Katie Ives

How would we climb if we saw the rock, itself as sentient, what would it mean to touch the skin of deities?

In A Culture of Stone, Carolyn Dean writes: “Not subject to death and decay, stone was...was animacy ‘paused’ for an unspecified period. The challenge here is to understand rocks...as ancient Andeans saw them—potentially animate, transmutable, powerful, and sentient…both normal and numinous”

Light the color and translucency of amber, quickly paling and then darkening into dusk and then night. I lay on a clear-cut hill watching the soft gold flow across so many treetops, so much deep silent green of woods, and fearing more clear cuts to come.

#protectnationalforests

At the Golden. Colorado, No Kings Protest, October 18. Two years after the day of my father's death. How the autumn light seems to glow from within everyone and everything, a gold beyond memory or imagination, recalling miracles and hope.

The indomitable Kathy Ives (Sr), my mom.

A poem I wrote for my dad (1946-2023)

panoramajournal.org/issues/issue...

In autumn, like a ptarmigan, I camouflage into the land, wishing that my soul, too, could blend into the light and leaves--so much unutterable beauty in the world.

into the realm of grey rock, pale dusk, and translucent stillness--into what I've come to call a glasslike clarity of being--that he first showed me, as a child, on trips to granite ranges.

Each autumn starts a personal liturgical season for me, since it was the time, in 2023, that my dad began dying. I thought of him, tonight, as I ran higher through golden light and golden lands

Harvey, whose own satires were partly aimed at the destructive fallacies of dominant groups, would certainly have approved of such ingenious forms of resistance.

People responded with an outpouring of memes, T-shirts, songs, and mock memorials parodying the false story and demonstrating, as folklorist Timothy H. Evans observes, that at times the “lies of those in power could be mocked in a carnivalesque way.

In 2017, Trump’s senior counselor Kellyanne Conway cited a nonexistent “massacre” by Iraqi terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to try to justify a travel ban against immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Yet while Trump derided any realities he didn’t like as “fake news” and while right-wing conspiracy theories still surge across the internet, pro-democracy activists have also figured out ways to turn some hoaxes against their perpetrators.

False claims by then-president Donald Trump and others about widespread election fraud became a catalyst for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol building in Washington, DC.

During the Trump era, Americans confronted avalanches of fabricated information designed to undermine the credibility of journalism and the survival of democracy itself.

A year after the 2016 US presidential election, Kevin Young wrote in Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, “Today the hoax mostly traffics in pain.”

“I don’t think many people get the chance to feel that way about anything,” [Mike] Layton recalled. He felt fortunate to have been a part of the history of Southeast Mox, to have been immersed in that “excitement of adventure, the beauty of such a remote area and the camaraderie of friendship.”

..Compared to the pernicious false stories of our current time, Harvey [Manning]’s 1960s hoaxes have an aura of innocence. The climbers lured to Harvey’s “Great Wall of No Name Peak” had an unforgettable experience of a wild and beautiful mountain.

Excerpt of one of the brief modern US political sections (in what is otherwise a mountaineering hoax and imagination book, though dealing with larger historical issues of colonialism, mapping and counter-mapping, and so on) below:

Anyway, my book still appears to be selling--I noticed today it was back in the top 100 for Amazon's Mountaineering Kindle list (perhaps briefly, but perhaps it will return again), though I think the hardcover version is better.

While he created hoaxes, he also left clues to solve them and hoped that they might serve as forms of resistance against serious, misleading ideas that devalued wild places, put ego above nature, and threatened public lands.

What would Northwest mountaineer and conservationist Harvey Manning [my protagonist] do? I often ask myself.

Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams Intriguing true tale of adventure and mystery: the desire for first ascents, the lure of the unexplored, and the ageless appeal of imaginary peaks and places

www.mountaineers.org/books/books/...

Back in 2021, when I published a book about North American mountaineering hoaxes, I was already thinking about the larger role of misinformation in US society. (link and excerpts in comments)

until I feel small and aglow, a brief light flaring at the edge of autumn, at the ending of the day.

"To write the way you do, you have to live a certain way," another writer told me. It can be hard, sometimes, to find my way to that life again: wholly open to the something beyond me, stilling my mind to these cadences, my thoughts to this love--

Back at my usual Saturday street corner with some of the usual crew. Because we will not be silenced.

#climbersagainstfascism

The Canadian Mountain Assessment: Walking Together to Enhance Understanding of Mountains in Canada The Canadian Mountain Assessment is a groundbreaking work of knowledge co-creation that showcases the diversity and significance of mountain areas in Canada, clarifies challenges and opportunities fac...

press.ucalgary.ca/books/978177...

Find Your Members in the U.S. Congress Find your members of Congress by typing in your address on Congress.gov.

As always, you can find contact information for your representatives here: www.congress.gov/members/find...

Also, ask your representatives to support the Block the Bombs Act "which prohibits the United States transfer of weapons that the Israeli military has used in its bombardment of Gaza until human rights violations cease."

progressives.house.gov/press-releas...