Robert Baker clicks his flame-orange Tecnica boots into his bindings on the summit of Rendezvous Mountain, the high point of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. Folks are just waking up in the valley below, but at 53, with bristling gray eyebrows, perma-rosied cheeks and a mariner’s beard, Baker wastes no time.

I watch Baker drop into Rendezvous Bowl, his skis cutting clean arcs through the wind-scoured snow. He moves with the ease of someone who鈥檚 skied this line for more than three decades鈥攍ight on his edges, unbothered by the chop. A cloud of powder trails behind him, then settles as he stops below, looking back upslope for me.

Baker has skied like this for decades, a local who built his life around the mountain. Until five years ago, he was running a plum and grape farm in Fresno so he could spend his winters here. Only in the last few years has he started tracking vertical feet, out of curiosity. By the end of last season, he logged 5.8 million feet鈥攁 full million more than the next closest skier at Jackson Hole. If this winter is anything like the last, he鈥檒l take more than 1,100 tram laps, spending the equivalent of a week of his life just riding back up the mountain. Unlike the younger skiers chasing single-day records, Baker鈥檚 approach is about sheer accumulation鈥攕tacking vertical, day after day, all season long. The Jackson Hole app will track nearly every foot. In classic ski bum-ese, Baker, called 鈥淏uddha鈥� by the locals鈥攕ays he doesn’t obsess over stats.

鈥淵ou get what you get,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 just go skiing.鈥�

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On the squat scrublands of a ranch property in Starr County, Texas, a few miles from the Mexico border, the ground is specked with a constellation of gray-green, quarter-size buttons of the cactus Lophophora williamsii鈥攑eyote鈥攚hich contain the oldest psychedelic medicine known to man. A mystic light washes through the scene and the air is hushed, until a voice in a thick Chicago accent breaks the silence.

鈥淟ookadat! Pey-ote. Whole shit tons of pey-ote, just doing their thing鈥� blending in with the听gravels that have been deposited here over the da tree-hundred-thousand years by da meandering channel of the Rio Grand-ee.鈥�

Joey Santore holds his cell phone, widescreen-style, in his fingers, one of which is tattooed with a ruler鈥檚 hash marks. He鈥檚 squatting in carpenter jeans and dusty black oxfords, scanning each of the rare cactus species while capturing a video of the plants in close focus.

鈥淎nd here you鈥檝e got 骋谤耻蝉辞苍颈补,听dog cholla, called that because it gets stuck in a dog鈥檚 paws鈥�. You鈥檝e got your 颁辞谤测辫丑补苍迟丑补,听beehive cactus鈥� all of this, growing in the dappled light and calcareous soil of the Tamaulipan thorn-scrub understory. Which, of course, is getting cleared away at an increasing rate to make room for the fucking Panda Express and the wind farms and the general tumor of modern society. Kind of a bummer!鈥�

Welcome to a fairly standard Saturday in the world of , a YouTube channel where Santore, a 39-year-old ex-punk and former freight train engineer who is self-taught in his field, films the trips he takes in search of some of the rarest plants on the planet. He exposes these botanical misfits to a quarter of a million subscribers鈥攅ven more if you include his audience on , , and the .

Among Santore鈥檚 fans are plant geeks, outdoor enthusiasts, and weed growers who were wormholed into Santore鈥檚 channel while looking up plant propagation. Much of his audience, no doubt, shares his worldview: in a landscape of American cultural decline, the study of natural sciences and ecological systems are all that make sense right now. Santore is turned on to the outdoors because he鈥檚 turned off by everything else. One clip that went viral a few years back features Santore attempting to save an orphaned coyote pup. In another, he leans on a strong Inland North dialect听to usher a rattlesnake off the road. Aside from the hits, Santore鈥檚 long-form videos offer a panoramic botanical and geological breakdown of a location, explaining au courant topics like plant speciation and biogeography, alongside profane rants about climate change and the state of things in general.

Santore鈥檚 vibe is not every plant lover鈥檚 cup of tea. On Twitter, you鈥檒l find that some young academics don鈥檛 think Santore鈥檚 takes on taxonomy are 鈥渨oke鈥� enough. Some botanists can鈥檛 handle the cursing. But you鈥檒l also find Redditors who credit Santore鈥檚 videos as their entry point into plants and ecological preservation.鈥淭alk to field botanists around a campfire, they鈥檒l say, 鈥榃hy鈥檚 he gotta swear so much?鈥� But the truth is that Joey has this sense of raw and unbridled enthusiasm that鈥檚 elusive to a lot of professionals,鈥� says Michael Eason, who runs the Rare Plant Conservation Department at the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

鈥淭he problem with botany is that it鈥檚 been geriatric and rich for a long time,鈥� adds Matt Ritter, a botany professor at California Polytechnic State University. 鈥淛oey鈥檚 a breath of fresh air. He is diversity. He didn鈥檛 grow up in a traditional way and has not had the traditional jobs that bring you into this field. He鈥檚 not afraid to mix the sacred, mundane, and lewd. And his science is good.鈥�

And that accent? When the camera is off, Santore dials it back. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 just for laughs鈥擨 can code-switch to a professional-white-guy voice when I need to,鈥� he says.

Botanists, even amateurs, have a bailiwick. Santore is interested in evolutionary biology and speciation鈥攐bserving how plants evolved into different forms, determining how and why each one got to be exactly where they are. During our drives between sites in Texas, I asked the same about him.

