Tag: Nature

More from Vancouver

Part 2 of our visit to British Columbia

From Vancouver, we drove north along the coast to picturesque Porteau Cove Provincial Marine Park. Situated on the most southerly fjord in North America, the park offers waterfront campsites with a view over Howe Sound to the mountains beyond. Purposely sunk in the cove is an old boat to attract scuba divers and other marine life.

But our main objective that day was the Britannia Mine Museum National Historic Site at Britannia Beach. Once an isolated company town, it supported one of the largest copper producing mines in the British Empire—with 240 km of tunnels in the mountains above it. It lies within the territory of the Squamish Nation, who had lived along the river banks for thousands of years, but had no permanent large settlements because of the mountains’ steep slopes right into the water.

The third and largest mill built on that site was erected 101 years ago, and processed 2,500 tons of ore per day, but eventually closed down in 1974. The raw ore entered at the top of the 20-story mill that crushed and ground it in each successive floor until the valuable metals and minerals were separated from the waste rock.

Before we entered the mill, though, we enjoyed a short tour by mine car through a section of the tunnel system. As we entered the bottom floor of the old mill built into the side of the mountain, we gaped up at its enormity. But the most memorable part of that visit was a truly clever and engaging light, sound, and live-action immersive show that interpreted how the old mill operated within that architectural marvel. (I’ve been in the educational/interpretational field for more than 40 years, and that’s the best presentation I’ve ever seen. If you’re going out of your way to coastal British Columbia, I recommend the tour!)

After the tour, we stopped at Shannon Falls Provincial Park to once again gaze upward toward mount and sky to soak in the sights and sounds of the gushing falls and rushing river.

Before we flew cross-country home, we made it a day in Vancouver’s famous Stanley Park. Larger than New York City’s Central Park (the natives are proud to boast!), the west coastal rainforest offers fantastic interaction with scenic waterfronts, majestic trees and mountains, and an abundance of cherished natural assets and cultural/historic riches.

We leisurely clopped along in an hour-long horse-drawn carriage tour, pulled by a pair of Percherons, with stops at Deadman’s Island, Totem Poles, Brockton Point Lighthouse, Lumberman’s Arch, and the Girl in the Wetsuit Statue—a takeoff of Denmark’s famous little mermaid. On our own power, we also visited the Lions Gate Bridge, the Vancouver Aquarium, Prospect Point, Third Beach, and Jericho Beach. From our elevated position, we were able to watch an enormous cargo ship leaving the Vancouver harbor.

Our red-eye flight home left at midnight from Vancouver, with a three-hour layover in Chicago starting at dawn, circling down over Lake Michigan. We arrived home via an Uber ride from our local airport at 12:30 pm. We ended our adventures with a drop-dead nap in our own bed, but with glad and thankful hearts for the full, enriching experience.

From sap to syrup

the history, lore, and how-to behind this sweet treat

If you’re a fan of maple syrup, you’ll love my little book about the history, lore, and how-to behind this unique North American treat. Learn the Natives’ stories, the methods of the colonists, and the modern innovations that make syruping a $1.4 billion global industry.

But if you’d like to try a little do-it-yourself sugaring in your backyard, this is also the source to help identify your maples, properly tap them, and boil off the sap to make your own home-grown sweetness. Recipes included!

And even if not, you’ll still want to get out and enjoy a maple festival near you, conducted by your friendly neighborhood naturalist.

Storey Publishing outdid itself in the highly attractive design of this perennial favorite, and I remain grateful to their fantastic editorial and production staff!

Rainbow in the rearview

it’s all about perspective

One rainy day I glimpsed a rainbow in my rearview mirror. And while I don’t recommend taking your eyes off your destination for long, a quick review of where you’ve been in such circumstances can be an encouraging reminder of three fabulous truths.

A rainbow in your rearview means:

•  the storm and its difficulties are behind you. You have survived it. Be grateful, and leave those troubles in the past.

•  you are facing the sun and its clearing skies. You are entering a change in your state of affairs. Be grateful, and embrace the future.

•  there are still beautiful wonders in this beleaguered, woeful world. Be grateful, and enjoy the present.

