Today we hiked the Crystal Lake Trail in The Eastern Sierra,
with a brave friend who led the way and cut in front on high altitude precipices!
We climbed 1,000 vertical feet starting at a base of 8900 ft,
passing many pristine alpine lakes,
and making a few nice friends en-route!
Tomorrow we go higher starting at a base of 9,900 ft and heading up into Tioga Pass, land of no wifi, so I will hopefully be back in touch the day after tomorrow.
Cheers to you from the high Sierras~
This video from England says about itself:
Ban the burn, 12th August 2012
Dongria Kondh talks about the issues of draining and burning blanket bog, in particular at Walshaw Dean Estate, above Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.
By Peter Lazenby in Britain:
Tuesday 9th August 2016
PROTESTERS will hold a mass demonstration against burning moorland for grouse shooting this week, which they blame for causing severe floods in the north.
The Ban the Burn rally will be held in the Yorkshire Pennine town of Hebden Bridge in the Calder Valley on Friday, the so-called “Glorious 12th” — the start of the grouse-shooting season.
Ban the Burn was formed following devastating floods in the region in 2012.
Moorland above the valley is regularly burned to make the land more suitable for profitable grouse shoots.
The deliberate burning has been condemned as a contributory factor to floods…
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From Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin:
“…There was no steady progression from simple to complex forms throughout Earth history. Simple forms of life arose early on, it’s true. But…that early simplicity continued in mind-numbing sameness for billions of years, with nothing more complex than singe-celled organisms for six sevenths of Earth history. When complexity eventually arose 530 million years ago, in the form of multicellular organisms, it did so explosively; within 5 million years (an instant in geologic time), evolutionary innovation produced a myriad of multicellular forms of life. Life’s flow is therefore not smooth, but extremely erratic.”
This 3 August 2016 video from the Veluwe region in the Netherlands shows two young red foxes playing with pine cones.
SAN FRANCISCO – In a unanimous rebuke, the Ninth Circuit court ruled Friday that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) had illegally approved a permit authorizing the Navy to use its high-intensity long-range sonar – called low-frequency active sonar (or LFA) – in more than 70 percent of the world’s oceans. Designed for submarine detection over vast expanses of deep sea, LFA has the capacity to expose thousands of square miles – and everything in it – to dangerous levels of noise.
The case against the Fisheries Service was brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), The Humane Society of the United States, Cetacean Society International, League for Coastal Protection, Ocean Futures Society and its President Jean-Michel Cousteau, and Michael Stocker, a bioacoustician and director of…
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This picture shows a little owl, by famous painter Hieronymus Bosch. It is in his painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.
This photo shows a little owl as well. In Bosch’s painting The Wayfarer.
That little owl, like many other animals in Bosch’s work, is a little detail in a painting full of little details.
We saw these owls on 8 July 2016, when we were in the natural history museum in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
The Tilburg exhibition on animals in Bosch’s works did not show the original works of art. These had been earlier this year in the exhibition in Den Bosch; and are now in the exhibition in the Prado museum in Madrid.
The Tilburg exhibition had reproductions of Bosch’s paintings. And also many stuffed animals of species shown by Bosch. I think there was a mistake in these stuffed animals: they…
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Photo © AURÉLIAN PRUDOR/CEBC CNRS
Who enjoys flying? I do (on planes, of course) and birds certainly do as well (they better because they do a lot of it)! According to recent study, frigatebirds can drift in the skies for up to two months without landing (I think this makes them the biggest fans of flying, along with albatrosses, another ocean-faring flier). In order to do this, the seabird seeks out routes with strong and upward-moving currents to save energy on its flights across the ocean. By hitching a ride with favorable winds, frigates can fly more than 400 kilometers a day (which is the equivalent of a daily trip from Boston to Philadelphia) and avoid having to flap their wings as much.
For instance, the birds skirt the edge of the doldrums, windless regions near the equator. For this group of birds, that region was in the Indian Ocean. On…
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A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the US Navy was wrongly allowed to use sonar in the nation’s oceans that could harm whales and other marine life.
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision upholding approval granted in 2012 for the Navy to use low-frequency sonar for training, testing and routine operations.
Continue reading: Federal appeals court rejects Navy sonar-use rules
Art, animals, and the earth 