. Abbey twisted facts—or maybe just made them up—to prop up his hot take on the Indigenous as shiftless moochers. History teaches the opposite, that when it comes to theft, white people stole land, water, minerals and timber from the tribes.

Elsewhere in Desert Solitaire, Abbey describes recovering the corpses of two Native men who died in a car wreck. The car was littered with accoutrements of modernity such as cheap wine, cowboy shirts, and a True West magazine. He concludes: “Nowhere did we see any eagle feathers, any conchos of silver, any buffalo robes, any bows, arrows, medicine pouch or drums. Some Indians.”

The cruelty is withering: Abbey is a member of the society that stole land, broke treaties, massacred civilians, and abducted children to deprogramming camps, and as he surveys Indigenous bodies that survived the genocide only to die young in an accident, he sneers at them for having lost their traditions.

In dreaming of an Eden for whites, he did not imagine that the supposedly drunk Indians might rise up to protect the planet from mining, drilling, and pipelines. In southern Utah, white environmental groups failed for decades to persuade Congress to protect lands as wilderness, but after they joined forces with the five tribes of the Four Corners, President Obama created Bears Ears National Monument. Meanwhile on the Standing Rock Reservation it was Indigenous water protectors who galvanized a worldwide movement against oil pipelines, arguing not for pristine playgrounds but for racial justice and tribal sovereignty.

So let’s not cry for Ed Abbey—and don’t pretend he’s been betrayed. When white environmentalists wonder why they can’t build the kind of coalitions that delivered victories at Bears Ears and Standing Rock, look no farther than their cultish devotion to Abbey.

Meanwhile, Abbey Acres or whatever it will be called seems actually a fitting name. The past decade has forced America to finally reckon with places named after genocidal settlers and slaveholdersĚýfrom Fort Bragg, North Carolina to Sheridan, Wyoming. We’ve wrestled with–and changed–names that commemorate men weĚýno longer admire. But in Abbey’s case there will be no need to re-evaluate. He dreamed of a land free from brown people where white people could play mountain man, and his name will grace the embodiment of his vision.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

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You might think that being author of an ethics column would make Sundog’s own ethical decisions easy. Not so much. This month I stumbled up my own quandary that I couldn’t answer.

I live in a town in the West near a big city park with a creek flowing through it. In other parts of the country it might be a national park, but here it’s just a place for running, fishing, and dog-walking. Recently, the cost of housing has skyrocketed, and we’ve developed a bad homelessness problem. This summer someone pitched a tent by the creek in this park where camping is clearly not allowed; the tent was about 100 yards from someone’s house.

A typical vagabond, I surmised. But as the days passed, as I took my dog and toddler on our daily stroll, I noticed that it was couple (man and woman), with a dog, who seemed to lay around all day on their mats talking on their cell phones. They were camped about ten feet from water; there are no restrooms in this park. Then I saw that they had a truck that they parked nearby with a couple old bikes in back. The license plates revealed that they live in the next county over. They aren’t really harming anyone, but they’re camped right in the trail by a little swimming hole. I talked to the guy briefly: he was pleasant enough, a bit rough around the edges, asked about fishing in the creek.

It bugged me more than it should have. I wanted to call the police or the park to have them booted. But that felt wrong. Like I should just live and let live. Before I did anything, the couple left.

A few weeks later, I went back to the spot. Now there was a hole filled with toilet paper and cigarette cartons. I did not inspect closely enough to see if the TP had been used. A backpack and some other gear was stashed under a plastic tarp. I had no idea if the mess and the gear belonged toĚýthe first people. What I did know was that it made me irrationally furious, white hot with anger, not the least because the sight of toilet paper makes my dog salivate with delight. My first thought was to haul all the trash and the gear to the nearest dumpster—a plan that filled me with self-righteous vengeance, and also the suspicion that I may be an asshole, or at least a person experiencing assholery.

Unsure what to do, I consulted a man with firsthand experience being unhousedĚýon public lands, Daniel Suelo, also known as , who evaded the law for many years while living in the Utah canyons. I asked him what I should do. He wrote back:

I’ve run into a lot of really trashy, stinky camps, and, of course, I don’t like it. It ruins it for everybody, especially our fellow “unhoused.”Ěý So, should we clear out trashy camps?Ěý It’s a choice between (1) the trauma of somebody losing what little home they have or (2) the inconvenience of a person with a house not having another clean place to walk or play.

