Flying drones is outdoor recreation.  Yet this activity often intersects with other outdoor recreation pursuits.  So much so that the National Park Service has banned drones in the National Parks since June of 2014.  That doesn’t stop people from flying them in the Parks and one fellow was recently tasered by a Park Ranger while […]

 Earth Day Facts and History Earth Day marks its 45th Anniversary in 2015.  What began in the USA on March 22, 1970 as an environmental education initiative, supported by Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.) and Congressman Paul McCloskey (R-Calif.), is now celebrated in nearly 200 countries around the world.  In many places it has expanded to Earth Week and […]

Edward O. Wilson defined biophilia as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life”.  He suggested that people are born with an instinctive bond with other living systems.  Most kids love animals – Wilson says that’s instinctive.  We like to think of biophilia as finding the joy in nature – ‘affiliating with other forms of life’ sounds […]

The term ‘wildways’ is used in its broadest sense by the Wildlands Network in its efforts to build interconnecting habitats for the benefit of migrating wildlife.  The concept, however, is not new. For decades the U.S. Forest Service has been developing land use plans around the notion of core habitats with connecting wildlife corridors.   […]

“Hike Your Own Hike” is the first principle in Francis Tapon’s 2006 book, cleverly titled “Hike Your Own Hike.” Tapon hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, and more, in an effort discover how to take his life to the next level. In a nutshell he decided: “Thru-hikers don’t blindly do what people tell them they should […]

I was a free range kid. My parents kept an eye on me more than I wanted, but I was still allowed to explore neighborhood parks and bicycle all over without supervision. While I see a lot of kids doing the same thing these days, some parents have become so over-protective that the kids barely get […]

In the early 1980’s the U.S. Forest Service was seeing increased wilderness use and associated impacts on the ground. For the most part, people were not intentionally causing damage, they were just loving the land to death. The solution was clearly not more regulation, but better education. Efforts to teach people how to enjoy the […]

The pathfinder as a searcher and the Pathfinder role at Explore!

Ever watch the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week on TV? How about Animal Planet’s Nature’s Deadliest or Rattlesnake Republic? Do these shows instill a love of nature and a desire to get outdoors? Quite the opposite.

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this […]