Outdoors

Li Ciavola trudged downhill through blinding snow and howling winds in a desperate bid to reach lower elevation. Behind him, attached by rope, was a sled filled with 150 pounds of his dying climbing partner’s gear.

Camping with boys is the same as camping with girls in a global sense. But there’s a world of difference in the details.

My daughters don’t care much for blood and guts, and that’s a healthy lesson for a Montana-born hunter-fisherman to learn.

When our kids were growing up, special occasions and vacations usually involved doing something special outdoors. My favorite Father’s Day treat was loading one of my daughters in the bow and making a splash in the annual Spokane River Canoe Classic.

Fly fishing

Mary Jo Stauner submitted this image on June 5 of a young squirrel standing on top of a fence post while exploring her backyard.

“Hello?” A voice echoed through the trees, like the afternoon sunlight streaking between the boughs. I was standing on a tree myself, a mess of woody carnage that had blown down in a recent gust – the kind that uproots and snaps behemoths as if they were kindling.

Last year packed a wallop for Washington’s mountains.

Washington State Parks is looking for community input on improvements to a 5-mile stretch of the Columbia Plateau Trail from the Fish Lake Trailhead south into the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge.

My dad gave me an aluminum canoe in 1971 for my high school graduation present. It’s still in the family, mostly retired since we entered the age of Kevlar but earning its keep as a durable roof over our dog pen. Every dent signifies an early lesson learned, and there’s a lot of them.

The wolf serenade had started with a solo, a deep bass introduction to the wildest choral arrangement a human will ever hear.

Fly fishing

Starting Friday, water recreationists will be able to use the Spokane River from the Spokane Street Bridge upstream to Post Falls Dam.

The spectacle left one president in awe: "In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world," President Theodore Roosevelt said in 1903.

The fickle nature of May and June temperatures have the garden stunted, sad and anemic. Even the leaves of the zucchini look like nothing more than a fig leaf covering the tiniest cherub’s wee bits.

James B. Summers took this image on June 2 at Saltese Flats Wetland Area. The yellow-headed blackbird was flying erratically before landing. The snack in its beak shows why.

For 16 years after becoming (briefly) the youngest American to summit the world’s highest peak, Jess Roskelley continued to pack his life with achievement – earning income and accolades as a welder, tying the knot with the woman of his dreams and climbing into an elite echelon of American mountaineering – before it all came to a sudden tragic end in the Canadian Rockies.

Only as an afterthought did John and Jess Roskelley talk about the corpses in their route through the Death Zone of Mount Everest. On May 30, 2003, their first morning back in Spokane and 10 days after standing on top of the world’s highest peak, the father-son team woke to other concerns in a strange land they call home.

Fly fishing