Books + Land + (the missing piece we’re all working toward)

University of Colorado’s School of Architecture graduate students beginning their design work at Buffalo Peaks Ranch.

We love Mark Wren, and the Rocky Mountain Land Library is incredibly fortunate to have him on our Board of Directors. Mark is well-known in the book world, serving as a sales representative for Texas Bookman for many years. He just sent this wonderful note off to friends, and we had to share it with the world!

Mark really captures the urgency (and OPPORTUNITY) coming up in the last 9 days of our all-or-nothing Kickstarter campaign:

Dear Friends,

I would like to give you an update on our Kickstarter campaign for the Rocky Mountain Land Library.  We’re at an exciting stage with our efforts in getting the first building completely rehabilitated and renovated, so we can add the most important element – people!

This will allow us to fill in our missing element:   Books + Land + PEOPLE = the most amazing space and experience.

To all of you who have already pledged on our Kickstarter page – THANK YOU!  To my friends who are still thinking about making a pledge, please know that your pledge is so important.  We all know our world is changing so much, and the Rocky Mountain Land Library is a special place that will allow us to reconnect, reenergize, and revitalize our connections to the land, to the printed word, and to each other.  Ultimately, is there anything more important?

Please visit our Kickstarter page to learn more, and know that I’m here to answer any questions you may have.  Our leaders Jeff Lee and Ann Martin are a constant source of inspiration, and we have them to thank for their vision and amazing commitment.  I hope one day we can all gather at the ranch and celebrate together, with books in our hands, stars in the sky above, and friendship & fellowship with each other.  Thank you – happy pledging, AND reading!

We have 9 days left to go, and we’re more than half way to our goal – so the remaining days are so important!

Link to the Rocky Mountain Land Library Kickstarter page

All my best,

Mark

Mark Wren, board member

Rocky Mountain Land Library

Help bring books, people & programs to Colorado’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch. With your support we will transform a historic high mountain ranch into a residential library devoted to land, community, and the many positive ways we can all move forward together.

But first, CLICK HERE and you’ll find out much more. Learn how you can be an important part of this land-inspired, book-loving grassroots project!

PLEASE DONATE & PLEASE SHARE!

Land Art Workshop: New Kickstarter Reward!

Skull at Buffalo Peaks Ranch, photo by Carl Young

The Rocky Mountain Land Library is excited to offer a Summer 2017 Workshop exclusively to our Kickstarter backers at the $750 level:

THE LAND ART WORKSHOP REWARD

Come and be a part of an immersive, on-site creation at Buffalo Peaks Ranch this summer. Accompanied by Colorado artist and sculptor Rik Sargent, participants will generate a narrative inspired by a particular reading from the Land Library’s collection — but mostly it will be the ranch, and the South Platte River that will set the tone for the day. This narrative will be physically manifested at the ranch, using local materials at hand. It’s all about the verb, it’s all about the doing!

Spend a weekend (July 29-30) at the ranch, camping (or stay nearby in Fairplay), foraging, and collaborating. Be among the first to establish Buffalo Peaks Ranch as a creation space!

This workshop reward is limited to 6 backers at the $750 pledge level. Backers at this level will also receive: the Digital Photo Collection, Outpost Correspondence, Sponsored Book, Land Library Bandana, and Land Library Book Bag. 

Artist & sculptor Rik Sargent in his studio

Rik Sargent has created incredible pieces of public art that equally emphasize the sculpture itself, and the environment it rests in. Below are a few pieces from Rik’s extensive portfolio:

‘One World, One Water’ — a 14 foot bronze sculpture at Metropolitan State University, Denver 

‘Spread Your Wings’ and ‘Eggolution’

We have 10 more days to reach our all-or-nothing goal! Please share our Kickstarter link, with friends, especially with those who would be intrigued to take part on our very first LAND ART WORKSHOP!

Help bring books, people & programs to Colorado’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch. With your support we will transform a historic high mountain ranch into a residential library devoted to land, community, and the many positive ways we can all move forward together.

But first, CLICK HERE and you’ll find out much more. Learn how you can be an important part of this land-inspired, book-loving grassroots project!

PLEASE DONATE & PLEASE SHARE!

Two Weeks to Go and 51% Funded!