– from Stepping Stones: our pathfinding adventures with Asperger’s

da Vinci, Genius

insatiably curious, relentlessly observant

I recently learned quite a bit about the self-taught polymath and world-renown genius Leonardo da Vinci, in an excellent biography by Walter Isaacson.

In it I discovered that Leonardo was the illegitimate firstborn son of Piero, in a long line of Florentine notaries. He lived with his birth mother and was apprenticed to the artist Verrocchio in Florence. He was a dandy dresser, favoring rose-colored robes. He was a disdaining contemporary of Michaelangelo (“He paints like a sculptor”), a friend of Nicolo Macchiavelli, and spent the better part of his life seeking patronage from provincial rulers to do the things he wanted to do. He earned a reputation for not finishing works, preferring instead to follow his interests, rather than his commissions.

As an artist, da Vinci is famous for his ability to convey lifelike motion with emotion in his subjects, and as the painter of The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa masterpieces. But his insatiable curiosity and keen observations led to many innovative concepts in art, entertainment, nature, science, geometry, architecture, urban design, engineering, hydraulics, and anatomy, to name just several.

How many other artists do you know who dissect cadavers to learn first-hand what muscles control movements in their subjects? He studied the actual mechanisms that transmit emotions into facial expressions. On one sheet of the ever-present notebooks he clipped to his robes is an anatomical sketch of a pair of lips that seem to suggest a just a hint of a mysterious smile, which resurfaced in his most famous portrait.

But what fascinates me about his anatomical studies is his intuitive leap to connect what he observed in natural stream flow with the internal biological workings of the human heart. Informed by his love of hydraulic engineering, fluid dynamics, and his fascination with swirls and eddies, he made a discovery about the aortic valve that was not fully appreciated for centuries. In 1510, he correctly concluded in that eddies in the blood in the widened section of the aorta were responsible for closing the valve it just passed through.

The common view, which was held by most heart specialists for another 450 years, was that the valve was pushed shut from above once enough blood had rushed into the aorta and began to back up. Most other valves work that way, closing when the flow begins to reverse. But in the 1960s, a team of medical researchers at Oxford used dyes and radiography methods to observe blood flows. The experiments showed that the valve required “a fluid dynamic control mechanism which positions the cusps away from the wall of the aorta, so the slightest reversed flow will close the valve.” That mechanism, they realized, was the vortex of swirling blood that Leonardo had discovered in the aorta root.

In 1991, the Carolina Heart Institute showed how closely the Oxford experiments resembled the ones Leonardo had described in his notebooks. And in 2014, another Oxford team was able to study blood flow in a living human, using magnetic resonance techniques, to prove conclusively that Leonardo was right.

Despite his ground-breaking discoveries and insightful futuristic fancies, Leonardo seemed motivated to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, rather than to be recognized as a scholar or to influence history. He largely left his trove of treatises unpublished. Over the years, and even centuries, his discoveries had to be rediscovered by others. Isaacson concludes, “The fact that he didn’t publish served to diminish his impact on the history of science. But it didn’t diminish his genius.”

I highly recommend the book: you’ll be amazed at the scope of da Vinci’s work, and perhaps, like me, inspired to be more curious and observant.

The abandoned ruins of Scotia Barrens

of pastimes and past times

The other day we took a short trip to the abandoned ruins of nearby Scotia Barrens, tucked away in the mixed hardwoods of central Pennsylvania. We’d heard about them, but didn’t know anything of their origins.

Our directions were to enter at the gate (which one?) and stay to the left at each branch of the trail. We apparently lucked out on our first pick, and found ruins within a few minutes of walking in the early spring woods.

Our first discovery was the concrete block outline of an old square foundation, that still had some duffy steps cut down into the ground in what may have been a cold cellar. But there were few clues to anything else of its history.

But soon, the brightly-glaring graffiti on a concrete structure caught our eyes through the green-tinted brown: an odd-shaped, rusting, reinforced concrete collection of columns and plates with an interior pit, leading to what appeared to be an old spillway.

On either side of this structure were two tall narrow berms that were higher than the top of the structure. Could it be a railway line that permitted an emptying of hopper cars? Yet if there had been a trestle, there was no trace of it. The berms sloped down on either side to the valley floor in 200 feet or so. Clearly they were manmade, and, judging from the size of the trees growing on them, was abandoned some 60-75 years ago.

