Wild About Utah

I loved Mark Brunson’s recent Wild About Utah on spring bird song, his words resonating with my own. Continuing on with his melodies leads me to a bird song that lifts me to new heights as I trot along a meadow trail. A bird of the prairie and countryside, the western meadowlark releases songs synonymous …

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A recent educational outdoor experience (I’ll call field experience) with a homeschooled family, prompted me to reflect on the balance between academic focus and student-exploration when teaching outdoors. Yes, some balance of the two is necessary. In the extreme case of too explicit of academic focus, why be outdoors at all and not just at …

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Finding a beaver dam gives me a sense of discovery and connects me to the past. I fondly remember my parents pointing out dams when we drove up Logan canyon. Instinctively, we’d scan, hoping to see the animals that built and maintained those structures. When we talked about beaver dams, the conversation often turned to …

Continue reading "Valuing Rodent Engineers"

The perfume of gasping stomata begins my morning as I walk outside to greet the day. Inhale, exhale. It is that greatest of olfactory medicinals that suddenly wakes my mind, like a winterworn cabin whose windows and doors are flung open with abandon on its first day of spring. Fresh air pools in the hidden …

Continue reading "Watch the world’s moments become memories, and memories become you"

Years ago, I was flying in an airplane headed into Salt Lake when the captain came on the intercom and suggested we look out the windows. Below us was a truly huge hole in the ground. This was my first look at the Kennecott open pit copper mine. In 1847, when Brigham Young and the …

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Skiing up our lovely canyon yesterday, enjoying American dipper and stream music, occasional king fisher chatter, Townsend’s solitaire melodies, I began ruminating on my ski equipment while watching their effortless glide through snow. A few weeks earlier, I had donated a pair of WWII 10th Mountain Division US military issue skies to the Stokes Nature …

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