Dawn breaks the darkness at Buffalo Peaks Ranch. photo by Sarah McLaughlin

We saw a sizable boost in Kickstarter pledges last week and we’re extremely thankful for the press coverage we continue to receive. Special thanks to all of you who have shared our project with your friends and contacts.  Everyone’s support and enthusiasm has energized our team and we’re excited for what is in store over the next 14 days.

Another big THANK YOU to everyone who tuned in and viewed our Kickstarter Live stream last Tuesday night. We hope to thank and converse with ALL of our backers at some point, ideally around a table in the Cook’s House, and at the workshops and events coming up this summer!

We have a mini-goal for the next few days. Join us to spread the word and get our campaign over 600 backers by next Tuesday! 

Kickstarter is an ALL-OR-NOTHING effort, and with the incredible support we’ve received thus far, we know we can make it! Who would you want to know about this project? Message our project link below to anyone else you know and follow up with those who you may have already shared our project with.

Project Link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1402759381/buffalo-peaks-ranch-a-literary-home-on-the-range?ref=8744wr

Inspiration can be born in an instant when we’re all working together!

In closing, we’d like to share a favorite book passage from Rocky Mountain Land Library Director and Co-founder Jeff Lee. The passage is taken from The Bottom of the Harbor by late legendary author, Joseph Mitchell.

Mitchell, who died in 1996, was the great wandering and listening soul of New York City. True, you won’t find any of his titles at local Nature Centers, but his sketches of the urban scene shows us a writer immersed in his home landscape. From Fulton Fish Market to McSorley’s Saloon, Joseph Mitchell observed his given plot of land keenly and compassionately, like the ideal naturalist that he was. Back in 1992, his work, long out of print, was resurrected in a wonderful anthology, Up in the Old Hotel.

The following passage, The Rivermen, from Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor touches on one’s relationship to the river and the city he inhabits. Cities around the world were founded on the banks of rivers and streams allowing humans to naturally network with one another along and with the river itself. This unstoppable, steady, yet often gentle flow can sculpt any landscape and has certainly shaped our thinking at the Land Library. The South Platte River has inspired the Headwaters to Plains network settling Land Library sites at Buffalo Peaks Ranch, Waterton Canyon, and in inner-city Denver.

Rivers and books each share the power to bring people together.

“I often feel drawn to the Hudson River, and I have spent a lot of time through the years poking around the part of it that flows past the city. I never get tired of looking at it; it hypnotizes me. I like to look at it in midsummer, when it is warm and dirty and drowsy, and I like to look at it in January, when it is carrying ice. I like to look at it when it is stirred up, when a northeast wind is blowing and a strong tide is running — a new-moon tide or a full-moon tide — and I like to look at it when it is slack. It is exciting to me on weekdays, when it is crowded with ocean craft, harbor craft, and river craft, but it is the river itself that draws me, and not the shipping, and I guess I like it best on Sundays, when there are lulls as long as a half an hour, during which, all the way from the Battery to the George Washington Bridge, nothing moves upon it, not even a ferry, not even a tug, and it becomes as hushed and dark and secret and remote and unreal as a river in a dream.”

The South Platte River slowly ripples by, with Buffalo Peaks Ranch in the distance.

From the Hudson River to the South Platte, please SUPPORT all things global and local at the Rocky Mountain Land Library! 

Help bring books, people & programs to Colorado’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch. With your support we will transform a historic high mountain ranch into a residential library devoted to land, community, and the many positive ways we can all move forward together.

But first, CLICK HERE and you’ll find out much more. Learn how you can be an important part of this land-inspired, book-loving grassroots project!

PLEASE DONATE & PLEASE SHARE!

 

The Oceans & the Stars

“Human lives are intimately entwined with plankton. Every breath we take is a gift of oxygen from the plankton. In fact photosynthetic bacteria and protists produce as much oxygen as all the forests and terrestrial plants combined. And for the last three billion years, phytoplankton have absorbed huge amounts of carbon dioxide. Plankton regulate the productivity and acidity of the ocean through the carbon cycle, and exert a major influence on climate.” — from Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World

For the past few days we’ve been featuring the global reach of the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s more than 35,000 volume book collection. Today our land-locked library travels from the Rockies to the deep blue oceans!

