The new book is something I always wanted to do – an illustrated nature journal.  The publisher was persuaded to have the drawings produced in colour and he also went into hardcover.  Both are a first for me, and the book has been beautifully printed in China.  I've just returned from a seven-week book tour - very exhausting but the usual mix of interesting new people and old friends and, of course, a way to make enough money to pay the fall bills.  Here are a couple of the internal illustrations - there are lots of plant drawings too.

For more details, check out the book page

But the big news is the pendulum. You may remember that I have been struggling with food sensitivities. I had been visiting an alternative medicine dietitian, and she had been “energy testing” me for food: if the food is placed on your stomach and you have good muscle resistance to pressure on your arm or leg, you can eat it: if you have no muscle resistance, you cannot eat it. It sounds bizarre and I went into the woman's office every time with “I don't believe this” but I had to admit it was working. The only trouble was, the list of foods I could not eat was getting longer – no meat, no gluten, no sulphites (vinegars, dried fruit, wine), no sugar, no soy, no caffein, no alcohol, no dairy. As I did not have unrestricted access to fresh fruit and vegetables (and I dislike beans) this was quite a problem. By March I was looking at a picture of the wildflowers in the Mammary Meadows and instead of the joy of being there, all I could think of was the pain of getting there. (I have fibromyalgia so a certain level of pain is constant, but the food problems made me ache a lot worse and gave me flu-like symptoms, too.) I was beginning to wonder how much longer I could continue up in the mountains.

I spent a lot of time cruising the web and trying various diets – the 4-day diet, the alkaline diet, but nothing much was working. Then somehow I fell into a pendulum site. I was attracted to the woman who gave it because she was not trying to be a Hollywood film star as so many of these “mystical” people do – she just looked very practical and ordinary. She suggested a few acupressure exercises to stimulate the pendulum. I went through them and made a pendulum out of a bit of sewing thread and a nail, the thread about 6" long. I held it in front of an apple (which I knew I could eat) and it started to swing. I held it in front of vinegar (which I knew I could not eat) and it swung the opposite way. It was completely mind blowing. I knew dowsing for water worked (although I have never tried it), but I had no idea you could dowse for other things.

So now I had a fail-safe tool to tell me not only what I could or could not eat, but also what supplements I needed and when.  I did not even need the food in front of me I simply could ask the pendulum if I could eat it.  This was a great boon for making the summer's shopping list.  I still had to buy things like flour and spaghetti to feed other people but I needed to know if I could drink soy milk or rice milk and stuff like that.  But it did not solve the food sensitivity problem and I was constantly asking myself why.

Many of the sites I looked at, including the pendulum site,  mentioned a woman called Donna Eden and her book Energy Medicine.  I had ignored her for a while but when the pendulum lady mentioned her I finally broke down and bought the book for $9.00 from Amazon.com.  I found it very difficult to deal with at first, as the cross referencing and indexing was poor.  Basically, Donna Eden embraces routines of stimulating acupressure points for all kinds of reasons – improving general health, brain power, stress relief, pain relief and so on.  She advocates a five-minute daily routine that does indeed take five minutes after you have learned it, but which took me at least half an hour at first as it took a lot of learning (even when I did stimulate the brain!).  But within a week I was feeling more energetic.  I had never believed in things like Auras and Chakras before, but here I was stimulating them.  Pendulums are not mentioned in Donna Eden's book, but with the pendulum I was able to determine which exercises I needed to do and whether or not I was touching the right place for the acupressure points.

Then came the breakthrough.  About three quarters of the way through the book I came upon a routine for getting rid of allergies.  Eden used it to cure a young man of severe hayfever.  This seemed a pretty remarkable claim.  Would it work for food sensitivities?  One of the items I missed most was bread.  I had just made a batch for visitors and I cut myself a slice.  I held Penny (the pendulum) in front of it – she indicated No.  I put the bread in a bag, stuffed it in my waist band so it lay on my stomach, and went through the 10-minute routine of holding certain acupressure points in order.  I held the pendulum in front of the bread – it said YES!  I ate the bread.  Adverse  symptoms usually appear the following day but the next morning nothing happened.  So I went through the process with cheese which had been a big no-no before.  Same thing.  No before the routine, yes afterwards - and no after effects.  I enjoyed my favourite food – bread and cheese, for the first time in a year and a half.  And the real bonus was that after I did the routine with a couple more foods, almost all the rest of the sensitivities disappeared by themselves.  I still have problems with preservatives – sulphites, commercially made ascorbic acid and pectin, and various chemicals used to maintain colour and flavour in processed food.  And you would be surprised how difficult it is to avoid these things when eating away from home.  When I travel I hold my pendulum over items in the supermarket or people's kitchens and know right away if I can eat it without problems.  I get some funny looks – and have a lot of explaining to do – but it works. Obviously, I cannot go into greater detail here and there is a lot more to it.  But if anyone has allergies or sensitivities and wants to try this, please contact me and I will explain things more fully.

