Boreal B[l]og

Welcome!   You will find pictures and descriptions  of wonderful boreal wilderness places, like ANWR, Arrigetch Peaks and Alaska’s Alatna River.  I am on an odyssey to see all 56 national parks in the 50 states.  These are the crown jewels of America; seeing them has been well worth it.   Young bull moose on Isle Royale above right; Dall sheep below left; further below is Wheeler Peak in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park; to the right is a wolverine in ANWR.

I have taken 57 canoe trips into the Boundary Waters/Quetico since 1981;  pictures of some of the more recent trips are included.  I’ve stopped taking pictures other than wildlife and special scenery, because after a while, water is water!  The photo below is a September sunset on Lake Insula in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.     I cannot deny the oddity of my calling this a Boreal Blog/Bog (that’s why there are brackets around the “l”) when I live in Tucson, part of the Sonoran Desert.   My heart  is “Up North,” ever since I was a camp counselor in Ontario in the mid-1960s, taking 25 canoe trips all over Algonquin Park, which is a couple of hours north of Toronto.

I’m also a freelance writer, emphasis usually on the first syllable, but honestly, I do get some of my work published.  My best writing is A Wise Owl, which appeared in the journal Neurology.  It’s not technical.  Code Team, which is on the same post, shows a side of a doctor you won’t believe!  I was an astronomy columnist for the Arizona Daily STAR for 20 years, and I have included two Focal Point columns I wrote for Sky and Telescope.  I’m an invited columnist for the Pima County Medical Society’s Sombrero, and the writings are sorted by year under Reality Check.  As you will discover, I don’t hold back much.  A lot of my writing comes from my trips, and frankly my ideas appear spontaneously, when I’m not thinking about it.  I experience something and later say,  “there’s an article.”  Of course, when one has a wolf in his campsite, ten trail miles from the nearest other person (see Thump), the story writes itself.  When I flunked my first English paper in college (deservedly), I never thought I would write as much as I did.  Practice sure hasn’t made me perfect, but it has improved my skills.

I am an addicted eclipse chaser, having taken 19 eclipse trips all over the world.  Why do I chase eclipses?  Read the post!!  See a brief video of one!

I’ve seen 11 total, 5 annular, and skunked on 3, in Iceland, clouds in South Africa and Cabo San Lucas.  I show both total and annular eclipses; for more information, see Jay Anderson’s Web page.  Jay and his wife Judy live in Winnipeg and are good friends.   Jay is a retired meteorologist and does climate analysis and predictions for the events.  Eclipses are one of the most beautiful sights in nature, and contrary to what some may think, the mathematics and geometry that explain them are equally as beautiful!

I am a volunteer math tutor (soon to be an official substitute!) in two high schools and for Literacy Volunteers, and I have a page how I do mental arithmetic, since I work with numbers almost as easily as I breathe.  I volunteer at Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska helping get people out to see the Sandhill Crane migration on the Platte River.  The Sandhill Crane migration is one of the two great North American migrations.  The other is the Porcupine Caribou migration in Canada/Alaska.  I’ve seen both in the same year.  I’m really blessed with good fortune.  Here’s one a shot from Nebraska: 

This is my first blog, but hey, I’m an old guy and I spend as much time as I can in places where electronic devices read “No Service” and if you tune a radio, it just keeps going ad infinitum.  Out in Sig Olson’s “back of beyond,” you don’t sit at a computer, you sit on a rock, a log, the good earth, and take in nature.  At least I do!

Enjoy!  I hope you have the good fortune to have adventures in the wilderness that I’ve had!    There will be both a total eclipse in the US in 2017 and an annular eclipse reaching the west coast and in as far east as Lubbock , TX, in 2012, 3 weeks before the last transit of Venus until the 22nd century!  The link will lead to the exact map.

Mike Smith