Leading a hundred feet in the opposite direction from the incongruous concrete skeleton were parallel lines of squat, square posts, each bristling with a stubby, rusty rebar or two. At the other end of this dotted line was another superstructure, likewise decorated in lively graffiti and mystery.

As we headed back to the gate, we met an old man wearing a blaze orange sweatshirt and a white beard scraggling all the way down his neck, and his border collie named Duke. We asked him if he knew anything about the ruins, and he declared he sure did!

His is the only house on the nearby road, we learned. Duke thinks the whole property is his backyard, and the old man allowed that he lets him believe it.

He told us that the structures were from the 1940s when the place was open-mined for iron ore, and washed out of the ground. The berms were to retain mud from flooding away. But the earlier industry was logging to create charcoal the nearby Centre Furnace. In the 1880s, Andrew Carnegie purchased the land and was the first to employ steam shovels to dig an open pit for ore. (“Did you see the pit?” No? Well, follow me!”) Carnegie sold out to a local company in 1890, who eventually shut down operations in 1909. And within a few years, Scotia became a ghost town. Except for its brief respite in the 1940s to meet the World War 2 demand for iron, its days of being reclaimed by nature have continued ever since. The land is now preserved as Pennsylvania State Game Lands 176.

The Roving Nature Center

America’s first fully mobile environmental education facility

On this date 35 years ago I founded The Roving Nature Center, America’s first fully mobile environmental education facility. It conducted environmental education programs at all kinds of indoor and outdoor sites from Boston to Erie to Virginia Beach. It won national recognition in the Take Pride in America Awards program for its “commitment and exceptional contribution to the stewardship of America’s natural and cultural resources.” It provided jobs to nearly 400 people and sustained my family for 18 years before I sold the company in 2005. I remain very grateful to for the unique opportunities and blessings it provided me.

Rugged good looks

Of sky, sea, rock and tree, the natural beauty of Acadia National Park is astounding!

My family recently completed a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine; our first together since the kids were little and lived at home. Some highlights:

Our first ascent of Cadillac Mountain elevated us into the enveloping mist. No views today! But we did find a waterfall gushing off its side.

While blue skies make clear vistas, there’s something to be said about the moody beauty created by seafog.

We mistook directions of an easy trail for a difficult one, and accidentally climbed Acadia Mountain over angular chunks of granite as large as our car, inadvertently verifying that, yes, it was indeed difficult! In both directions! While we’ll never do that again, we’re glad to say that we did!

The scenic rocky coast of Maine absolutely commands your attention. As one co-admirer said to me, “It’s so beautiful, it’s ridiculous!”

Two hours before the diurnal high tide peak, Thunder Hole displays nature’s relentless force in a spectacular show as the in-rushing surf explosively expels air from a cave under the rock ledge.

We lunched at Jordan Pond (savoring its signature pop-overs!), ambled along its waterfront boardwalk trail, and soaked in the fabulous view of the looming Bubble Mountains.

A cruise through Frenchman’s Bay brought us delightful observations of harbor seals, harbor porpoises, and crowds of cormorants hanging out on Egg Island and its lighthouse. We cruised past a house on a rocky promontory that could be rented for just $25,000 a week (!), and around uninhabited Ironbound Island—so named because it can’t be accessed from a boat due to its sheer rock cliffs surrounding its entire perimeter—topped with a virgin fir forest.

We attended a star gazing party on Sand Beach: our first with a completely obscured sky, save for Antares at the southern horizon. But the rangers nonetheless kept us entertained with interpretive tales of nighttime glories. (And in a Truly Small World case file, the one young ranger was from Stroudsburg, where I once worked, and another visitor was from Carol’s hometown of Perkasie, and had worked with her brother!)

We stopped by the much-photographed site of the Bass Harbor Head Light. And although the sky wasn’t clear again, we gained some appreciation of its importance on that rocky crag.

At low tide, Bar Island is connected by a land bridge to the town of Bar Harbor. We trekked over and back before being marooned for nine hours until the next low tide.

