Category: General

Bosque del Apache Pollinators 2025

The Friends of Bosque del Apache presided over an open house and grand opening of their Pollinator Habitat Enhancement Project, on the North Tour Loop at the Observation Blind Trail of the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.

Hundreds of native pollinator-friendly shrubs, milkweed, and wildflowers were planted in this area, hand-watered, and more accessible trails were added.

This project is part of the River for Monarchs initiative, building pollinator-friendly sites along the Rio Grande Corridor to support the migration of the Monarch butterfly.

I asked one of the volunteers, “What single piece of knowledge would you like me to come away with from this event?”, and was gifted with explanations that completely reshaped my understanding of the Monarch. (I have to remember that question for future interactions!)

Monarch butterflies migrate up from Mexico, and when they arrive in this area during the spring, milkweed has not started to flower. But that doesn’t matter, because Monarchs lay their eggs on the leaves of this plant and the caterpillars eat the toxic leaves and then become toxic themselves to predators.

The toxicity of milkweed is why farmers who raise cattle and horses tend to eradicate the plant, so the food source for the Monarch is disappearing, unless we act.

Thirst for the Outdoors 2025

Canteen Brewhouse in Albuquerque holds an annual outdoor fair in the parking lot, where several trail groups, public land agencies, restoration groups, and outdoor recreation groups can meet members of the public and promote use of the outdoors in New Mexico.

NMVFO staffs a table, and puts on a demonstration of 2-person crosscut saws.

We allow young people to handle one end of the saw, under close supervision, and they get to take home the disk that they sawed!

I got a chance to chat with many potential new volunteers, and to make connections with other outdoor groups. Thanks goes out to Canteen, a long-time supporter of NMVFO.

Audiobooks

I listen to audiobooks while hiking solo, and have been fortunate enough to do a long hike each year since 2012– that is a lot of audio. I record links to each completed audiobook in my online hiking journals, first as a note to myself, and second a recommendation to anyone reading or crawling this blog, a shout-out to the work of authors and readers that I have enjoyed.

My preference is to avoid audiobooks with DRM Digital Rights Management, and unfortunately a monopoly controlling contemporary audiobooks insists on DRM as a condition for authors to be published with them. Luckily for me, LibriVox was started in 2005, a group of volunteer readers who record and distribute audiobooks of public domain books. In my youth I tended to read mostly science fiction, and missed out on many classics of literature, and LibriVox has allowed me to remedy that situation in some small part.

(Please be aware that book copyright duration differs according to country, and USA rules are different from everyone else. Nowadays I look forward to seeing what new books slip out of copyright January 1 of each year, for possible use on my next hike.)

Below are all the audiobooks completed on my long hikes to date, sometimes with short notes. Perhaps this might help other travelers on their audiobook journey. More notes below the list…

AT 2012

(no audiobooks on this trip, just podcasts)

CDT 2013

CDT 2014

CDT 2015

CDT 2016

GET 2017

PCT 2018

NNML 2019

AZT 2020

MRT 2021

HDT 2022

CT 2023

GXL 2024

GET 2024

More Notes

When hiking, I only listen to audiobooks in one ear, at moderate volume, and take care to be aware of sounds around me. If I am in serious bear country, audiobooks can wait.

For USA copyright rules, in 2025 works published in 1929 or before move into the public domain. Due to a quirk in copyright law, many early science fiction whose copyright was not renewed by the publisher became public domain early, so I have recently been enjoying Golden Age SF.

I make a note of particularly good readers, and often seek out other books they have read. Some of my favorite LibriVox readers: Kara Shallenberg, Karen Savage, and the prolific Phil Chenevert. For the Girl Genius Agatha H series, Angela Dawe is excellent. For Cory Doctorow books, Wil Wheaton is super, though the author is also quite good. I avoid AI readers, for now. No narrators with uptalk, please.

On early hikes I also listened to contemporary audiobooks by Podiobooks.com, a site for mostly free downloads by self-published authors. Sadly that site has been absorbed by another website with a different business model, and links may not work.

During the lonely months between long hikes I keep up morale by searching for more audiobooks on LibriVox and elsewhere, and currently have more than 100 books downloaded for future hikes.