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Mountain Men of Idaho by Darcy Williamson
MOUNTAINMEN OF IDAHO by Darcy Williamson
Our Price: $9.95

Perfect Paperback: 76 pages
  • Publisher: From The Forest; Revised edition (September 26, 2011)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0984313680
  • ISBN-13: 978-0984313686
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
  • Cover by Claire Remsburg

    They were hunters, trappers, bear fighters, Indian killers who lived off the land and survived annual rendezvous. The sun, the wind, the harsh winter climate tanned and dried and leathered their faces until those without beards (and there were a few) had to roll up their sleeves to bare white arms as proof of their Caucasian identity.

    The majority dressed more in Indian fashion than Indians. Fringed shirts. Buckskin leggings. Feathers. Beads. And bones. They wore their gee-gaws with pride ~ each trinket a momento of some rendezvous, Indian maiden, daring feat, or gift of friendship.

    Possessions were bare essentials, scaled down so that all could be hastily gathered and spirited away at the first sight of trouble. Those over-encumbered easily lost the over-flow to Indians, if they didn't first, lose their lives trying to protect their property.

    It was a life of extremes. Days of hunger would quickly be forgotten while consuming ten pound of sizzling buffalo steak. A day of cold and misery could thaw before the blaze of campfires as the memory of its harshness trickled away with each sip of Old Jamaca rum. Loneliness would give way to wild get-togethers with rivals or friends. The men would become engorged on gaming, drinking, pitting wit against wit, and brawn against brawn that solitude would become, once again, a desperately needed state of being.

    Mountainmen were mountainmen for the sheer joy of freedom, endurance and oneness with nature. Any one who said that it was for the money, lied.


    PHOTOS: Book cover, front; Neilus ~ cover model and subject of last mountain man story in book; author.

    McCall's Historic Shore Lodge
    MCCALL'S HISTORIC SHORE LODGE by Darcy Williamson & Marlee Wilcomb
    Our Price: $9.95

  • Perfect Paperback: 90 pages
  • Publisher: The Meadow Cottage Industries; 1st edition (February 1, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0978528204
  • ISBN-13: 978-0978528201
  • Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches

  • Of all McCall, Idaho's historic buildings, Shore Lodge of Payette Lake, reigned for 40 years as the most loved. Although it was conceived as a resort, stock holders did not want McCall's lodge to imitate Sun Valley's resort-style glamour. Rather, this project's catchwords were to be "wholesome: and "service". From its conception to its demise, locals and visitors would gather in a recreational setting and enjoy lakefront accommodations, dining and entertainment in an unpretentious, relaxing style.

    Table of Contents: 1. Shore Lodge ~ Payette Lake's Keynote 2. Flynn's Lardo Murel 3. Italian on Ice 4. Winter Blues 5. Shore Lodge Riding Stables 6. Johnny Runnalls and Old Skeeter 7. "The Man With the Perfect Profile" 8. Bing Crosby, Top o' the Morning 9. Miss Idaho 10. An Opinionated Character 11. Silenced Slots 12. Perry Bruce 13. Henri Temianka in Concert 14. Shore Lodge's Water Shows 15. Naming McCall's Sea Serpent 16. January 21st., 1954 ~ When The Lights Went Out 17. King of the Dock 18. John Edwards 19. The Case of the Missing Huckleberries 20. John's Swans 21. Hal and Dorothy 22. The Annens and the Basement Community 23. Douglas 24. Postcards from Shore Lodge 25. Sunday Brunch on the Lakefront; Picnics at Brundage Mountain 26. An Unwelcome Guest 27. Shore Lodge Snow Sculptures 28. The Takeover 29. It's History Now In 1989, this historic Idaho icon was purchased by a San Diego real-estate developer in a hostile take-over. Shore Lodge thus was extensively remodeled and christened Whitetail Lodge, an exclusive membership resort.

    "This book brings back wonderful memories. Shore Lodge was an integral part of the "Village of McCall". The book's research was thorough and detailed. The writing is humorous and endearing while being historically accurate. The many photographs lend added dimension to the characters and stories. Kudos - a lot of history and nostalgia in such a small book!"

    PHOTOS: Cover photo; sample pages; back cover.



