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.

This week, I interviewed Sara Lowe. Sara lives in central Wyoming where she’s a livestock investigator and a detective for Fremont County. Fremont is about 9,200 square miles, about the size of Vermont and has about 40,000 residents.

At a mental health forum last year, I got to hear Sara and a few other officers talk about the on-the-job stresses that bleed into their off hours. Sara’s moment of awe didn’t happen during her work, but because of her work. Because of her work, she’s spent years cultivating a way to generate her own sense of peace and calm. Heck, it was Sara who taught me about box breathing. She also does horse clinics.

Sara said that just last week, a chaplain was brought in, to help the officers with the steady stream of tragedy and violence that has unfolded lately.

This fall, Sara is headed to the University of Wyoming, to work on her master’s in the mental health field. She wants to help the officers and ranchers who, in her observation, desperately need support.

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, go here and thanks!

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

This week, I interviewed Summer Peterson. Summer lives in Colorado now, but up to recently she’s been in central Utah as a farmer, a horse vet, and a competitive rider.

By competitive, I mean, really accomplished. She was for years a semi-professional three-day eventer. Three-day eventing is dressage, cross country, and showjumping. The sport was originally conceived as a test for cavalry horses and riders, to gauge bravery, endurance, discipline. Summer calls it the triathlon for horses and riders.

I felt so fortunate to be able to record this moment. The pandemic hadn’t figured into the Awe, Nice! scheme of things until now. I know the outdoors was a great solace to many during this time, even for those of us who are (were) outdoors and away from other people as a matter of course. There are more stories out there, for sure.

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. Find a link to his terrific music here.

My name is Maddy Butcher, I developed Awe, Nice! to bring a bit more attention to those non-verbal connections that we have and that Summer generously brought to light with this segment. If you’d like to donate, find the link here and thank you.

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

We all are capable of experiencing moments of wonder. They are not reserved solely for creative or religious people. Moments of awe cross the political spectrum. They cross the livelihood spectrum. Awe is a positive force that can be felt by everyone.

Nonetheless, I carry a fair amount of skepticism around with me. It’s a journalistic thing.

Like. I tend to think moments of awe actually happen with ho-hum regularity. It’s since we’re humans – distracted, in our heads, with dulled-down senses, that we miss them. When we do witness awesome moments, it’s because that moment occurred just when we happen to be particularly present and tuned in to our surroundings.

I mean, how often to you find seaglass or a shard of old Indian pottery when you are not intentionally looking for it?

How do you hear the ‘drink your tea, tea, tea of a towhee (the bird in our logo) if you’re not listening?

Most Awe, Nice! interviewees tell me they experience moments of awe all the time. Yes, cool things are happening all the time, but these folks, these interviewees see them because they’re kinda special in a 21st century way. They’re quiet and connected, with their senses that is.

Occasionally with this project, I share a few mini-moments of awe. My nickname for these segments - cringe away! – is Mini-Awe-Polis.

Mini Awe Polis is a bundle of small wonders that have collected in my noggin. Kind of like the hay in my jacket pockets.

Since we working our way into the dog days of summer, I wanted to give canines some attention. While dogs sure can wreck nature sightings – because they tend to investigate eagerly and like to eat or chase things that you might want to see – they are also good at helping you discover things you might have otherwise overlooked. So I try to pay attention to them. When we’re working cows, for instance, they alert me to things I should be paying attention to all the time. Cows can hide. I know this may sound silly, but in big country, they can tuck in under scrub oak and you can ride right past them. Of course, this doesn’t happen if your dogs are with you.

In the fall, we bring cows off of the National Forest and down to winter pastures. It’s a week of long days and, after a summer of moderate work, the dogs are primed and I feel like they take this week seriously. One day, in the middle of the day, I watched my dogs Monty and Tina over several hours as they helped move cows up a gully and across a big meadow, bordered by scrub oak and Ponderosa pines. I knew they were thirsty, but they are so dedicated to the task that they won’t leave the cows. So I developed a command, ‘get some water’ so that they can essentially give themselves permission to drink.

