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How the Land and Water Conservation Fund Supports Trail Running

9/25/2018

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My forefoot strikes dirt, my toes push off and the other foot follows suit. Prairie grasses brush my shins as I run the Bloody Knife Trail up a hill above General Custer’s old house at Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park near Bismarck, N.D. A whitetail explodes out of a woody draw and bounds up a hill. The Missouri River flows below where Louis and Clark camped on their voyage west in 1804. The reconstructed On-a-Slant Mandan village lies at the confluence of the Heart and Missouri Rivers. Like many trails I’ve run, the Land and Water Conservation Fund has contributed to this public land opportunity for all.

Trails to run are the first feature I look for when visiting a new city. I traveled to Bismarck-Mandan, N.D., earlier this month for the Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers annual conference. We enjoyed a tour of the Custer house at Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park on the first night of the conference, but I focused on the hills behind it. The Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) has invested almost $310,000 in the park’s trails and facilities, so a couple days later I drove back out to the park and ran five miles on its trail system.

Trail Running Participation is Growing

The Outdoor Foundation released its 2018 participation report in July. It showed that 55.9 million Americans participate in running, jogging and trail running, making it the most popular outdoor activity in the country. Trail runners have more than doubled as a subset of that category in the past decade, from 4.2 million in 2007 to 9.1 million in 2017. Five of the top six motivations to get outside involve some version of “exercise” or “nature”, according to the report, and trail running accomplishes both.

Trail running reduces impacts to knees from striking hard surfaces, strengthens stabilizing muscles from uneven terrain, and includes the psychological benefits of spending time in nature. It has helped me lose 50 pounds in the three years since I started. Trail running is also uniquely dependent on public lands. While trail runners only need a single track dirt path to run on, those trails often need public lands and facilities like parking lots, restrooms and trailheads to support them.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund Invests in Trails

Many of the trails we run — like those in the Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park — have received Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) investments for support facilities, trail development and the acquisition of the public land itself. The Land and Water Conservation Fund was established in 1964 to invest royalties from offshore oil and gas development into public outdoor recreation land and development, making grants to local, state and federal entities at no cost to taxpayers.

In fact, all of the trail races I’ve run in the past two years have occurred on LWCF-acquired or developed land. I ran the 10K at Trail Fest last summer at Brighton State Recreation Area in Michigan, where the LWCF has invested almost $740,000. A couple weeks later I ran the Boulder Sunset 5K in Boulder, Colorado. The Boulder Reservoir has received more than $72,000 in LWCF grants. This summer, I ran the half marathon at Trail Weekend and the 50K at Run Woodstock. Both races use the Potawatomi Trail and facilities in the Pinckney State Recreation Area, which has received almost $830,000 through the LWCF. And this is just a sliver of the growing number of trail races held across the country. Chances are good that the LWCF has invested in your favorite trails, too: there isn’t a single county in America which hasn’t received an LWCF grant.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund Will Expire Without Action by Congress

The LWCF is set to expire at the end of September, 2018, though, if Congress does not reauthorize it. While I was in North Dakota, news broke that the House Committee on Natural Resources passed a permanent reauthorization of the LWCF after a compromise was reached. At the same time, the National Wildlife Federation public lands team and state affiliates were in Washington, D.C. lobbying their congressional representatives for reauthorization of the LWCF.
This is a big step forward, but the compromise must still be passed by the full House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and signed into law. And while the compromise includes permanent reauthorization, it does not include dedicated funding, so there is still much work to do with little time to do it.

Whether you run trail races or just like to kick up dirt for fun and exercise on your own — like when you’re in North Dakota for a work-related conference — it’s likely that your favorite trails have received LWCF investments to help make them what they are. The LWCF supports the trails we run, so let’s support the LWCF so it can keep making those investments for us.

Please join the National Wildlife Federation in calling upon your senators to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
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Paint Creek

5/20/2012

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Paint Creek
by Drew YoungeDyke

Belly-deep in Paint Creek
and leaking waders
Rippling riffles
Fill me up
In proportion to
The time I'm here.

Purple flowers on bank
I should know their names, 
               but don’t;
 My happy ignorance
 Does not diminish
 Their aesthetic effect.

Shallow surface
Over sandy bottom
Gravel under riffled current
Heavy legs above the plane
So stay in the water, 
                 of course.

Fallen log, deep shadows
Plop! Stop.
Be still, be silent
While eyes search blackness
Beneath expanding circles
Through polarized lenses.

Leaves filter sunlight
Illuminating submergence
Foggy, clear, and perfect; there:
Holding against the current,
A silver flash, a rainbow streak
Rising to the surface of Paint Creek.
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Michigan LCV's Green Gavels Rates Michigan Supreme Court on Conservation Cases

5/17/2012

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Michigan LCV's Green Gavels Rates Michigan Supreme Court on Conservation Cases
by Drew YoungeDyke

ANN ARBOR --- The Michigan League of Conservation Voters (LCV), in cooperation with the Environmental Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School, has evaluated every Michigan Supreme Court decision over the past 30 years for their impacts on conservation and environmental protection. Following that analysis, Michigan LCV worked with a bipartisan advisory panel to apply ratings - red, green, or yellow gavels - to each relevant case so Michigan citizens can quickly gauge the conservation impact of each case and each justice’s opinion.