As a result of all this, I found I had a great deal more energy than I have had for years and not only looked forward to all my hiking trips but also went on several camping trips.  I covered more ground on foot than I have done for a decade.  I had a whole new lease of life.

An account of my hikes in pictures can be seen on my website on the photojournal page.  But one trip deserves a mention.  I am now trying to arrange it so that I can get to other mountain ranges for a week or so in the summer and look for plants there.  My dream is to do a Mountain Plants of BC book.  But it means I have to go away in the peak season  when the flowers are blooming.

At the end of July I flew with friends to Success Lakes near the foot of Mount Monarch.  It is possible to use a float plane to get into the lower of the two Success Lakes, but not fly out of there as it is too small for a plane to take off loaded.  We intended to camp for three days then hike out for five days to Hunlen Falls.  I had done most of the hike in reverse 25 years ago and anticipated no difficulty with the remaining distance.

But the country around Success Lakes proved impossible for anyone who was not a mountain climber.  We had the dogs to contend with as well as ourselves.  The bush was incredibly thick and the rocks were loose and huge and steep.  It took all day to go 1½ kms from one lake to the next.  And just before we made camp on the only bush-free area, a tiny boulder fan at the bottom of a creek,

one of our party stumbled and badly twisted his foot.  Even if he had been able to hike, however, I doubt we could have found a way out of there.  I did day hikes from the camp and found spectacular flowers and glaciers,

but any attempt to find a route through to the hiking route I knew was foiled by cliffs, huge sheets of ice, or giant unstable morraines.  The satellite phone that was supposed to have come with the group was discovered to be out of date at the last minute so we had no means of communication. Our campsite was right below where Tweedsmuir Air's flight-seeing tours would fly overhead and we hoped to be able to signal them, but for several days the weather was poor.  Finally a Cessna flew overhead.  We waved red things frantically, the plane circled, waggled its wings to indicate that it saw us, and flew to Nimpo.  Several hours later an RCMP helicopter arrived from Kamloops and flew us home.

Speaking of dogs, I nearly forgot to tell you I now have two new dogs.  Bucky was given away last fall and in his place came Nahanni from Inuvik. 

She is a white husky bred by a sled dog outfit – and she wouldn't pull the sled.  She was shipped down on the vegetable truck.  A guy called Bill, who lives in Inuvik, spends his life driving south to Costco in Kamloops, filling his gigantic refrigerated truck full of produce, then driving it north.  With truck maintainance and the like, which he does down south, the round trip takes 2 – 3 weeks.  In the winter, when the tundra is frozen, he can drive to Tuktoyuktuk.  Makes the idea of a 100 Mile diet seem a little ridiculous.  Anyway, he brought Nahanni to Williams Lake where I met him at the Husky station!  Where else would you pick up a husky dog?

Nahanni is very pretty and feminine and affectionate.  Raffi was bigger but Nahanni soon learned to beat him up.  She is very much a prima donna and did not like carrying the pack so I have to resort to subterfuge to put it on her.  Then, to my horror, Raffi got a twisted stomach in May.  I rushed him to the vet in Williams Lake but they recommended to have him put down.  So that was very upsetting.  Anyway, I now have Badger, a squat, shaggy somewhat unpreposessing dog who dislikes men in baseball caps as he was beaten by them in the past.  But he has turned out to be a very happy goofy dog who really loves life. 

He also loves water.  He does not mind carrying his pack too much – he goes swimming anyway.  Nahanni thought she was going to boss him as well but after a couple of really gung ho dog fights, she has learned to respect him.

Progress at Ginty Creek is slow but sure.  The first guy I did a deal with to build a nicer cabin for me in return for the lower property has faded out of the picture but I now have a similar arrangement with another person.  Not much of his work was done last summer as he had other commitments but with the help of my trusty wwoofers I did a lot more falling a clearing.  The spring wwoofers ripped the bathroom out of the trailer and put a small tin stove in there for a heater.  It will be quite a bit more comfortable.  In the fall, the trailer was moved from beside the river to the upper property and a wwoofer and I built a roof for it.  Huge piles of brush await burning in the spring.

I arrived home from the book tour in -36C weather!  But my wonderful wwoofer-cum-dog-sitter had a warm cabin, the woodbox full, soup and bread made, water hauled from the post office (where I have to pick it up when the river is frozen) and a huge pile of Christmas mail.  Also, there was very little snow - only about 2” on the ground so I did not have to plough.  A very different home-coming from the last two years!

In two days it is the solstice.  The days will be getting longer and that brings hope for the coming year.  I wish you all the best for a prosperous season and all the year - and years - to come.

(Sunrise/moonset at Ginty Creek.)

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