I personally know people who’ve had their trashy camps cleared out with no warning, and, naturally, it catapulted them into major trauma, on top of the mental illness they were already suffering. I myself once had my own clean camp by the Colorado River completely cleared out. It sent my life into upheaval. However, for me, not suffering mental illness or traumas, it was par for the course, the kind of risk I knew could happen, and had mentally prepared for.

Though I don’t justify trashy camps, having scolded fellow campers for leaving trash, letting them know they are ruining it for all of us, I still think housed people need to see the lumber yard in their own eye. Housed people create many, many times and environmental destruction than all houseless people put together. Our landfills, trash barges, and oceans of garbage gyres testify to this. But housed people’s trash and environmental destruction is out of sight, out of mind.Ěý Ěý

Also, the housed don’t consider how difficult it is to dispose of trash for people without city trash service or without even a vehicle. The unhoused often have to walk miles to throw trash away, and, even when they do find a receptacle, it’s often illegal to dump into it. Add to this the fact that most houseless people suffer mental illness, traumas, and/or addictions.

But, yeah, I’m all for everybody, including the houseless, learning accountability for their own actions. Cops sometimes leave notes at houseless camps, giving them a few days warning to clear out their camp. A fellow citizen could warn them to clear out the trash but not the camp itself.

I returned to the spot in a rain storm. Most of the gear was gone. What remained was a plastic box, like a portable filing cabinet, filled with someone’s valuable objects, soaking in the rain. It was sad. As for the pile of garbage, I’ll wait until my wells of compassion refill, then I’ll go clean it up.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

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Dear Sundog: For several years I’ve crewed for a semiprofessional ultrarunner. He isn’t a very close friend, but I like working with him. Sometimes I pace him, and the aid stationsĚýare a good time. A few others also crew—we don’t get paid, or ask to be paid, but do it for fun. Recently he got a pretty big sponsorship. Now he’s getting paid for these ultramarathons, but he hasn’t offered to pay any of us helping crew. I’m not looking for a salary, but I think he could at least offer to pay our gas money. Shouldn’t he? —Free Labor

Dear Free: There’s nothing like money to spoil a good time. The work you’re doing for your friend hasn’t changed. Neither has the amount you get paid for it. And yet it’s no longer fun. Instead of doing something from your generous heart, with a few rustic perks chucked in, now you’re working for The Man, thinking,ĚýI slaved all weekend for this dude, and all I got was a bottle of Gu?

The crux here is this idea of “should.” Should people pick up their trash? Should drivers stop for pedestrians? Should my boss give me a raise? Yes, yes, and yes! But do they? No, no, and no. The road to hell is lined with shoulds. I think your sponsored athlete would be a decent fellow if he called you up and offered you some cash. But it’s not unethical of him to accept volunteer support on his path to fame. The point is, you don’t have control over what he does with his money.

Probably the best thing to do is simply ask him to pay you. You don’t need to lecture him about profit sharing or ethics, just ask. If he says yes, then problem solved. If he says no, then you get to decideĚýwhat you get out of crewing for him and if there are intrinsic rewards—being outside, meeting great people—that make it worthwhile. If not, you can, as they say, take a hike.

I will admit I have, especially over the last couple years, thought very hard about pirating the Yampa or Lodore. I grew up in Craig, Colorado, the jump-off point for these two exquisite river trips. I have very fond memories of these trips as a kid. My dad and his good friend would take me and my friends, and now we are taking our children. It is a generational love affair with rafting and especially on the Lodore and the Yampa.

One of my sharpest memories was when my father and his good friend were caught pirating the Yampa River. Probably 25 or 30 years have passed since they were caught; however, I still remember it vividly.ĚýThey figured they would use the cover of darkness to help in the operation. It was my dad, my stepmom, his good friend Bert, and three juveniles, (me being one of them). Bert and my stepmom were running the shuttle to Echo Park (they figured Echo Park would be inconspicuous), and my dad and I prepared boats at the launch. It wasĚýmaybe 11 P.M. Suddenly, a ranger appeared and asked when we were launching. We were busted! My dad told the ranger tomorrow. “Great, I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” replied the ranger.

