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Showing posts from June, 2017

Up North

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After 3,250 miles and 55 hours on the road, we returned from our annual vacation to Minnesota and Wisconsin last week.  Upon arriving home we weren't even out of the truck for 3 hours before it was back to a soccer practice for Cael that evening, maybe that's why it has taken me a while to get to this post. We started our trip with a 14 hour drive to Milwaukee, WI for a friend's 40th birthday party and then over to Madison, WI to see Anne's family.  Thankfully today's kids have tablets, DVD players, and a whole host of other gadgets to keep them entertained on long hauls.  Hazel it seems was born with an acute sense of smell which did not lend well to Meg our black lab sitting by her the whole trip.  Anne eventually gave her a bottle of orange hand sanitizer to mask the smell of the dog.  Cael and Hazel have been going on long road trips since they were babies so they take the long miles pretty well.  By the time we got to Milwaukee we all wanted to get out of the

Teaching Kids Leave No Trace

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I am certain that 20 years from now when my kids are on their own, I will find fossilized Cheerios jammed in the farthest crevices of my truck and Anne's car.  Earlier this week I came home from work and it looked like the Tasmanian Devil visited our house even though Anne just spent hours cleaning that same morning.  Kids seem to leave a path of destruction comprised of food crumbs and missing Lego pieces wherever they roam, so as a parent or grandparent you might ask how do I even approach teaching them Leave No Trace Principles?  Kids just want to get dirty and dig holes!  Luckily with a few simple ideas, you can make it enjoyable and a learning experience that will grow old with them. In my last blog post I discussed the large increase of visitors which is taking place to our Parks and Wildlife areas.  How do we minimize the impact of this trend and conserve these spaces for generations to come?  It starts with educating ourselves and teaching our kids.  When I was a kid,

The Instagram Effect

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Summer break has officially kicked off in our house, the kids have been out of school for a week now and our trips are on the calendar.  Recent research has shown a significant increase in attendance to outdoor recreational areas.  In 2016 the National Parks celebrated their 100th Anniversary and saw huge jumps in attendance, Joshua Tree National park in California saw a 25% increase from 2015 to 2016 bringing in over 2.5 million people.  Compare this to in 2011 the park saw just less than 1.4 million visitors.  The NPS publishes statistics for every National Park, check out those for your park here .  Our favorite local National Park to visit is the Great Smoky Mountains, it just happens to be the most visited with a record number 11.3 million visitors in 2016!  Below is a graph of total visitors to the National Parks from 2006-2016 where a huge spike has occurred since 2012.  The number of Instagram users in the United States also doubled from 2012-2016, is there a correlation?