Search Results for: chile

How Federico Albert Stopped the Sand from Swallowing Chanco, Chile

April 2016. In trying to figure out how John Muir finally found his way to the slopes of Volcán Tolhuaca in November of 1911 to camp under his “long-sought for” Araucarias,

Camping with Darwin’s Fox: Nahuelbuta National Park, Chile

April 2016. We arrived late in the afternoon after a drive up and over steep and sometimes rough gravel roads into the Chilean coastal range west of Angol. The road wound

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

Maples, Mapuches, and Monkey Puzzles: Human Dimensions of John Muir’s Travels in Chile

February 2013. Few people are aware that John Muir, a founding father of American conservation, travelled alone to Chile in 1911 at the age of 73 because he wanted to see

Tracking John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile

Few people know that John Muir – nature writer, champion of Yosemite, and a founding father of the American environmental movement and of our system of national parks – traveled

Revisiting Poetry Cove

August 2023. In my last story, I wrote about revisiting the tidepool at Middle Cove of Cape Arago on the central Oregon coast where I’d done some of my doctoral

Writing

Bruce Byers has been writing to inform and inspire readers about natural history, ecology, and conservation for decades. “In Our Place,” his monthly column in the Boulder Daily Camera newspaper (Boulder, Colorado) ran

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

Morning Visit with Aldo Leopold at the Shack

In his essay “The Round River,” Aldo Leopold wrote: “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the

Nature’s Warm Heart: Following John Muir’s Footsteps at Fountain Lake, Wisconsin

“This sudden plash into pure wildness – baptism in Nature’s warm heart – how utterly happy it made us!” John Muir wrote in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth,

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    Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast My new book from Oregon State University Press will be out in September 2024! You can pre-order online at Oregon State University’s website: Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast I hope you enjoy and learn from Nature on the Edge!  I am planning a number of in-person events (readings, …...
    The View from Mukuntuweap February 2024. The canyons here are eroded into mostly Jurassic strata that were deposited near sea level roughly 200 million years ago, and later folded up by orogenic forces that raised them to elevations of up to 10,000 feet. In the recent instant of geological history since our human species reached this continent, this landscape …...
    The Cream in the Gooseberry Fool It’s a tale of obsession, religion, money, passion, beauty, science, and sex—every good story should have at least some sex in it, right? And it’s a tale of mystery. Actually, it’s two interwoven tales. The first relates to the Reverend Gilbert Henry Raynor, rector of Hazeleigh, a small village in Essex, England, at the turn …...
    Revisiting Poetry Cove August 2023. In my last story, I wrote about revisiting the tidepool at Middle Cove of Cape Arago on the central Oregon coast where I’d done some of my doctoral research. On that trip I also went back to another significant place at Cape Arago that I call “Poetry Cove.” Here’s the background: During my …...
    Revisiting the Great Tidepool Sunday, August 13, 2023. It was a decent low tide, less than a foot below the MLLW (mean of lower low water), the “0” of tide tables, but still low enough to easily get into the mid-intertidal zone. And at a decent hour too, a little after 0-dark-thirty. It was already starting to get light …...
    Whalers and Quakers On a recent trip to Cape Cod, we spent the first night in New Bedford, Massachusetts, once known as “the city that lit the world” because its whaling fleet was the largest in the world and whale oil was the fuel of choice for oil lamps (and spermaceti, from sperm whales, for the best candles). …...
    Walking the Cape with Henry Cape Cod, Thoreau’s last book, begins with “Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean…” and the final sentence concludes “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.” It was published posthumously in 1865, three years after his early death from tuberculosis at the age of …...
    The View from Limuw The indigenous inhabitants of the island called it limuw, “in the ocean.” A prosaic but apt geographical name for the place. The name has a very matter-of-fact, here and now implication. But the Spanish who explored the Chumash Channel and its islands beginning in the 16th century and colonized the area with their string of …...
    The Chumash Channel and its Islands When Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo sailed into the Santa Barbara Channel in 1542, he found a thriving indigenous maritime culture living along the coasts and on the Channel Islands. One thing that impressed the Spaniards were the large seagoing canoes. One major coastal village had so many canoes on the beach that Cabrillo called it …...
    The Art of Ecological Restoration on Santa Cruz Island The large fabric print hanging on the west wall of the dining room of the Santa Cruz Island Reserve research station caught my eye immediately. A tangle of creatures drawn in detailed black covered the white background, intertwining in almost Escher-like fashion. There were sheep and foxes, eagles and jays, oaks and mallows, skunks and …...