Welcome to Awe Nice, that’s a-w-e-n-i-c-e, where we highlight moments of wonder while working outdoors.

This week, I interviewed Beau Gaughran of Berwick, Maine. Beau directed A Brutal, Beautiful Life, a short documentary about ranching for which I served as writer and producer. It’s done well at film festivals and is now online.

Almost all of Beau’s work is outside, often in the backcountry. I’ve learned from him that you need athleticism as well as creative talent to excel at this kind of filmmaking.

The moment that Beau chose to share doesn’t unfold outdoors, but it sure is worth hearing.

One of the reasons I love working with Beau is because of how he sees, how he takes in his surroundings. Such a talent.

Hearing, of course, is huge. Because of his decades-long enthusiasm for water sports and because of particularly angular ear canals, Beau’s had lots of ear infections and compromised hearing. He’s right not to take it for granted, eh? Where would Awe, Nice! Be without it?

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us at awenice.com.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. You can find a link to his music and a donate button on our about page.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Kim Kerns. Kim is a fourth generation rancher in eastern Oregon. The country is remote. No Man’s Land. Services are distant, which is why her family and their neighbors banded together to organize a rural fire fighting entity, which you’ll hear about.

I met Kim several months ago and we talked about dogs, mostly. Kim and her family have about a thousand sheep and hundreds of cows. They have eight guardian dogs, several stock dogs – those are mostly kelpies and border collies, and she also has Burt, an 18-pound Jagd terrier, who keeps down the pack rat population and takes on all comers, Kim told me.

Predators are a constant source of concern. Mountain lions, wolves, coyotes. She relies on her incredible guardian dogs to keep her animals alive, especially during calving and lambing, in the spring, but really year-round.

It’s a big operation and she tackles it with her parents, her husband and two employees.

Kim said she met a big family from Seattle up on Big Lookout Mountain during the 2017 eclipse. They were planning to just watch the eclipse in a parking lot or something, but they ran into some NASA guys who said, “Heck, no. You’ve come all this way. You’re going to get up to this mountain!” And they did. Afterwards, that family tracked down Kim’s dad online and got a message to him that visiting with Kim and her friend, Maddie Moore, was a highlight of their trip.

Awe, Nice! welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl. Find a link to his terrific music here. If you’d like to donate, find the link on our About page and thank you.

My name is Maddy Butcher, I developed Awe, Nice! to highlight moments of wonder outdoors.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.

This week, I interviewed Sisto Hernandez. Sisto lives in Arizona and I met him at a training for range riders. Range riding is a successful strategy for deterring wolves from predating on cattle and Sisto was teaching, sharing his insights from work with the reintroduced Mexican wolves.

A few notes on some things Sisto mentions:

- Traps aren’t metal contraptions, they’re fenced off areas of between five to twenty acres, built for holding cattle.

- Tapaderos are leather fittings, sometimes rawhide, over stirrups that keep anything from getting wedged in your stirrup. That's a scenario which can be pretty dangerous for you and your horse.

- The Mogollon Rim forms the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau and features big sandstone and limestone cliffs. As you might imagine, it is a significant natural boundary for flora and fauna.

- The Rodeo-Chediski Fire burned nearly a half million acres in 2002. At the time, it was the biggest fire in Arizona history.

That country that I've seen on or abutting the Grasshopper Livestock Association acreage (which itself covers nearly 200 square miles) is everything he describes. Beautiful and sometimes treacherous. Hopefully you can check it out. At least by taking a drive down Highway 77, which runs through reservations, National Forest, and Salt River Canyon.

I did a little research and learned that aside from his work on the land, Sisto was an accomplished saddle bronc rider, competing for years at the national level. Brain and brawn.

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here.

Our music is by my friend, Forrest Van Tuyl.

If you’d like to donate, find the link here and thank you.

Keep your eyes, ears, and mind open. Until next time.