I’ve been watching The National Parks, America’s Best Idea for a few days. At first it seemed a bit boring, but maybe that’s because most of the outdoors videos I watch are Radical Reels or any ski movie made since 1992. Watching “America’s Best Idea” is a bit like going from a Lange poster to an Ansel Adams print; it takes a bit of time to see the beauty.

The old photos and the talking heads in the documentary are fantastic. If I could offer one small criticism (besides the name), it would be the music. This is nothing new for a Burns doc; the songs in his baseball documentary were all just different version of “Take Me Out to The Ballpark.” Also, what was with the Muir historian who had a beard exactly like Muir?

The story of the National Parks mirrors the story of every VH1 musician documentary. Someone finds the park/musician, tries to exploit it for financial gain, and then an advocate steps in and saves it. Regardless, I’m enjoying the program very much.

The first time I saw California’s Redwoods was a day of thick fog. (Probably not uncommon on the coast.) Standing at the base of the trees, you’d get a feel for the height of the trees based on the enormous trunks, then turn your head skyward and lose the tops in the low clouds. It felt like I’d stumbled into Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and I was walking among a land of giants. I somehow managed to avoid getting eaten by a huge sloth. National Geographic committed a camera crew, a team of scientists, and some robot camera magic to shooting photos of the trees and studying them. Wend has the video. This image of the largest tree is a conglomerate of about 80 photos.

Isn’t Mallorca kind of a party island? Or maybe I’m thinking of Ibiza. Either way, they can’t be far apart; Spain’s about the size of Texas. Pretty rad video of some deep-water solo action from Emily Harrington and Backcountry.com Athlete Cedar Wright. About as cool as climbing videos get.

via GetOutdoors

The study actually found that health improves during a recession. The “money kills” interpretation is my own. A look back at general health and life expectancy has found that both improved over the Great Depression. No one’s sure why, but they speculate that people smoke, drink, drive, and eat out less when they have less money. I’d speculate that simple pleasures also lead to a longer life, but maybe it’s just that cheap whiskey is more life sustaining than expensive stuff.

via Outside

This is one of those things that no one’s paid much attention to and, frankly, it’s nice that way. The easily offended ACLU sued over a cross in California’s Mojave National Preserve and won a ruling that the symbol on public land violated the 1^st Amendment’s ban on establishment of religion. People argue enough over ‘god’ in the Pledge of Allegiance; let’s try to leave the parks out of this. The ruling is being challenged at the Supreme Court and will be heard on October 7^th. I could care less if there was a cross or a Star of David or some Tibetan prayer flags in a national park, though I guess that a Nazi flag might offend me, so I guess you have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Too bad that line can’t be along common sense; there’s enough land in these parks to practice whatever beliefs you want.