Friday, April 3, 2020

Summer 2019 (How to make Garlic Powder)


 
The Sublimity Life’s Recipe: How to make Garlic Powder in the middle of a Pandemic

I'm sure there is garlic powder in this meal.  Photo by Carrie.
Corona Virus Update:  The editors of this blog are concerned about our lack of earnings and the decreasing number of people that are reading this blog during the shelter-in-place orders.  With the Corona Virus and many kayakers who have been told to “work from home” hitting the river for solo trips; the readership has dropped to a new low.  To further complicate things some of our editors are facing major hardships.  Editor 1 has been forced to move back in with his mom, an unhappy scenario.  Editor 2, one of our favorite editors here at The Sublimity Life has been forced to transition from her regular line of work to delivering food with a Portland start-up called Boober.  In an effort to increase readership, I have been forced by the editors to reinvent our look and transition to a food blog, you know, a long story, lots of pictures of food and how it was made, and then the main thing you wanted at the end after you scrolled down to see all the adds, a recipe.  We have reached a compromise and I’m still allowed to give my “Summer 2019” adventure reports as well.  The market reports have shown that readers want a good story to accompany their recipe.  To further complicate things they have put me under a deadline to get this thing published; I was already running late on my previous deadlines.  We here at The Sublimity Life would like to show you how to make Garlic Powder while stuck at home during this crisis.

“I’m embarrassed to be in bed when you arrived.  It’s nothing, just a little fever that I’m treating with gin.”  Camus



The first thing you need to do is plant the garlic, usually sometime in October for Oregon.  This photo is a re-creation I didn’t have any pictures of planting the garlic.  Don’t forget to cut the scapes off the top of the hardneck varieties in early summer.  If you don’t cut them the garlic thinks it is going to seed and you will not get a good crop.  Plus scapes cooked in butter are amazing.  Maybe, I’ll give you that recipe in next year’s blog.

OK, while the garlic is growing, “Summer” 2019 started a bit early for us here at The Sublimity Life.   It was time to once again take a Winter Term vacation in exchange for working Summer Term.   “Why?” you might ask.  The answer is easy, it was time to go to the other side of the equator and visit New Zealand. 

“Some were dreadfully insulted, and quite seriously, to have held up as a model such an immoral character as A Hero of Our Time; others shrewdly noticed that the author had portrayed himself and his acquaintances … A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression.”  Lermontov

Lacey and I spent a month touring the South Island in New Zealand, and then my sister and some boaters came in to do another month long tour.  Since this is mostly a boating (cooking) blog, the main kayaking Lacey and I did during the first month was a guided sea kayak trip in Doubtful Sound.  Although a little expensive, it was worth paying for the guided trip to see an isolated part of New Zealand’s South Island Fjords.  The trip involved a bus, then a boat ride across a lake, ditch that boat and take another bus over the pass, hop on a smaller boat, launch the sea kayaks from that boat out on to the Doubtful Sound Fjord.  After a good day of scenery, birds, and paddling around; the little boat picked us up and we reversed the process to get back home.  The road system that we used to get to the Fjord is kind of interesting.  In the 70’s an Australian company made a power plant by diverting the flow from a huge lake in the interior, through the coastal mountain range in a tunnel, and into the fjord to manufacture electricity for a huge aluminum smelter that converted Australian ore to aluminum.  The local community wasn’t able to stop the dam, but they did keep the dam from raising the level of their lake the proposed 30 meters that the Australians had hoped for to a much smaller height increase.  Despite the sad story, it was a good way to explore deep into the West Coast.  Remember to recycle your aluminum.



The other outdoors adventure Lacey and I embarked on was one of the famous New Zealand Treks through some native bush on Stewardt Island.  The amount of native bird life on the island is substantial.  Remember that New Zealand had no mammals before colonials messed that up.  The islands had only birds, including a giant extinct flightless bird called a Moa that the Maori hunted alongside an also extinct giant Haast eagle; the biggest eagle ever known to exist.  We got to see lots of Parrots and other native birds in the wild and the adventure was well worth the effort.  Lacey and I had lots of other non-boating adventures over the month including a trip to see some penguins in a reserve.

