On a lovely January morning, I walked the LeTorte trail, which runs along the eponymous nature preserve. LeTorte’s name comes from an early 18th-century French-Swiss explorer who built cabins in the area after receiving the land from William Penn. James and his wife Ann fought with the American Indians (probably Shawnee) in 1720, but […]
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Today at Shippensburg University I attended a fascinating talk by scholar Dr. Joshua Eyler, who presented on his new book _How Humans Learn_ (you can see him on the second photo). Eyler spoke about the ways science and evolution can help us best understand ways to obtain new knowledge.The aristocratic clergy writing books at the
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Here’s a story for you: the oldest recorded story we know of, in fact. This smudgy cave painting made international headlines last December when scientists in Indonesia reported the discovery of a panel measuring about 14 feet depicting a hunting narrative — this picture is a detail. Dating the mineral deposits atop the pictures, which
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The earliest date that humans first settled in the Americas is something anthropologists do not agree upon – yet. Although whole-genome DNA processing might someday shed more light on the subject, some scholars favor an idea that people first crossed the Bering Straights less than 20,000 years ago, while others argue for an earlier wave
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Today while hiking, my friend Erin and I happily encountered a group of folks doing trail maintainace as part of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. This association has very long roots in the region, dating to 1927 when a group of people began with the goals to help build a section of the 2,100-mile A.T.
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In the southeastern part of Pennsylvania, a range of mountains that make up part of the Tuscarora State Forest (see second photo) run in a crescent shape from the nine o’clock to the twelve o’clock position. And running from south to north on the western side of these mountains is route 522, which goes across
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In the north-central region of Maryland, the Catoctin Park has some of the oldest layers of the earth’s exposed mountains. The Appalachians rose out of a collision between plates in North America and Africa 200 million years ago, and parts of the convergence appear here, where the quartzite rocks you see are part of a
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The Darlington Hiking Trail in south-central Pennsylvania runs over a seven-mile trajectory going east-west from the Susquehanna River to the Appalachian Trail, where the path turns into the Tuscarora Trail. The Darlington path actually predates the Appalachian Trail, having its origins from 1908, when people who began the Pennsylvania Alpine Club (such as the famed
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The area comprising Pine Grove Furnace, near where this photo was taken, was practically clearcut in the 19th century as the lucrative iron works industry increased its influence. Many of the waterways were also harnessed in service to the area’s iron forges. In 1912 and 1913, the South Mountain Mining & Iron Company sold thousands
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These images are from the northern terminus of the Tuscarora Trail, a 252-mile path from south-central Pennsylvania to the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. In the 1960s, the security of the Appalachian Trail was jeopardized by commercial land owners. Future-minded members of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy began work on the Tuscarora Trail as a potential
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In south-central Pennsylvania’s Pine Grove Furnace State Park lie the ruins of one of three secret interrogation camps in the continental United States for prisoners of World War II. You are looking on the first slide at the remains of a large mess hall. Camp Michaux was originally built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the
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Along a particularly rocky portion of the Tuscarora Trail in Perry County, Pennsylvania, is situated a 3,037-acre wildlife sanctuary established by Florence W. Erdman in memory of her mother. The F.J. Reineman Wildlife Sanctuary dates from 1966, and the trust establishing this land gave it to Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which is just near
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You are looking at an ecological transformation: what you see here is the former Gunter Valley Dam, which used to block Trout Run in the Tuscarora forest of south-central Pennsylvania. The reservoir from the dam supplied the community in Shippensburg with water from the early 1960s, when it was built, until about 2010, when engineers
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Since the year 2000, the Audubon Society has been involved with the site shown here called Hawk Watch. Located at Waggoner’s Gap along the Kittatinny Ridge just north of the town Carlisle in south-central Pennsylvania, Hawk Watch has a legacy of being a major corridor for thousands of hawks, eagles, and falcons who traverse across
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In the far north-central region of Pennsylvania lies Cherry Springs State Park, an amazing resource that shows how important civil planning can be for enabling the natural world to profit future generations.The area’s old-growth forests were clearcut in the late 19th- and early 20th- centuries, and an airport was built there in 1935 — inauspicious
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Worlds End and Loyalsocks are magnificent and adjacent Pennsylvanian State Parks in the north-central part of the state. Thanks to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Worlds End’s forests were replanted, and now Hemlock, Yellow Birch, and Red Maple join other tree species in a remarkably diverse ecology. The American environmentalist and state governor
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The Black Moshannon State Park is smack-dab in the center of Pennsylvania. It shares much of the history of so many other preserved natural areas in the state, in that the region suffered horribly from clearcutting and deforestation before the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Depression era replanted before the park’s founding in 1937.The park
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Near Big Spring State Park in central Pennsylvania lies the Hemlocks Natural Area. Made up of about 120-acres of rare old-growth forest, the region became a National Natural Landmark in 1972. There, Hemlock trees over 100 feet tall and hundreds of years old grow amidst tulip poplar, black gum, oak, and basswood trees.A small stream
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This is John R. Baylor, a politician and military leader for the Confederate forces during the American Civil War. In 1861 he brought his troops from Texas into New Mexico to threaten Union forces near Las Cruces. Although they were outnumbered 500 Union soldiers to 200 Confederates, Baylor’s men were victorious.The path towards the Union
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The landscape shown here is part of a vast and ecologically diverse ecoregion known as the Chiuahuan Desert. In the second image, a map shows its expansive territory, which encompasses about 250,000 square miles (647,500 km), making it the largest desert in North America.An unusual feature of this very young ecoregion (only about 9,000 years
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