Who is The Schiff?

“We must develop the moral imagination that will allow us…to develop empathy with wild creatures.  We must nourish in ourselves the humility to escape an infantile egoism…requiring us to understand that the universe was not created for our particular species and generation alone.” (Kathleen Dean Moore & Michael P. Nelson)

The Schiff is an irreverent pen name used by Silvertip Mountain Center, LLC (members, Laurie Hinck and Jay Schifferdecker).  Our home is Silver Gate, Montana, a small village with around seven year round residents amidst one of the most rugged and remote spans of alpine left in the U.S.  Shrouded in snow and ice most of the year, this place bestows blessing upon us daily.

But we scrapped and struggled to get this life, it is our deliberate design for happiness.  After attending graduate school, Laurie purchased the home of her infancy.  Jay found this place over twenty years ago.  Together we own Silvertip Mountain Center and the Log Cabin Café.  Epic hard work in the summers, careful budgeting, willful leveraging and deliberate design make this amazing life financially possible.
We sacrifice security to wake here everyday.

Our voice is uncommon, bred from our incredible mountain life:

·        Intimate knowledge of mountains from years of alpine climbing, skiing, walking

·        Attachment to home

·        Doctoral study of culture and the environment

·        Commitment to a healthy democracy, community & the free circulation of ideas  

·        Environmentally ethical & successful models for two gateway businesses

Combined, our experience gives us an unwavering, uncompromising commitment to environmental advocacy, starting especially with the protection of our home.  We exist to be good neighbors to our nonhuman surroundings.  Our blog comes from our sense of moral and ethical obligation.

Who is Jay Schifferdecker?

I grew up in the grasslands of rural Kansas at the edge of the Flint Hills where I always spent a lot of time outside.  In Kansas, it is hard to find wild places.  I mostly explored creek bottoms because I didn’t feel alone anywhere else.  Everywhere else was open prairie and plowed fields.  I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

When I was 17, I hiked some of the John Muir trail alone then enrolled in college in Manhattan, Kansas.  During my first summer break, I escaped back to Yosemite for a seasonal job.  That was all it took for me to give up on my institutional education. 

In Yosemite, I learned the about the ironies of wilderness preservation and modern society’s demands on the environment.  Yosemite is ironic because it is supposed to be a place for the protection of wilderness, but it also has a massive industrial machine.  The infrastructural system set up to deal with visitors’ needs becomes the experience itself.  As soon as you are away from the valley floor, wilderness reigns again.  I still love Yosemite and climb there as much as I can, but it is a strange place.  Yosemite’s busy-ness got to me and in the late 1980s, I left to take a job in the Tetons.

Often during these years, I hitchhiked across the West between adventures.  Living on the road like that was simple.  I learned a part of life most people have never experienced.  It also taught me to appreciate the comfort of my life now.

In the spring of 1991, I was in the Beartooths looking for ski opportunities and discovered Cooke City.  Since then, it has been home for me on and off.  Many times in Cooke City, I lived in a shack with no water and took extended backcountry trips. 

I hope that these blog posts will inspire and encourage more concrete action on behalf of the environment.  I have watched glaciers disappear in my lifetime.  This is remarkable. Solo climbing has taught me that I am in control of my destiny.  I apply this insight to human choices about the environment. 

We are in trouble.

We need radical change in ourselves and our desires.

Who is Laurie Hinck?

This blog is my gift to Silver Gate in reciprocity for all the blessings of my home.  My essays draw upon three truths Silver Gate has taught me about home, heart and history. 

First, I offer readers my unusual intimacy with home.  Not many people live within such a wonderful alpine forest, and what is more uncommon is that I was born here. Since my first breaths, I have fostered a stronger bond with these rocks, snow drifts and moose than I have with most people.  I am very proud of this fact.  Living here, literally in the building in which I was an infant, I offer a time honored kinship with my home for a culture addicted to motion and speed.

The second thread in my writing comes from my contemplative practice.  Silver Gate is as much ashram as home to me, nurturing and perhaps creating in me a proclivity for quiet reflection.  I have wedded my routine to Silver Gate’s cycle of dark and cold.  Winter rock walls are my refuge.  Each season, I retreat with intention, resisting a schedule that, like most, naturally inclines toward socializing and activity.  Instead, I willfully wander amidst the willows and wind, preferably alone or quietly with Jay and our dogs.  I supplement my company with the words of scholars I admire, Rick Bass, William Cronon, Paul Kingsnorth and other cultural historians and critics. 

Stillness strengthens my compassion for my silent nonhuman neighbors.  My deep inner life gives me courage to speak here for the voiceless with whom I have spent my life.

Finally, because of my need to protect Silver Gate, I have studied extensively, lending an academic layer to my perspective.  I left Montana to earn a master’s degree in anthropology in New York City, and a doctorate in history in Albuquerque, focusing on U.S. West and environmental history.  My training instilled me with a deep commitment to the free circulation of ideas for the sake of healthy communities.  My knowledge of our culture’s “commitment to infinite growth on a finite planet” drives me to warn about the future (Moore and Nelson, 88). 

I pass what I have learned from Silver Gate.  From years of intimacy with home, from nurturing my heart in silence, and from mourning history’s destruction, this is my hope for environmentalists:

Cherish rocks, snow and trees. 

Slow down. 

Do less, think more. 

Be still. 

Study and meditate upon your choices, even “small” decisions. 

Go within.  Be true.  

References:

Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson.  Moral Ground; Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril.  San Antonia: Trinity University Press, 2010. website