After Lacey left, I had a few days to kill before my sister and the boaters showed up.  I reserved a couple of guided rafting trips.  The first trip was on the Shotover River, which gets a lot of traffic thanks to its proximity to Queenstown.  The road into the river had some extremely narrow spots that would have been a bit sketch if we had run into any traffic heading in the wrong direction.  The river was quite fun and one of the more difficult guided rafting trips I have taken.  I personally wouldn’t want to take a bunch of clients down through the steep drops and sharp rocks in the canyon.  My paddle raft even had to be roped out of a hole that it was stuck in.  I hope my draw stroke is what helped us stay upright while we waited for them to hit us with a rope on the second try.  That said everything was pretty fun until we got to the tunnel.  Similar to the American River in California, minors cut a tunnel through the cliff to divert water and help them dig for gold.  The easier line down the rapid is through the tunnel because a large class 5 drop is waiting on the main stem of the river.  That said, the exit to the tunnel is much more difficult that I was expecting.  The tunnel empties out into a sharp bedrock slide.  The raft slid down it just fine, but I wouldn’t want to kayak it at the low flows that we had.  It seemed to have a bunch of sharp fins of rock.  The next day I took another guided trip on the easier Kawarau River and honestly I enjoyed it just as much.  It had 4 different rapids with fun big wave trains that were totally entertaining.  We even boated through a Hobbit filming location where the Gates of Argonath were filmed.   The “gates” weren’t present since they had been created with computers, but it still was a pretty fun spot.  We got to see people bungee jumping from one of the more famous New Zealand locations.

Ok, our favorite editor who is currently working at Boober is getting tired of her new job (she gets carsick, especially with the smell of cheap food in the car) and wants me to get back to the point of this blog; how to make garlic powder, so that we can get some ad revenue coming in.  I don’t have any picture of some of these steps, but you harvest the garlic and dry it in the garage for at least a couple of weeks and up to about 8 months.  For the following photos we are using the last of summer 2019’s crop.  The first step of cooking is the most difficult; shuck all the garlic.

“Of course there is a cause somewhere.  Can’t be an effect without a cause.  You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”  Murakami



Now for a quick mini lesson on New Zealand, while you shuck the garlic.  When all of the other continents were pushed together into Pangaea, New Zealand was under water.  It was only pushed up out of the ocean after the supercontinent broke up.  Before humans arrived, the birds existed as the top predators and the island had no mammals.  Another animal on the island that I find particularly interesting is a dinosaur like lizard called a Tuatara.  I have no idea how they got to the island but they are pretty fun.  Birds and reptiles currently have a hard time breeding in the wild because of the rat invasions brought by the Colonials.  The Maori haven’t been in New Zealand nearly as long as I would have guessed; online I find that they were Polynesian settlers that arrived at about 1320 AD.  It didn’t take to long for the largest birds on the island to go extinct, but the Europeans brought far more damage with their imported mammals and invasive tree species.  The most recent invasive species is a Stoat that was naively brought in to control the rabbit population (also invasive).  It didn’t work and the Stoat has become another big predator of the birds.  Currently New Zealand has a controversial policy of dropping poison over the entire islands targeting the mammal (non-human) species to keep the populations as low as possible.  I know it seems like a crazy policy, but it seems like the best thing for all the bird’s sake.

Carrie on the Routeburn Trek
After a couple of days on my own in Queenstown; the kayaking/rafting crew showed up, my sister Carrie, Babcock, Carol, and Jerod B.  Our first mission was a trek, very unusual for us boater types.  It is kind-a what you do when you go to New Zealand.  We choose a 3-night trek on the Routeburn, which is the second most popular trek in New Zealand.  Four of us brought our own tents so that we could avoid the noisy huts that the New Zealanders and Australians love; Jerod developed a trick of restacking the wood shed and sleeping in it.  We did have to spend one night in a hut, but next time we now know we could have walked a little bit off a side trail and set up a tent instead.  Make your reservations early if you want to hit this up next time you are in New Zealand.  The permit system has an opening date and you really want to grab your reservations that day, but like any reservation system you can also watch for cancellations.

Ok, so now that you have the garlic shucked you need to run it through a mandolin.  It is crucial to wear cut proof gloves, as anyone who has owned a mandolin before could tell you.



