#Gifford Pinchot State Park

[yagodichjagodic]

Oil pastels at Pinchot tonight

[yagodichjagodic]

Sunsets at pinchot. Nothing has changed.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this press release from the Center for Biological Diversity:

The Center for Biological Diversity today filed a petition urging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the Cascade red fox under the Endangered Species Act. The Washington state foxes are threatened by climate change, small population size and a host of other threats.

“The cold, snowy landscapes where Cascade red foxes live are melting away before our very eyes and these animals and their homes need to be protected,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center. “For these foxes to have any future, we have to curb greenhouse gas pollution and protect more of the natural world, not only for their sake but for ours.”

Once found throughout high elevation areas of Washington’s Cascades, the foxes have been lost from the North Cascades, or about half their range. A small population of foxes survives in the state’s southern Cascades, centered on Mount Rainier National Park and several wilderness areas on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

In addition to climate change, Cascade red foxes are threatened by predation and disease, habituation to humans, poisoning, incidental hunting and trapping, habitat destruction and fragmentation due to logging, development and vehicle collisions. These threats are all magnified by the small size of their population. Scientists estimate that the foxes’ genetic diversity has dwindled to the equivalent of just 16 individuals.

[pcttrailsidereader]

Forget the Yacht. The Best Travel is on Foot, Through Wilderness

Nick Kristof is a columnist for the NY Times. He has also hiked the PCT. We included a wonderful story in Crossing Paths: A Pacific Crest Trailside Reader that Kristof wrote about hiking with his teenaged daughter, his general companion on the PCT (which he references in this column). He has and continues to be a high-profile advocate for walking. Here's his most recent column.

By Nicholas Kristof

Some folks think the best way to travel is by private jet. Or yacht. My choice: by foot.

Some think that the best thing about America is its wealth, technology and modernity. Others point to its Democratic institutions. But I’m with the writer Wallace Stegner that America’s “best idea” is our spectacular inheritance of public lands — purple mountain majesties — amounting to about 40 percent of our nation. As Stegner said of our national parks: “Absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best.”

Some people worship in a church, others in a temple or mosque. I attend the cathedral of the wilderness, for among wildflowers in an alpine meadow we can all connect to something grander than ourselves.

I don’t want to overromanticize the wild; my cathedral has no thermostat, so it’s always too cold or too hot, and it can be filled with mosquitoes. But wilderness still fills me with semireligious awe.

The 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that God and nature were the same, and perhaps in an age of declining religious practice some can find in nature another kind of higher power to be inspired by. Like religion, wild spaces teach us humility and patience (certainly mosquitoes do). Wilderness puts us in our place, calms us, soothes our souls. Like prayer or meditation, walking through the wild gives us an opportunity to detach, to reflect, to self-correct.

So here I am in my alpine cathedral on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon, marking the end of summer with my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, as we backpack on the Timberline Trail. My family hikes this loop around the mountain almost every year.

We cowboy camp, without a tent — if rain seems likely we set up a small tarp — and fall asleep watching shooting stars. Then we rise with the first orange rays of the sun: A sunrise serves as caffeine. We stow our sleeping bags and hike, with no schedule or plan. When we’re tired, we rest and eat. When we’re thirsty, we stop at a rushing creek and fill a water bottle with snowmelt. When dusk approaches, we find a flat patch of ground and lay out our sleeping bags.

As we walk, we ponder. What I’m pondering is how lucky we are that our forebears more than a century ago — prophetic leaders like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot — fought industrial interests and succeeded in preserving wild spaces for our public use in 2024, and our great-great-grandchildren’s use in 2124.

The original model for America was to privatize nearly all land, so by one analysis only about 15 percent of New York State is now publicly owned. But over time in newer states, with champions like Roosevelt, national parks and forests were created and more state and city lands set aside as well.

Today a majority of the land in states like Oregon, California, Idaho and Nevada is held by the public. Alaska is an extreme example: About 85 percent of Alaska is set aside for the common good.

I can’t help thinking that if we were to allocate land in today’s more calculating age, America might make a different choice and sell pristine spaces to the highest bidder, perhaps with naming rights to mountains and rivers. This might be Mount Musk, and we’d be outside the fence wistfully exchanging stories of the glaciers on a billionaire’s playground.

