On hikes I’ve seen wild cats and wild pigs, golden eagles and turkey vultures, stinking skunks and hissing serpents. Wild animals are interesting enough, but what really amazes me is the more basic survival drama evident in a flower or…

Read the whole thing

Rattlesnake Wrestling!

Fishing the John Muir Trail is a nice piece at thru-hiker.com. Includes actual streams that have yielded fish in the past. Good to know when a bear has stolen all your food and it’s three days’ walk to the next…

Read the whole thing

I’m planning to hike at the Pinnacles National Monument on Sunday, so this page showing which flowers are in bloom is quite handy. Most of them aren’t, but there should be enough to distract us from all those cool rocks…

Read the whole thing

The Dude says he finally got around to catching that movie about the guy who lived among Alaskan grizzlies till one of them ate him. Timothy Treadwell was a guy who lived among grizzlies in Alaska. It appears he thought…

Read the whole thing

Outdoor Sports Blog links to somebody who believes Big Foot is real. All I can say is, most of the backcountry is unexplored by humans; judging from the rarity of seeing other people on the trails in populated areas, I…

Read the whole thing

I don’t want any of the caribou habitat disrupted, I don’t want nesting birds unnested. Like all right-thinking people I despise multinational oil companies and their stooges in the halls of power. I’m properly awed by the majesty of the…

Read the whole thing

So I checked this morning to see if I’d gotten any more votes in the Outdoor Blog of the Year contest (no time like the present to move me up in the rankings!) and I happened across a really interesting…

Read the whole thing

It’s happening in Mongolia, the New York Times reports. The only other possible exception to the woeful trend, conservation experts say, is the apparent increase in wolves. That is hardly welcomed by herders. If the animals wolves prey on become…

Read the whole thing