Exploring Nature by Sheila Newenham
Winter and spring all in one walk. Round Lake State Park in North Idaho is a 200-acre preserve surrounding a 58-acre lake with hiking trails, multi-use trails, and a campground. It was chilly when I started out on the 1.8-mile Trapper’s trail roughly circling the … Continue readingRound Lake State Park, Idaho
They said there’d be armadillos. They weren’t wrong. I arrived at Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, a 2760 acre mix of saltwater marsh, pine and deciduous woods, and grasslands, midmorning on a gorgeous, mostly sunny spring day. Before its establishment as a refuge, Harris Neck … Continue readingHarris Neck National Wildlife Refuge
Wabi-Sabi: a Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty and serenity in objects, landscapes, and designs that are simple, imperfect, and impermanent. Wabi is about recognizing beauty in simplicity. Sabi is concerned with the passage of time, the way all things grow, age, and decay, and how … Continue readingOld Car City
If you google “Corkscrew Audubon Swamp” plus “Florida Panther”, you’ll find videos of startled people and startled cats like this one on You Tube by Andrea Wipperfurth (March 2016). So when I saw that Audubon Corkscrew Swamp was near where we’d be staying in Florida, … Continue readingAudubon Corkscrew Swamp
It’s a happy, warm, sunny day in Seward, Alaska. August days like this are a special treat in this rainy Pacific coast town. The Trail The Lost Lake Trail in Seward traverses seven miles over 1200 feet of elevation gain to its namesake alpine lake. … Continue readingLost Lake Trail in Seward, Alaska
Pack Your Patience It’s 7:45 on a Monday morning, twenty minutes after the sun pierced the horizon and started to lighten the sky. The eleven-mile, one-lane Cades Cove wildlife loop is at a stop-and-crawl from the outset. I can’t see the front of this train … Continue readingCades Cove Wildlife Loop
The Smoky Mountains aren’t a place for quiet, intimate, or prolonged wildlife encounters. It’s a place for the masses to get a glimpse of the wild that could change their life. And that’s just as important. My go-to methods for finding local wildlife consist of … Continue readingFinding Bears in the Smoky Mountains
Reportedly, one of the “Top 25 hikes in America,” Sitton’s Gulch Trail in northwest Georgia follows its namesake creek three miles to a stunning waterfall. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this. The trail is covered in fallen leaves predominantly brown and … Continue readingSitton’s Gulch Trail
Desert Promises The desert doesn’t tug at my heartstrings as the mountains do. I prefer more green in my landscapes, and I’m not enamored with the heat – even the dry heat. But, every new place has a personality, surprises, and lessons to teach. With … Continue readingKolob Canyon, Zion National Park
Too Hot for Bears We’re sitting on a dilapidated old viewing platform above the O’Malley river in Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. The views are expansive. Up the river, I can see the O’Malley Lake to my right, mountains across the valley in front of me, … Continue readingFishing Fox