On this day, I saw a drainage and told them to get some water. They heard me but still took turns. Tina went for water. Monty stayed with the cows. When Tina came back, Monty went for water.

On the next day, we had more interaction with other help, folks with their dogs and horses. We got the cows to their stopping point that evening, a high desert grassy area with a pond, and settled them in. The dogs knew we were done for the day. I watched as almost all of them seemed to let down. Most of them peeed and pooped. Some starting playing. They had punched their time card and were headed for the tailgate party.

My mom told me many times: a productive life is a happy life. Sure, maybe she was telling me to work hard, but she also felt this way – passionately - when it came to dogs. I do think that my dogs are happiest when they are working.

But what do I know?

I developed AweNice with the notion that we all are capable of experiencing moments of wonder. They are not reserved solely for creative or religious people. Moments of awe cross the political spectrum. They cross the livelihood spectrum. Awe is a positive force that can be felt by everyone.

This project specifically seeks out interviews with those who work outside and work with animals, people I feel aren’t heard from often and whose daily life is relatively quiet and disconnected. I should qualify that: disconnected in the mainstream, digital sense. I’m finding, though, that they are deeply connected in other ways, to other things.

So, anyway, I want to share a few mini-moments of awe that I’ve experienced.

Get ready to cringe all you listeners! This is the first segment of Mini-Awe-Polis. Mini Awe Polis is a bundle of small wonders that have collected in my noggin. Kind of like the hay in my jacket pockets.

There is a big, solitary, feral cat that comes around at night, especially in winter. I’ve named him Dana because I’m not sure if he’s male or female, but I’ll call him a him. Dana is fat and smart and friendly, which I think is a pretty unusual combination for a feral cat.

Because he is not stupid, Dana knows he can handle one dog, but probably not more than one. My dogs are not warm to cats, so, not surprisingly I rarely see Dana during the day.

But at last call (sometime between 8 and 11 at night when I check the horses and take a little walk with the dogs), I can sometimes spot him.

More than once, he’s crouched in the scrub, a hundred feet from the house, and watched as the dogs, clueless, go streaking by. I think Dana has us pretty well figured out. It’s fun to consider how he considers us.

And speaking of cats.

I was helping gather calves on New Year’s Day last year. I had two dogs with me and was riding my grey horse, Ray. The country was rough, full of piñon, juniper, and scrub oak. I was sussing out a small, narrow canyon alone.

When I say sussing out, I mean that I suspected the calves were down in the canyon, grazing their way east, and I was zigging and zagging, trying to find a way down to them.

But the sides were steep, mostly unpassable, and I was having to back up and turn around a lot. My dog, Tina, jogged across this giant boulder jutting out over the gully and I took a picture to capture how frustrating the going was. We paused and listened for animals moving. Then I look across and watched as an adult mountain lion strode up the other side of the canyon, some hundred feet away. She

walked with purpose but not urgently. She was large and lanky and graceful, and powerful – I remember her tail, which seemed as long as her body. I soaked it in, not taking my eyes off her, not moving or reaching for my phone. Then I saw another one, a juvenile, following her at a distance.

I’ve lived in cat country for more than a decade and I know well the feeling - in your bones and in your mind - that you are being seen by them. But I’d not laid eyes on one until now. Stay safe, Dana.

AweNice welcomes interviewees. If you have a moment you experienced while working outside and would like to share it, contact us here. AweNice also welcomes your support. You can find a donate button on our about page.

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

This week, I interviewed Andrew Clements, of Cortez, Colorado. Drew works for the state, but the program also does work for the US Forest Service in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah. Here, he shares an encounter with a grizzly bear in the Yellowstone National Park, while he was part of a team collecting forest health data near the confluence of the Thorofare and Yellowstone Rivers.

Drew told me that a fair amount of logistical work goes into planning for his field season. He tends to hit locations of lower elevation early, then chase the snow up to higher plots before being pushed down lower, again, by the snow, in the fall. Drew figures during any given year, he hikes four to seven hundred miles and is hoping to keep on keeping on until his knees give out.