• Down on the Ground Hiking with Hobbes

    This was written in the summer of 2019 on what turned out to be my last hike with this good friend for many years; he has since, as mountain people are wont to put it, ‘gone on up the mountain.’   Down on the Ground Hiking with Hobbes   Sumer is icumen in Loude sing…

  • Friends to Cross Passes With

    First published as part of the second edition of Dragons in Paradise, in 2014.  Friends to Cross Passes With   It was getting dark, and snowing harder, and I was wondering if they were actually crazy enough to have come out on this fool’s adventure. Was I going to get to the cabin and find…

  • Mountain Bluebird

    Grendel en route from Poverty Gulch to Mendicant Ridge

    Presented in April 2016 at the Gunnison Arts Center, as the opening for a writer’s workshop. Thanks, David – and thanks for the invitation to be here tonight. Greetings to all of you, and welcome to Western. It has been wonderful to watch David and Mark Todd and other Western faculty bring “Writing the Rockies”…

  • Partnering with a Border Collie

    Partnering with a Border Collie by George Sibley   Barring strange accidents or chance, I’ve partnered with my last dog – mostly because my last dog was such a superior partner.  She was a border collie, Zoe; and Zoe was actually the only dog I’ve ever really been invited to partner with, however unworthy I…

  • Dancing in the Streets Crested Butte Style

    From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.                                                                                     – T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”               In a strange mix of grace and craziness, a group of costumed women doing the stately Morris-dance lead down Elk Avenue a much less stately…

  • Sawmill I: Working the Gate between Worlds

      First published in High Country News, Sept. 16, 1985; the sawmill job had been in the late 1970s.   Sawmill I: Working the Gate between Worlds   In the realm of interesting things that confuse me and confusing things that interest me, the relationships between trees and humans are high on my list.  As…

  • Desert Empire

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    ‘The Desert Empire’ is a long essay Sibley wrote for Harper’s magazine in 1977, a drought year throughout the American West, and one of the five driest years in the recorded history of Colorado River flows. It is part celebration of the accomplishments that enabled the Colorado River Basin to survive that year on close…