Photo credit: NASA/ESA

A common query raised at Christmastime is whether there was an actual astronomical event that occurred at the time of Jesus’s birth that explains the Star of Bethlehem, which is chronicled in the Book of Matthew:

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

I watched this video three times and caught something new each time. I found it funny because of the exaggerations, but a lot of it is based on a sad reality.

From my experience in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, Asian American hikers are still underrepresented but are more commonly seen than black hikers. When I tell white friends that I like hiking, they seem to think it's a bit of a novelty but they aren't flabbergasted by it.

Do you support equal access and participation of the outdoors? Join the Hikers of Color group on Trails!

But how about a book? There are some great suggestions in this discussion in our Forums about birdwatching books. Birdwatching Phil weighed in, along with some other folks with helpful ideas.

My personal favorite is...well, you can read about it in the Forums!

Happy Birding!

Photo by Jon Jay.

When I crawl into bed at night I hear absolutely nothing, or leastways, nothing human. Around my house the air hangs as quiet and still as freshly fallen snow. There’s no freeway roar. No garbled noise from a neighbor’s TV. No radios. No car engines. Not even conversations. At night, Yosemite is absolutely quiet. For someone like me, who craves silence the way some people crave chocolate, this feels like the ultimate indulgence.

Having a husband who loves the sounds of a city – for him it’s a kind of human lullaby – I understand that there are people who don’t love silence the way I do. They love the hustle and bustle. The comings and goings. The sense that life is going on around them at a furious pace. I thought I was one of those people. And, truth be told, for years I was. But during my final two years in Los Angeles, I would wake up every night to the roar of the freeway (which was more than two miles from our home) and know I had to leave the city. The noise was driving me away.

I give them a wildlife refuge. Or a national park. Or a monument.

I do it through the Sierra Club's Wild Places campaign. You can, too, and Trails fans who do it before midnight on Sunday, December 13 will get a 15% discount (see secret code below), AND free shipping, AND a guarantee that your gift will arrive in time for Christmas.

Here's how it works: You choose the place you want to sponsor, whether it's the Great Smoky Mountains, Adirondack Park, the Arctic National Wildlife refuge -- there are ten places from which to choose. Then select your sponsorship level (they start at $20). All gifts come with a special personalized letter, certificate of sponsorship, photo and fact sheet of the wild place, and a plush wildlife animal or rucksack. To get a 15% discount, enter the code TRAILS (must be all capital letters) at checkout.

Your symbolic sponsorship supports all of the Sierra Club's efforts to protect America's wild lands and wildlife, keep our air and water clean, and solve global warming.

Just thought I'd pass that along. Give it a look-see. And if it saves you some shopping time, then you go play outside!

The Geminid meteor shower emanates from the constellation Gemini.
Credit: Kelly Whitt/Celestron’s The Sky

The Geminid meteor shower is one of the strongest showers of the year. It wasn’t always this way. When the meteor shower was first discovered, around the Civil War, it was a quiet display. Over the years the shower has become more active as Earth heads deeper into the path of the debris field, which has slowly been drifting farther into our orbit.

The bits of dust that trigger the Geminids come from an object known as 3200 Phaethon. While some sources suggest that 3200 Phaethon is an extinct comet, others have claimed that it is an asteroid. This would make the Geminid meteor shower the first to have an asteroid as its source.

Yesterday, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar delivered a powerful keynote address at the UN Climate Change Conference being held in Copenhagen.  That speech, entitled "New Energy Future: The Role of Public Lands in Clean Energy Production and Carbon Capture," gave a clear message to the world just how much the Obama Administration has already accomplished moving us toward a cleaner energy economy and how we're going to finish getting there.  The Secretary made clear that our abundant lands are going to play a crucial role in that transition, both in terms of responsible renewable energy development as well as acting to naturally sequester carbon.

The speech was eloquent and meditative and deserves to be read in its entirety which can be viewed here.  Some representative highlights are excerpted below:

Photo courtesy John Gould.

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of

poetry….

…I love them

for finding what

I can’t find,

And for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it

so that

a thousand times, till death

finds them, they may

discover it again,….

                                          -- Denise Levertov, “The Secret.” Reprinted in A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, MD; Fari Amini, MD; and Richard Lannon, MD

So begins an ambitious book, already almost a decade old, by clinical psychiatrists pushing the borders of new brain science into areas once fiercely reserved for poets and philosophers.

Finding books like this lying around the house is one of the perks of living with a poet/psychology grad student. And, while I was skeptical of science attempting to find logic in a mystery (love) that seems necessarily beyond logic’s reach, the book yielded some interesting insights into the creative process, into poetry as a form of translation from one brain to another.

