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Field Notes

Sustainable Logging For Healthy Forests

Over the last five decades, the logging industry in the united states has evolved considerably, and that is a good thing. Nowadays, when you hear a chainsaw roar to life or see a semi-truck rumble by loaded down with freshly felled trees, you’re witnessing the final stages of an incredibly complex process. A myriad of groups has weighed in, each one with a straightforward goal in mind, ensuring that the logging industry is sustainable and causes as little environmental damage as possible.

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5 Min
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Field Notes

Sustainable Logging For Healthy Forests

Over the last five decades, the logging industry in the united states has evolved considerably, and that is a good thing. Nowadays, when you hear a chainsaw roar to life or see a semi-truck rumble by loaded down with freshly felled trees, you’re witnessing the final stages of an incredibly complex process. A myriad of groups has weighed in, each one with a straightforward goal in mind, ensuring that the logging industry is sustainable and causes as little environmental damage as possible.

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5 Min
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Food

Filson Food: Pork Shoulder with Foraged Asparagus & Wild Spring Onions

Spring onions are truly wild and much more abundant than asparagus. They can be found in drier climates in open clearings and among sparsely treed Douglas Fir forests. The challenge is that the green onion shoots often look just like grass. Look for clumps of 4–6 green cupped or folded shoots that all meet together where they come out of the ground. Use your fingers or a knife to dig out the root slightly before pulling them out as a whole cluster. Once you get an eye for them you will notice them absolutely everywhere.

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3 Min
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Profiles

Why We Must: On Diversity in the Outdoors by Eddy Harris

“It’s easy to imagine that Black Americans don’t ski, don’t fly-fish for trout, don’t camp out, don’t kayak or surf, and don’t appreciate nature – don’t do a lot of things. Somewhere along the way, the Black experience, at least in the eyes of so many people – Blacks included – became an urban phenomenon, as if living in cities precludes the desire and possibility of re-creating in the great outdoors and appreciating the natural environment.

I have done all of those activities, and then some. I fish, I camp, I hike in the woods, I hike in the mountains. I even like opera. I have canoed the length of the Mississippi River twice. If there is a reason we don’t see Blacks taking part in a lot of those activities, perhaps it has more to do with economics and exposure and less to do with the activities themselves.” – An excerpt from Why We Must, by author and storyteller Eddy L. Harris.

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5 Min
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How-To

How to Build a Backyard Sawmill

My family comes from a proud tradition of loggers and woodworkers. My great-grandfather left his home in Norway and emigrated to Washington to work as a logger. My grandfather followed in his footsteps to work in the lumber industry, and my father has worked with wood for as long as I can remember. When my wife asked me to make some raised garden beds with her, I saw this season of quarantine as an opportunity to tap into my roots, expand my DIY skillset, and explore milling my own lumber with my chainsaw. If you have your own saw and a few standard tools, you can get started for a few hundred bucks.

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10 Min
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Profiles

Matt Mendes of Spin the Handle: Chasing Reservation Chrome

Before Matt Mendes guided on the Deschutes River, he drove the Green Monster. It was 2002, and Mendes was 13 years old; the job was his first on the river. The Green Monster, an old Ford F350, nicknamed for its paint job, belonged to his maternal grandfather, Al Bagley, a revered fly-fishing guide and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. The tribe governs the 1,019-square-mile Warm Springs Indian Reservation, located in Oregon’s high desert and bound to the east by the Deschutes, one of the country’s premier steelhead and trout destinations. In 1997, Bagley became the tribe’s first fly-fishing guide, capitalizing on its exclusive access to 22-miles of the Deschutes’s west bank, per an 1855 treaty with the United States government. The business was gangbusters from the get-go.

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5 Min
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Food

Filson Food: Fire-Baked Dutch Oven Cobbler

Backcountry fire-cooked desserts often take a back seat to more common campfire dishes, like breakfast hashes and one-pan meals. This is a mistake. It is true that most dessert recipes benefit from the controlled environment of your home kitchen and calibrated ovens, but this doesn’t apply to all desserts. For reasons that are beyond me, some recipes seem to thrive in a rustic wood-fired kitchen. Cobbler is one such recipe. For starters, cobbler just looks right at home in a cast-iron Dutch oven. Given the rustic nature of cobbler, it seems to get even better when cooked by fire. The irregular look and the slight char that comes with sometimes uneven heat only makes cobbler better.

