M.A.D. Mountain-Pub Crawl

Spring has Sprung!

Host: Mammoth After Dark
Start Time: Thursday, April 30 at 11:30am
End Time: Thursday, April 30 at 11:30pm
Where: Mammoth Mountain and The Village at Mammoth

More details and RSVP...

Fly-Fishing for Trout in Winter Is Hot

Mike Mckenna lays
it out
(Bill Becher Photo)By Bill Becher for The New York Times, 4/12/09

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — For many years, cars loaded with skis and snowboards sped past the turnoff to Hot Creek in the eastern Sierra on their way to the Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. Now, some winter visitors are stopping to fly fish at one of California’s most fabled trout streams, although not everyone seems pleased...

Read on.

Skiing California's 14ers

Christian Pondella
PhotoFrom a distance it looked perfect. Perfectly epic. But from the summit, with skis on, looking down at an enormous chockstone wedged into the trap door of a fifty-five degree couloir, nine thousand vertical feet above the trucks, a sliver’s width passage to either side and only the thinnest of early-spring rot to look forward to, the prospect suddenly became, as Pondella would later recall, “frickin’ dicey.”

Read the whole story in the latest Eastside Magazine.

Rituals: A Fire Must be Fed

Mark Douet/
Getty ImagesThis is it, I thought (once again): the time for splitting and hauling firewood was yesterday...

The New York Times, 3/13/09

Not Finding Nemo

Scientists count Devils Hole pupfish larvae at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Monica Almeida/The New York Times.“I got nothing,” shouted Paul J. Barrett, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, during a recent pupfish count deep in Devil's Hole, Death Valley National Park, as reported in The New York Times.

It doesn't look good for the tiny fish that once stopped Vegas in its tracks.

Meanwhile, up in the Sierra, the alpine chipmunk heads for the sky.

New Stamp for the Sixth Extinction

Not the first Yosemite stamp. But will it be the last?A new 42-cent first-class stamp featuring Albert Bierstadt’s 1864 oil painting “Valley of the Yosemite” debuted Thursday morning at the Yosemite Village Post Office. The last Yosemite stamp (2006) featured a sunrise photograph by Galen Rowell and sold at the bygone international letter rate of $.84. (LAT)

Meanwhile, scientists at U.C. Berkeley argued that accelerating declines in amphibian populations point to a "biodiversity disaster" of epic proportions.

Carcasses of Southern Yellow-legged Frogs in Sixty Lake Basin in Sierra Nevada, California. The frogs died of chytridiomycosis, an amphibian disease caused by a particularly virulent fungus. (Vance Vredenburg)"There's no question that we are in a mass extinction spasm right now," said David Wake, professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley in a press release. "Amphibians have been around for about 250 million years. They made it through when the dinosaurs didn't. The fact that they're cutting out now should be a lesson for us."

There have been five mass-extinction events in the history of the planet--when "extinction numbers far outweigh the emergence of new species." Now it seems we're onto the next.

Quoting from the statement: "Of the seven amphibian species that inhabit the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, five are threatened. Wake and his colleagues observed that, for two of these species, the Sierra Nevada Yellow-legged Frog and the Southern Yellow-legged Frog, populations over the last few years declined by 95 to 98 percent, even in highly protected areas such as Yosemite National Park. This means that each local frog population has dwindled to 2 to 5 percent of its former size. "

Uh-oh. Better stock up on postage stamps.