Bert and my dad discussed options: (1) Pack up and pretend like nothing happened, or (2) Get up really early and go. What would be the worst that could happen?Ěý We opted for number two.Ěý We got up around 4 A.M., and down the Yampa we went.

I believe that my dad and Bert were also frustrated with the permit system, especially in our backyard of Craig. It was a great trip, but there were a lot of people who met us in Echo Park four days later. The sheriff and multiple National Park Service officers were present. With a megaphone, they yelled for us to pull over immediately, which we did, Upon reaching shore they quickly handcuffed our parents and placed them in custody in the back of pickup trucks. They didn’t place my stepmom in cuffs (I think they wanted someone to take care of us kids). After some hustle and bustle, they released our fathers, but not before writing them a hefty ticket and a mandatory appearance in a federal courtroom in Grand Junction.

My dad thought it was important that I witness the justice system firsthand, so he dragged me to the arraignment. The government had evidence in the forms of photographs. One night during our pirated trip we had a spaghetti fight. The easiest way to clean up after a spaghetti fight on the river is of course a swim in the river. While we were swimming and cleaning ourselves off, a helicopter swooped down and took pictures of three nude boys washing the remnants of a spaghetti fight off in the river. We later learned the helicopter was on a fire patrol but was also informed of the pirated trip and asked to make contact with us if possible.

When all was said and done, my dad, stepmom, and my dad’s friend were all fined and banned from the national-park systemĚýfor an extended period of time. The fine was nothing to laugh at either.

Another reader, David N., suggested:

1) Why not fly down to Mexico, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Peru, Bolivia, Columbia, etc., where the locals and regional governments actively promote outdoor recreation, have few permit restrictions, and have a lifetime of rivers to run. Many rivers in these countries are entirely unprotected and face a barrage of threats from hydropower, mining, and logging. Just by putting boots on the ground and blades in the water, you’ll be supporting an alternative path.

2) Buy a drysuit and go in theĚýoff-season.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

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Dear Sundog: Periodically, celebrities get blasted for flying their private jets all over the place or committing some other kind of wasteful, climate-hurting action. Should I care? —Papa Rossi

Dear Papa: The hand-wringing over celebrity excess is, for many, yet one more reason to be anxious and outraged about the state of the planet. You’re referring, I assume, to that a batch of A-listers including , Jaz-Z, and Steven Spielberg, with their private jets, are burning carbon at a rate 480 times that of regular mortals. A flak for Taylor swiftly denied this, claiming that the jet was often loaned out to others, but nonetheless the premise of the ultra-rich flapping around in personal airplanes while we proles fester in traffic jams and TSA lines smacks of a dystopic future already arrived. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Keven Hart, Sly Stallone, and others of breaking drought water laws by using too much of it. Every few years, it seems, are slammed for their climate hypocrisy.

The good news, Papa, is that this is one eco-crime that you can stop worrying about. Not to say that these people aren’t wasteful. Hell, they might even be evil. And if you’d like to register your discontent by no longer watching their movies or listening to their records or buying their products, then I encourage it. But if your goal is to save the planet then you can safely avert your eyes from this brouhaha and instead keep them on the big picture, which is forcing government to take action at the policy level.

These journalistic jabs at the hypocrisies of the rich and famous, though perhaps informed by good populist intentions, in reality serve as a type of “what about-ism” that distracts and weakens the urgency of real reform. For example:

You: 33 million people were displaced in flooding in Pakistan!

Them: Yeah, but what about Jay-Z’s private jet?

You: 160 species of animals went extinct in the last decade!

Them: Yeah, but what about Stallone’s swimming pool?

You see how it goes. Americans, deprived of a queen and royal family to worship, tend to deify Hollywood stars and then long for their disgrace and comeuppance. It’s a fairly harmless pastime—Sundog thinks we should all resent the rich as a matter of principle. But don’t confuse it with climate action, and consider the opportunity costs of how else moral energy might have been expended.

