Cold Splinters

The 1978 film Welcome to Spivey’s Corner just got added to Folkstreams a week or so ago and, like most of the films on Folkstreams, it’s absolutely amazing. The film spotlights Spivey’s Corner (then pop. 49) annual Hollerin’ Contest which still takes place every year in this tiny North Carolina town. What’s hollerin’? From Folkstreams.net:

Hollerin’ is considered by some to be the earliest form of communication between humans. It is a traditional form of communication used in rural areas before the days of telecommunications to convey long-distance messages. Evidence of hollerin’, or derivations thereof such as yodeling or hunting cries, exists worldwide among many early peoples and is still be practiced in certain societies of the modern world. In one form or another, the holler has been found to exist in Europe, Africa and Asia as well as the US. Each culture used or uses hollers differently, although almost all cultures have specific hollers meant to convey warning or distress. Otherwise hollers exist for virtually any communicative purpose imaginable — greetings, general information, pleasure, work, etc. The hollers featured at the National Hollerin’ Contest typically fall into one of four categories: distress, functional, communicative or pleasure.

Spend 17 awestruck minutes here.

June Curry (aka The Cookie Lady) received the Adventure Cycling Association’s first ever Trail Angel Award in 2003. The award has since been named after her, in honor and recognition for her help towards over 11,000 weary traveling cyclists on the Transamerica Trail. June Curry began baking cookies for cyclists the very first year that the Transam was run, during Bikecentennial ’76. Curry lives atop a ridge just after a grueling climb in Virginia, just before the Blue Ridge Parkway. Over the years Curry offered water, lodging, a place to relax, and of course cookies in exchange for stories from people all around the world. Curry’s home (and cycling “hostel”) serve as a literal museum, with yellowed polaroids, sweaty caps, and used bike tires, archiving over thirty years of the Transam. Over the years there have been hundreds of articles written about The Cookie Lady, including from the New York Times. Hats off to you miss Curry.

Click on over to google books and read the June 1978 article in Backpacker Magazine titled Elder of the Tribe: Aldo Leopold. A great primer to Leopold and his “land ethic”.

“What I am trying to make clear”, he wrote, “is that if in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be ‘development’ to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even on the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for. The sixth house would not be development at all, but rather … stupidity.”

After reading the article go to your local library, check out A Sand County Almanac and read it twice.

The Open Road Pioneers was a club started in 1927 by The Open Road For Boys, a boys’ magazine encouraging the outdoor life that was published from 1919 to the 1950s.

The Club Undertakes

1) To acquaint each member with the spirit and ideals of the frontier

2) to encourage each member to adopt the principles of courage, self-reliance, honesty, sportsmanship, endurance, progress and co-operation.

3) To teach each member useful things about woodcraft and outdoor life.

4) To familiarize each member wit the natural wonders which are all about him

5) to enlist each member in helping to conserve and increase the fish, the game, the forests and the other natural resource of his locality.

*Learn more about the Open Road Pioneers and other old kids’ clubs at Vintage Kid Stuff.

I’ve been doing this Cold Splinters thing by myself since May 2008, a little bit more than two and a half years. There are going to be some big things happening in this neck of the woods in the Year Of The Rabbit, things I can’t wait to work on, and the first of many is the addition of Geoff Holstad, whose brainchild, SO SWEATY, is one of my favorite places on the Internets. Holstad is an artist from Michigan with an amazing eye and a shared interest in all the things we like to write about on this rag. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s one of the nicest people in these United of States. Geoff has already written several posts here for your reading pleasure, and despite the spelling of his name, he’ll be sticking around for good as a guest contributor. Make him feel welcome.

Thanks everyone for reading and emailing and asking questions and commenting and just bein’ around. You’re the best.

Happy 2011,
Jeff and Geoff

Line drawings from The Exploration of The Colorado River and its Canyons

Stehekin is a small unincorporated community, settled just south of North Cascades National Park in northern Washington state.  The community today boasts 75 permanent residents along with a one room, log cabin schoolhouse that was in use up until 1988.  It now stands on the NPS’ National Register of Historical Places.  Pictured above is the schoolhouse and a student beginning his trek home, from the National Geographic book American Mountain People (published in 1973).  It is noted in the margins that students would ski up to 5 miles into the surrounding mountains to and from school each day.  Yes please.

Take Pride In America is a 1987 video that seeks the American people’s help in reducing litter, vandalism, etc., in and around the national parks and public lands. Even more interesting is the video’s narrator, Lou Gossett Jr., who seems legitimately angry about the “bad people” who were, at the time, killing our bald eagles and filling our mountains with Diet Pepsi bottles. Watch it here.

Finis Mitchell (1901–1995) was an American mountaineer and forester based in Wyoming. During the Depression, he and his wife stocked lakes in the Wind River Range with over 2.5 million trout. He served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1955 to 1958. At the age of 67 he retired from his job as a railroad foreman and dedicated himself full-time to exploring and writing about the Wind River Range of mountains.

Over the course of his life, Mitchell climbed all but 20 of the 300 peaks in the range. At the age of 73, while on a glacier, he twisted his knee in a snow-covered crevasse. He hacked crude crutches out of pine wood and hobbled 18 miles to find a doctor, and was able to resume climbing until the age of 84, when further injury to the knee from a fall put an end to his solo climbing career.

In 1975, he published a guidebook to the range called Wind River Trails, and in 1977, the University of Wyoming gave him an honorary doctorate. Congress named the mountain Mitchell Peak after him — one of the few landforms to ever be named after a living American.

Read: Finis Mitchell on the Forest Service website

During the late 1920s and early ’30s, a small hut stood at the Boulderfield (12,750 feet) on Longs Peak in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The Boulderfield is 5.9 miles into the Longs Peak hike and the beginning of the hike’s most difficult portion. Guests could hike or ride horseback to the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin, spend the night in a bunk with a hot meals, and climb the 14,259-foot peak in the morning, usually by the north face, which was equipped in those days with steel cables for hand rails. For two or three years during the early ’30s, Hull Cook worked at the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin. He and Clerin Zumwalt, aka Zum, became famous for their rescues on the park’s only fourteener. Hull is pictured on the left in middle picture. Each morning the guides used to shout, “Indian’s a-comin’!” as they spotted the first hikers at the edge of the Boulderfield.

Back in April, the Colorado Mountain Journal posted some of Hull’s memoirs from his time at the Boulderfield. You can read them here:

As hotels go, ours was tiny and Spartan. We called it “the cabin.” There was no electricity and no running water, unless you ran while carrying it from the spring. There was also almost no privacy. It was a two-story structure, the upper floor accessed by a ladder hinged to the ceiling of the ground-floor room. By Hilton standards it was indeed small, only 14 by 18 feet, so the space had to be efficiently utilized. Upstairs, springs and mattresses were placed directly on the floor, three on each side of the stair hole, and above the stair hole was a double-decker single bed. This arrangement could accommodate 14 people in relative comfort, unless someone had to go to the bathroom during the night, in which case comfort might be called into question. He or she would have to stumble over fellow sleepers, descend the ladder and seek relief outdoors, presumably making the effort to follow the dark rocky trail to the distant privy. No lights. Possession of matches or flashlight was desirable even to find the place, and to obviate the need for a somewhat unsanitary old-fashioned pot, and although canvas curtains could be drawn between the beds, there would have been few people with the callous temerity to use it in such a setting of crowded togetherness. If you rolled over you were apt to find yourself in bed with a stranger, possibly not all that bad if it happened to be someone of the opposite sex.