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 what happens now? It’d be one thing if it was a Photoshopped image, but it’s a real photo. I guess the North Carolinians who’ve been freaking out agree not to leave the state, and then they send the e-mail to people in Texas so they can commence freaking out.

An intense POV video of an avalanche burial that’s a nice reminder to drill with your gear before the season gets going. (Actually, it’s a better reminder to tell your ski partners to drill with their gear before the season.) This guy was buried for four-and-a-half minutes and had an Avalung with him. After watching this vid, I’m gonna get an Avalung and one of these BCA Airbags for the garbage dump I ski on sometimes.

via Backcountry.com Twitter [Gizmodo]

Oh man. This poor door-to-door census worker was lynched in a Daniel Boone National Forest in rural Kentucky. Yeah, lynched. Not only that, someone who reads too many Dan Brown novels wrote “Fed” on his chest with a marker. Initially it looked like some antigovernment nut did it, but now they think the crime scene may have been staged. Possibly the census worker walked in on a meth lab in someone’s house or something.

Thanks Jason

Set your Tivo or pick up some beers for your friend with the TV. Ken Burns’s epic new documentary starts today at 8/7c on PBS and a bunch of other nature-oriented channels that will be running loads of PBS commercials for ages.  I hope you’re prepared for loads of John Muir love and lots of egalitarianism.

This is the last of the Gavin McInnes nature help videos and perhaps the most important. Choosing an adequate spot to build a fire is pretty important.

Injured soldiers and people with disabilities might one day benefit from a hydraulic hand that doubles finger strength.

That’s cool, rock climbers are second in line though, right? Scientists at the Department of Energy had found a way to apply pea-sized hydraulics to applications that require a lot of power in a small space. A set of these hydraulic gloves with 25 moving parts would deliver 20 pounds of pinch force, twice what the normal hand can deliver. Pull some on and scale El Cap after taking two years off from climbing; just hope they don’t break halfway up.

via GetOutdoors

I feel like he’s flying down the trench at the end of Star Wars. This is Cody Townsend skiing the Terminal Cancer Couloir in Nevada’s Ruby Mountains shot via a helmet cam. A good reminder to get some leg exercise before enough snow piles up to actually make turns.

via The Mountain World

Oil-rich, otherwise useless land.

I went to Dinosaur National Monument as a child and was really disappointed I didn’t see any oil rigs on the horizon. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is trying to keep it that way by denying oil companies previously awarded leases that would allow them to drill near Arches and Dinosaur Parks. The Deseret News has the story, but since it’s the Deseret News the story is all about how families in Southern Utah are being crushed by big government getting in the way of their American Dream. A 9-year-old girl evenwrote Salazar a letter about how she had to give up her pony since her grandfather was laid-off on the oil fields. A pony! You heartless bastards! Let them drill in these useless desert wastelands!

Lloyd Gust hangs business cards at trailheads and considers himself on call from June until the first of October. Give him a call anytime you’re on the Pacific Crest Trail and in duress, and he’ll drive hundreds of miles to take you to get gear repaired or go to the hospital. He doesn’t charge any money, and if you give him a cash donation he sends it off to the trail association. He receives no payment, and so far this year has come to the aid of 286 hikers. He’s been to the top of McKenzie Pass 5000 times and drives a Chevy Cavalier. Does life get any better than picking up smelly hikers in a fire-engine-red sports car?

The Trail Angels are a loosely organized group that helps hikers on the PCT and the AT. They’re cooler than the Angels of Death Metal and don’t have to wear berets like the Guardian Angels. You can join them. I guess just by being nice to hikers since the Angels don’t have any kind of meetings or anything.