What’s most insidious about being upset about the excesses of the stars, is that it accepts the frame that one person’s individual habits are what is causing the crisis—and what sill solve it. But it won’t. The only way we’ll solve it is by the government passing laws and building infrastructure that will take us out of fossil fuels: laws that require higher MPG vehicles, laws that end coal-burning power plants. Obsessing over our individual carbon footprint may make us feel guilty—or virtuous—but it won’t solve the problem.

The concept of a personal carbon footprint was representing British Petroleum with the explicit goal of shifting the blame of global warming away from the oil industry and onto individual consumers. It was a dazzling success: the phrase “individual carbon footprint” has entered the lexicon and its various free online guilt calculators are provided from everyone from the Nature Conservancy to the EPA to the New York Times, generally without a hint that they are repeating BP’s propaganda. The greatest trick the oil industry ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

I’m not saying that you should therefore feel liberated by Taylor Swift to guzzle the most gasoline possible. Sundog prefers to run errands on bicycle rather than in his eight-cylinder pickup truck, but he’s not deluded into thinking he’s saving the planet. Rather he’s saving his own peace of mind: he gets to be outside, he doesn’t erupt in rage while stuck at red lights or circling the block for parking places. While a good argument can be made that those positive vibes alone are doing some work toward a more just world, it’s not a replacement for real infrastructure like more bike lanes and paths, public transportation, and redesigning cities so we don’t live so far away from the places we need to get—like offices and schools and stores.

As for the soon-to-be-ubiquitous electric vehicle that will allow the Global North to continue its exact behavior and still save the planet, Sundog suspects this might be a case of allowing the people who created the problem to try to solve it, and the consequences of scaling up coal-fired electricity and lithium mining to match current levels of gasoline-fueled cars appears daunting,Ěý but that’s the subject for another column.

Sundog recalls that when he was camped for months at Standing Rock to help the Lakota block the Dakota Access Pipeline, a frequently uttered barb by the oil biz was that Water Protectors were a bunch of hypocrites because they drove gas-powered cars across the nation to protest an oil pipeline. Here you see the wicked effectiveness of British Petroleum’s campaign of personal responsibility: We use oil just as much as anyone so we have to keep our mouths shut and not say a bad word about it.

Focusing on footprint makes us blame ourselves for the fact that virtually all cities and towns built since World War II were designed to accommodate, encourage—and depend on—driving a car.Ěý While it’s true that millions of people liked—and to continue to prefer—this design, that doesn’t mean that they designed and built it. That was the work of government policy, heavily influenced by the oil and automotive lobbies. And we the people can reverse that only by outward action, not inward self-blame.

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Dear Sundog: For many years I’ve been in the practice of knocking down cairns while hiking. I dislike them because they turn a natural landscape unnatural. And I love route-finding, which is ruined by someone else showing me the route. Now that I’m introducing my sons to hiking, I’m passing on to them the practice of knocking over someone else’s obnoxious piles of rock, telling them they are improving these places for the next visitor. Am I right? —King Cairnage

Dear Cairnage: First some definitions. Frequently confused with a white lady who asks to see your manager, a cairn—not a Karen—is a stack of rocks that shows you where the trail goes. They can be as simple as three small stones, as monumental as the two-legged towers of Acadia National Park, or as whimsical as the imagination of the stoners who spend hours balancing unlikely objects: picture Dr. Seuss’ Horton the elephant perched on a tiny egg on a nest on a tree.

Cairns can be immensely helpful in keeping us on track, especially on rock and sand where there is no discernible trail. And to many, such as yourself, they can be immensely annoying, yet one more sign of humanity’s inability to chill the F out, stop making and altering things, and just let Earth be Earth.

As for deliberately destroying them, you have to ask the cairns’ purpose, and what happens if you knock them down. The answer varies widely by location. If you’re , the short answer is no, you should not knock down cairns. They are put there by people who know what the hell they’re doing, such as rangers and trail crew, and they are part of a plan to manage a jillion visitors with as few as possible of them getting lost or forging a brand new trail. (You should also not build new cairns in National Parks.)