The sun did put in an appearance near the end of our week, and we took to the top of Cadillac Mountain once again for a panoramic view of the four Porcupine Islands (so named for their sloping backs prickled with firs) and the rest of Frenchman’s Bay out to the Gulf of Maine.

A Hadley Point visit capped on our last evening on Mount Desert Island with delightful west and east views of a down east Maine twilight on a late August evening.

And there was so much more we didn’t see. But of sky, sea, rock and tree, the beauty is both astounding and refreshing!

Of arts, refreshment and re-creation

I’m grateful for many healthful recreational and cultural opportunities this summer.

We’ve enjoyed a couple of healthfully engaging days lately, as we continue to recover from the strains and fatigue of long-covid.

a smattering of engaging summertime pursuits

On the professional front, each third Friday in July is National Park and Recreation Professionals Day, and my office was quite busy sharing the various promotions, tributes and recognitions across the state, as we honor the many behind-the-scenes workers who keep our parks and public facilities clean, safe, and ready to use. Now in its fourth year, and celebrated by thousands of colleagues nationwide, it is quite gratifying to see the worth of my original concept embraced by so many park lovers throughout the country.

The Central Pennsylvania Festival of Arts returned to town and campus with a big welcome after a two-year pandemic hiatus.

Carol and I attended a community sing-along in which Poppa & Picker, a guitar-banjo duo, accompanied the crowd in such old favorites as In the Good Ol’ Summertime, The Happy Wanderer, This Land is Your Land, Let There Be Peace on Earth and many other timeless tunes of generations gone by. And when we picked up on You Are My Sunshine, two little preschool girls in the audience, in all their youthful zeal and abandon, lustily belted out the song they apparently knew so well, enhancing the evening’s entertainment! The Orpheus Singers punctuated the singalong with a few of their own special selections.

(I noticed that the 20-something sound tech guy wearing his ball cap backwards, didn’t sing, but kept his face and lips pressed in a slightly amused arrangement, alternating with a thumb-tapping duet on his smartphone. He did, however, suggest we sing Will the Circle Be Unbroken.)

We just missed getting the last seats for an Improv Comedy show, but did attend the Essence 2 choir concert, strolled through hundreds of artists’ booths admiring their attractive wares, and enjoyed some Peachy Paterno ice cream from the Penn State Creamery. We took in a bit of a tour of the known universe with a planetarium program and stargazing on Davey Lab’s rooftop observatory.

We dined downtown amid the crowd of collegians and soon had our fill of them. One observation I wasn’t looking to make (but regretfully have): College women’s summer fashion can be described as revealing as much of the 4 Bs as possible—breast, belly, back and bottom.

We attended a State Theater screening of the highly entertaining 1920 silent adventure film The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks, accompanied by live musicians. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is the world’s only year-round, professional ensemble re-creating the syncopated sounds of early musical theater, silent cinema, and vintage dance. The director encouraged the audience to interact with the show the way our young grandparents did—hissing the villains, oohing the flirting romance, and cheering the appearance and ultimate victory of Our Hero! Upon the conclusion, the audience was “kindly invited to perambulate to the Egress” during the exit music.

Speaking of the arts, I was recently able to pick up an old pastime of mine: leathercraft. On Saturday, I finished refurbishing my father’s old axe. I replaced the broken handle, buffed off the rust, sharpened the edge, and constructed a custom leather sheath. Now to fashion one for its smaller version, my old Boy Scout hatchet.

We planned to attend the Cardboard Regatta at Welch Pool, just a walk down the trail from our home. Unfortunately, the race proceeded more quickly than our arrival, as the fun flotilla of 50 colorful cardboard crafts didn’t float for very long. We did witness the soggy remains, however. (Photo courtesy of Centre Region Parks and Recreation.)

Other honorable mentions from the weekend include, but without photo coverage, are the high drama of a pair ruby-throated hummingbirds duking it out at our feeder, and witnessing a sharp-shinned hawk raiding what appeared to be an owl’s nest, and carting away a squeaking morsel in its clutches.

The lawn is crunchy in our current dry spell, but our tended-to flowers are displaying their best blooms to the mid-July sun. And we’re grateful for the physical and mental health benefits, and the life-enriching cultural opportunities that public recreation offers us this summer!