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5 Min
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Profiles

Bianca Shannon: A Life Built Around Horses

In New Mexico’s cowboy country, Bianca Shannon turns heads. She rides a one-eyed horse, her silver nose-ring glinting in the sunlight, multiple tattoos peeking out from beneath her Oxford shirtsleeves. If you ask, Shannon may expose her inner right forearm to reveal the ink she got right before she left New York City to move to Santa Fe in 2014: a wrist-to-elbow rendition of a Leonardo da Vinci horse sketch. She describes the tattoo as “a kind of yearning for what I really wanted to be doing with my life.”

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3 Min
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Field Notes

Filson Signature Materials: Rugged Twill

Filson’s 123-year legacy is outfitting miners, loggers, ranchers, and sportsmen with durable apparel and goods that provide unfailing protection. For more than two decades, we’ve applied more than a century of manufacturing experience to build luggage and bags to transport their gear there and back, without fail. Our Rugged Twill fabric is a large part of why our bags are so dependable – this article examines what it is and where it comes from.

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5 Min
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Profiles

Lael Johnson – Olympic Peninsula Fly Guide

Lael Johnson is a fly fisherman and guide on the Olympic Peninsula. His passion for the anadromous fish of Washington’s coastal rivers is contagious. He loves these fish, these rivers, and the people he is lucky enough to experience them with. Filson Contributor Ben Matthews spent a few days on the river with Lael to ask a few questions about guiding, steelhead, and life in general. If you’re interested in heading out on the river with Lael yourself, check out his website and book a trip. You won’t regret it.

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5 Min
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Profiles

Why the Skagit River Watershed Matters

Nothing feels small on the Skagit River. It emerges from the Cascade Mountains, the ridgelines rising suddenly and severely, compressing the landscape and framing the view with their immense, sharp mass. For much of its length, the river is wide enough that three or four drift boats could easily pass side by side with plenty of room to spare. Anglers standing in its flow could never dream of reaching the far bank with a cast. If that angler is fly fishing, then they are likely to be using a two-hand rod to throw a Skagit head, a short specialty fly line developed on its namesake river a generation earlier to deliver big flies and sinking lines to winter steelhead-holding water.

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4 Min
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Profiles

The Glaciers of the North Cascades

North Cascades National Park counts more than 300 glaciers along this northwestern spine of mountains—and that’s just inside the park boundaries. The North Cascades are the most glaciated place in the country outside of Alaska, but this ice-clad range has remained relatively under the radar compared to places such as Montana’s Glacier National Park or Mount Rainier in the South Cascades. The landscape here feels wilder, at the edge of things, with a mystical feel of vastness and geologic time lent by the presence of these relics from the last ice age.

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5 Min
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Profiles

North Cascades: Bastion of the Wild

Sitting like stone guardians just below the Canadian border, the North Cascade mountains are keepers of the wildness that once roamed unchecked across North America. Soaring high into the skies, their stony and snowy peaks seem to scrape at the clouds that pass overhead demanding tribute as they float by. Sparkling like scattered gems, glacially fed lakes brilliantly reflect the sunlight while, through deep green valleys, bright, blue-gray rivers run down to the surrounding flatlands. It is a spot where a person could quickly leave behind all of the trappings that attach themselves to our modern daily existence and transport to another existence entirely.

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4 Min
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Profiles

Zech Bennett: The Undersea Tradesman

When you meet Zech Bennett, he seems like a pretty ordinary guy. Not too tall or too short, he seems somewhat in shape but is not a chiseled gym rat. The brown hair sticking out from underneath his baseball cap is slightly askew, and his face breaks into an easy smile. He is the type of person you could share a few beers with at the bar while swapping stories about ferrying kids to events or catching up on the latest scores. It’s only when you hear what the 32-year-old Homer, Alaska, resident does for a living that you realize there is more to him than you see at first glance.

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4 Min
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Field Notes

You Take What You Can Get: Or Suffer the Consequences

The stampede for gold into the Klondike of the Yukon territory reached a peak in 1898. In that same year, 1,200 other miners set out for other regions of the far north, including to the Koyukuk and Chandalar river drainages in the remote Alaska Territory interior, in a desperate search for similar riches. This region is situated in the northwestern part of Alaska, with the Koyukuk River flowing through it from the borders of the Arctic Ocean to where it enters the Yukon at Nulato.

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3 Min