hobolinks :: April :: 2007

I think Island Kerstin is my favorite outdoor photographer on Flickr. Every time I see one of her shots, I end up lost in her photostream for a while.

You can now download topos in GeoPDF format from store.usgs.gov (seems broken now, but hopefully is for real). Get helpful hints and how-to’s at Free GeoTools.

Scientists discovered these rodents being sold as snacks in Laos.

This is a new website dedicated to species that are Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered.

EDGE species are truly one of a kind. If they disappear
there will be nothing similar left on the planet. Two-thirds are receiving little or no conservation attention. Help save these remarkable species.

The most recent census of the Siberian leopard puts its numbers too low for survival of the species, according to results presented April 18 at Russia’s Ministry of Natural Resources. Habitat fragmentation and hunting are given the primary blame.

I started reading this short writeup from a doctor and hiker, and kept reading to the end.

(Via As The Crow Flies)

It sounds like the official southern terminus hasn’t changed much:

Within the first hour I had drawn blood on both my hand and foot from thorns! One thorn actually went straight through the sole of my new shoes and poked my foot!

It takes one day to get excited about a cow trough:

I couldn’t find the first well, but had three liters so wasn’t too concerned, The next four windmills were all turned broken or dry, so I made my three liters last until evening when I found great water –right from the well pump spigot instead of out of the cattle trough.

I too had problems with map accuracy in the early days:

It is handy having three sets of maps, plus the GPS. Many are obsolete –for example, two didn’t even have highway 113 on them!

Ann got a wound from a yucca plant on this section that bothered her for years. Steady got away with:

Lots of cuts and scratches on the legs, but only about twenty over an inch long, and only two that are of concern. One is a cactus spine puncture about 1/4 inch deep that I could not make bleed, and the other is a nasty scratch. I’ll monitor each for infection.

Best of luck Steady, I’m jealous already!

Previous studies have cited a fungus as the reason for population declines, but this study found declines of populations free of the fungus. Global warming seems to be the next fall guy in line, though the synopsis of the evidence doesn’t sound at all conclusive.

One statistic I hadn’t seen yet: 100 frog and reptile species have gone extinct in Central & South America since 1980.

Ok, this has to be a new level for human-powered vehicles.

Among all Google’s APIs, I will be most interested in how the most recent AJAX Feed API gets used. May not sound like much, but could it make it so easy to rip off content from blogs that bloggers will have a disincentive to create good content? Or will it just give birth lots of neat, properly credited aggregations, like a master map of the GeoRSS feeds from all of our outdoor blogs? Will traffic be properly channeled or plain stolen? I’m both trepidatious and tempted to dive in.

Here’s one of those internet gems you dig up once in a while, a detailed journal site by an adventurous outdoorsy couple done entirely, it appears, in static HTML. I look forward to browsing around some more.

The new “outdoor trips” layer in Google Earth has led me to trimbleoutdoors.com. This company is selling navigation tools for cellphones, and compiling an outdoor trips database. Not huge yet, but seems to be good quality.

TrailJournals.com has been pretty quiet on the Continental Divide Trail so far this year, even though snow levels are way below average. At last there’s a a post from Steady, lured into just one more hike as described by his transcriber:

Once again I watch Steady prepare to walk away down the trail. During and after the PCT he told everyone that this was the only long distance hike that he would do. But you thru-hikers know that once you hike a long trail you are never the same again. That you have to BE there again. That the taste of the sunrises and sunsets, the high mountain vistas, the stream crossings, the sheer beauty of it all and the personal challenges conquered…all these things lure you on. And the friendships forged are extraordinary.

I bet that nearly everyone attempting a through hike of a national scenic trail produces at least one horribly complex spreadsheet in the planning process. Only a matter of time, it seems, before somebody puts their planning process into some free online software. This one’s just for the PCT.

Biologists have topped the 1 million mark in their effort to catalog the species on Earth. It appears that about half of those are in the online database.

Google has again managed to generate impressive buzz with it’s new “My Maps” feature at Google Maps. I happy to see it, because I hope it will save me from having to write a map editor for my software. Instead I just import a KML file, which can be created or edited with Google’s tools.

This has been brewing for a while, and now you can officially download oodles of map data at GeoGratis. I found topos in the CanMatrix data set.

Via The Map Room

Another very good article that describes the homeless and the world they inhabit compellingly.

Via On Homelessness in America

Caretakers of the 280 or so existing California Condors are excited that a pair has laid an egg in Mexico for the first time since the 1930′s.

This looks like a good article about one of the few places a homeless person might be tolerated during the day – a public library. Libraries have been crucial to my own comfort and communication during homeless stints.