oh, you know, up in a tree. "I swear officer, it was already dead when I jammed spikes into it and started hacking its limbs off!"
even besides being kind of uncomfortably creepy, humor-wise, that is actually true! I would never put climbing spikes into a live tree. you see, every lodgepole pine in colorado is dying. and as impressive as that sounds, it really doesn't hit you until you see a picture like this:
...and realize that, aside from a few aspens in the foreground, every goddamn tree in that picture is a lodgepole pine. anyone with a house in the mountains needs to get the nearby lodgepoles cut down before the entire fucking rocky mountain range catches on fire. which it will, and soon.
that's a lot of trees to cut, and someone's gotta do it. someone too naive to be scared of chainsaws. someone with flexible employment status. a friend, my brother, and I bought some saws and a chipper and headed for the hills.
*TO BE CONTINUED*
i used this sourdough culture for quite a while:
the giza culture
The bakery where this sourdough was found dated straight back to antiquity and was literally in the shadow of the pyramids. This culture could be the progeny of the one that made man's first bread and is similar to the one we used to recreate that first bread in Egypt for the National Geographic. The dough rises well and is moderately sour.
it's really awesome knowing that your bread is rising thanks to the progeny of yeasts and bacteria from egypt thousands of years ago.