John Muir Slept Here, and the Mystery of the Missing Monkey Puzzle Pictures

April 2016. In his journal entry for November 20th, 1911, John Muir wrote: “Foggy morn 6 o clock packing for the lofty ridges where grows Araucaria imbricata.” He had arrived in Victoria, Chile, on November 14th, and after being delayed for
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Following Up on Following John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile

April 2016. I’ve written several stories before about two previous trips to Chile with my son Jonathan, during which we reconstructed the route taken by John Muir in 1911 in his little-known quest to see forests of Araucaria araucana, the monkey
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The View from El Cañi

April 2016. It was a glorious, crisp, sunny fall Sunday when we turned into the small parking lot at the trailhead of the Sanctuario El Cañi in the village of Pichares, about 20 kilometers east of Pucón, Chile. Pucón is a
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Coffee and Quetzal at Los Tarrales, Guatemala

January 2013. I’d taken a cup of the home-grown local café de la finca and a piece of leftover cake from dinner dessert the night before in the dark of the old house where I was staying at 5 AM.
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In Search of the Sublime with Albert Bierstadt in Brooklyn

February 2016. It was Valentine’s Day, Sunday, February 14th, sunny and clear. But an Arctic blast on Saturday night had sent temperatures below zero in Central Park, making this the coldest Valentine’s Day in New York City on record and the coldest day
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Butterflies in a Blizzard, or Chaos in Colorado and What It Means for Us

January 2016. My flight to Denver from Washington’s Dulles Airport was on time on December 15th, even though the previous United flight had been cancelled by a hard-striking snowstorm in Colorado. A low, white blanket of patterned clouds covered the
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Pondering the Palms of Cape Hatteras

November 2015. A serendipitous trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in early November gave me a personal, human scale for understanding some ecological facts about climate, climate change, and coastal plant communities. I ran the Outer Banks Marathon on
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Travels in Alaska: Seeking the Sublime Among Glaciers and Fjords

September 2015. All but one of the 40 glaciers that flow from the Harding Icefield, which caps the Kenai Mountains on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, spill into a handful of fjords that connect with Resurrection Bay and the Gulf of Alaska. I
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Time Travels in Alaska

After a sunset touchdown in Anchorage, I spent Saturday night in the Puffin Inn, a two-star motel, and after a two-star high-calorie breakfast at Gywnnie’s Old Alaska Restaurant just up the street the next morning, I was finally driving south
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Laudato Si’: The Pope’s Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home

September 2015. Pope Francis’s visit to Washington, DC, this week motivated me to speed up my reading of his lengthy and weighty encyclical on climate change, ecology, and humans and nature, “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home.” The document
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    The View From Cascade Head Lessons from the Biosphere from the Oregon Coast To be released by Oregon State University Press in October 2020. Book Description from the OSU Press Catalogue Cascade Head, on the Oregon Coast between Lincoln City and Neskowin, has stunning ocean views, abundant recreational opportunities, and a rich history of ecological research and conservation. Its landscape …...
    More Fun and Philosophy in the Andrews Experimental Forest In my last story posted here, “Explorations in Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest,” I described some adventures during a two-week residency in October, 2019. My opportunity to be there was thanks to the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, a collaboration between Oregon State University and the US Forest Service. I was …...
    Explorations in Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, located in the Willamette National Forest on the western slope of the Cascade Range, is one of 84 experimental forests in a network established by the U.S. Forest Service. It is one of the most well-studied forests in the world, famous for the long-term...
    Deep Ecology in the Mammoth Cave Area Biosphere Reserve, Kentucky The Ecological Society of America (ESA) held its annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, from August 11-16 this year. I depend on these annual events to catch up with the cutting edge of ecological research and thinking that is relevant to my ecological consulting, and with ecologist friends and colleagues from across the country. Field trips …...
    Report from a Season at Cascade Head February 2019. My last posting, “Monarch Field of Dreams: Reprise,” came at the end of September. Now I should explain why it’s been so long since I’ve written anything here. I’ve just returned to my home base in a Washington DC suburb after nearly four months at Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast. At the …...
    Monarch Field of Dreams: Reprise In the spring of 2010, I dug up a few milkweed plants along a bike path I often ran along and transplanted them to my garden. As I wrote then in a blog titled “Field of Dreams of Monarchs,” I had a very optimistic “if you plant them, they will come” vision. And, sure enough, …...
    Canoeing Louisiana’s Manchac Swamp with Ecological Aliens and the Voodoo Queen My flight from Washington, DC, to New Orleans on the first Friday of August was delayed for seven hours by mechanical problems, so instead of getting to my hotel in time for happy hour in the French Quarter, I arrived at 1:30 AM, exhausted. The next morning, I headed for Café Beignet on Royal Street, …...
    Walking on the Trembling Prairie As we stepped out into the open marsh after crossing over the tree-covered spoil bank along the canal by which we had reached this place on a large pontoon boat, the feel of the ground was immediately, noticeably different. We pushed our way through chest-high grasses and other marsh plants, watching carefully where we placed …...
    More Colorado Fires and Firemoths and More On a trip to Colorado two years ago, in July 2016, I was driving down from a trailhead in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area after a glorious hike to Arapahoe Pass when I saw the plume of smoke pushing up to the east, high enough to start forming a “pyronimbus” cloud – essentially a thunderhead …...
    The Internalization of a Land Ethic: A Visit to Coon Valley, Wisconsin US Highway 14 drops into the town of Coon Valley after passing through Viroqua and Westby in the scenic landscape of the Driftless Area, a unique pocket of American geology, 85% of which is in western Wisconsin. The repeated pulses of the ice ages that pushed continental ice sheets across most of nearby North America …...