Perhaps that would be more efficient. Private landowners might do a better job controlling forest fires than the government. But what a loss for the nation.

On our first night out on this trip, Sheryl and I found a spot under soaring fir trees beside a babbling brook, as the mountain and its glaciers loomed over us. During the night, some large animal, perhaps Bigfoot, woke us by crashing through the brush, adding priceless atmospherics.

This was a spot that no billionaire could buy. It was ours that night, perhaps some other hiker’s the next night, and maybe on the third night Bigfoot had it all to himself. In our shared wilderness, there are no tiers of pricing as at Disneyland; we are all equal before the majesty of nature.

In some parts of America, private beaches are the playgrounds of the affluent. But Oregon beaches are all public, so earlier in the summer my family backpacked on the Oregon Coast Trail, which meanders from Washington to California along deserted beaches (and forced us once, when we miscalculated the tides, to make a run for it around a small cape to avoid the waves). Those glorious beaches are mine, are yours, are ours.

In many ways, America is a class society. Rich and poor live in different neighborhoods, shop at different stores, send kids to different schools and inhabit different worlds. But one place of true democracy is on our public lands.

My daughter and I hiked the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada over six years (best parenting I ever did), and the trail was the most egalitarian space I’ve seen. We met C.E.O.s, nurses, construction laborers and students, with none of the usual cues to judge status. We all stank.

In the course of writing a recent memoir, I came to realize that I probably had suffered a mild case of PTSD from covering too many wars and massacres. It was in this same period that I developed a passion for backpacking, and I suspect that I unconsciously prescribed myself wilderness therapy to heal.

It works. I see wild spaces as a place to think, to escape cellphones and editors (sorry, boss!), to connect with loved ones, to be dazzled and humbled by the vastness of space and the slowness of geologic time, to escape class divides, to purge ourselves of frustrations and political toxicity, to bare our souls, to be recharged.

Thank God for America’s best idea.

[geocyclist]

A very windy day on Pinchot Lake for the first trip out with the sunfish!

[beingprecedessoul]

Another hike on Lakeside. I woke up late and almost didn't go, but in the end I got myself out for about an hour hike. I can't let depression hold me down! I let myself rest yesterday since I had a hard hike Sunday, but this yerning is still strong, so I'm not gonna let needless doubt keep me from this fire.

[aladylostinlove]

Gifford Pinchot State Park || November 3, 2017

[urbanadventureleague]

Summer 2022 Bike touring/status update

Summer 2022 Bike touring/status update

Camping at Ainsworth SP in the Gorge, 15 June 2022. Ricohflex Dia/Kodak Gold 200 We’re just a couple days away from the start of July. If it’s not too hot (or too smoky) July through September marks the best time to bike tour here in the Pacific Northwest–long, dry, warm days. Spring typically isn’t a bad time to tour or camp here either, if you get the weather right. But this spring has been…

[mobile-artifact]

Waterfall

Gifford-Pinchot State Park, PA

[yagodichjagodic]

Solo Christmas Eve at Pinchot.

I’ve lost a lot this year.

Shed a lot.

Died a lot.

But I didn’t disappear.

[theamandacollection67]

Gifford Pinchot State Park is 2,338 acres in Pennsylvania state park in Northern York County.

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Play fair to the earth

Play fair to the earth

World Wildlife Day ~  March 3

Wildlife Montage. Red Winged Blackbird, White Tailed Deer Fawn, Garter Snake, JackRabbit, Mallard Ducklings, Black Crowned Night Heron

Gifford Pinchot centered on  conservation as follows; ” The principles which the word Conservation has come to embody are not many, and they are exceedingly simple. I have had occasion to say a good many times that no other great…

[tinyntipsy]

I think it’s safe to say she ❤️’s the water 🐶💧 #foryou #puppiesofinstagram #lake #tired (at Gifford Pinchot State Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CRO0FlkFVP3/?utm_medium=tumblr

[jimbargas]

Gifford Pinchot State Park, York County Pennsylvania 8.13.2020

Photo by Jim Bargas

[beingprecedessoul]

4th hike! This time I went to Gifford Pinchot state park and spent about an hour and a half on the Lakeside trail until it started to rain pretty hard and I had to turn back. If the rain stops I think I'd like to go back out later this evening.