Bear with my over simplification. Accept the theory that the human brain is (has evolved into) a “triune” brain—and that’s an interesting and highly substantiated theory. The “reptilian brain” (the one brain reptiles have) is responsible for vital controls (mostly subconscious) like breathing, swallowing, heartbeat, and the startle reflex.

During our Thanksgiving birding weekend with friends to Humboldt and Del Norte counties in northwest California, we saw a bunch of cool birds and some rare ones, the most unlikely one being a Crested Caracara, a large raptor of the Southwest which has an odd pattern of vagrancy along the California coast. However, in addition to searching out rarities, we were also paying more attention than usual to the common local birds we encountered during our trip.

Why, you might wonder, did we care whether we saw yet another Western Gull or Surf Scoter or American Robin when they’re all easily seen in San Francisco? The simple answer is that we’d never birded in that area before, so these were automatically new birds for our “county lists” for Humboldt and Del Norte Counties.

View from the top of Sentinel Dome in Yosemite. Photo courtesy Jamie Simons

Last May, while hiking in Yosemite National Park, Jamie Simons and her family stumbled across the public school on the Valley floor. As her daughter made a beeline for the slide, Jamie turned to her husband and said, "I want to live here." Easier said than done if you don't work for the park. But Jamie is persistent and so today she and her family have made the move to live for one year in Wawona, where her daughter attends the one-room schoolhouse. While Jamie writes, her husband longs for noise, fast food, people, and the sights and sounds of the city.

This is Jamie's first weekly post. Please welcome her to Trails!

                                             -- Tioga Jenny

Into the Park

I’m standing on top of Sentinel Dome in Yosemite National Park. Below me thunder the waters of Yosemite and Nevada Falls. Directly to my right is Half Dome, to my left, El Capitan and the Three Brothers. My head feels light, whether from the altitude or the view, I can’t say. I only know that I feel like the luckiest person alive. For this year, at least, Yosemite is my home.

On Wednesday, December 2, the Sierra Club partnered with a coalition of other environmental organizations to honor members of Congress who have championed efforts to protect our national forests' roadless areas.  In 2001, President Clinton issued the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which added protections to our country's remaining 58.5 million acres of roadless forests.  These ecologically rich areas serve as vital wildlife habitat, provide clean water, store large amounts of carbon, and offer exemplary recreational opportunities.

Photography copyrighted: John Hyde, Wild Things Photography

Despite President Bush's efforts to undermine the Roadless Rule, the majority of our country's remaining roadless forests remain protected, and thankfully President Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack have made commitments to upholding and defending this landmark conservation policy.  Congressional leaders have been instrumental in the success of protecting our roadless forests and Wednesday gave us the opportunity to honor them for their efforts to build support for legislation that would more permanently protect these precious areas.  Receiving awards in person were Representatives Jay Inslee (D-WA), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Diana DeGette (D-CO), Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and former Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY).

Although the majority of our country's roadless areas are currently protected, areas remain that are still at risk.  Idaho and Colorado submitted state-specific plans that greatly reduce the level of protections that their roadless areas receive, and the Tongass National Forest in Alaska is not protected under the national rule thanks to a temporary exemption that the Bush administration made in 2003.  As a result, there is still the need to weigh in with the Obama administration.

Take action and encourage them to uphold and defend the 2001 Roadless Rule to ensure protections of all our roadless forests, including the Tongass.

This article originally published the Lay of the Land blog.

In a quiet patch of southeastern Utah is an area set aside for its naturally beautiful landscape and exquisitely dark skies. Natural Bridges National Monument was originally established in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect its water-carved sandstone bridges that are up to 5,000 years old. In 2007, Natural Bridges became the world’s first International Dark Sky Park.

Light-polluted urban areas wash out all but the brightest stars, whereas a visitor to Natural Bridges National Monument can see up to 15,000 stars over the course of a night. Viewing the night sky at Natural Bridges is like seeing it the way humans would have seen it when the sandstone bridges were first carved. The sky and stars take on the dominance that they had every night which caused people to weave tales about what they were and what their patterns meant.

Photo courtesy John Gould.

In the fringe month I hear the new wasps hitting the glass
they have come from the white hem of a dead island sea
a break-through under the sun, an advancing tendril
killing its host in its reach into that
otherness,…

                        —“Species” from Tracer, Richard Greenfield

“Greenfield traces the cracks and fissures of ordinary life,” says Susan Howe in the back copy for this new collection from Omnidawn Publishing.

It takes confidence and skill to navigate that rupture without falling in. Someone with fresh chops, and an ear for the music behind the performance. You can tell, right away, when someone has what it takes.