Fundamental to life on Earth, plankton are also eerily beautiful, and represent a virtually unknown cosmos in our midst. Christian Sardet’s Plankton: Wonders of the Drifting World is the most visually exciting book we have come across in a very long time. Go slowly, page by page, and a pure sense of wonder will fill you to the brim. Much like gazing at the stars — or viewing the astounding images from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the interest of both science and poetry, Plankton needs to be on the same Land Library shelf with the recent The Hubble Cosmos: 25 Years of New Vistas in Space!

Plankton Mandala: This image from Christian Sardet’s book depicts more than 200 different kinds of plankton. In the upper part of the mandala are the largest creatures of zooplankton: jellyfish, siphonophores, ctenophores, salps. In the center are a mix of chaetognaths, annelids, mollusks, and crustaceans. Also included are larvae and juveniles. The lower part of the image shows microscopic organisms (measuring less than 1mm), mostly single-cell protists: radiolarians, foraminifera, diatoms, and dinoflagellates.

Just one of thousands of images from the Hubble Space Telescope: Supernova Remnant: SNR 0519.

Planktonic Juveniles: including the red-blotched squid, Loligo vulgaris.

From the chapter, Worms and Tadpoles: Arrows, Tubes and Nets.

John Steinbeck had this to say about tide pools. He could have been talking about the wide open ocean as well:

“It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

For more on the Plankton Chronicles Project visit their photo-filled website, or view many short film clips on Christian Sardet’s YouTube channel!

From the Rockies to the Ocean’s depths, please SUPPORT all things global and local at the Rocky Mountain Land Library! 

The Rocky Mountain Land Library’s long-awaited Kickstarter Campaign is LIVE! Help bring books, people & programs to Colorado’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch. With your support we will transform a historic high mountain ranch into a residential library devoted to land, community, and the many positive ways we can all move forward together.

But first, CLICK HERE and you’ll find out much more. Learn how you can be an important part of this land-inspired, book-loving grassroots project!

PLEASE DONATE & PLEASE SHARE!

HELP US SPREAD THE WORD FAR & WIDE!

Pleasing Work, Stacked High & Dry

“Here it comes at last. The cold time. The great time….Time to take a stroll out to the woodpile and get started.” — Lars Mytting, Norwegian Wood

Published in 2011, Lars Mytting’s Hel Ved (Solid Wood) spent more than a year on Norway’s bestseller list. Over a year ago, this wonderfully written book arrived in the States, under its new and very descriptive title, Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way.

Earlier in his distinguished writing career, Lars Mytting wrote three novels, with the most recent receiving Norway’s National Bookseller Award. With Norwegian Wood (a bit of a departure), Mytting lends his poetic voice to an in-depth exploration of stacking logs, drying wood, and all the fire-burning elements that keeps us warm.

Norwegian Wood offers time-tested tools and techniques of turning wood to fire. Along the way we meet real people who, year after year, work diligently for the winter ahead:

Ole Haugen, Elga, Norway: “Ole is the kind of man who would rather sing the praises of others than his own. His stacks, he says, are simply practical constructions that do the job. But seventy years of experience tell their own story. The ends of his stack are so neat it looks as though the whole thing had been trimmed on both sides with a huge circular saw. Not a single log has been laid crosswise. Even twisted logs have found their places in the stack, without compromising the stability of the whole.
‘My method is very simple. I do the chopping, splitting, and stacking in small doses. That way I don’t get too stiff, and the wood doesn’t lie long on the ground. The secret of an even woodpile is to learn the trick of knowing what sizes you need to make a stable structure….And I also allow for the fact that the wood is going to shrink a little as it dries, so I build in a slight inward lean against a support, so the stack won’t topple forward that easily.’” — from Norwegian Wood.

 

Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips around the better to remind me of my pleasing work. — Henry David Thoreau

Known as the beehive or the Holzhausen, the round stack is an outstanding form of woodpile once widely used in Norway, but now almost obsolete. It is not easy to make, and if it starts to collapse the whole thing goes. But a successful round pile has much to recommend it. It makes good use of the available space and can accommodate twisted wood, and, if it’s properly constructed, rainwater will run off the outside so it does not need a top covering.” — from Norwegian Wood

 

Brute survival, but an artist’s touch as well: one of the many sculpture stacks that pop up in rural Norway during the spring. This angler’s dream was stacked in Drevsjo by Bjare Granli.

