History of National Parks

The history of US National Parks is pretty interesting.  While the US is fairly young but we were pioneers in the protection of public lands and the establishment of national parks.  NPS.gov has an useful page on the history.

Trails in Massachusetts

I am a bit disappointed that Mass GIS doesn't show that many trails for the Commonwealth.

While the entire state view looks like this:

Even when you zoom in to the large open space lands in our area, you don't get that much more information:

So to get trail data for the area, you need to do a Google Search.  You might find, for example, this site.http://www.americantrails.org/resources/statetrails/MAstate.html

And you might find buried in WWW land, this 2003 trail guide for the area. http://robertbristow.home.comcast.net/~robertbristow/userguideweb/guide.html

http://www.recreation.gov/

Where can you find info on recreation in America?  Well besides Google, try http://www.recreation.gov/. You can search by location (with or without a map) activity or just browse the databases.  This site links many other federal government websites.

Good stuff.

Snow

The US has some unusual weather this season.  The west is experiencing a serious drought and the rest of the country has been hammered with cold and snow.  You can track the season of snow, and compare it to the snowfall in the west.

For local weather, see our station at this link.

Jamaican Bobsled Team

No gold, but we have to give them credit for their Olympic Spirit.  Here is a news report from the Caribbean Journal.

Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium 2014

The Program is posted online at the NERR webpage.

75,000 flights cancelled since 1 December 2013

and 14,000 just this week!

Seems weather is the big culprit.  But can we really call weather the culprit since we may be the blame for at least some. of it?

The site FlightAware keeps these kinds of records (reported by wire services). The site is also good for tracking flights and even estimating arrival times, something I do when I need to pick up someone at the local airport (BDL).  Also you can weather reports, news reports related to the industry and lots of useful information for us, the client/passengers.