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Video: The “Scientific” Beauty of the Northern Lights
There are many delightful and magical myths about the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights. The Inuit of North America interpreted the lights as a ball game—with a walrus head serving as
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The Stickiness of Learning Outdoors
Today, the average American child is by far an indoor creature, spending only four to seven minutes a day in unstructured play outdoors and more than seven hours a day in front of a
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Grasslands: A Lot More Than Just Flyover Country
Across the world, they go by many names: downs, prairies, pampas, rangelands, steppes, savannas or velds. But what all of these landscapes have in common is that grass is their naturally dominant vegetation. These “grasslands” occupy what I
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Wilderness: Lost and Found
Today, little more than 20 percent of the world can still be considered “wilderness.” That’s not a lot, especially when you weigh the benefits that those few designated areas provide. In the last two
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Traveling Small in the Big Outdoors
Being an inveterate introvert, I avoid large crowds—well, really, even groups of people numbering 15 or more—like the plague. Yet the places that call to me are some of the most jam-packed because they
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The Year-Round Land of Evergreens: the Taiga
It’s mid-January, the time some people call the “doldrums,” a period of feeling low energy and a lack of motivation after the Christmas and New Year season of celebration and parties. It can be
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More than Travel Guides, Maps Tell Nature’s Stories
Maps are far more than sets of instructions on how to get from Point A to Point B. They tell stories. And whether they’re digital or paper maps, the tales they spin range from
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New Year’s Day 2019: What Outdoor Place Misses You?
My father never had the “urge for going,” as songwriter-singer Joni Mitchell calls it—the desire to travel. I place the blame for that fact squarely on the shoulders of World War II. As a
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