Nearing the end of the northern summer, one for too many of the wrong kind of record books, some notion of hope is more than welcome. This edition of his newsletter offers some:

Beavering Away

With Your Help. (An annual update!)

In the guise of my annual report on our nifty online community I’m going to show you my vacation pictures! Lucky you!

It’s possible I’m just feeling guilty because I took a couple of days off in this Summer To End All Summers. But Sunday and Monday, while Hillary was introducing southern Californians below the age of 85 to the concept of ‘tropical storm,’ I went on a wander with an old friend through the middle of the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, a splendidly remote chunk of land that I’ve lived on the edge of, off and on, for much of my life, and which I never tire of exploring. This wilderness area is about 125,000 acres, or nine times the size of Manhattan, and it’s just one of thirteen big chunks of wild land in the Adirondacks, the greatest wilderness complex in the American east by far. (The Adirondacks are bigger than Glacier, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite—combined). There’s nobody living in that 125,000 acres—unless you count the moose, bear, loons, hawks, whitetail deer and gnats we kept encountering. And of course the beavers.

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