“Men on the road together have three choices.  They separate, they kill one another, or they work things out.”  Salman Rushdie in his new book Quichotte


Next came our main mission for New Zealand, run a multi-day river, on our own power without guides.  On the way to the Clarence River we stayed in Christchurch, had the best ramen noodles I have ever had in a refurbished A&W style hamburger shaped restaurant, and saw some of the destruction and rebuilding efforts from the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.  Only recently had all of the bridges and infrastructure been fixed so that the shuttle for the Clarence River wasn’t an epic multi day affair.  We choose inflatable kayaks and a rented raft for this mission.  Overnight trips are what we love in Oregon/ Washington/ Idaho/ etc and we wanted to try a similar adventure in New Zealand.  We choose a six-day class three section of the Clarence River, which seems to be one of the longest runs that you can do in New Zealand.  It starts out as a pretty small river with some boat dragging, and grows in size as you go downstream.  It was hard to find the river information about the river that we wanted, but we dug enough to find some good info.  If you decide to run this river, just contact me and I’ll hook you up with the info I know, including the boat rental company were we rented the raft.  That said we still had a lack of info, one book called the run 136 km, another 170 km, and the biggest estimate of all was 212 km.  I was sitting on a beach on day 2 scratching my head about how far we needed to go each day; it didn’t help that I had forgot to download one of the 6 maps to my GPS map system on my phone, we spent a whole day confused about that.  Honestly I don’t have a lot to tell you about the Clarence other than it was really fun.  It reminded me of the Lower Owyhee river which is one of my favorites.  Similar to the Owyhee the water has high concentrations of minerals and it isn’t recommended that you drink the water even after filtering, but we were able to get water at the very rustic Kiwi Huts and some side streams.  Also similar to the Owyhee you pass through some farmlands; one Kiwi farmer we saw had his own helicopter to go around and check on the sheep, and we happened to see him in action. I haven’t seen that in Oregon.  We only saw one group the entire trip, a guided trip, who just happened to launch the same day and time as us.

The Launch on the Clarence.  Photo by Carrie.
 
A fun little rapid on the Clarence.  Photo by Carrie.

Clarence River.  Photo by Jerod


Clarence River.  Photo by Jerod.
Don't forget, it is New Zealand.  They have rep for bugs.  Photo by Carrie.
“I kept it (a blog) up for a while, making these cheerful, chirpy postings to The Future is Noa! but  I felt like a total fraud.  And then one day, a couple of months after I got back, I happened to check my statistics, and I realized that the whole time since I started my blog, only twelve people had ever visited it, for about a minute each, and I hadn’t had a single hit in weeks, so that’s when I stopped.  There’s nothing sadder than cyberspace when you’re floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.”  Ruth Ozeki A Tale for  the Time Being

Most of the rapids on the Clarence are bouncy boulder filled riffles into a headwall.  It seemed like almost the exact same rapid over and over.  The best whitewater is actually in the last 40 km; in the midst of the best scenery.  The uplift of the Earthquake initially made a waterfall rapid about 8 km from the takeout that was a portage for a number of years. The rocks in this area are all limestone and the river has quickly eroded the river back down to runnable shape again.  The uplifted basically created about 4 miles of our favorite rapids until we reached the bridge at the coastal highway that marked our takeout.  The guided trip floated past us here and went out the last km to the ocean; which made us jealous because we’ve always wanted to float a multi-day river into the ocean; but we didn’t know about it ahead of time and our shuttle was meeting us at the bridge.

From here we headed to a one-day guided sea kayaking adventure in Kaikoura Bay.  It was pretty funny when the guide had us all get into our boats on dry land and practice putting our spray skirts on and off.  It was a great day and we saw a bunch of albatross, fur seals jumping into the water, and a couple of the little blue penguins swimming in the ocean.  Awesome.

Babs putting his skirt on for the "first time."  It's to long of a story for this blog but his bow babe was a treat.   Photo by Carrie.



“With all that I construct a portrait which is the image of all and no one.”  Camus

On the drive to our next river adventure in Murchiston NZ, on the Buller River we heard about the Christchurch Mosque shootings over the radio and Facebook.  It is numbing to think that so many things like this happen in the US; it was hard for us Americans to comprehend how sad the New Zealanders felt.  They really thought that such a thing could never happen to them.  The atmosphere was dreary for the next week or so, but Kiwis (New Zealanders) are good at pulling together.

It is time to turn your oven on to dehydrate mode between 130-150 degrees Farenheit.  If you oven doesn’t have a dehydrate mode you can turn it to the lowest temperature; and consider turning it on then off every hour.  Flip and stir the garlic every couple of hours.







