Roll your own.

A couple times a week we have just beans and rice for dinner, and to spruce things up usually also have tortillas, and most all of the time I make the tortillas myself. I got into making my own tortillas years ago while backpacking in Guatemala. I guess I thought tortillas simply came from machines somewhere, but there along the streetsides of every town were women patting out corn tortillas and cooking them on car fenders and hoods positioned over charcoal fires. I experimented for a while with corn tortillas from a mix but never liked the results, then moved on to flour tortillas, also from a mix, and was more satisfied. After moving to Missoula I forewent mixes and did all my tortilla making from scratch.

Tortillas from scratch can be done with regular around-the-house ingredients, and I estimate I can make a batch of a dozen for less than 25 cents and in about half an hour. Better, there's really no way to mess them up, and I only measure the flour and water and just eyeball the rest. (One thing that does help is that our well has very minerally water, which I think makes them fluffier. San Antonio, which I saw somewhere was the Tortilla Capital of the World, also has famously minerally water.)

Here's my recipe:

3 cups regular flour; 1 cup very hot water; a handful of shortening; about a teaspoon of salt; about a teaspoon of baking powder

1. Mix the flour, shortening, salt, and baking powder. Then, add the hot water and knead into a ball. Add flour or water if it's too wet/too dry. It should look about like this:

2. Cover the dough with a damp cloth and let it sit somewhere warm for a few minutes; I put it atop the radiator. While the dough is rising, heat up your griddle. We use, courtesy of my parents, a good-sized plug-in griddle, though before I got that I used the largest, thickest frying pan I could find. Or, you could use a car hood -- whatever happens to work. Whatever it is, it needs to be good and hot.

3. Take a scoop of dough and sort of roll it out so the creases disappear. Nothing perfect, but perhaps like this:

4. On a floured surface, roll the dough out into something that looks like the sort of tortilla you want to eat. Mine are about 8 inches across and not totally round circles. I like mine thick, but Laura likes them thin. Does not matter. Here's what passes as acceptable at our house:

5. Put the tortilla on the griddle and cook about 90 seconds per side.

6. Here is the finished result:

Meanwhile, in the Bitterroot:

Funny moment below Lappi Lake on Saturday: I skinned 5.25 miles up Bass Creek Canyon and hooked a left to climb toward Lappi Lake, but misjudged things and had about an hour of full body contact thrashing in a heinous forest before popping up at the lake and making it most of the way to the summit. Along the way most of the time I could look back and see the hulking behemoth of St. Joe across the canyon -- one of the Bitterroot's biggest peaks. Anyway, I had a nice descent and on the way out tried to traverse north to miss the worst of the forest and coming around a knob saw a party of two in the bowl across from me who had come up the way I though was better. Even though they were 50 yards away the acoustics meant we could have a perfectly normal conversation. After talking snow for a moment I said, "Don't follow my tracks into the forest -- it's a morass." One of the guys thanked me, paused for a moment, and added "And don't follow our tracks either -- the forest we came through is awful."

A bit more of a chat revealed that they had left the trailhead an hour ahead of me and already summitted St. Joe, and were just having a fun tour to Lappi to take in the scenery. BURLY!

Parting shot: baby's first time skiing.

Scouting Libby.

Getting to know Pole Creek.

Legendary Turner: remote, open three days a week, and $37.

The neighborhood: when they tell you what CB channel to monitor, you know it's remote.

Turner's lone chair.

Purcell Mountains.

Turner's front side.

Afternoon run on Flatiron Pass.

Storm day in the Libby Creek cirque, central Cabinet Mountains.

Snowy drive home.

Work 8 hours, drive 7 miles, ski until dark. Repeat.

Pattee after work.

Jumbo, Hellgate, and Missoula from Woody Mountain.

Elsewhere ski conditions have degraded markedly. Two weeks of little snow, warm temperatures, and clear skies up high have pounded and baked everything into a mess. I went up Sweeney with Mo, Derek, and Cassidy on Sunday and we found poor conditions.

