Author: HikingMike

Denizens of the Steep short film – Bighorn sheep and backcountry skiing in the Tetons

Here’s an 8 minute film about bighorn sheep and backcountry skiing in the Tetons. It shows the bighorn sheep there are an isolated population since their range has shrunk drastically all over North America. It looks like they are really avoiding people. They’ve lost some of their lower elevation wintering grounds and now stay at […]

Some Coniferous Trees are Deciduous. Mind blown.

I heard a tree mentioned in a Nova episode called Metasequoia or “Dawn Redwood”. The first sentence on Wikipedia’s Metasequoia page is: Metasequoia (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), or dawn redwood, is a fast-growing deciduous tree, one of three species of conifers known as redwoods, and the sole living species in its genus. Wait, what? Am I reading this right? I didn’t realize […]

Article: Groups Want Florida To Purchase Big Cypress National Preserve Mineral Rights

My first thoughts when seeing this headline were: How can Florida, or anyone, purchase mineral rights on/below National Preserve land owned by the people of the United States? No. Leave it with the federal government and the people. But it turns out the mineral rights are currently owned by a family that is pursuing oil […]

Silver Lake Thoughts

Highland, Illinois has a gem of a city park on the outskirts of town with Silver Lake Park, and I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up near it. I recently had a conversation with someone who had been house shopping in the Highland area for months. He said he had wanted a house […]

BS Yellowstone Supervolcano News Headlines

I recently went on a kick reading up on Yellowstone news and information that was triggered by the story of possibly using the Yellowstone supervolcano as an energy source. After reading from various sources, I discovered something mildly disturbing and rather annoying. Volcanoes are so cool (and Yellowstone is basically the biggest, so super cool), that […]

Yellowstone Supervolcano as an Energy Source?

I came across the National Geographic article linked below not long ago and quickly learned there was a LOT of buzz around this idea. Some of the buzz came with BS headlines from less reputable news outlets, which I’ll write about in another post. NatGeo: Yellowstone Supervolcano Could Be an Energy Source. But Should It? The […]

Google Working Through Problems in Migration of Photos from Panoramio to Maps

A very welcome and informative post from a Google employee just popped up in the Google Maps & Earth Help Forum yesterday. “We are still working to migrate the photos of those Panoramio users who linked to their Google+ profiles. We are detangling some oversights in the transfer toolís original design and need to take […]