But of course the true test of all the hard work of chopping, stacking, and drying, is how warm and content you will be throughout the long winter. Author Lars Mytting seems very comfortable in his writing den.

Fuel for the soul: like wood piled for the winter, the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s book stacks, carefully arranged in a non-toppling, Norwegian way. We hope Ole Haugen would approve. (Land Library storage site, February 2012)

We’ll be writing much more about the global reach of the Land Library’s books in the days ahead. To learn much more about the Rocky Mountain Land Library and our wide-ranging collection, be sure to visit our current Kickstarter page!

The Rocky Mountain Land Library’s long-awaited Kickstarter Campaign is LIVE! Help bring books, people & programs to Colorado’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch. With your support we will transform a historic high mountain ranch into a residential library devoted to land, community, and the many positive ways we can all move forward together.

But first, CLICK HERE and you’ll find out much more. Learn how you can be an important part of this land-inspired, book-loving grassroots project!

PLEASE DONATE & PLEASE SHARE!

HELP US SPREAD THE WORD FAR & WIDE!

 

Mutual Bonds of Respect

Here’s another in a series of posts on the global reach of the Land Library’s 35,000+ volumes devoted to people and the land:

“Palani Mohan first made contact in 2013, sending me a selection of photographs from his numerous trips to the Altai Mountains in the far western reaches of Mongolia. It is a vast and unforgiving landscape, where temperatures routinely drop to minus forty degrees celsius in winter, and where the skies are filled with forbidding lenticular cloud formations. During the long winters the burkitshi (eagle-hunters) leave their homes with horse and eagle, and head into the mountains to hunt for several days at a time. Palani’s photographs struck me as forcefully as conveying not only the hard beauty of this wild and seemingly empty terrain, but also, more significantly, the intense relationship that the hunter forges with his eagle. It is this bond of mutual respect and trust that defines the life of the burkitshi and gives it profound meaning.” — Hugh Merrell, from the foreword.

With over eighty doutone images, Hunting with Eagles: In the Realm of the Mongolian Kazakhs is one of the most visually stunning books the Land Library has seen in a very long time. As award-winning photographer Palani Mohan explains in his introduction, this is a culture under threat. There are no more than fifty hunters left, and that alone motivated Mohan to record this unique relationship between man and bird.

The golden eagle is a perfect predator, with an awe-inspiring wingspan, a beak built to rend flesh, and talons that can kill prey instantly by piercing the heart. A fox is easy prey, and when hunting in pairs, eagles are capable of bringing down a wolf — Palani Mohan

“Madina, a 63-year old Kazakh wearing a fox-skin coat, cradles his six-year old eagle in his arms. ‘They love to be carried in such a way. It makes them feel loved and relaxes them, just like a baby‘, he told me.”

“Even though the eagles are kept in the hunters’ homes, they remain wild birds with a finely honed killer instinct.”

“I sat in a rocky crevice and found myself listening to the wind roaring around the contours of the mountains and whipping the grass, ever-changing in tone and volume, and becoming deafening at times. As the hours wore on, I thought about everything but also nothing, and felt utterly at peace. With only nature’s symphony and my silent guide for company, I experienced one of the most memorable moments of my time in Mongolia.”

Palani Mohan’s work has appeared in the pages of National Geographic, and he is also the author of Vanishing Giants: Elephants of Asia. For much more, please visit Palani Mohan’s website!

And here’s two related books from the Land Library’s collection:

Both by naturalist Stephen Bodio: An Eternity of Eagles, a natural and cultural history of eagles across the globe, and Bodio’s own field report from the land of the Kazakhs: Eagle Dreams: Searching for Legends in Wild Mongolia.

Many years ago, Colorado ecologist David Cooper compared the high mountain grasslands of South Park to the steppes of Mongolia. With Buffalo Peaks Ranch (the Land Library’s headwaters site) located in the middle of South Park, no wonder we keep adding Mongolian books to our collection. They are some of our favorite books!

