As I mentioned earlier, there’s a single stud bear who has fathered most of the bears in the (re-establishing) population of bears in the Pyrenees. Now they’re bringing in some competition. Bigger projects like the grizzlies and bison of Yellowstone in America show this sort of thing can work.
Found this recently on the WSJ while checking up on him:
For the attention-challenged, there’s a cool video:
I have heard that polar bears are one of the few predators that will actively stalk humans.
Basically, mature and immature bears are patrolling around the base, and one large female is literally camped out on or under their building, waiting for them. They’ve run out of flares to scare them off, and lost a sled/guard dog (poor thing) as well.
Bet on the bears – they were there first.
It’s not unusual for polar bears to approach human outposts in the Arctic, where waste is often difficult to dispose of and attracts carnivorous predators. The phenomenon has intensified, though, due to climate change.
Arguably this is related to climate change – but arguably, hairless apes wandering the Arctic wilderness are much tastier and easier to kill and eat than seals, especially when the sea ice hasn’t formed up yet.
During my summer as a Maine Appalachian Trail caretaker, I was “privileged” to take part in an event called “a mixer”. All 4 caretakers, plus some MATC volunteers, converged on the Horns Pond shelter area for a mid-year roundtable summit, a bit of a swim, and some hard, disgusting labor.
Horns Pond is high up on the Bigelow Range, and the thin alpine soil offer the traditional outhouse/privy dynamic; the waste won’t decompose due to the lower temperatures and lack of organic matter. So, the MATC has two composing privvies.
These do not compost themselves. This is a thoroughly disgusting process.
In early summer, the caretakers and volunteers backpack many 40-50 lb. bags of mulch up the famed Firewarden’s Trail, aka the MATC Stairmaster.
There are two privvies, each set high up on the edge of a hill and over a very large galvanized tub. The entire area behind the privvies is roped off with biohazard signs, and it’s on the downhill lie from the pond and spring which serve as the water sources. The “droppings” fall down into the tubs. Here’s where its important not to throw trash into the privvies. When full, volunteers don goggles, aprons, thick gloves, masks, and slather Vicks Vapo-Rub under their noses for the smell, and shovel forkfulls of mulch into the “droppings”, at the same time picking out the Coke cans, wine bottles, flashlights and tampons from the more biodegradable stuff. These are all bagged in multiple layers of plastic for pack-out. Once there’s a good amount of neutral carbon-based mulch/chips turned into the droppings, they’re emptied out into covered compost bins.
At this point the volunteers are pretty much done. Throughout the process, people manning water bottles are providing drinks so that no one touches their water bottles. The workers frequently swap rubber gloves as the fingertips literally fill and overflow with liquid sweat. Everyone washes their boots in bleach, and changes clothes – if you do all this in full sun you end up soaked to the skin, as everything you wear is impervious. Fortunately, the Horns Pond is nearby, and a nice chilly 50 degrees or so.
The full-time caretakers then monitor the temperature of the compost piles, ensuring that they heat up enough to kill off all the bad bacteria, turning and managing as needed. Once this happens for enough time, the now-composted mixture is spread out on screens to dry. As it dries, the newly formed ‘soil’ falls from the chips, and once dry, the chips are further rakes to further separate the new soil from the chips; the chips are used again. The soil is then manually dispersed throughout the area.
Next time you’re up near treeline and there’s a privy, give silent (or vocal!) thanks to the caretakers who quite literally, shovel your shit.
Here’s a video from 2014, MATC is now using a rototiller (who packed THAT up the mountain?) to do the mixing. Not sure I entirely support the mechanized, and LOUD equipment, but it probably does a more thorough job.
A repost from the Beeb. I saw snow on Ben Nevis when I hiked the Great Glen in 1993. “Neve” snow is the snow that lasts from year to year, and can form a positive feedback loop as it keeps the surrounding area cooler and more reflective (higher albedo), which can lead to the creation of more snow, etc. I haven’t looked at the relative precipitation levels in Scotland, but it’s fair to say they’re always rainy. Joking aside, there might be scenarios where warmer temperatures bring disproportionately more snow, which means you get this sort of accumulation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-37020327
I found my old logbook from when I was a caretaker at the Piazza Rock shelter area on the Appalachian Trail in Maine. What a terrific experience, it really opened my eyes to Leave No Trace as a philosophy, and the overall effect that small impacts have when multiplied by hundreds. I spoke to hundreds of people that summer, and spent a lot of time on Saddleback mountain as a summit steward, keeping people off the alpine terrain and helping preserve the blueberries and mountain cranberry for the bears. I count “section” hikers rarely, only if they told me they were section-hiking, else, everyone was a dayhiker.
