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 [ more... ]

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 [ more... ]

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 [ more... ]

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 1st Amendment’s ban on establishment of religion. People argue enough over [ more... ]

A tiny tourist town southwest of Sydney, Australia voted to ban bottled water after a national beverage company tried to move into town and pump water from a local aquifer. They would have sold water back to tourists at about a 250x markup. The move to ban “single use bottles” came after a record drought [ more... ]

Yogi-style bears have been running hell on Aspen business owners, and now the shop owners are striking back with science. Man, I should have paid more attention in earth sciences. The Colorado Department of Wildlife has loaned electrified mats to business owners who’ve set them up at night and reported success. When I first skimmed [ more... ]

Researchers at Dartmouth audited ski resort snow reports and discovered that they report 23% more new snow on weekends, but “there is no such weekend effect in government precipitation data.” In other words, ski resorts lie! Of course we all know this info. It’s like the Texans who get to Deer Valley and throw a [ more... ]

The tiny South Pacific country of Palau has announced that they’ll create the world’s largest shark sanctuary. The tiny nation of 20,000 people is scattered over 200 islands and encompasses an area about the size of France. Most of the country’s income comes from tourism, so this is a move to bring in more SCUBA [ more... ]

This e-mail featuring a photo of a mountain lion dragging a deer has been making its way around North Carolina for a few weeks. People aren’t exactly barricading their homes, but the local lion raised some native fears. Turns out it’s a hoax, and the photo came from a game farm somewhere in Texas. So [ more... ]