But there are plenty of other types of public lands: national forests, national monuments, national conservation lands, wilderness and wilderness study areas, and so on. You’re probably in the right knocking down cairns in wilderness, as these places are meant to be devoid of signs of humanity such as roads, toilets, and motors. You also should consider level of use: a popular trail near a big city is similar to a National Park in that a cairned trail prevents regular, expensive search-and-rescue operations. Lastly you need to think about the durability of the terrain: in grasslands or forest, it doesn’t really matter if people wander off trail: things will grow back. But in the canyon country where Sundog parks his singlewide, the soils take decades to recover from footprints, and when each hiker “finds” his own route it leaves a spider-web of trails, a worse impact than a single cairned path.

Exhausted yet? What I’m saying is that to obtain the ethical ground to knock over cairns, you have to do your homework, and indeed become an expert on the place you’re hiking—and probably a local. Consider the alternatives. You knock down a cairn and people get lost and get hurt or require rescue. Or taxpayers pay to have them all put back up. Or you cause a bunch a people to stray off trail and degrade the place. It is not assured that your actions are improving the experience of those who follow.

And what about rocks stacked for no practical purpose but merely for . . . ? A decade ago these precarious enjoyed a moment of insta-fame, recalling the lovely ephemeral “land art” of Andy Goldsworthy. A chorus of scolds rose in condemnation: surely these trifles have no place in pure wilderness. Rock stackers do not expect their work to outlast monuments; indeed many of them knock them over themselves after taking a photo. So are there ethical qualms about kicking them back into a “natural” state?

No.

But that doesn’t mean you should do it. Here your question opens a larger philosophical debate as to what nature is. The most prominent American take, from the likes of Thoreau and Muir and Abbey, is that nature is a virgin paradise unspoiled by the corruptions of humanity, where we go for solace and connection with the infinite. Sundog himself subscribed to this idea for decades of his youth as he ambled through remote canyons and deserts.

But what if we thought of the natural world as, instead, a place where humans have dwelled, farmed,Ěýand hunted for tens of thousands of years, and that only appeared “empty” to European settlers because the Native people had been driven off the land with guns, germs, and stealing. When the likes of Lewis and Clark and Daniel Boone came West, the reason they found unpeopled land wasn’t because God gave it to them for their spiritual rejuvenation, but because 90 percent of Indians had already died from the diseases carried across the Atlantic.

What does this have to do with your cairns? Changing my ideas about wilderness changed my expectations of what I was supposed—or entitled—to do there. Once we accept that none of this continent is “virgin,” then perhaps our passion to erase all signs of humanity might waver. Would anyone knock down street signs in New York City in order to find their own route, the way Giovanni daĚýVerrazzano did in 1524? Often the fight to preserve the land just as it was feels impossible; because it is impossible.

I’m not suggesting we abandon “wilderness” as a legal designation to protect places from roads, mines, and drilling. Rather, I advocate forĚýa shift in thinking, a realization that the fantasy of finding one’s way through untouched terrain is just that: fantasy. Instead of expending our energy to preserve the illusion of Eden, we might work to return the land to its legal owners, and honor the treaties signed with tribal nations by the United States Congress. Purity is an impossible standard to attain; we should aspire instead to truth.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

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Dear Sundog: I recently traveled to a popular mountain town for a family funeral. Because it was during peak season, hotel options were limited. I found an affordable Airbnb, which offered me the use of a kitchen (I have food allergies, so eating on the road can be tricky) and a real living space to unwind and decompress with grieving relatives, rather than perched awkwardly at a bar or on a hotel air vent.

The trip went smoothly, but when I got back I checked out the Airbnb hosts’ information, I was dismayed to discover that they own roughly a dozen properties in an area where affordable housing is scarce and homelessness is rampant—mostly due to investors buying up properties to rent out to visitors like me.

I feel guilty. If I’d had time to research beforehand, I never would have booked with them. I hate knowing that I contributed to the housing crisis. I feel extra guilty that the trade-off felt justifiable when I assumed they only owned one property. Can you think of an appropriate penance to balance this out? —Imperfect Traveler

Dear Imperfect: You’re right that short-term rentals in mountain towns are gutting neighborhoods by displacing the locals and replacing them with tourists. As I write this, I gaze across my street at one such vacant bungalow—lights out, curtains drawn—in a town where the cost of a house has doubled in three years.