I’ve posted the daily hiker counts in my Google Docs, the link is here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1F7LPAtiOpAIcW-kr8OWH2VubHvHvb14SkHU0xe5Whro/edit?usp=sharing
Gaps exist due to time off. I was 10 days on, 4 off.
As expected, a big surge of northbound thruhikers came in September, racing the closure of Katahdin. What I had forgotten about, was a strange trickle of SOUTHbound hikers in September as well.
This tells me that if I want to climb Saddleback with minimal traffic, pick some time in early August – for a year which had the same kind of Spring as 2002! Some years the Mountain is open early, som late.
What’s funny are the notes I made, apart from weather observations and trail conditions from my ridgeruns – I had some unkind things to say about a lot of the northbounders I met, and based on my own experiences hiking, I want to say its for 2 reasons: they’re very proud of themselves, and assume you know nothing about what they’ve experienced, and secondly, they’ve just made it through the Whites and the over-sanitized, restrictive rules of the AMC. In Maine there’s no fees, and the caretakers have a much different role.
My biggest official duties included cleaning graffiti from the summit of Saddleback (yep, really), chasing an ATV rider off the Trail corridor, and getting Colby college in trouble for camping above treeline.
The next time you’re at a backcountry site with a privy, or there’s a bog bridge, or stone stairs, or a piped spring, give a little thought to the folks who invested their time. By providing a permanent, convenient place to camp, it focuses the impact on 1 area instead of spreading it out along the entire trail like a strip mall.
Today starts the 112th annual Foster Old Home Days fair. The Conservation Commission is continuing its work on Recycling, the restoration of the American Chestnut, and giving away native pollinating plants:
Joe-Pye weed
Coastal Milkweed
Goldenrod
NY Aster
Repost from The Daily Beast, but I have to comment. This is terrible. What I can’t understand is why people would think that this is OK. I suppose there’s two possibilities, one is that the entire crowd was that oblivious and literally uncaring, the second is that they knew what they were doing was wrong, but no one person wanted to step up. People will do things in mobs that they normally wouldn’t do otherwise. I could make a tenuous philosophical connection between this kind of crap and with the culture of a people with perpetually broken economy, but I won’t.
(photo by martudilaz of Instagram)
“After being pet and pawed at by dozens of people, one of the small creatures was found discarded on the beach, its usefulness as a social-media prop at an end. It was left coated in sand and soon died slowly of dehydration. Several people continued to snap photos of it as it lay gasping, just feet from the water. “
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/18/rare-dolphin-dies-for-mob-selfie.html
Every year I gobble up a few tanks of propane making syrup from the maples on my property. Because I have mostly red and swamp maple, whose sugar content is in the .5-1.5 percent range, I have to boil a lot of sap.
Side note: I’ve planted sugar maple saplings that I bought from the Arbor Day people, but that’s 8-10 years out.
Given the massive amounts of wood, brush, and a stand of girdled trees that I’ve slowly been harvesting, I have “free” fuel. Boiling my own sap with my own wood as fuel using recycled parts gives me “free” maple syrup, manages brush on my property, is carbon-neutral, and is a great hobby.
I purchased the Vogelzang barrel stove kit from Northern Tool, and today took advantage of the 40 degree (F) weather and installed it. Total time about 2 hours, and I only cut myself on the sharp metal once. The kit has the cast iron feet, front door and an adapter/damper for a 6″ pipe.
Tools you will need:
Drill with a small and a 5/16″ bit
Jigsaw/Sawzall with a metal cutting blade (or 2)
Magic marker for marking your cuts
Beefy phillips-head screwdriver
Cleverness at filling in the blanks on the instructions
Total cost: free barrel (but look on Craigslist, $25-40 is the norm), $51 for kit incl. shipping, 2 bags of play sand and 2 lengths of 6″ pipe, total $80.
