Posts tagged — Mike Baker

A Chilly Trek through Crater Lake NP (by Mike Baker)

A Chilly Trek through Crater Lake NP (by Mike Baker)

Sitting amid southern Oregon’s Cascade Mountains at 1,833 feet, Crater Lake National Park is a recreational wonderland that attracts skiers, sledders, snowboarders, snowmobilers, and snowshoers each winter, thanks to a 43-foot average yearly snowfall. But this playground was once a dangerous place to live for the original Native Americans who lived here when Mount Mazama erupted just over 7,700 years ago. The cataclysm decapitated the mountain, removed roughly a half mile of elevation and spread ash hundreds of miles away. Between 200 and 300 feet of ash and pumice settled near the eruption, which, due to hot gasses, eventually formed solidified columns...

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Vivacious Variety in Olympic National Park (by Mike Baker)

Vivacious Variety in Olympic National Park (by Mike Baker)

Established in 1938 by Franklin D Roosevelt, Olympic was the nation's 21st National Park, founded on Washington's rugged northwest peninsula and named after 7,980' Mount Olympus. It is an International Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site, two designations granted to the park due to a rich geography that includes hundreds of species of animals (including over 300 species of birds) and over 1,100 species of plants. The park's distinct ecosystems create a range of diversity rarely found elsewhere: a rugged coastline, glacier-capped mountains, forests, and rivers. The peninsula's diversity attracted –and kept– pre-historic humans, who hunted mastodon with stone-tipped spears as far back as 12,000 years ago, supplementing their diet with deer, elk, and gathered plants. Fish, marine mammals, and shellfish were provided by the...

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Essential Estonia (by Mike Baker)

Essential Estonia (by Mike Baker)

Estonia was swept into Christian Europe in 1227 when 2,500 of its native pagan inhabitants succumbed to a 20,000-strong army of Teutonic crusaders. It was controlled for 764 years by a succession of Danish, Swedish, German, and Russian rulers until the country permanently secured its independence in 1991 from the Soviet Union, emboldened by the Singing Revolution and the Baltic Chain of the late 1980s. Today, it is noted for the high degree of personal, religious, and press freedom enjoyed by its citizens. Powered by a robust information technology sector that gave birth to Skype and an electronic government that enables online voting over the country’s nearly-nationwide Internet infrastructure—submitting a tax return takes less than five minutes!—Estonia boasted the 2nd highest level of economic freedom in the world in 2017, putting it on track to be one of the EU’s top...

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Summer Reading is Totally Lit! (by Mike Baker)

Summer Reading is Totally Lit! (by Mike Baker)

August is a month of eventually's: the evenings eventually become cooler,  the grass eventually becomes wet with the morning dew, football season eventually kicks off, and the summer eventually, though unofficially, ends when students in much of the US start back to school. By this time, most parents and kids have gotten a good start to the school year with the help of a SUMMER READING LIST. Though it varies by state, district, school, and grade, summer reading can keep a student captivated and wanting more once school starts, whether that's adventure on the high seas, science fiction, mystery, the macabre, or the simple fairy tale. And certainly, any of our Literary Classics posters can provide a lure to hook and engage a young mind....

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Moon, Man, & the Space Machines (by Mike Baker)

Moon, Man, & the Space Machines (by Mike Baker)

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission. On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong took humanity's first "walk" on a celestial body other than Earth when he stepped onto the Moon's surface. Alongside this monumental achievement, it's also important to remember the work provided on the back-end by the many, many individuals, groups, and machines that helped make this historic landing even possible.  People have desired to walk on the Moon since antiquity, expressing this desire in various art forms for centuries. The physical reality of doing so, however, did not  become a possibility until Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's eponymous rocket equation in 1903 and Robert Goddard's first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926. By 1949, having reaped...

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