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    TEN MINUTE MEALS, FIVE MINUTE WORKOUTS
    Our Price: $13.00

    Ten-Minute Meals, Five-Minute Workouts: For People Who Never Have Enough Time by Darcy Williamson, Robert Sweetgall, Pat Zak

  • Spiral-bound: 159 pages
  • Publisher: Creative Walking Inc. (December 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0939041219
  • ISBN-13: 978-0939041213
  • Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.2 x 0.5 inches

    With "lack of time" being America's top excuse for poor eating and sedentary living, here is your practical Nutrition and Physical Activity Resource covering ... 69 Creative, Delicious, Healthy Meals/22 Wonderful Walking Workouts for Weight Loss, Stress, Reduction, Cardiovascular Conditioning and Better Brainpower/30 Core-Muscle Strengthening and Stretching Activities for Lifelong Independent Living.
  • Review: Time, the missing ingredient in American lifestyle is finally tackled in a brand new book combining quick, delicious, healthy recipes -- and workouts you can do in a flash. Three authors, Williamson, Sweetgall and Zak, each share their expertise in a most unique 3-point book covering:

  • (1) Ten-Minute Meals and More (69 great
    recipes.)
    (2) Wonderful Walking Workouts (22 walks
    for weight-loss, cardio-conditioning, stress
    and brainpower.)
    (3) Core-Muscle Strengthening and Stretching
    (30 smart postural/toning exercises that
    can be done in your car, kitchen or living
    room.)

  • The whole strategy of Ten-Minute Meals and Five-Minute Workouts is to give people quick solutions for healthier eating and exercise in a time-crunched world. The "Ten-Minute Promise" book introduction explains how fast food and sedentary living has afflicted 60 million Americans with high-blood pressure, 18 million with diabetes, and created over 100 million overweight Americans.

  • In this book, Williamson, Sweetgall and Zak clearly show how improving health takes only a few minutes a day. Workouts do not have to consume 30 minutes of precious time, nor does meal preparation have to consume an hour. Good health is only minutes away.
    In this combination cookbook - fitness guide, Darcy Williamson has whipped up quick-fix dishes that take 10 to 20 minutes to prepare. Her recipes are without red meat, pork or poultry. Recipes include Low-Fat Spinach Lasagna; Quick Breakfast Burritos; Enchiladas with Mozzarella Cheese and Kale; Curried Couscous Salad; Robert's Lemon Garlic Salmon, and Tofu Kung Poa. Most meals are family-sized and will serve between four and six people. There is even a section of recipes just for children. Williamson also offers tips on how to reduce preparation and cooking time, as well as a list of items for a well-stocked pantry.

  • Robert Sweetgall advocates walking as a natural lifestyle activity, requiring no special equipment. Sweetgall offers a menu of walking workouts that fit into a busy schedule --walks to strengthen the heart, walks to lose weight, walks to reduce stress and walks to stimulate thinking. These walks include the "M&M; Walk," the "One-Cent Walk," "The Let-It-Be Walk," and "The Memory Walk."
    Pat Zak, P.T. presents exercises that stretch, strengthen and tome muscles without stressing the body. They can be done anywhere in the home, car or office. Not only does Zak explain how to do each exercise, he also gives tips to prevent injury. "Gain Without Pain," is Zak's philosophy.
  • More from Darcy Williamson: Basque Cooking and Love; River Tales of Idaho; The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook; How to Prepare Common Wild Foods; Salmon River Legends and Campfire Cuisine; Cooking With Spirit: North American Indian Food and Fact & many more!

    PHOTOS: Book cover; sample pages.
    RockyMtnWildFood
    THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN WILD FOODS COOKBOOK by Darcy Williamson
    Our Price: $17.95

  • Plastic Comb: 251 pages
  • Publisher: The Caxton Press; 1st edition (March 1, 1995)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0870043676
  • ISBN-13: 978-0870043673
  • Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 6.5 x 8.8 inches

    Art of Food Foraging by Guy Hand June 22, 2011


  • Like a shaman's cape, her knee-length, earth-toned jacket billowed behind Darcy Williamson as she moved silently through the woods near her McCall home. Even as she zigzagged her way through lodgepole pines, her eyes darting from tree limb to ground to middle distance, she never slowed her pace. She'd already lost her three companions and even I, unburdened with a collection basket and tools, found it hard to keep up.

    "I move through a forest pretty quickly," Williamson said as she brushed strands of graying hair behind an ear, "and I don't like to linger in one spot because that tends to cause over-harvesting."

    Only when she spotted something edible did she slow down enough for the others to catch up. Often that edible thing was invisible to me until Williamson carefully plucked it from the ground, brushed off the soil and pushed it toward my face.

    "Should I try it?" I asked of something ivory-colored and pea-sized.

    "If I hand it to you," she said with only the slightest hint of a smile, "I expect you to eat it."

    When you're in the woods with a well-known forager like Williamson, you have no choice but to trust her. Thankfully, that small corm--she called it an Indian potato or turkey pea--was sweet and starchy. In fact, nothing she offered me that day was odd-tasting, unpleasant or emergency-room worthy, and soon I was at her heels like a fledgling bird begging for more.