Ma Nature on Mother’s Day

A couple of scenes from a delightful Mother’s Day walk around Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center on this beautiful May day! Lake Perez, marsh marigolds and skunk cabbage, American beech buds reaching toward the hemlock canopy, redbuds blooming against a blue sky, Tussey Mountain and the rain-swollen Shaver’s Creek itself. Not photographed: a trio of snapping turtles, a ground-shuffling ovenbird, and all the rest of Mother Nature showing off her springtime garb!

Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center area, Petersburg, PA

Messing around in a small town

the learning legacy of engaging peers in free-spirited, unsupervised outdoor play

Chapman Quarries is the smallest incorporated borough in Pennsylvania, with a population in the 2010 census of 199 people. It’s where my dad’s family was established, and where his dad, granddad, and nearly all his male relatives worked the slate quarries.

While I didn’t grow up in town, that’s where church was and where my cousins and grandparents lived and where I spent a good amount of time. And it was the only place apart from school recess where I was able to freely interact with a lot of other kids outdoors. Three childhood memories tell a connected story:

Ice skating on the dam. The nearby quarries both used and generated a lot of water, and before Hurricane Agnes’ flood broke it in 1972, the dam was an idyllic nook in the woods. All the kids would walk out the back of town down “the dam hill” to amuse ourselves on the frozen lake. (It was a good joke to tell the new preacher about “the dam hill!”) I wasn’t a very good skater and I remember my cousin Judy telling me that I spent more time lying on the ice than skating on it. The older kids would build a bonfire off to the side, and we’d spend the better part of the whole day freezing, thawing, and “just messing around,” as we called it, with never a grown-up in sight.

Skateboarding on Main Street. The town was founded on a great hill after slate deposits were discovered in the 1850s, which brought an influx of hard-working families from Cornwall, Wales and Devon to work the quarries. When the skateboard craze hit some hundred-plus years later, it drew all their young descendants to Main Street with short, metal-wheeled boards to mess around. (Metal wheels were the leftover technology from roller-skates, which took a special key to adjust on your feet. And—let me tell you—roller skating on uneven slate sidewalks just wasn’t even fun!) I remember my cousin Craig telling me I had to get a skateboard with clay wheels—they’d work a lot better and I wouldn’t be spending all that time lying on the concrete than riding atop it. Like sledding, we’d walk to the top of the hill and ride the boards straight down the center of town, pausing only when someone would yell “CAR!” The old folks in town wished we wouldn’t go so fast because they didn’t want to see us get hurt. But no one stopped us.

Swimming in Claude’s Pond. Deep, water-filled Fisher’s Quarry was the destination of choice for the older teen boys to go skinny-dipping and wash up when it was hot. (This had also been the common practice of all the previous generations.) But I had that opportunity only once, living out of town as I did. Instead, my pappy would occasionally drive me and my brother and sister and a couple of cousins to his friend’s farm pond where we’d go wading and swimming and messing around. The older teen boys would drive there themselves and bring a long wooden plank. They’d extend it over the deep end of the pond and secure it with one of their jalopy’s front wheels to create a perfect diving board. The bigger boys allowed me, as a non-swimmer, to take a few turns, and after some tentative jumps into the shallows, I ignored my own caution and jumped out as far as I could. I remember my cousin Robert hauling me out of the water, saying that I shouldn’t spend more time lying on the bottom than floating on the top.

I learned a lot from my cousins. And from going outside and getting involved.

Like mine, most Baby Boomers’ childhoods were characterized by the habitual frequency in which we engaged our peers in free-spirited, unsupervised, outdoor play. It was there that we learned leadership and cooperation in picking teams for a pick-up game, and creative problem-solving in building a treehouse over a creek. We exerted our bodies while managing risk, and stretched our imaginations while messing around. We discovered both ourselves and our places when we pushed our limitations and our possibilities. Our self-development sprung from self-reliance.

A copious body of research now proves what we then knew, but didn’t understand: that social interaction in connection to nature is essential for our physical and mental health and our intellectual and social development. May we extend that legacy to both encourage and enable it with our children—and theirs.

Exit mobile version
%%footer%%