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Aside from the introductory material below, this page will will mainly serve as a navigation page to photos taken on my travels through nature upon this planet.

On Getting Back To Nature
 

"Why do millions of Americans desert their comfortable and convenient apartments and split-level houses for a time each year to go camping under comparatively primitive conditions in our forests and national parks?  For that matter, why does anyone go for a walk on a woodland trail when one could be speeding along a superhighway in a high-powered automobile?

We live in a vastly complex society which has been able to provide us with a multitude of material things, and this is good, but people are beginning to suspect that we have paid a high spiritual price for our plenty.  Each person would like to feel that he is an entity, a separate  individual capable of independent existence, and this is hard to believe when everything that we eat, wear, live in, drive, use or handle has required the cooperative effort of literally millions of people to produce, process, transport, and, eventually, distribute to our hands.  Man simply must feel that he is more than a mere mechanical part in this intricately interdependent industrial system.

We enjoy the comfort and plenty which this highly organized production and distribution has brought us, but don't we sometimes feel that we are living a secondhand sort of existence, and that we are in danger of losing all contact with the origins of life and the nature which nourishes it?

Fortunately, there is a saving streak of the primitive in all of us.  Every man secretly believes that if he were an Adam, set down in a virgin world, he would not only be able to survive but could also provide well for his Eve and any number of little Cains and Abels.  Who has not dreamed of escaping the increasing complexities and frustrations of modem life by running off to some South Sea isle and living on coconuts, fish and breadfruit?
 

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Probably very few of us will ever be faced with the necessity of living off the country for any extended period of time.  The outdoor skills, necessary to the survival of our ancestors, are now utilized in the service of recreation. In recent years there has been a great renewal of interest in hunting, fishing and camping.  I do not consider this a deplorable atavism, but a creative protest against the artificiality of our daily lives.  A knowledge of wild food gathering can contribute greatly to our enjoyment of this back-to-nature movement.  It can add new meaning to every camping trip, to every hike or even to a Sunday drive in the country.  It involves no dangerous or expensive equipment and is an activity that can  be shared by the whole family.  Even those too gentle or too squeamish to kill and dress game or fish can enjoy gathering and preparing wild plant food for the camp table.  Those who remember when they packed a picnic lunch and went out for a day's berrying or nutting will never deny the possibilities of wild food gathering as a family recreation."  

-- Euell Gibbons, Stalking The Wild Asparagus
 

Walking Softly In The Wilderness
 

"Some of our wilderness is unmistakably, jarringly crowded.  And some of it is trampled: certain especially accessible or scenic places have gotten the worked-over look of run-down city parks...

This kind of physical damage, disturbing as it is, is in fact just one of three dimensions of the impact problem.  It may not even be the most important one.

A more profound type of damage, which may accompany the first, is ecological rather than aesthetic.  It is long-term disruption of natural systems.  It may be invisible.  Unlike the eroded trail, the overfertilized, subtly polluted lake may still look good.  Nor is it obvious when native birds and animals disappear from a well-used area, or when a grizzly bear, tempted into aggression by backpackers careless with their food, becomes a menace that must be destroyed.

A third type of damage overlaps both of the others.  It is the effect of people on people, what we do to one another's enjoyment of places...

If every hiker entered the wilderness resolved to make no mark on the country, to do no harm to its creatures, and to intrude on the experience of other people as little as possible, the threefold problem would be on its way to control...

Because of what might be called consumer resistance, quota systems have not spread beyond a few regions.  Lately, the agencies have put their hopes on education, on getting each visitor to understand the need and to cooperate in keeping impact down.  It's in the interest of every wilderness user to make this voluntary approach a success.

Each backpacker must make certain that his or her own way in the wilderness is a gentle and thoughtful way.  Each of us must make a game, an ethic, a matter of pride, of waking softly in the wilderness world.  Each of us must develop a personal, knowledgeable code, subtler and perhaps stricter than any set of standardized rules can possibly be.  We have to grasp the fact that no change we inflict on the wilderness is trivial: each of us now is a thousand."

-- John Hart, Walking Softly In The Wilderness: The Sierra Club Guide To Backpacking

Tips For Low Impact Hiking/Camping

• don't camp on vegetation
• take the landscape as it is found
• carry out all trash and uneaten food
• carry stoves to limit the need of fires or keep them small
• ask for park policies and follow them
• look for lesser used places
• try off-season and week day trips
• cut down group sized
• leave pets at home
• use a lighter boot without huge lugs where possible
• recognize easily damaged terrain and avoid it or use appropriate caution
• bury excrement shallow, not deep
• avoid walking on the edge (lip) of a trail so as not to flatten it
  (to maintain proper drainage and avoid widening it)
• rest on already packed-down ground
• perform DIY trail maintenance where needed
• walk single-file (except spread out for cross-country)
• limit your stay
• avoid "living off the land"
• cooking: let the green stick grow
• explore all options before setting up camp
• wear soft-soled shoes in camp

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This page was last updated on February 12, 2023

Always remember to "Think Green" because good planets are hard to find!!  

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