I’ve been doing a lot of hiking, driving, and writing the past couple of weeks, and still working on wrapping up my latest book. Still, I’m keeping up with adding hikes to the site, just no time to do much blogging. Here are the new hikes in the past week:
I spent this morning on a foray into the Forest with folks from the Florida Native Plant Society. It let me look at my favorite habitats in a very different light, plus explore a number of places I hadn’t seen before.
Just found out that the FT Gateway Community video Seidler Productions pulled together out of our shoots for the 27-minute PBS special I scripted is now YouTube’s editors pick for the Travel category. How cool! Here’s the link.
Thanks to a posting about Mike DeWitt’s video (see a few blogs ago), I stumbled across a website called BestHike.com. Today’s post concerns hikers lost in the jungles of French Guyana for 7 weeks. Since I’ve hiked all around the world, it’s a blast to find a site devoted to hiking everywhere and anywhere. Bookmark this one.
I read this disconcerting commentary by Orlando Sentinel Lake edition columnist Lauren Ritchie after my husband brought it to my attention. In a nutshell, drug addicts (and other reprehensible individuals) are looting natural lands in Lake County for archeological artifacts to sell on Ebay, destroying stream banks and digging holes in natural habitats. This brings up the point some friends and I discussed this week, that Ebay needs to have more accountability for sales of stolen goods than they do. But more importantly, if you’re on a hike in Central Florida and see suspicious digging or damage to creek beds and banks, please report it both to the land manager and to the local sheriff’s department. It’s not easy to police natural lands … but if you see something suspicious, it’s your duty to report it. Thanks.
Then come out to FOWA’s Great Florida Outdoor Communicators Day, April 21, in Gainesville. Listen and learn to folks who range the spectrum from college student to nearly retired on how they got into their outdoor writing careers, what the perks and downsides are, and what motivates someone (like me) who loves the outdoors to end up writing about it for newspapers, magazines, websites, and in books!
For more information on this event, please contact FOWA President Tommy Thompson (352) 284-1763 or by email. Read the rest of this entry »
