Nature & Wildlife
Have you ever seen a greater short-horned lizard scrape its crown of spines along a canyon rim? Smelled the fresh spray of a cascading spring? Heard the love songs of a northern pygmy-owl duet? Or, perhaps, whispers through the breeze—from the Navajo sedge plants growing in seeps and hanging gardens?
Nature & Wildlife
What, you may be asking, is an ungulate? You’ve actually known them all along, but perhaps just didn’t know them by their official moniker. Among the ungulates that are native to North America are bighorn sheep, bison, caribou, Dall sheep, mountain goats, moose and white-tailed deer. What do they all have in common?
Travel Tips
On its finest days, summer feels like it could last forever. But, alas, all good things must come to an end. Or, when it comes to the seasons, sublimely shift into something new. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”
Nature & Wildlife
Behold the natural wonders of Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park—with vistas so dramatic, you might think you’ve been transported to a world galaxies away. Pink cliffs melt into vermilion, and red rock canyons carve through the desert as pinnacles rise hundreds of feet into the sky.
Travel Tips
When was the last time you truly saw the stars? Looked for shooting stars and named the constellations? Woke up early enough to see a spectacular sunrise? Depending on where you live, you may have ample opportunity for stargazing, as well as great sunset and sunrise viewing year-round.
Nature & Wildlife
Rocks are unmoving. They are solid and stoic, massive and stolid; forever dependable as an essential part of the Earth’s crust. Promontories and peaks, cliffs and crags, are all rocks. Even the very word rock implies a brand of strength, sturdiness and stability, unchanging over the millennia. That’s the conventional view, anyway.
U.S. National Parks
After almost a year of isolation, lockdowns, mask-wearing, and strained relationships with family and friends, you might think that there’s not much good to say about 2020 as we come to its end.
Travel Tales
A strange, three-sided, metallic monolith was discovered in an undisclosed spot somewhere in Utah’s canyons during a helicopter survey of bighorn sheep on November 18, 2020. The Utah Department of Public Safety workers who found the object determined that the structure was 10 to 12 feet tall and planted firmly in the ground.
Travel Tips
I traveled to Bryce Canyon National Park for the first time in 2007. Because I have a fear of “edges,” this park was challenging for me.
Travel Tales
The world that I look out upon from the window in my home office, here in Wisconsin, is pretty quiet right now. In other times, the interstate just beyond the woods that surrounds my house would be busy with fast-moving cars and semitrucks. But presently, only occasionally does the sound of any traffic reach me.
Conservation
In the heart of Bryce Canyon National Park, I sauntered with a small group of nature lovers through a forest of Ponderosa pines. I was guiding a natural history program, and my companions were nature lovers and travelers with Natural Habitat Adventures & World Wildlife Fund.
Travel Tips
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s the most stressful time of the year. No matter where you tend to fall on that spectrum during the week preceding the end-of-the-year holidays, almost all of us hope for a quiet and peaceful season. But how do you go about achieving that silence?