You’re also right that it feels far more insidious to learn that the Airbnb isn’t just Mom and Pop renting their mother-in-law apartment, but rather a professional investor running a small hotel chain while perhaps avoiding the taxes and zoning to which actual hotels are subjected.

But here’s where we part, Imperfect: I don’t see you as the guilty party here. So instead of prescribing a hair shirt or self-flagellation as penance, allow me to attempt to assuage your feelings of guilt.

First, people traveling to mountain towns for funerals are not the problem. Indeed nobody but undertakers and gravediggers models their business on the expectation of a steady parade toward the cemetery. Towns like Sun Valley, Idaho, and Bozeman, Montana, are in the business of outdoor recreation—and the occasional visitor like yourself who arrives for unexpected family business at short notice barely amounts to a single flake of snow.

Next, be kind to yourself. You made this trip because someone you loved died. Sure, it’s generally better to investigate your VRBO or AirBnb host before booking, just as it’s better to read the ingredients on a soup can before purchasing, but in the throes of grief, we have to let that go out the window. We have to allow friends to drop off a casserole and not worry whether the vegetables came from a local organic farmer.

Between your food allergies and needing a space for grieving, it appears that you made the best choice. Let me say that again so you don’t skim past it: you made the best choice. And let’s not forget that the corporations that own most hotels are generally not founded on social or environmental justice principles.

Still, you feel guilty. If only you had had more time to prepare, you tell yourself, you might have made a more ethical decision. Let me speculate, Imperfect, that your guilt and dismay are less about affordable housing in a place that you don’t live and more about grief. Someone you cared for is gone forever. It happened so suddenly that you didn’t have time to click and scroll until you found a way to travel “perfectly.”

This is how death operates. Most of the time, weĚýmortals don’t get to decide who lives and who dies. We don’t get to decide who is struck down in youth and who limps into a second century. People die at the most inconvenient moments. Yet rather than accepting our powerlessness in matters of mortality, we tell ourselves that in fact we did have the power to keep someone alive, it’s just that we somehow misplayed our cards. If I’d answered the phone when she called, she wouldn’t have been on that street when the truck skidded on the ice. If only I’d tried harder to curb his drinking. If only. If only.

I hear a variation of this in your letter. If only they hadn’t died so suddenly, during peak season, in such an expensive town, then I could have done better research and made an ethical decision. Instead I did bad, and feel guilty, and must perform penance.

Sundog doesn’t think you need penance. You need to grieve. It would be perfectly normal for a grieving person to spend their hours tracking down the owner of the Airbnb, investigating local codes and zoning ordinances, and reporting them to the city officials. It might even qualify as ethical action. But I doubt it will make you feel better. Anger and control are just two ways in which we bottle up the grief, to prevent sorrow and love from pouring out. It seems impossible that you will be able to solve—or meaningfully affect—the real estate crisis in far-off ski towns. And yetĚýsuch an endeavor may be attractive because it’s more possible than bringing the dead back to life.

Sundog used to think he was the river, carving his path toward the ocean. In grief, he learned he was just a rockĚýin the river, getting tumbled along—or sitting perfectly still—at the mercy of powers far greater than himself.

Let this one go, Imperfect. Perhaps your penance—if that’s what we want to call it—is to look inward, to consider that everyone we care about will one day be dead, and in spite of that, or maybe because of it, find more courage to love them while we’re here.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

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Dear Sundog: When I drive north from Santa Fe through the San Luis Valley, there’s this range that always catches my eye. South of Blanca Peak, north of the Latirs, clearly high elevation and with what looks like very skiable terrain. Curious, some friends and I pulled the region up on and were surprised to find out that it’s privately owned. The highest point in the region is Culebra, a fourteener, and you have to pay $150 to climb it, and it’s owned by some Texas oilman who definitely doesn’t need the money. There’s another private Colorado fourteener, Mount Bross, that is illegal to summit (or at least used to be), and there are ranches in northern New Mexico bigger than national parks that encompass lower peaks and close off access to entire stretches of river. My question is: Should you be able to own a mountain? What does that even mean?” —Freedom of the Hills

Dear Freedom: We are rightly offended by people, especially Texans, owning mountains.