While the oven heats up; Murchiston was the original outpost of South Island boating.  As boating tourists have become more advanced, some of the hub has moved to the West Coastal town of Hokitika, home of the helicopter runs.  Many of the kayakers that visit the Buller River stay at the Riverside Holiday Park and if you arrive on a weekend you should be able to find people to kayak with and boats to rent.  The first day we ran a fun class two section of the Buller called Doc Creek Run and boated back down to the Holiday Park.  At the takeout Carrie and Carol met a group of local boaters.  They had all once been class five boaters but just like us have calmed down.  That same day we shuttled together to the Middle Matakiki River Run.  It is a very pretty class two plus run that is a small step up from the Doc Creek run.  In true New Zealand style, the take out is over a farmer’s field set up through a deal between the farmer and kayak school that pitches in for road maintenance.  Two of the boaters continued past our take out and ran the lower Matakiki River, which has a class four plus rapid created by the 1920’s earthquake in the region.  It would have been difficult in the inflatable kayaks so we ran shuttle.

Matakiki

What to do now.  Photo by Carrie

Carol on the Maruia


Carrie on the Maruia

Our second day was the highlight.  Carrie, Carol, and I ran the upper Maruia River.  You might have heard of this river because the lower gorge has a 30-foot waterfall that has long been famous with kayakers including a classic video of Rush Sturges doing a front flip off the drop in a Dagger kayak.  It was fun to look at it on our drive home after our run upstream of it.  The run we did was a classic class three, granite boulder run with crystal clear water on a sunny day.  Again we had to take out in a farmer’s field and they were cool with it when we asked while running the shuttle.  Amazing, that would never happen in the US.  We left them a six-pack.  This river has a long lead in and equally long paddle out so it isn’t that popular with the local boaters.  The three of us loved it and would run it every other weekend if we lived close to it.  The run is in the other side of a mountain from the road and goes through native Kiwi bush and trees.  When you are in New Zealand it is easy to spot native trees compared to European and American invasive replants.  The run likely has never been logged.  It had about 15 class 3 minus rapids with one solid class 3 rapid which made the perfect break for lunch.  It should be noted that we ran this at lower levels and the run would be much more difficult at higher river levels.  We felt like we were back in Idaho on a granite run and we loved it.

After at least six hours of stirring occasionally and baking you will need to check the garlic.  You are looking for it to snap in half easily.



While you keep stirring and checking the garlic, our next adventure was a helicopter run on the west coast of the South Island called the Landsborough.  It is one of a few classics overnighters in the area.   For a while we had talked about trying to do it ourselves with the inflatable kayaks, but the logistics and knowledge of river levels seemed like a pretty big road bump in the planning.  When I contacted a local guide company, the amount they quoted us didn’t sound too bad and we decided to go for a guided trip.  We told them ahead of time that we were boaters and asked to stay an extra day on the river, we got quite an adventure with Alex, Rodin, Baurny, and Wika; all stellar fellas and able to party with the best of them.  I know at least a couple of them are pretty famous in the boating community.  Two of them even brought rifles to do a little hunting on the trip; all of the mammals are invasive in New Zealand and thus the hunting regulations are pretty relaxed.

By the way, Carol and I are in this helicopter at this point.  Photo by Carrie
Carol in a helicopter.

A helicopter selfie is always a bit expensive.


Anyone recognize this guy.  I know at least a couple of you do.  Photo by Carrie.  PS, such a great guy.

Photo by Carrie.
 Solve the equation 3x+4=19.  Wait is anyone even listening to my zoom lecture at this point?

 
Photo by Carrie.
If you look close you can see Carrie, Babs, and Jerod coming in.
It is hard to explain this drinking game.  But Babs was good at it.
The adventure started with a helicopter ride into our first camp.  It was a gorgeous day and the west coast mountain glaciers were out in full force.  It was an amazing flight.  Our first day of boating included all of the bigger rapids.  New Zealand rivers are constantly changing during each flood event and every rapid was a little bit different from the last time the guides had seen it.  The paddle raft hit just about every rock in the river, but we survived without any swims.  The gear boat was stocked with lots of gear and generally had good lines until it broke an oar.  The spare oar was also broken.  Luckily this was on the last of the big rapids and they were able to R2 it down to camp where Jerod used his skills to fix the broken oar.  Then it was a layover day in an awesome camp (minus the sandflies) before boating out the next day to end a great adventure.


Photo by Carrie.  Wika.

The current Portage. Photo by Carrie.

