“My first awareness of Reality with a capital ‘R’ came to me in the form of hunger, that nagging devouring of my own flesh from which there is no escape except through death, that incessant longing that has to be satisfied at all costs. My second awareness came in the form of freezing cold, which kills more quickly. In the face of this awareness, the real me– a vulnerable, petty, selfish, greedy, cowardly me– surfaced.

I felt as if Art had given us all a great gift. The day he lay frozen on the tundra and I sat beside him in the sunlight, I felt a warm spiritual peace envelop me. …I had come to understand that life is good. …Reality had never seemed so sweet.

By the end of the trip, we loved one another as we had never loved before, because outside that perimeter of love lay terror, terror of lying alone on that ever-frozen land. …How graciously it fed us; how quickly it killed Art. And so we huddled in our spiritual cocoon of love, and lived in beauty, frightened to death.”

–from George James Grinnell, A Death on the Barrens

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“Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the time I am being carried on great winds across the sky.”

–“Ojibway saying,” as quoted in George James Grinnell’s A Death on the Barrens

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the mirror plateau

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the buffalo plateau

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crossing yellowstone lake

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good advice

“Dada, please don’t say things that you don’t know what they are.”