hobolinks :: December :: 2006

Attention is being paid to the situation of homeless residents of Paris, France due to the 200 tents erected along a canal for the holidays.

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been fiddling my own outdoor website called The Outdoor Map for almost a year now. My vision for it has changed, but I still use it all the time myself for finding places, keeping notes and links for them, and general map investigation. I had hoped that the site would support itself through advertising, but I never promoted it, and now the hosting bill is coming around. So, even though I still have many unrealized plans for it, I invite you play with the site a bit and see if you find it as useful as I do. Any comments you may have would be welcome.

Another online trail site joins the pack: trailchaser.com. It has a nice looking interface. Tracks, photos, waypoints, and elevation profiles are done well, but some key features like topo maps and printing are missing. One thing it does have that others don’t is the ability to draw a trail if you don’t have a GPX file.

While hiking the CDT in 2004 I encountered some of the researchers collecting hair samples for a Grizzly population count in the area. The counts are now in: a minimum of 545 individual Grizzly bears were found. This is higher than anyone expected, showing that at the moment at least Grizzlies are faring better than polar bears. They must also keeping away from humans for the most part to account for our low expectations, another good sign.

WILDCAT is preparing for a CDT through hike by cutting extra firewood so he doesn’t freeze when he comes home. He accompanies this with some thoughts about the environmental aspects of using wood for heat. Looks like it may be a good journal.

A six-week search of the Yangtze for the white rivers dolphins known as Baiji has turned up no sightings. It is said to be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction in half a century. The last confirmed Baiji sighting was in 1997.

I’ve already linked to most of these, but National Geographic has a nice summary of of the results of this year’s sea life survey.

For two decades now, Larry and Donna Charpied have battled Los Angeles county to prevent them from building a giant garbage dump outside Joshua Tree National Park. Living an hour from the nearest grocery store in their 1954 Airstream, they are the makings of desert mythology.

National Parks Traveler does some analysis of the whopping National Park Pass fee increases for 2007. This, as just this weekend I discovered a fourth type of park pass in my area: in addition to the national, state, and county parks surrounding us, each with their own pass, the city of Fort Collins sells its own pass for at least one park near the city. Enjoy your public lands, if you can afford them.

Creek Running North discusses some predictions of a Joshua Tree National Park without Joshua Trees, and muses on possible causes.

Primatologists estimate that 5,000 West African gorillas have been killed by the Ebola virus. Combined with hunting, they say this could wipe them out. Ironically, hunting is one way Ebola is suspected to pass from gorillas to humans.

Alastair Humphreys’ new book about his 4-year tour, Moods and Future Joys, has just been released. There are some good videos on his site, and a blog.

(Via Treehugger)

My last question led me to this article, which contends that mass extinction predictions fail to account for the self-balancing effects of climate change. While ice caps shrink, for instance, vegetation in rainforests may increase. The fact that past climate temperature increases similar to those predicted have not caused mass extinctions is cited. I’d like to find some past predictions and see how close they were.

• a similar comment in the journal Nature
• A short British Royal Society Paper
• A summary of a Marshall Institute study

Tally up some new shrimp, catfish, manta rays, and meat-eating piranha from a recent survey of a confluence in Venezuela. As with most species discoveries these days, some may already be threatened. Where is the tipping point, I wonder, between species discoveries and extinction discoveries? For now at least the former seem more prevalent.

Now I see my mistake – I bought a fifth wheel that required a big diesel truck to pull it instead of one of these.