Travel Tales
Some have always been drawn to the mountains, while others are called to ocean shores. But I constantly feel the pull of forests (I’ve even written a book about them). My particular predilection causes me some mild embarrassment and social discomfort, because what could be more cliché for a baby boomer than being a “tree-hugger”?
News & More
A new study finds that introverts tend to live in mountainous areas and extroverts gravitate to flat regions. Are we genetically predisposed to landscape types?
Travel Tales
There are a few rare places in the world where time as a linear construct just doesn’t seem to make much sense; places where the past, present and even the future seem to be all jumbled together, like pack ice piled up along a shoreline.
Nature & Wildlife
Tomorrow, September 3, 2014, will mark the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. In 1964, the bill that created the act passed the Senate by a vote of 73–12 and the House by 373–1.
Videos
From the moment I read John Muir’s sentiment about going to the mountains—that “thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity…”―I have tried to do just that at least once a year.
Travel Tips
This post was originally published on the WWF Travel Blog Rising majestically above the African plains, the 20,000-foot Mt. Kilimanjaro has beckoned to climbers since the first recorded summit in 1889. Here are 10 interesting facts to help inspire your own future summit: 10.
News & More
Nature surrounds us with an amazing variety of animals, insects, birds, plants and topographic features. To refer to and distinguish the entities in this bounty, we assign them names—often two: one for common use and one, a two-parter, for scientific identification. Usually, the person credited with discovering or finding something new gets naming rights.
Nature & Wildlife
British explorer and Royal Navy officer Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912. A hundred years later, on January 17, 2012, in honor of this historic adventure, the National Geographic Society exhibited some rare photos of the expedition, taken by Herbert Ponting.
News & More
In 1719, when cartographer John Senex was drawing a map of the English empire in America, there was still a lot that was unknown. The little information about this “new land” that he did have came from the accounts of various Jesuit and French explorers, and not much of it matched.
Travel Tales
Ever since the explorers of old used oral storytelling, flyers and published journals to spread word of streets lined with gold, fountains of youth or rich silks and spices, people have been using mass media to motivate others to go on adventures.
News & More
When early, intrepid European explorers first began trekking through the New World in the late 1400s, they were awed by the strikingly different cultures they encountered. But they also came to notice something else: remarkable physical similarities between the Asian peoples they had seen during their many travels and these new, soon-to-be-known-as “Native Americans.”
Nature & Wildlife
An arctic fox off the coast of Baffin Island has recently proved that wanderlust isn’t restricted to humans. Apparently, this little canid—and some others of her kind—has a propensity for it, too. In spring 2008, Canadian biologists fitted 29 arctic foxes with tracking collars and began monitoring their movements by satellite.