Layover
Jerod fixing an oar on a guided trip.
Soon after we left the river there was a big flood on the Landsborough that wiped out a lot of the bridges and land locked a number of people.  If it had been forecasted during our trip we would have had to cancel.  Did I mention New Zealand has crazy weather with tons of little mini microclimates?  We had to leave for home after the Landsbourogh but New Zealand was quite the adventure.

Back to the garlic, now you will need to turn the garlic into a powder using a coffee grinder.   Since our house always buys ground coffee, ours never gets used for coffee; but instead enjoys an occasional grind of some garlic or Ancho powder.  The trick is to run the powder through a stainless steel kitchen strainer after each grind session and then regrind the parts that won’t fit through the strainer.  After repeating this process for awhile, sometimes I will return the small bits that don’t fit through the strainer to the oven and other times I just toss them into the compost bin.






“Just like a one-winged angel”  I accidently made up this quote while drinking an Aperol Spritz and listening to Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks.  It makes me sad. I picture an angel on its fall from heaven after a small misstep from a cloud without the ability to make it back; because heaven lacked the foresight to utilize Universal Design and build safety railing on the clouds.

Because I took winter term 2019 off, I had to work summer term 2019 and couldn’t fit in any big adventures.  But we did manage to run a section of the Upper Owyhee River in the week that is between my spring term and summer term.  The Owyhee has long been one of my favorite rivers because it sits in a very isolated corner of Oregon and Idaho.  This was our first time on the upper stretches of the river and it won’t be our last.  We choose to take our versatile inflatable kayaks down the upper branches of the East Fork of the Owyhee River and ended our trip at Three Forks; a hard shell would have worked just fine on this section.  We began at Garat Crossing below a class four plus gorge.  Our flow was 840 cfs dropping to 580 cfs measured at Crutchers Crossing.  You will likely need to use one of the local shuttle services to help you find this launch site because it is pretty hidden.  The shuttle driver didn’t think my truck would make it down the steep road to the put-in and back up, which we had expected, so we took 2 loads each down the 1000 foot decent into the canyon with camping gear for 6 nights and boating gear.  A four-wheeler might really help out here and would be able to get down to the river or at least to the last little drop off.

 
The Launch.  Photo by David Brigg



Photo by David Brigg


Our first campsite was at a place called The Thules.  The river once went through a beavertail, but has cut a path straight through leaving the beavertail dry.  It was gorgeous but I can’t recommend this camp.  It was full of mosquitos and some ticks.  It might be the case that we just had bad timing.

The next day was a 20-mile day with amazing scenery down to the confluence of Deep Creek and an amazing campsite.  Some groups come into this location via Deep Creek instead, which might be something to try out on some future trip.  We lounged around for the afternoon preparing for a long adventure the following day.  A mountain lion even showed itself for a brief minute up on the cliff behind camp.

Owyhee Falls.  Photo by David Brigg.

The next day lead us through one rapid that was easier than it looked called Boulder Jam and then down to the portage at Owyhee Falls, an un-runnable rapid at these flows.  First of all let me tell you what I would do next time at the Owyhee Falls (a place I have long wanted to visit).  I would camp on river left about 150 yards above the start of the rapid at an ok campsite that will be there for you unless the water is pretty high.   There is a trail from camp, that is a bit hard to find but it winds out of camp and high up the hill before descending back down to the river.  It is the safest portage path, but shortcuts exist downstream on the left that are steep and a little sketch.  In my ideal plan I would walk my boat and gear to the bottom of the rapid before setting up camp that night.  The next morning I would break camp and walk my camping gear down to the bottom.  Opinions will vary a lot here, but there is also a portage route on the right through the boulders; it didn’t look very nice to me.  It had a small eddy and the entire walk looked like it was through these huge boulders and you still have to run the bottom section of the rapid with a loaded boat after a long portage.  So what we actually did do was use one of the shortcuts on river left and took between one and three trips each during the middle of the day in the sun.  It was exhausting.  When it is all done, grab the camp that is a little ways down on river right across from a spring.  It is so awesome, and you earned it!!

Photo by David Brigg

You have no idea, I would do anything to be here now.  I'm currently stuck in a 850 square foot house and feel lucky as shit to have a job and a house. Reach out to your friends and family  if you find yourself in need; I think we all are willing to bend a few of our usual "helping a dirtbag-kayaker" rules in a positive way. To be clear, I'm not helping everyone of you who reads this blog out (I think the usual count on my stats is about 12); but I've already had some plans set in motion to help a few people, and am willing to put a few more plans in motion.   Photo by David Brigg

Photo by David Brigg

Photo by David Brigg

Photo by David Brigg

Photo by David Brigg

Photo by David Brigg

Portage at Thread the Needle.  Photo by David Brigg.