Sundog hauled his own carcass to the top of Culebra Peak some years back, though I recall the fee was more like $50 back then. It’s part of “Cielo Vista Ranch,” a spread of more than 83,000 acres along 23 miles of ridgeline in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. In addition to the fourteener, it’s got 17 unique peaks above 13,000 feet. “One of the largest, most pristine, & distinctive private properties in North America,” gushed the listing agent when it was offered for sale in 2017. .

The land was by a thirtysomething Houston billionaire, William Bruce Harrison, who made his fortune the old-fashioned way: he inherited it. A brief, unhappy browse of stole 30 minutes of Sundog’s time on Earth that he shall never regain. Despite green buzzwords like “stewardship” and “preservation,” it left me with a deep chill as to what the privatization of public lands might look like. The “ranch”—a more accurate word might be “estate”—advertises itself in a series of smarmy dick-waving superlatives: “Do you desire the trophy of a lifetime?” “The highest privately-owned peak in the world,” “…opens its gates to hikers anticipating an experience that no public land can offer.” Each climber must make a reservation and pay the $150 fee. Those who fail to arrive between 6:00 and 6:15 A.M. the day of their climb forfeit their pass.

While there is little we common people can do about aristocrats posing as environmentalists, it’s a stark reminder of the devil’s bargain that conservationists make when they laud the efforts of land barons to save the or draw up on their property: we requested nature, we got feudalism.

What’s more, the ranch website’s history tab casually asserts that Culebra Peak was in fact a part of the Republic of Texas, a claim as dubious now as it was in 1836 when the fledgling Texas congress made it. Mexico flatly denied the claim, and Texas made no successful effort to invade, colonize, or defend the land which extended all the way north to present-day Wyoming. Texans, bless their little hearts: always believing themselves a bit larger than they really are. Such specious revisionism comes as no surprise to anyone who has skied at Steamboat or Taos amidst the snowplow stampede of straight-legged Joe Bucks in Mossy Oak who seem to think they, well, .

(In a peculiar omission, Cielo Vista’s burnished history of Texas makes little mention of the historical factor that led toĚýits successful war for independence from Mexico and its failed war for independence from the USA: white people’s insistence on their divine right to own Black people. But that, I suppose, is beyond the scope of today’s column.)

As you mention, Freedom, Culebra is not the only privately heldĚýfourteener. A handful of them are, mostly descending from mining claims, but most allow public access. The notable exception isĚýMount Bross, whose owners have closed the peak for more than a decade because of liability issues.

Is it ethical to own a mountain? In Sundog’s opinion, not at all. But American capitalism does not distinguish between mountain and valley, cliffs and plains. Land is land, and you can own it.

We in the West are a bit spoiled: we’re so used to mountains on public land that we’re shocked to find one that isn’t. That’s not the case on the other side of the Mississippi, where many mountains were grabbed around the turn of the 20th century, before the concept of public lands came to be. Such lower, rounder, slumpier mountains are not only owned, but they regularly have their tops removed by massive machines in order to suck the coal beneath, a practice that will heap shame on America for centuries, the way we heap shame on other supposedly great civilizations—the Romans for their throwing Christians to the lions, the Mayans for sacrificing virgins to the gods.

But back to Culebra. What about the ethics of charging money to climb it? It appears that the owners sell 60 permits per weekend, so in the peak summer season they are grossing around $36,000 per month. That may be a lot for you and me, but certainly doesn’t make a large difference to the billionaire owners. Odious, sure, but preferable, ethically, to banning hikers altogether.

The irony, I suppose, is that Culebra’s popularity rests entirely on the utterly arbitrary yardstick that makes it one of the 53 peaks required to bag all of Colorado’s fourteeners. Culebra is 14,053 feet high. If AmericaĚýused the metric system, the mountain’s unsexy height of 4,283 meters would land it on zero bucket lists.

Sundog likes to imagine anĚýearthquake that crumbles 54 feet from the top of Culebra. Mountaineers could remove one notch from their belt and spare the indignity of contributing to a billionaire’s inheritance. Rich boys could continue to play cowboy. The mountain would be anonymous, abandoned by the box-checkers, left to the wanderers: the way, Sundog believes, all mountains were intended.