I hate to see that evening sun go down.

Scott and I got skunked on Mill Point: plenty of snow but not enough to cover the horrendous amount of downfall there. I was on Mill two years ago but either there was much more snow then or much less downfall. Either way, we got to 6,300 feet and could see the summit and nearly the entire way was littered with downed trees. In some 20 years of backcountry skiing it was the first time I can ever recall where I kept my skins on for the descent.

So I got home at an embarrasingly early hour. Cooper was asleep, so on Laura's prodding I went out for a second time, this time to a spot very close to town. I found great snow, no downfall, cold temperatures, and clear skies. There aren't nearly enough good clear cold days around here, and on days like that I hate to see that sun going down.

Current conditions.

Career goals and ambitions and whatnot and etc.

(View west from the summit of Camas Point, down the full length of North Lost Horse Canyon and into the abyss of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness complex, one of the largest roadless areas in the United States.)

On Friday morning I sent out a flurry of texts seeing who wanted to go skiing, but since I had not heard from anyone by the end of the work day, and since I was feeling tired, and since it had not snowed in a while, and since it was at that moment cloudy, I started thinking about a small day to someplace I already knew pretty well. But Mo texted as I was making dinner: well how about Camas?

(Upper Camas, after all was said and done.)

Camas is a decent goal for a day of skiing, with skinning from the car, good vertical, and pleasing scenery; even better, while I’ve heard a lot about the mountain and spent plenty of time looking at it, I’ve never been. I met Mo at 7, Ted drove her Tacoma in 4 lo to 4,700 feet, we met the other half of our group at the turnaround, and were skinning by 9.

(First few turns from the summit: not bad. The Bitterroot Valley near Hamilton is about 5,000 vertical feet below.)

Turns out I was mostly right about the snow. Though we had spectacular clear skies and it was not too cold, after the initial 10 turns from the summit we were met with wind buff and a variety of semi-supportable crusts. Probably the best snow of the day was found on the kiddie slopes above Kidney Lake.

(Traversing to find softer snow.)

On the drive home I talked to Mo. Today, in fact, she begins a multi-week process of taking written and oral exams which, once she passes, will allow her to be called a “PhD candidate”. (Her beau Ted, I believe, has a master’s.) Missoula probably has more opportunity for ecological-type PhDs than most towns its size, but that’s not saying a lot. She and Ted said they did not want to leave Montana, or at least the Northern Rockies. So I posed the question I sometimes think about: what if the University of Kansas City called and offered a sweet job and tons of money? (Actually, I have no idea if there is such a thing as the University of Kansas City; I just made that up because Kansas City sounds in every practical way the opposite of Montana.) No way, they both said practically in unison.

(After a short scramble from the summit proper, getting ready to descend.)

You certainly pay a premium to live in a place like Missoula. Most people understand that pretty well and made the choice accordingly. In the pursuit of passport stamps and powder turns Laura and I made decisions that will have a lifetime impact on our earning potential. Then again, we got the passport stamps and the powder turns, and skiing Camas is a decision I can make the night before while making dinner. Anyway, something to think about.

Here's a picture of a sleeping baby:

If what you really want is all-Cooper-all-the-time, see my other blog

It feels good to use stuff up.

We are rewarded for buying new things, not using things until they are used up, and it's easy to ditch stuff when it gets blemished or goes out of style. To me it feels good to use things until they have no life in them. Witness: an old pair of ski gloves.

I found these along the access road while driving home from Cataloochee one night about five years ago. I used them for backcountry skiing and biking. Biking is hard on gloves and these have been in a stage of falling apart for several years now. When the duct tape shreds began to catch on the brake lever, and when I could feel air oozing through the holes, and when someone casually asked why I was still wearing them, I figured it was time for an upgrade.

It will be interesting to see how long these $13 Kinco gloves last. They're made for construction but are the go-to glove for patrollers. They are lined but I can feel cool air coming through the knuckles where the fabric is; Kinco had all-leather gloves, but they were $3 more.