Photo by David Brigg

The hotspring; would have been awesome if it wasn't so damn cold out.
Shortly downstream, the next day began with a much easier portage on the left at Thread the Needle.  I could see how this gets runnable at some flows.  We continued down some fun whitewater to Clutcher’s crossing which is another access point.  Past that we hit the confluence of the South Fork and East Fork Owyhee.  If you can time it with your trip itinerary to stay here; it is amazing.  We plan to run the South Fork into this location the next time we give the upper Owyhee a go; just to give a different stretch of the river a try.  We didn’t stay at this camp because we didn’t know the run well enough to be wasting too much time.  House Rock Rapids and Bald Mountian Canyon (which also had a good campsite) were a lot of fun.  We ended up staying just below Dukes Creek at a small sand bar that was difficult to find but was a nice spot; after what felt like a really long windy day.  (SA Dave lost his drone at this campsite; if it wasn’t so darn sad to see him sad, it was pretty damn funny to watch the thing crash itself into a cliff).  Be careful choosing your camp itinerary on the Upper Owyhee.  It just doesn’t get run often enough for the boater traffic to clear good campsites and there are some really long stretches with absolutely no useable camps.  You can always find a spot in the sagebrush but it will be you, tent, rocks, some cowshit, and sagebrush and you won’t enjoy it.

An early launch from below Dukes Creek, brought us down to Cabin rapid.  SA Dave and I were able to run everything except for the lead in; which was literally just a quick drag over the rocks.  Some of it was too difficult for Niki and she walked sections of it while Dave walked back up and ran her boat down.  The rapid was deceptively difficult and long.  It is possible to walk the whole thing on the left. You would have to take your time and watch for Rattlesnakes and it wouldn’t be much fun, but it would be an easier portage than Owyhee Falls.  My plan for the future is have the less capable boaters walk it and the others will just run it a few times taking their IK’s and hard shells down.  This was by far the hardest rapid we ran; most of the other difficult stuff was likely portages at most flows.  On the list of, what I would do next time, the camp on the right directly below Cabin looks amazing.  This was our only true error of the trip, skipping that camp.   Next time.  We proceeded down to Cable.  PLEASE scout the entrance to this portage.  It was easy but any error and you are in some big trouble.  A rope down in the eddy isn’t a bad idea.  At some flows the rapid is runnable, but our flow there just wasn’t much of a line.  It is a boulder sieve so it would likely get easier at low water or at high water.  I think almost every big rapid on the Owyhee, Jarbridge, and Bruneau was formed by a landside from the cliffs and looks similar to this one.  It took us a long time to find a camp after that, so watch your timing.  We finally found one just below Five Bar Ranch at the confluence of the West Fork Owyhee.  It was a hard camp to find, but it worked just fine.   

We had planned to stay one more night but the weather changed our minds.  Next time I do this river I want to camp near the mouth of Antelope Creek and explore its long history of Native American occupation in this drainage.  Some very old documented artifacts come from this side stream.  The campsite won’t be that great but it looked doable and a great opportunity to explore.  The hot springs some miles below Antelope Creek on the left is amazing (make sure to crawl up to the top) but it just wasn’t quite warm enough to fight the bitter cold wind and chill that was setting in; not to mention it doesn’t seem like it has much of a campsite.  We got off a day early at Three Forks bummed that we had missed a couple of good camps, but so stoked on the upper Owyhee.  I mean, just check out these pictures.  I love all the runs in this area.

Our next little mini adventure was Allison’s permit down the Rogue River.  We stayed one night at a nice camp and then two nights at the Ross Family Lodge (Half Moon Bar Lodge).  Pretty sweet.

One final trip of the summer; Becky, SA Dave and I circumnavigated Orcas Island up in the San Juans.  We had dolphins hanging with us everyday.  It was another great mini adventure.  You might notice I’m complaining about working last summer and yet I was able to fit in three badass trips.  Us teachers have it so rough :-). (Sarcasm)  No really I hate this whole teaching online thing, but at least I have a job and I totally feel for you boaters out there who don’t have anything at the moment, because of these necessary shelter-in-place rules.

