Our international birding trip this winter was to Madagascar, the fourth largest island in the world, after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo. It is located in the Indian Ocean, about 250 miles off the coast of southeastern Africa. Madagascar is nearly a thousand miles long and about 350 miles wide, oriented from NNE to SSW. […]
Category: Natural History
2019 Wander Wrap-up
From Great Basin National Park, in eastern Nevada, a long drive south took us to southwest Utah, during which we lost nearly all our elevation and the geology changed dramatically, with the appearance of spectacular red sandstones, colored by hematite (ferric iron oxide). Just outside St. George, we visited The Nature Conservancy’s fascinating White Dome […]
Crossbill Puzzles
We crossed back into the U.S. on Sept. 3, in Montana, with one month before we were due in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We first visited Glacier National Park (NP), an old favorite, but it was disappointing as Manyglacier had far fewer mammals than last time we were there (October, 2001), and was much more crowded, […]
Ten Thousand Taxa
After leaving the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, we spent another long day driving east and south to and through Alberta. It was sobering to return to extensive civilization after about three months with only occasional glimpses thereof, in Whitehorse, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. We no longer had to pull off the road whenever we detected […]
Retreat!
On August 13 we got a good fresh water fill in Dawson City (not something we take for granted!), but had difficulty locating some fairly basic food and drinks that needed restocking. Heading southeast on the Klondike Highway, we took the side road to Keno, an old mining area famous for its alpine butterflies. This […]
The Dempster Highway (Part 2)
We left off last time on July 31, camped at Engineer Creek at Kilometer (Km) 194 on the Dempster Highway in the Yukon Territory. A long drive the next day, with some rain, took us past the Arctic Circle and through the fourth bioregion along the highway, the Eagle Plains (Km 248 – 410). These […]
The Dempster Highway (Part 1)
We crossed from Alaska back into the Yukon Territory on July 27, via the very scenic Top of the World Highway, which provides good access to high, dry tundra. Just before reaching the Yukon River, we visited Orchid Acres, a phenomenal protected area containing thousands of Spotted Lady’s-Slippers, Cypripedium guttatum. Like the plants we had […]
The Dalton Highway
Leaving Fairbanks in dense smoke from wildfires, we took the Steese and Elliott Highways north about 80 miles to the beginning of the Dalton Highway, a.k.a. the Haul Road, which runs 414 miles one-way to the town of Deadhorse, the publicly accessible gateway to Prudhoe Bay. This road exists to support the oil fields, and […]
Where There’s Smoke …
After returning to Anchorage from Nome, we spent a few hours in a Barnes and Noble bookstore, treating ourselves to some actual physical books for our belated 33rd anniversary – nearly everything we read now is digital, on our Kindles (books) or Kindle Fire tablet (color magazines). Afterwards we had a superb seafood dinner and […]
There’s No Place Like Nome
Perhaps our most anticipated destination of the year, Nome is over 500 miles WNW of Anchorage, on the south side of the Seward Peninsula, along Norton Sound, which opens to the Bering Sea. Like the rest of the western half of Alaska, it cannot be reached by road, but uniquely among arctic destinations in North […]
