Today's Biographical Sketch

Horace Kephart.

Kephart was an outdoor writer of the early 20th century. He's associated with Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which he advocated to the US government when it was still just mountain wilderness. The Boy Scouts troop in Bryson City, North Carolina is named in Kephart's honor. His noteworthy books include Camping and Woodcraft and Our Southern Highlanders.

Pic:

Quote: "The scrotum of a buck, tanned with the hair on, makes a fine tobacco-pouch." (Camping and Woodcraft)

Probably Americans Wouldn't Do Much Better

"When it comes to trees, we're stumped! Survey shows nine out of ten Brits struggle to recognise Holly leaves and don't know where conkers come from."

(Note: "Conkers" is a game played by boys in the UK, it involves drilling a hole in a Horse Chestnut, threading a string through it, and swinging the chestnut against another chestnut wielded by an opponent similarly armed. The chestnut that isn't broken by the engagement is the "winner." The horse chestnut itself, as well as the game, answers to the name "conkers.")

How many of you out there can identify an Ash tree? A Black Walnut? An Osage Orange? For that matter, how many of you can recognize Poison Ivy when you see it? Stinging Nettles? How many of you have ever seen a Wild Turkey out in the wilderness? A coyote? Red Fox? Do you know which snakes in your state are venomous? Can you identify them? Ever found an arrowhead in the woods? What about a geode? Have you ever, just for a lark, panned for gold in a local stream? Can you identify birds without seeing them, just by hearing them?

There's a whole other world out there to discover, if you just push away from the electronic devices and go in search of it. Or take the electronic device with you, and use it to identify what you find out there; easier than carrying a half-dozen guidebooks.

If a Tree Falls In a Forest...

...and the forest in question is the Giant Sequoia National Monument, will the various bureaucrats and functionaries working for the US Forest Service be able to decide what to do about it?

Probably not.

New York Times False Premise Headline of the Day

"In The Wild, A Big Threat To Rangers: Humans."

Let me just fix that up for you a bit:

In The Wild, A Big Threat To Rangers: Criminals.

The article posits the premise that park rangers are under more threat than ever from armed humans in wilderness areas, and that this is a result of the 2009 law that gave law-abiding citizens the right to be armed in national parks. Yet every example cited in the article is a criminal misuse of a gun or the possession of a gun during a crime, which the 2009 law had no effect over. You didn't have a bunch of criminals waiting for the 2009 law to pass so that they could carry guns in national parks; they did so already.

Rangers are in no danger from law-abiding citizens with guns, which is what the 2009 law addressed. Just the opposite may someday occur, in fact: an armed citizen may come to the aid of a ranger in conflict with a criminal.

Losing Touch With The Land

A study in UK suggests that Britons are losing their affinity for the outdoors, with fewer and fewer each year knowing how to fish, use a compass, or climb a mountain. Some don't even travel.

And yet, I'd bet that many of them do those things while playing video games; they just can't be bothered to do them in real life.