Cascadian Paradigm by Alex Roberts
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Meltdown Medicine: Where the Music Meets the Mountains and Helps Heal a Community

8/13/2015

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 I wish to thank Coast Mountain Culture for giving me the opportunity to tell this story in their Summer 2015 issue.  They only had space for a couple hundred words, but I had a great deal of material and wanted to add to the story.  Thank you for reading, and I appreciate you sharing this with friends, especially those in the Meltdown Family.  Photos provided by Summer Meltdown.

The highway winds through dense Cascadian forest.  Nahko and Medicine for the People, the weekend's opening headliner blares on the stereo.  We are cruising to the 204 Summer Meltdown Music Festival, four days of music and positivity.  Just as the dramatic glaciated peak of Mt. Whitehorse comes into view, the forest terminates in a mile wide swath of destruction.

At 10:37 a.m. on March 22, 2014, a massive landslide claimed a portion of the rural community of Oso, including the lives of 43 of its residents, resulting in the deadliest single landslide incident in United States history.  The Governor declared a state of emergency and President Obama surveyed the damage from a helicopter. An extensive rescue and recovery effort ensued in conjunction with a deluge of community support.

We turn the music down and slowly drive past heavy machinery sorting through wreckage.  It's a sobering preamble for four days of festivities.


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When Condors Soared Here Too

6/25/2015

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An internal debate rages as I nervously watch the teens scramble about the basalt formations.  Half of me is joyful to watch them climb about and explore; this is why we came out here - this is what they need.  Half of me wants to prohibit them from leaving the ground; if one of them falls I am so screwed.  

I'm the leader/chaperone guy for a group of Portland teens, who fan out around the walls and caverns of HorseThief Butte.  These crags are the stalwart remnants of a basalt monolith that survived the prehistoric glacial floods.  We play hide and seek, evading one another behind rock outcroppings, laughing.  Once we get our breath back, we climb to the top to eat our lunch.  The Columbia River surrounds the escarpment like a horseshoe.  Mt. Hood dominates the skyline with its sharp relief.

Before the creation of the dams, there was a Native American Village on these shores.  The Columbia roared cascaded over a steep drop known as Celilo Falls..  For many and more generations, the Wishram and other indigenous peoples gathered their sustenance from the river, netting and spearing behemoth salmon.  The dams flooded everything, buried the falls and the village.  Today, hand crafted wooden fishing platforms remain along the shores; weathered white, the bones of what once was.


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Reflection and Redemption on the Colorado River

4/24/2015

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I read this entry the night I wrote it on the Grand Canyon.  The group had suffered the worse weather of the trip and patience was fraying.  The release of tension I felt at the end of the day coupled with an appreciation for the group.  I have made some minor edits from my original journal entry, but this is largely what I wrote there on the beach of Pancho's Kitchen


April 3, 2013    Pancho’s Kitchen, Colorado River, Grand Canyon National Park

Today we pushed from Forester Canyon to Pancho’s Kitchen.  When I woke this morning, my gut already felt tight from the memories of my rookie trip last year on this stretch.



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    As an outdoor professional, I get opportunities everyday to enjoy unique experiences, see beautiful scenery, and meet interesting people.  These are stories about those experiences and interactions.  

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