Category: Outdoors
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Beginner Bikepacking: The C&O Canal, harpers Ferry to D.C.
Once you get a gravel bike — and a whole world of routes and good fun enters your world — it’s a quick and slippery slope into exploring bikepacking. Lucky for me, I currently call D.C. home, and one of the most confident-inspiring bikepacking routes ends (or begins) right in my theoretical backyard: The C&O…
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National Association of State Foresters’s 2023 Photo Fellow (D.C. Forestry)
Had some great fun learning about beetles, urban wood waste uses to improve communities, and some other forestry projects as National Association of State Foresters Photo Fellow last month (a very big thank you for the opportunity)! I followed foresters in the Washington, D.C. Urban Forestry Division capturing some pretty darn cool things (for someone who…
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The Southeast’s Protected Cave Network
I know a thing or two about caves growing up in southern West Virginia. We used to walk high between the river bank and rock ledges when we played in the woods growing up, spelunking for coal fossils. Any trip to any good state park included some nice rocks to squeeze between or climb up.…
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Visiting Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon”
Down in the southwest corner of Georgia near the Alabama state line, on Canyon Road in a little town called Lumpkin, sits one of Georgia’s Seven Natural Wonders: Providence Canyon. The canyon has gained popular reference as Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon” and it certainly bares resemblance. Instead of spending years being cut out by the…
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Alabama’s Best Kept Secret
“What is this place?” “The town of Spectre. Best kept secret in Alabama!” And best kept it is. Spectre is a fictional town that Edward Bloom stumbles into early in Tim Burton’s film ‘Big Fish’ (2003). The film was an adaptation of the book with the same name by Birmingham-born Daniel Wallace and is an…
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Finding Peace in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge
Every year around my birthday I always like to treat myself to a lesson; sometimes that lesson is self-care and culture immersion on a beach in Mexico or Spain, sometimes it’s something far deeper. Disconnecting in the Blue Ridge is something far deeper. There is a lesson in testing your strength, and there is a…
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Alternate Views: Paddle to See the Cherry Blossoms
Pandemic or not, cherry blossom season always gets crowded around the Tidal Basin. I mean, yes, they’re all elegantly hanging over the rippling basin in varying shades of pinks and whites and you get to glance across at the Jefferson Memorial; it’s whimsy. If foot traffic isn’t your thing, you can always ride the ripples of the…
Sara L. Cottle 