Saturday Morning Links

Photo by Veikko Venemies on Unsplash

1. Ever heard of the Aulanko Nature Reserve​? Me neither. It’s in Finland, and the park was established in 1883, in region of Häme, the property originally purchased by colonel Hugo Standertskjöld, who had made his money manufacturing arms in Russia.

2. This is right up my alley. Outdoor Life through Popular Science, Christine Peterson writes about ultra marathoner Mike Wolfe, who hunts pronghorn by trying to outlast them. Running after them to exhaustion. Persistence hunting.

Fawns, bucks, and does jockey back and forth in their quick race across the prairie, legs blurred, bodies flowing forward with effortless efficiency. Wolfe turns toward them and keeps a steady pace, his lanky body draped in a threadbare button-down shirt, hands relaxed, legs light, back barely shifting. It’s the tortoise and the hare—two species that both evolved for loco­motion: one for sprinting, the other for endurance. But in this case, if the tortoise wins the race, he kills the hare.

This isn’t some sort of experiment for Wolfe. It’s not even really an athletic pursuit, at least not in the way we think of marathons or big mountain races. This is a personal quest. It’s his way of tapping into some deeper predator-prey relationship.

“I’ve run various antelope long enough to where there was­—it’s like there was a switch. Something changed and the animal and I were suddenly on different terms. I’m not flinging a compound bow at 80 yards. This is the original fight. Who’s going to outlast the other one? It feels primal, but not just to me, also to the antelope.”

3. SideTracked Magazine is one of those sites I always go back to, mainly for the terrific photography and this link is no different, hiking in the woods of the Wilderness of Scotland.


4. From Bitter Southerner’s Shane Mitchell, the history of cane sugar in the United States.

5. You might think that you might not learn a whole bunch from the Craft Brewers of Boise regarding the IPA (which is my favorite beer even though that’s an absolute cliche), but you’d be absolutely wrong. Picking up with the complete history of the IPA: Part 2, British Bitters.

Published by

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s