“I’ve always wanted to write a book; maybe explore the inner workings of the boater community and their motivations.  I have never make it very far with this idea, but it is always fun to read some really good books traveling on these adventures and tossing good quotes into the blog from the books I’m reading.” Shane

After a recent night of too much food and too much whiskey, I had a dream.   In the dream, it was the middle of a hot summer night where I was walking down a street in a small town.  I spotted an indoor garage sale that included a lot of whitewater equipment at great prices.  I loaded up on all sorts of paddles, boats, and other things that I was hoping to buy.  All the cheap prices seemed to good to be true until I went to purchase the items. They told me the bill came to $142.19.  President Trump had recently printed new currency.  I had a $10,000 bill that featured the President himself in the center fold, but my purchases didn’t add up to that much and they didn’t have change for my large bill.  The $10,000 dollar bill was the only currency that Trump had printed on paper.  The Federal Reserve had printed other currencies on recycled things such as old bowling trophies, leather wallets, flip flops, and other odds and ends.  That also wasn’t a problem because I had a huge backpack full of the newly stamped currency.  I started by placing the old bowling trophy on the table to figure out how much it was worth.  In tiny print that took me awhile to read (because I had forgot my newly prescribed reading glasses): it said $19.93.  The problem was that all of the currency wasn’t printed as nice multiples of one, two, five, or ten; it was all sorts of random numbers.  The old wallet was worth $1.56 and the list went on.  I was trying to stack stuff on the table and mentally add until I reached an amount of close to $142.19.  The mental adding was the real nightmare as I kept struggling to add in my sleep.  I never resolved the dilemma before stirring and waking.

After reading this and thinking about money, the editors of the blog have figured out a crucial error in our funding model.  It turns out these online recipes usually try to advertise a key ingredient in the recipe attached to a known brand name such as Kraft Mayonnaise.  That is the most common funding model for a food blog.  We made this garlic powder from scratch and we even used last year’s garlic cloves to seed this year’s crop.  There isn’t a single source of advertising that is going to take us on.  We have shifted the advertising model towards the liquor brands shown in the background shots; but we have been told that this doesn’t make much money. Liquor doesn’t need to advertise during a Stay-at-home order.  We hope our ideas work to generate some much needed income for the editors, but for now our favorite Editor Two is going to have to keep working at Boober, Editor One has to keep living with his mom, and I need to continue to teach college math in this weird virtual world.  Someday this blog will pay off, but it doesn’t look like it will be this year.  In the meantime, if you live in the Portland area, please consider placing an order with Boober to support my editor and let me know how it goes, I’m curious what you think.

On that note, lets finish up this garlic powder.

Recipe for Garlic Powder
1.  Plant the Garlic
2.  Grow the Garlic
3.  Harvest and Dry the Garlic
4.  Husk the Garlic
5.  Turn the oven on Dehydrate mode at about 130-150 degrees Fahrenheit
6.  Run the Garlic through a mandolin (The kitchen tool not the musical instrument)
7.  Toss in oven flipping and turning often until they break when snapped (6 hours or so)
8.  Run through the coffee grinder (Mine never gets used for coffee, just ancho powder, garlic powder, substances that recently became legal, etc. you get the idea)
9.  Run through a stainless steel kitchen strainer
10.  Toss in bits that didn’t fit in the strainer back in the oven at 150 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour
11.  Repeat till you have no garlic chunks are left
12.  Store in refrigerator and share with your friends.  IE. In the times of social distancing you should leave a bottle of whiskey and packet of garlic powder on their porch, text them, and wave.

Actual Covid-19 update from Shane:  This blog is very “Tongue in Cheek” and “Stream of Consciousness” thinking.  We here at the blog are working hard to just create a temporary distraction from your daily routine during a Shelter-in-place order.  I really don’t care if you are politically left of center like most of my students or far right of center (I realize that some of you family members will consider my criticism of Trump to be a bit harsh but it really was just a dream I had).  I love you all and I appreciate all of the sacrifices you are making.  We all should be concerned about the rate of spread of this disease and all of our efforts make a difference.  I’m very concerned about you and your family just as much as I’m concerned about elderly members of my family.  If you want to support the people I/you love, keep your distance so the first derivative of the logistic model has as small of a global maximum as possible.  Oops that was kinda mathy, just do your part to flatten the curve.

Take Care.  I’m so glad I got to hardshell the Middle White Salmon two weekends in a row before all the shelter in place orders came down; I dream about those quick runs a little every day.
SYOTRACV
See You On The River After Corona Virus


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