The website logo, featuring a string of black mountains, capped in snow, with a setting sun behind the range. The title "The Mountains Are Calling" across the bottom.

Mediocre Amateur

Mediocre Amateur Today I was feeling the wanderlust in a large way. The last quarter-year has been difficult for many of us who love traveling and exploring the outdoors in locations that aren’t necessarily in our areas. The desire for travel, however, doesn’t simply vanish during a quarantine. One benefit of modern life is the

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Prime-Period Cicadas

Prime-Period Cicadas Depending on where you are in eastern North America, every 13 or 17 years something magical happens, figuratively and literally. Out of the soil emerge broods, all at once, of Magicicada, otherwise known simply as cicadas. For most of the lives of these insects, they exist underground, sucking up the juices from deciduous trees. When

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Documenting Demise

Documenting Demise As we explored in the previous issue, Mt. St. Helens began to display activity in March 1980, a string of action that led to the largest recorded landslide and an incomprehensible lateral blast on May 18. This two-month period allowed geologists and amateur scientists time to study the mountain in the buildup. Many volcanologists

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Intro to Clouds

Intro to Clouds Clouds, how do they work? They’re all around us, a daily companion, perhaps relegated to the background. As the National Weather Service states, “They can weigh tens of millions of tons yet float in the atmosphere.” Do you make time for miracles? If, as I do, you make time for miracles, let’s discern

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Nature’s Mothers

Nature’s Mothers This weekend is Mother’s Day. To celebrate I thought it might be fitting to send you some videos of mothers and children in the natural world. But how do you narrow that to a few examples? It’s like typing in “cat” or “dog” in a search engine and trying to rummage through the

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Aconcagua – South America’s High Point

Aconcagua – South America’s High Point   We’ve aimed the virtual GPS at Argentina to visit South America’s highest mountain: Aconcagua. At 22,837 ft, Aconcagua is not only South America’s queen, but it is also the tallest peak in the Southern Hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, and the highest outside Asia. This classification makes it one of the Seven Summits –

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