Forget the sunscreen? Bite your tongue

I‘m pretty fried over the reaction some people have had to my face lately.

Even in a normal state, it’s not a pretty puss. It’s never been much of an attraction to any living thing except mosquitoes looking for fast food.

The past two weeks, however, I’ve been turning some heads and catching some stares.

I really don’t mind that some people have kept their distance to avoid any chance of communicating a disease. I can live with that. Looks like this can kill.

But it really hurts when somebody scrutinizes my peeling nose and cheeks and says, “That’s a doozy of a sunburn.”

Even though my nose last week looked as though I’d been staked out face up for a week of desert torture, an experienced outdoorsman has to resent the implication that he isn’t savvy enough to apply sunscreen.

That would be as embarrassing and unforgivable as being the hunter education instructor in Montana last month who mistakenly rammed a live round into a shotgun and misfired it through a library ceiling during a firearms safety session with a group of young students.

There are certain things outdoor specialists are supposed to know. Bicyclists wear helmets, kayakers wear life jackets.

We all wear sunscreen, unless we’re ignorant or simply stupid.

I’m way smarter than I was 30 years ago when I pedaled my bicycle across the United States with a tube of Sea & Ski sun tanning lotion in my handlebar bag.

Actually, I’d never heard of sunscreen at that time. I often used zinc oxide on my nose during climbing trips and while biking. Clown white, we called it. I can still remember the post-trip degreasing of my camera and sunglasses to remove the opaque ointment.

Nowadays sunscreen is convenient, invisible and effective. Hats and long-sleeve clothing that block the sun are light, cool and comfortable. I regularly wear both forms of protection outdoors, and so should you.

My wife – a former lifeguard before the age of the titanium-based sunscreen she treasures more than gold – is the sun protection Nazi in our household. Our daughters have done most of their hiking and canoeing while wearing lightweight long pants with any exposed skin slathered sunscreen.

A family legend was born the afternoon their mom, wearing a straw hat large enough to trigger UFO sightings, chased the girls into the surf through a flock of teenagers on a crowded Hawaiian beach to make them reapply more sunscreen while boogey-boarding.

I’ve climbed sun-drenched peaks such as Mount Rainier, canyoneered the desert country of Utah, paddled the Missouri River when the Montana temperatures were hitting 110 degrees and hiked most of the trails and fished most of the waters in the Inland Northwest – and I haven’t had a sunburn in 25 years.

In many cases, sunscreen wasn’t enough. I used a granola bar wrapper to fashion a sun reflector that I attached to my climbing goggles to help defend against the bombardment of UV rays while I climbed on Mount McKinley.

But as much time as I’ve spent outdoors, protected and unprotected, it’s no surprise that the sun has damaged my skin.

The 15-year-old elk roast I found at the bottom of my freezer didn’t have as much freeze-burned flesh as my face, neck and shoulders a few years ago when my doctor dabbed my sun-caused booboos with liquid nitrogen.

Three weeks ago, I started applying a preventative medication prescribed by my dermatologist. In layman’s terms, the fluorouracil cream nips precancerous skin conditions in the bud, even when they are too small to be detected.

The treatment causes the skin to turn red and defoliate. Eventually my face had all the appeal of a molting reptile.

“Whoa, looks like you got a little too much sun last weekend,” one lady said, repeating a refrain I heard often last week.

Ouch, that hurts.

Hot fishing: Adding the points for quality of life in the Inland Northwest, fishing stacks up pretty well.

Williams Lake in Spokane County and Fishtrap Lake in Lincoln County were the top two trout producers out of 119 lakes checked by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife during Saturday’s fishing season opener.

Dozens of other lakes in the region also are providing great fishing for those who venture out. For example, I’ve heard about the man who caught a limit of browns and rainbows in half an hour from Clear Lake and I’ve received a photo of two happy youngsters posing by several limits of trout from Diamond Lake.

At Lake Pend Oreille a mackinaw of nearly 20 pounds and a rainbow of nearly 17 pounds are leading the Spring Derby that will put $23,000 in cash and prizes in the pockets of anglers by the end of the week.

Not so hot fishing: On April 30, 2001, the count of spring chinook salmon over the Snake River’s Lower Granite Dam was 90,019 fish and people were calling conservationists wackos for demanding more measures to protect salmon and steelhead in the Columbia system.

This year on April 30, the count of spring chinook at Lower Granite was two fish.

Even the most bull-headed among us can now count them on their fingers.