    For most of us, the art of foraging fell out of favor a few thousand years ago--thanks to that invention we call agriculture--but not everyone abandoned the impulse to gather. Back in the early '60s, Euell Gibbons grew famous from his book Stalking the Wild Asparagus. More recently, urban foragers like Iso Rabins in San Francisco and Sam Thayer in Washington, D.C., have made it hip to hunt city parks and vacant lots for food. Here in Idaho, Williamson has been foraging the forests around McCall since she was old enough to walk.

    It all started when a naturalist friend of the family began showing the 2-year-old Williamson woodland plants. At 5, Williamson was treating sick animals with her growing collection of medicinal herbs.

    "By the time I was 6, I would go off into the woods to live off the land but never got to stay overnight because my mother would get worried about me," Williamson said. Mom would occasionally have to entice her home with promises of chocolate malts and cheeseburgers.

    Now 62, Williamson went on to write 23 books on herbalism and foraging, as well as develop a business called From the Forest that deals in medicinal plants, seeds and preparations. On this day, though, Williamson was looking for lunch and helping the rest of us find it in McCall's still-snow-dotted mountains.

    "This is a Brown's peony," she said of a handsome, low-lying plant covered in unopened, burgundy-colored flower buds as she began plucking several marble-sized specimens. "We're going to take some of those. They taste similar to Brussels sprouts."

    A short beeline from there, Williamson found a large patch of stinging nettles. She knelt down beside the dark green plant covered in nasty, stinging hairs.

    "What we want for food are the shortest, tightest ones," she said. "We want these that are still kind of closed at the top and that snap off real clean like an asparagus."

    The young stems gave an audible pop as Williamson broke them off at the base with her bare hands.

    "All right, don't stand around," she said to the rest of us. "I've got gloves here for the sissies."

    As we trailed Williamson in her zigzag through the woods, we soon found mint, edible lichen and flowers, tubers, bulbs and wild garlic. We even munched on a lodgepole pine appetizer.

    "The cambium layer on that pine is very rich in sugar and starch." Williamson said. "And the needles are high in vitamin C and A."

    She plucked a few young needles off a branch, then handed them to me with the assurance that "lodgepole is like a smorgasbord on a stick." I dutifully nibbled, expecting nothing more than the taste of Pine-Sol, but again I was surprised by a mildly spicy flavor that was entirely pleasant.

    After a couple of hours, the five of us had collected a lunch's worth of wild produce at no cost and with none of the usual paper-or-plastic supermarket conundrums. And Williamson's pace had slowed to the point I could ask a non-what's-that question: "Do you think the art of foraging is becoming more popular?"

    "I believe so," she said as she chewed thoughtfully on the tender end of a young cattail sprout. "I believe it's going to become more popular still as food costs go up and more toxins and pesticides are found in our food."

    Williamson estimated that there are hundreds of edible plants in the McCall area alone, many available year round. The catch is identifying them and, of course, knowing what to avoid.

    "There are only a few poisonous plants in Idaho or in any region, for that matter," Williamson said. "So you do the backward thing: You learn the toxic plants. It's a lot easier to learn what's going to poison you than what's going to feed you."

    It's also good to take a class and grab a field guide or find an experienced tutor, like Williamson.

    The growing interest in foraged foods, Williamson believes, is a positive development and a logical extension of the local food movement. After all, what's more "local" than native and naturalized plants that spontaneously pop up all around you? But she also feels it's increasingly important to teach students environmentally sensitive foraging practices. That's why she doesn't linger in one spot, forages lightly and only picks from abundant plants. When she digs a bulb, she carefully pats the ground back in place to hide the hole. It's not only to preserve the resource, which is reason enough, she said, but to also ensure that a potential increase in foraging doesn't raise the ire of land management agencies like the Forest Service.

    David Olson, public affairs officer for the Boise National Forest, said that although the Forest Service doesn't officially encourage foraging, it currently has no regulations prohibiting gathering plants for personal use in Idaho's national forests. There are, however, regulations against harvesting threatened and endangered species. Olson said, knowing what you're picking is not only essential to health but also will keep you out of legal trouble.

    Back in Williamson's expansive kitchen, our group prepared lunch with everything we'd foraged--and it wasn't the hardscrabble, survivalist's, wish-I-had-a-steak meal I'd feared it might be. Our foraged lunch was, in fact, stunning: a delicate salad of tender chopped cattail stems, young huckleberry leaves, wild garlic and bright yellow lily flowers, surprisingly delicious steamed nettles (they lose their sting when cooked), nutty-tasting sauteed Brown's peony buds, meaty snowbank mushrooms and a soothing lodgepole pine needle tea.

    The nettles were particularly flavorful and research suggests that wild greens are often more nutritious than store-bought greens.