Instructions were good, not even chinglish, but left many small details out. If you’ve built things and are handy this is not a problem. If you are looking for IKEA-like detail, seek help or look elsewhere.
Ear plugs are a must. One thing I found is that unless you punch all the holes first, they’ll have a tendency to ‘walk’ while you’re drilling, and nothing will line up. What I did was get the parts on with 2 or 3 screws, then used the holes in the Vogelzang castings to line up the drill – everything went together perfectly.
Once assembled, I put a few inches of sand in the bottom and lit it up. Worked like a charm, exactly as I had imagined it would. At one point the surface temperature was 800 degrees (F). It had a pretty funky paint smell for a bit. I let it burn down, I’ll scrape the charred paint off later, and maybe hit it with a can of stove paint. Next step will be to attach a shelf to hold the pan of sap (stainless steel steam-table tray). I can taste the syrup now.
Front attached:
Feet attached:
Microtrash is always a big problem, and rare is the trip I take without coming home with a cargo-pants pocket full of it. Common offenders are cigarette butts, corners of Clif/Snickers/Nature Valley bars, crumbs of those ubiquitous blue foam pads, and the occasional bandaid. Note, I never pick up toilet paper, so ladies, please try and pee farther away than right next to the trail.
Macrotrash is a little more of an interesting dilemma. You see either modern dumpsites at trailheads (tires, beer cans) or you find ‘historic’ items rusting away at an old cabin site, or the remains of a can dump at an old shelter. Sometimes its piles of trash, and unsightly, or its in high traffic areas where it encourages more trash. Here’s a case where a very busy caretaker in the Maine Applachian Trail Club cleaned up a massive amount of really bad trash. I helped carry down some big rusty iron bits on my way down the Firewarden’s Trail (totally overwhelming my pack’s suspension, but worth it).
http://www.matc.org/assets/Resolved-Refuse-Removal-ATJourneys-MarApr2014.pdf
I can live with some of it, things like this I found in the desert of southern California. It adds a certain atmosphere, and has some historical value. This area was actively mined for gold.
But what kills me is the modern “woodsman’s” trash. Plastic garbage bags left behind. Propane cannisters. Toilet paper. 5 gallon buckets of poop. Benches, tables, chairs hacked together with local lumber and plywood. When I was a caretaker on the AT in Maine, I once packed out nearly a full black trashbag, just from a single hike ~40 miles and hitting 3 shelters. Unacceptable!
These are the things that say “This area is actively used. It is not wild, whatever you thought you were going to see. It’s a campsite, a playground, a city park. It’s to be used and consumed, not preserved or saved for the next person. We beat you to it, so suck it.”
Digging through some old hiking photos from Hawaii, I was struck how similar the trail is to New England, despite having probably 1/100 of the traffic. That volcanic soil just can’t take the abuse, similar to the thin layer of soil on top of the mineral soils covering the mountains of the Northeast. Just like how in alpine zones like Marcy, Washington, Saddleback and Katahdin one step off the trail does irreparable damage, the terrain on relatively ‘new’ land like the Hawaiian islands is fragile.
First you have jackasses like this. Despite a marked trail, an easy trail that doesn’t need poles, a sign to stay on the trail, these two decided to take a break off the trail to adjust. The terrain seems hardly fragile, but it’s the sense of wildness you’re looking to preserve. If you end up with footbeds all over the lava, then its not a cool dormant crater anymore, its a city park.
On Kauai, in the Waimea Canyon park, there’s a long trail that runs through jungle then along the coast. Here you have a hip-deep trail, and a “bonus” trail along the side, probably created by sneaker-wearing hikers in the wet season. If you #PlanAheadAndPrepare you have the right shoes.
When the trail is eroded like this, you want to stay on it – and you can see the subtle psychological pressure to keep away from the edge; the soil is getting compacted as the trail erodes.
These are the only legitimate ones allowed to go off-trail. Partially because they live here, partially because they have four wheel drive.
It’s important to leave the land in the condition you’ve found it, as you owe it to the guy behind you. Let him have his experience, just as you had yours, and perhaps next time, someone will leave something for you.
Patching you through to the wild!
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Helping to preserve and enjoy the wide open spaces of western Rhode Island
Leaving the faintest trace 