Pandemic Library, Episode 6: Favorite Places

-
In an "Ask A Librarian" question, Ivan asked, "What is your favorite place (BESIDES MONTANA)? Montana is certainly my favorite place, as Ivan must have figured out. Besides Montana, my favorite places are mostly in Colorado, where I grew up.

It was hard to pick just one spot. Rocky Mountain National Park would be an obvious choice, as would the mountains and valleys in and around Gunnison, Crested Butte, the Collegiate Peaks, the Sangre de Cristo Range, the Poudre River Canyon, and so forth. So much spectacular scenery to choose from. . .

But I kept coming back to the mountains of home, west of Denver, in the Evergreen area. It isn't the Colorado high country, and our little valley won't make it on picture postcards in tourist towns. Even so, it is the place in which I grew up. And where we grow up, as the writer Scott Russell Sanders writes, shapes us in deep and profound ways, for better or worse.

We moved to Evergreen in early January of 1972, when I was in fifth grade. During the next several years, I explored the surrounding hills and got to know them in all seasons. When I went off to college, I missed that valley as much as I missed my family; in fact, the two seemed interwoven.

Ivan, I don't know if this answers your question, but your question did inspire a video log entry. Look for the video at Pandemic Library, Episode 6.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMay 18, 2020 at 10:54 AM

    what is your favorite animal and candy. my favorite animal is the penguin it will never fly though.....it is very disapionting. my favorite candy is charleston chew.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMay 27, 2020 at 9:50 AM

    On a vaguely related note, do scientists like mutants?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ask a Naturalist: Part 1

-
The "Ask a Librarian" questions were certainly fun for me to answer, and I will continue to respond to those questions from time to time. However, while working on a recent blog post ( Pandemic Librarian Gets Back to Nature ), it occurred to me that I could fill a need that all hikers have at some point. I am, of course, referring to how convenient it would be to have a botanist with me whenever I'm hiking. That way, I could ask him or her about the plants along the trail. I do have a couple of botanist friends, but they don't always answer right away when I send them texts with photos of some plant or another. I won't answer your questions right away, either - but like "Ask a Librarian," the answers to your questions to the natural world will not be ones you can find with any kind of Google search, or any other reputable database, for that matter. So, without further ado, here are the first questions. The first question comes from Eowyn, who ask
Read more

Ask a Librarian: Answers You Won't Get From Google: Science Friday

-
Just about all of the questions for this week's post are science-related. That's only fitting, since just yesterday I watched my nephew defend his doctoral thesis during a Zoom presentation. His topic? "Lend me some sugar: how plysacharides and pleomorphism drive the dissemination of a fungal pathogen." I don't understand it, either. That fungal pathogen, by the way, is Cryptococcus neoformans. It will turn your brain into cottage cheese, basically, if you get it. The takeaway here is to beware of fungal pathogens. Just in case you were wondering. And thanks to Pam, my favorite sister, for helping me answer this week's questions so that I could go for a hike. The first question comes from "Unknown" in a reply to a recent blog post: "Do scientists like mutants?" Thanks for asking, "Unknown." You could have asked our nephew Steven; he's a real scientist.  (This question actually comes from my brother, who, contrary to what I use
Read more

Pandemic Librarian Gets Back to Nature

-
Image
A couple of years ago, I took a week-long Master Naturalist's class at the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula. We immersed ourselves in the plants, birds, insects, fungi, mammals, and geology of western Montana. It was too much information, but I did learn about a couple of free apps that make it much easier to identify plants, butterflies, and pretty much anything else in the natural world that will sit still long enough to for me to take a photo. My favorite app is "Seek." It's produced by the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. The app is free and it's amazing. You can use it like a camera to focus on a flower or other plant and watch it work to identify it. Success is not guaranteed, of course - sometimes the app can figure out just the order or family. But with even what look to me like fuzzy photos, Seek provides a quick ID, as with this California Tortoiseshell butterfly: "Seek" works best with things that do
Read more