Ticks are always a concern on the trail so make sure you use bug spray with DEET, tuck your pants into your socks to keep them off your silky smooth legs, and check your body thoroughly when you get home. The black-legged tick (or deer tick, picture above) can carry Lymes Disease, so they’re the ones you really want to make sure aren’t creeping around under your skin. There was an article on the NYTimes Room For Debate Blog earlier this week written by five different professors explaining what we should know about ticks and their environment and the steps we can take to control them. Some interesting viewpoints by the authors are highlighted below:

1) There are more and more ticks each year. This is directly correlated to the fact that there are more and more deers each year. In Rhode Island, each deer produces about 450,000 larval deer ticks every year.

2) Virginia opossums play a prominent role in reducing human health to tick born diseases by grooming the ticks off killing them before they even have a chance to feed.

3) This tick species bites dozens of species of mammals, birds and reptiles — not just deer. And several recent studies in New York and New Jersey have found no connection between populations of deer and ticks. In fact, abundance of black-legged ticks is more closely tied to that of white-footed mice. Ticks feeding on mice survive well and are highly likely to become infected with the Lyme disease bacterium.

Posted: July 30th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 5

Last time I’ll post on Abbey for a while, I promise. I’m sure it’s annoying. The North Rim Firetower in Grand Canyon National Park, a firetower that Edward Abbey manned for four years in the late 60s and early 70s, has been named to the National Historic Lookout Register. What does this mean? Nothing, of course. And as The Goat points out, the solitude that the great men and women who man these towers experience is cleary not filled with thoughts of making this list. But an honor is an honor folks and, without the time that Mr. Abbey spent in that tower, we wouldn’t have Black Sun, one of Abbey’s most critically unsuccessful books he ever wrote. The story of a firetower lookout who falls in a love with a young girl and gets blamed when she disappears in the park where he works, the New Yorker called the book “an embarrassingly bad novel.” I unfortunately have not had the pleasure of reading this book. Have you?

More info here

MP3: Buffy Sainte-Marie – He’s The Keeper Of The Fire

Posted: July 30th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

The Cardón cactus, scientific name Pachycereus pringlei, is the tallest cactus in the world with a maximum recorded height of almost 63 feet. This article says 70.

Take that, Saguaro.

Posted: July 30th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none