    "It puts spinach to shame," Williamson said as I went for another helping. "Greens are expensive when you buy them fresh in the market," she added. "But you can go out in your field or backyard and have some of the best tasting greens on earth."


    PHOTOS: The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook; a collection of wild spring foods; sautéing Brown's Peony blossoms; cooking Morel Mushrooms with strips of elk steak and Wild Onions on the field stove.

    River Tales of Idaho by Darcy Williamson
    RIVER TALES OF IDAHO by Darcy Williamson
    Our Price: $17.95

  • Paperback: 342 pages
  • Publisher: Caxton Press (March 1, 1997)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0870043781
  • ISBN-13: 978-0870043789
  • Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
  • Illustrated by Jim Paxton

    Idaho rivers have played an important role in history, travel and commerce. River Tales of Idaho, includes 58 stories that illustrate the importance of the state's streams to Native Americans, explorers, settlers and recreationists.
  • For anyone interested in the history of Idaho and anyone concerned about the region's natural resources, Williamson's book contains fifty-eight vignettes of river tales and legends, old and new.


    PHOTOS: Book cover, front; sample page; one of Jim Paxton's illustrations; book cover, back.
    HealingPlants
    HEALING PLANTS OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS by Darcy Williamson
    Our Price: $19.95


    BOOK REVIEW by REBECCA READS

    “An herbalist, botanist or scholar may study plants for a lifetime,
    becoming an authority on the general & scientific aspects of the medicinal plant kingdom--and never gain intimate knowledge of the subjects they so closely scrutinize. Such understanding comes from not only harvesting and preparing the plants for medicinal purpose, but in the actual use of them. It is through their use that one gains confidence in the truths of the plants' healing properties. With such truths comes wisdom; and through wisdom comes a deep sense of commitment to the plants' survival and environmental preservation.”

    Intimate:
    1. pertaining to the inmost character of a thing; fundamental.
    2. most private or personal.
    3. loosely acquainted or associated; very familiar.
    4. promoting a feeling of privacy, coziness, romance
    5. resulting from careful study or investigation; thorough.

    Healing Plants of the Rocky Mountains is much more than a handbook by which I can identify some plants growing in a particular region of the world. It is indeed a devotional journey into the living land wherein Darcy Williamson is content to dwell. It is a personal, scholarly, illustrated journal of her love affair with the friends who sustain her.

    As she introduces each friend--Alder; Alum; Angelica; Arnica; Arrowleaf; Peony; Cascara; Chokecherry; Cleavers; Cottonwood; Cranesbill; Elder; Fir; Gentian; Gumweed; Hawthorn; Horsetail; Huckleberry; Lomatium; Oregon Grape; Pennyroyal; Pipsissewa; Skullcap; Nettle; Sweet Cicely; Sagebrush; Uva Ursi; Valerian; Virgin's Bower; Willow & Yarrow (just typing all those names is poetry!)--Darcy Williamson tells us her memories, often of when she first came upon the plant, describing the seasons, or a particular hike up a snow-covered draw, or a hillside in spring, a summer meadow.

    Healing Plants of the Rocky Mountains is filled with illustrator January Atkinson's vivacious glimpses of both flora & fauna that delight the eye & ably convey the visuals needed to identify.

    It was a struggle to categorize this book--was it Health, Mind & Body? It is a healing book. Did it go into Home & Garden? If you live, as I do, in the wilderness, then many of these plants' coastal cousins live in my garden. Or is it Education & Science? How to use each plant is meticulously & scientifically referenced & listed, with all necessary cautionary explanations.

    As I read, I kept remembering Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear & Iza, the wise women, who found Ayla & taught her all she knew. Healing Plants of the Rocky Mountains not only teaches me to identify & use each plant, it brings up memories & makes a friend & mentor out of its author.

    Healing Plants of the Rocky Mountains is as glorious a discovery as coming upon a hillside of Sagebrush basking in summer sun, or a patch of Cranesbill in the dappled forest.

    Very well done! A must for wild plant lovers.

    Cover illustration by January Atkinson; Illustrations by January Atkinson; ISBN 0-939041-22-7 Perfect bound,
    176 pages; Indexed; SRP $19.95.

    More from Darcy Williamson: Basque Cooking and Love; River Tales of Idaho; The Rocky Mountain Wild Foods Cookbook; Ten-Minute Meals, Five-Minute Workouts: For People Who Never Have Enough Time; How to Prepare Common Wild Foods; Salmon River Legends and Campfire Cuisine; Cooking With Spirit: North American Indian Food and Fact & many more!

    PHOTOS: Book cover, front; sample page; January's illustration of Virgin's Bower; January's illustration of Pipsissewa.