Monthly Archives: August 2012

Avery Island :: By Lindsay Mott



Avery Island, Louisiana, is home to world-famous Tabasco pepper sauce. It’s also home to a beautiful 170-acre lavish garden oasis in the middle of a cypress swamp and an amazing wildlife preserve where thousands of snowy egrets visit year to year. Tabasco, and the factory tour showcasing its history and production, is the backbone of the island’s offerings, but there’s much more to see. To the families that have lived and worked on the island and are continuing to run the operation, grow the commercial business, and maintain the natural aspects, Avery Island is more than a tourist destination. It’s been home for close to 200 years and is a natural haven for them as well.

“We’ve been stewards of the land and taken care of it for a long time,” said Paul McIlhenny, chairman and CEO of the McIlhenny Company, the company that produces Tabasco sauce.



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Big Laxá: Part Two :: By Jeff Bright

From the United Kingdom and the rest of northern Europe, or from eastern North America, getting to Iceland is a quick jaunt. Coming from the Pacific Northwest, it’s a bit more of a trek, but surprisingly not the lengthy journey I had imagined.

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Wilderness Journal :: By Tim Guilfoile


Utah’s High Desert: An Urgent Call
Strip mining for coal is destroying the high desert of southwestern Utah. And if you get to know the desert and its surroundings, you will come to understand what a heinous crime strip mining has become.
From a distance, the high desert of southwestern Utah, in the semiarid foothills of the Colorado Plateau, seems a pitiful place. Even the imagination cannot replace the desolation—devoid of the life, color, and diversity that are assumed to be the foundation of wilderness. But just as you cannot marvel at the darkness by drenching it with light, you cannot see the desert without wading in and touching it with your senses.

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Farquhar Atoll — Seychelles :: By Henry Gilbey

It’s the moment when you lift off into the unknown that a fishing trip like this really starts. I totally get that the Seychelles are one of the world’s most desirable hot weather holiday and honeymoon destinations, but to me they will always be synonymous with some of the best saltwater flats fishing to be found anywhere on this earth.

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From the Sportsman’s Widow :: By Sandra Stenson

What I did Last Summer
It was the best of times (for him, mostly), it was the worst of times. It was the season of exploration and the season of holding down the fort at home.
This summer, while I was dealing with minor distractions such as students, research, report-writing, and comforting two sixty-pound dogs during each day’s major downpour, the husband went on three “work” trips exploring different piscine regimes. The poor dear, all that work tearing him away from home—how ever did he cope?

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Home to Roost: Where Doves Come in Droves by Terry Wieland

It was one of those deep, dark, velvety, southern-hemisphere nights, the kind where the sky goes black and opens like a flower, and you wonder how there could possibly be so many stars.

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2012 Spring