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Dear Sundog: I was recently invited to a reunion of fellow river guides at a national monument. Some 75 river rats will converge in the same town on the same acre of land after many years working together, where lifelong relationships were forged, greatness had, etc. However, even with many of us entering the lottery for a permit for a day trip on the river, we couldn’t manage to win a single one. Would we be wrong to sneak on the river and launch without permission? Thanks, JensenĚý

Dear Jensen: You’re not alone in thinking that the lottery permit system for our western rivers has become absurd. Last year in Dinosaur National Monument, which straddles the Utah-Colorado border, 18,000 people applied for the 300 overnight permits on the Green and Yampa Rivers. In 2021, vied for the 500 available private permits to float the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Odds were grimmer still on the Selway River, which flows from Montana to Idaho, where just one of every 122 applicants won the lottery. Here are just a few things that are statistically more likely than drawing a Selway permit: death in a car accident, pregnancy on the pill, acceptance to Harvard,Ěý.

The number of permit applicants has doubled or tripled for many rivers in the past decade, while the number of permits for those placesĚýhas stayed the same. The causes are complicated: What used to be a slightly onerous chore involving paper checks, stamps, envelopes, and phone calls can now be performed online in minutes. The pandemic cancelled many 2020 permits but allowed holders to postpone till 2021, thus there were even fewer available launches.

As bad as it may seem, the lottery system marks an improvement from the previous waiting-list system, where applicants for a Grand Canyon permit waited as long as 20 years.

And so I feel your pain, Jensen, and having been denied any permits for three straight years, I feel the same urge to flaunt the rules and just sneak onto the river when I damn well feel like it.

There are two types of “pirate” trips. The first is stealthily pushing off from shore without being detected by rangers, an undertaking that generally involves the cover of night or some little known dirt-road access point. I don’t think that such a move is deeply unethical: if you follow Leave No Trace principals, your pirate trip won’t really affect the river or other people’s experience.

That said, I have to advise against it, citing theĚýtragedy of the commons,Ěýthe idea that when people have access to a shared resource, but act in their own interest, they will quickly deplete the resource. Perhaps the prime resource these rivers offer is solitude. If one party makes a pirate trip, no big deal. If 100 groups break the rules, then you’ve got a circus. What’s more, pirate trips are extremely illegal, and rivers areĚýstrictly monitored, so you may face fines and being banned from future permits.

The second type of pirate trip is one in which someone has a valid permit but the participants presumably don’t know how to captain a boat and pay guides under the table to row them. This turns out to be even more illegal, as it violates laws about commercial licensing. It can result in boats being confiscated and, theoretically, could result in jail time.

All of this raises the question: WhyĚýdon’t agencies simply increase the number of permits? For example, in Dinosaur, there are only four launches per day on the Green River, split evenly between private and commercial clients, a number which increases to six for the two glorious months when the Yampa is running. Surely the river could accommodate more!

Well, maybe not. Part of what makes these river canyons precious is their spectacular and inhospitable topography: often you are literally floating between sheer rock cliffs. There are very few suitable camps, and on a typical summer night, every single camp is taken, with groups of up to 25 people. To allow more permits would require somehow clearing and excavating more camps along the narrow riverbanks.

Sundog would argue that of all the public-lands sites in the U.S., western rivers are the crown jewel. Spending a week or two floating the Colorado in the Grand Canyon or the Middle Fork of the Salmon is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And as frustrating as it is to not get a permit to do such a trip every year, the current permit regulationĚýseems to be superior to any other in terms of protecting the exquisite character of these places.

So what to do when you don’t draw a permit? Look into the rivers that don’t require a permit. Many provide a similar experience. And as a last resort, which may cause injury to both your pride and pocketbook, you might have to break downĚýand pay a commercial outfitter to take you downriver.

UPDATE: Despite being locked out of permits via the lottery, Jensen reports that his group was able to snag several cancellation permits. This happens when those who win the lottery fail to claim their permits, so they are doled out on a first-come first-served basis. Jensen and his crew will be able to hit the river—legally—after all.

Got a question of your own? Send it toĚýsundogsalmanac@hotmail.com.

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