It’s been about two months since the last post, and about 5 weeks since we finished our 8-month “wander”, as they say in Australia. We’re now back in El Paso, TX, with plans to hit the road again in mid-January. From Algonquin Provincial Park, in Ontario, we drove to Rochester, NY, on Oct. 2. Along […]
Ontario, A Paddler’s Paradise
After leaving Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, we spent four weeks in the province of Ontario, half of that time along the Canadian shores of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, and half in Algonquin Provincial Park (PP). The locations along the lakeshores were new to us, but Algonquin is one of our most visited […]
MT-ID-WA-OR-ID-WY-MT-ND-MN-MI
In case you didn’t figure it out, the title contains the state abbreviations of our route since the last real travelog blog post about five weeks ago. Whereas our first five months of travel involved many stops and few long drives, the last five weeks have been quite different because of the detour to Oregon […]
Eclipse!
I started planning for Monday’s total solar eclipse about two years ago. Using a plot of the path of totality on Google Maps, I spent hours studying satellite imagery along the track, in areas where the weather was especially likely to be clear. I particularly was searching for remote places where we could dry camp […]
Prairie Retrospective
Although earlier blog posts have covered our prairies trip in some detail, the purpose of this post is to provide a higher-level perspective on our trip as a whole, and to make recommendations for others touring the prairies. I normally impose on myself a 1000-word limit, for readability, but have allowed this one to go […]
Prairie Finale
Two days ago marked the end of our 4.5-month prairie trip itinerary, in north-central Montana. This post will cover the last 3.5 weeks, while another post will summarize the prairies trip as a whole, with reflections on how the trip went, and what we though were the best spots. From northwest North Dakota, we traveled […]
Prairie Medley
It’s been 25 days since the last post, during which time we have visited 21 locations in the Dakotas and the western edges of Iowa and Minnesota. Of these, 12 were preserves established by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), 7 were federal properties, and two were state parks. Four tallgrass prairie sites were in the distinctive […]
The Niobrara Valley: Biological Crossroads
From where we left off last time in southwest South Dakota, we crossed over into Wyoming, but still in the Black Hills. We stayed two nights at a lovely dispersed campsite next to a wetland in northeast Thunder Basin NG. There was a huge hatch of insects a bit before sunset, and the habitat looked […]
Storms and Shortgrass Prairies
In the previous post I mentioned a number of trip statistics but left off the most important of all: new species towards our goal of 10,000! Yesterday was our 108th day on the road, and we have seen exactly 300 new species, so we have averaged about 2.8 species per day. This brings the grand […]
Three-Month Retrospective
We’ve been on the road about three months now, and so have long since surpassed the length of our previous longest road trips (52 days each to the Arctic in 1999 and California in 2003). It seems like a good time to calculate some trip statistics, and in this post I’ll also provide some additional […]
Nomadic Naturalists 