The quietest place in America is fern-swaddled, lichen-draped, moss-blanketed. It is past the splintered tree, through the tilted spruce, beyond a damp pocket of bog, its precise location marked by a tiny cairn of polished riverstone. Its floor is a dappled jumble of deadfall and blowdown, nurse logs melting back into the earth even as […]
Last weekend Elise and I spent three days backpacking in the vicinity of Pyramid Pass, a high notch in the stony spine of the Idaho Selkirks. With a couple of friends in tow (don’t worry: absolutely no hugging!), we crested the pass and descended to a teacup lake nested in a bowl of granite and […]
The kitschiest town in Washington nestles in the Cascades, two hours east of Seattle and three west of Spokane, where the Wenatchee River elbows its way through a cleft in snow-veined mountains. This is the picturesque home of Leavenworth, a faux-Bavarian town that has gone all-in on a year-round Oktoberfest vibe. The ersatz chalets boast […]
Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have […]
Three weeks and approximately two lifetimes ago, I went to Rock Springs, Wyoming to meet some migrants. The pilgrims in question were mule deer, a whole herd of ‘em, who trek each spring from the sere sagebrush valley where they winter to alpine summer pastures, devouring fresh green-up as they wander. Along the way they […]
By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, […]
Earlier this month, on a night hike in Costa Rica’s Monteverde cloud forest, I made the acquaintance of the above insect, which, best I can tell, is a member of the Pterochrozinae, a group commonly known as the leaf-mimic katydids. (Entomologists, please correct me!) Walter, our guide, found this individual, which is fortunate because I […]
In the early 1930s, Britain found itself at war. The “invading armies” were “vicious (and) destructive,” threatened “man’s dominion of the earth,” and seemed capable of propagating at almost supernatural speeds. Politicians denounced the assailants in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Scientists, called in to manage the unfolding debacle, prophesied utter […]