Santore, who uses his Italian immigrant grandmother鈥檚 last name, was born in Chicago; his mother was an elementary school teacher and his father听left on his first birthday, he says. 鈥淗e was a total dud,鈥� Santore tells me. As a child, Santore took an interest in science early, visiting Chicago鈥檚 Field Museum听with his mother and propagating elm trees from seeds in their听yard. As a teenager, he was kicked out of military school and got into graffiti and the punk scene. For three years in his early twenties, Santore traveled the U.S. by hopping freight trains. He saw the railroad, he says, as 鈥渁 place where you could get away from people, a kind of open-air playground.鈥�

The revelation that led him to science came outside the cafeteria at Pima Community College, near Tucson, Arizona.听鈥淚 found this used astronomy textbook and was reading a section about spectroscopy on a train. It blew my mind to learn that you could take the light that鈥檚 reflected off a star or a planet, put it through a prism, and get a spectral signature of whatever that planet鈥檚 atmosphere was composed of. I realized I didn鈥檛 know shit. It grated on me. I felt like an ignoramus,鈥� he says.

In 2006, Santore enrolled in a few classes at a community college in San Francisco. He left shortly after.听On a whim that same year, he was hired on by the Union Pacific railroad, working as a brakeman, and later, an engineer. For the next 13 years, Santore studied the geology of railroad cuts as the trains traveled through them and stocked his railroad bag with botany research papers听from the website Sci-Hub.

Off the clock, Santore started growing rare conifers from seed. When he ran out of room in his California backyard, he began planting them without permission in public places, including Mandela Median Park in Oakland. Then, in 2012, he appropriated听space in the park for rare trees, including Baker, Tecate, Santa Cruz, and Guadalupe cypresses, along with lodgepole pines, California live oaks, and California incense cedars. Some are now 30听feet tall.

His video on surveying the site, 鈥�,鈥� now has half a million hits and contains advice for other unauthorized foresters in the making, such as, 鈥淭he concept of legality doesn鈥檛 matter as much as intention鈥� and 鈥淏e like lice in a kindergarten class鈥攈ard to get rid of.鈥�

With this and other听videos starting to reach a wide audience, Santore quit the railroad in 2019 and began botanizing full-time. He says he found his higher power in plants.

鈥淚nstead of this myopia, where we view everything through the lens of our own life, botany听lets you zoom out and see how the world works and observe these relationships that different organisms have with each other. I want to get more people excited about it, because there鈥檚 a lot of dark shit coming our way,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e鈥檙e gonna need this kind of awareness of ourselves in the world to be able to deal with it.鈥�

It turns out, our trip to see peyote听in its natural habitat is somewhat of a red herring. What Santore really wants to hunt down today is an even more cryptic plant: Asclepias prostrata, or prostrate milkweed. A genus that鈥檚 vital to the threatened Monarch butterfly, milkweed is a Santore favorite. (He sells a shirt bearing the words 鈥淧lant Milkweed or Get F*cked鈥� on a 听hawking his illustrations.) Prostrate milkweed is Texas鈥檚 rarest variety, recently proposed for the endangered species list; it鈥檚 observed just a few dozen times a year, sometimes less, in a handful of locations, typically thorn-scrub habitat near the Rio Grande. The wavy-leaved, low-growing plant is adapted to poor soil and south Texas heat: when faced with drought, prostrata can disappear for a few years and go dormant in its underground rhizome. But even in the spots where the plant survives, invasive buffel grass is out-competing it. So prostrata听is being chased, perilously, into the middle of the road.

In pursuit of the plant, we travel a labyrinth of unpaved, sandy-soiled roads primarily used by U.S. Border Patrol. Santore runs down a list of coordinates where prostrata has been observed in the area, thanks to tips from other botanists and old herbarium records. In one location, we crawl through thickets of thorny blackbrush and silvery gray cenizo, keeping an eye out for diamondbacks, javelinas, and ticks. After 20 minutes of hardcore bushwhacking, we鈥檝e found no milkweed. Most of the scouting sites are on private land; in one spot, where Santore says the setting seems right for prostrata, we hop a barbed-wire fence to perform a search. In the Crime Pays worldview, forgiveness trumps permission. 鈥淚鈥檝e been breaking relatively unimpactful laws my whole life,鈥� Santore says. 鈥淲hat are you gonna do?鈥� 听

Late in the afternoon, Santore finds a jackpot: nine or ten plants on a roadside, a few of them flowering. He fires off a video.

鈥淎nd here鈥檚 that damn rare-ass milkweed, Asclepias prostrata. Look at all these individuals. And finally we鈥檝e got a nice money shot. First time I鈥檝e ever personally seen this species in bloom. Look at those flowers. Look at those coronas鈥攜ou got the five hoods, you鈥檝e got the five horns. Holy shit, you gotta be a hawk wasp to get in there and pollinate this thing. Fuckin鈥� A. What a banger.鈥�

Our last stop for the day is a ranchland property on some bluffs overlooking the Rio Grande; it was once open to the public but is now off-limits to birders, botanists, and everyone else. We clamber over a soft sandy soil littered with bivalve fossils, stopping to observe Texas mimosa, Gregg鈥檚 buckwheat, and Mandevilla lanuginosa, a white-flowered bush pollinated at night by moths. Santore can鈥檛 stop noticing things.

Eventually, we come across a prostrata听located in the middle of a road, just inches from a marker surveying for the potential border wall. Santore shoots a video.

鈥淲ould you like to see a big dumb fence on top of this guy? A performative fence? Someone should tell this plant that鈥檚 not the best place to grow. But I guess it likes the lack of competition. I guess you fit in where you can fit in.鈥�

With the light fading, we walk back to Santore鈥檚 pickup truck, and he muses on the value of this somewhat听uncharismatic plant. 鈥淭here鈥檚 something to be said for keeping something like this around. It鈥檚 part of this interwoven fabric that supports the life that鈥檚 been here for millions of years. We shouldn鈥檛 burn down the library before we understand what鈥檚 in it, you know?鈥�

The post Meet Botany鈥檚 Badass, Shit-Talking Star appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.