To learn much more about the Rocky Mountain Land Library and our wide-ranging collection, be sure to visit our current Kickstarter page!

The Rocky Mountain Land Library’s long-awaited Kickstarter Campaign is LIVE! Help bring books, people & programs to Colorado’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch. With your support we will transform a historic high mountain ranch into a residential library devoted to land, community, and the many positive ways we can all move forward together.

But first, CLICK HERE and you’ll find out much more. Learn how you can be an important part of this land-inspired, book-loving grassroots project!

PLEASE DONATE & PLEASE SHARE!

HELP US SPREAD THE WORD FAR & WIDE!

“The egg of a sea bird, lovely, perfect, and laid this very morning.”

Over the next few days we’ll be highlighting the global reach of the Rocky Mountain Land Library’s more than 35,000 volumes dedicated to people and the land. Here is today’s timely post!

The Land Library’s celtic roots run deep. For the past 30+ years, we have built a strong collection of books on the natural histories of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales — with a special emphasis on the Hebrides and Ireland’s western coast. As Saint Patrick’s Day draws near, we reached for one of our favorites: Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape edited by F.H.A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan, and Matthew Stout.
This handsome atlas explores the rural landscape as a defining element of Ireland’s national heritage. Far more than a collection of maps, this book is thickly illustrated with photos, drawings, diagrams, and charts. An excellent text presents a narrative where layer upon layer of natural & cultural histories intertwine. Detailed descriptions are given of building styles, field and settlement patterns, archaeological monuments, villages, woodlands and bogs. Abundant maps open your eyes to Ireland’s glacial past, along with its rich heritage of stone circles, ring forts, sacred wells, Cistercian monasteries, and much more.

Also pictured above, from the Land Library’s shelves: The Natural History of Ulster by John Faulkner and Robert Thompson — the first comprehensive study of the natural history of Ulster Province in the north of Ireland.

Here’s just a brief sampler of other Irish books and authors that have found a home at the Land Library.

Off the southwest coast of Ireland, The Blasket Islands has produced a remarkable set of lyrical memoirs. They are books coming straight from native voices, and not part of a literary movement. Our favorite might just be Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A-Growing, translated into English in 1933. E.M.Forster wrote the introduction to that edition, and to this day, his praise for O’Sullivan’s book seems pitch perfect: “…here is the egg of a sea-bird — lovely, perfect, and laid this very morning.”

Also pictured above: Ireland: A Smithsonian Natural History by Irish naturalist Michael Viney — a well done and very comprehensive guide.

The Land Library has many books on Ireland’s flora and fauna, plus a special shelf devoted to the works of writer and cartographer Tim Robinson:

Tim Robinson has won two Irish Book Awards for his Connemara trilogy. Writing about Robinson’s two volume study of the Aran Islands, Michael Viney describes it as “one of the most original, revelatory and exhilarating works of literature ever produced in Ireland.”

The English writer Robert Macfarlane has had a huge influence on the Land Library’s team. We’re also not aware of anyone else who catagorizes authors by rock type. Here is Macfarlane on Tim Robinson (pictured above):

Limestone has been blessed with two exceptional 20th century writers. The first of these is WH Auden, who so loved the high karst shires of the northern Pennines….The second of the great limestone writers is Tim Robinson. On the west coast of Ireland, in County Clare, between the granite of Galway and the sandstone of Liscannor, rises a vast limestone escarpment, pewterish in colour on a dull day, silver in sunshine….So begins one of the most sustained, intensive and imaginative studies of a landscape that has ever been carried off.”

So here’s a question: Won’t there be people in the Rockies who will want to read the works of Tim  Robinson of the Aran Islands?

YES, we definitely think so.

Please SUPPORT all things global and local at the Rocky Mountain Land Library! 

The Rocky Mountain Land Library’s long-awaited Kickstarter Campaign is LIVE! Help bring books, people & programs to Colorado’s Buffalo Peaks Ranch. With your support we will transform a historic high mountain ranch into a residential library devoted to land, community, and the many positive ways we can all move forward together.

But first, CLICK HERE and you’ll find out much more. Learn how you can be an important part of this land-inspired, book-loving grassroots project!

PLEASE DONATE & PLEASE SHARE!

HELP US SPREAD THE WORD FAR & WIDE!