It is now available to every Michigander online at www.michiganlcv.org/greengavels.

“Green Gavels pulls back the heavy velvet curtains that have surrounded the Michigan Supreme Court for so long and allows citizens to look objectively at how each decision impacts our land, air, and water,” said Michigan LCV Executive Director Lisa Wozniak.

University of Michigan Law students, under the supervision of Professor David Uhlmann, researched and wrote objective summaries of every relevant case. Professor Uhlmann previously served as chief of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton and Bush administrations.

"Judicial decisions play a significant role in environmental protection by ensuring that our environmental laws are properly implemented. The Green Gavels project will provide greater understanding about the role of the courts in our environmental law system and enable voters to make choices that better reflect their environmental values," said Professor David Uhlmann.

Attorneys on staff at Michigan LCV applied positive, neutral, or negative ratings to each case and to each justice’s rulings. Ratings were then peer-reviewed by the bipartisan advisory panel. The University of Michigan Law School did not participate in the rating process and takes no position regarding support or opposition for any judicial candidates.

Michigan LCV already grades the State Legislature and Governor Snyder through its Legislative Scorecard and “How Green Is Your Governor?” programs, respectively. Green Gavels extends this work to the judicial branch, thereby finally holding each branch of state government accountable, the only conservation organization in the state to do so.

“The Supreme Court’s decisions touch every trout stream, every forest, every park, and every inch of Great Lakes shoreline,” said Tom Baird, a Member of the Board of Directors for the Anglers of the Au Sable and one of the lead attorneys on the landmark Anglers of the Au Sable v. DEQ Supreme Court case in 2010. “Green Gavels is a much-needed project. People need to know the impact that justices have on conservation.”

The Michigan League of Conservation Voters, a 501(C)(4) nonprofit organization, is the leading political voice for protecting Michigan’s environment. Green Gavels can be found on the Michigan LCV website at www.michiganlcv.org/ 

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Public Land, Public Trust

11/21/2011

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This post originally appeared on the Michigan League of Conservation Voters blog on Nov. 16, 2011. 
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Hunting public land, Nov 2010

Public Land, Public Trust
by Drew YoungeDyke
Y
esterday was Nov. 15. That may seem like a meaningless statement to some, but where I’m from, it’s like saying that yesterday was Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Independence Day, and my birthday all rolled into one: it was Opening Day for firearm deer hunting.

In northern Michigan, that usually meant a couple days excused from school and a trip to a neighbor’s property, if you were able to secure permission, to sit in a plywood blind and freeze while waiting for a buck to appear silently from the woods. If you didn’t know someone, or didn’t have your own acreage to hunt, then you went to the nearest patch of state land wearing as much blaze orange as you could while retaining the ability to walk. Hunting is so important in this state that even the legislature has recessed for deer season.

However, the very concept of public land is under attack here in Michigan. The resource that has defined our state since it was a territory is now deemed expendable, even burdensome, to some state legislators. Bills recently introduced in the Michigan House and Senate include proposals to limit the amount of public land Michigan may own, to force the DNR to grant permits for easement roads over public land - even when landowners know there is no road access when they purchase the land – and, most appallingly, to raid the Natural Resources Trust Fund in order to publicly fund private mining and logging roads through state land.

These proposals indicate contempt for undeveloped land held in the public trust, and thereby contempt for those who use it. State land, public land, is the great equalizer that allows every Michigan citizen to hunt if he or she so chooses. State land means that you don’t have to be land rich, or inherit a farm, or even know a farmer (though they’re generally great people to know), in order to engage in the oldest outdoor activity in the history of our species. Hunting also contributes $153 million in state tax revenue, and most hunting license fee revenues go to conservation programs. In Michigan, public land means that you can live in a small town and still hunt, or live in a city like Grand Rapids, Traverse City, East Lansing, Detroit, Marquette, or even Ann Arbor (really) and still hunt.

While true that there is plenty of public land across the state – approximately 4.5 million acres, the most of any state east of the Mississippi – most of that land is concentrated in northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. It gives great character to the northern part of the state, but if you live in southern Michigan, there are precious few places to hunt. The DNR has an innovative tool for locating public hunting areas, called Mi-Hunt, but you’ll find many of those areas are crowded with other blaze orange dots scattered throughout the tract.

The problem with bills that would cap the amount of state land, ordestroy its wild character by slashing it with roads, or deplete the trust established to purchase new state lands by spending it on private industry roads, is that state laws apply statewide. Someone from the Upper Peninsula or northern Michigan may look around and think that state land is infinitely abundant, but a state law preventing new land acquisitions would apply equally to southern Michigan, where what little available state land exists is already fractured by roads, easements, and development. At a time when the biggest obstacle to hunter recruitment is the availability of a place to hunt, there is no action more anti-hunting than limiting and destroying public land.

While the legislature is recessed, I hope they go out on state land and hunt. I hope they experience the outdoors as an active participant, first-hand, and realize what they rob from Michigan citizens when they introduce and pass bills like these. When they return from their break, I urge them to oppose any bill that would limit, carve, or destroy the abundance and character of public land in Michigan. Until then, I’ll be tracking whitetails on state land while we still have it. 

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The Eternal Lightness of Backpacking

9/20/2011

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Tarp shelter, October backpack bowhunting.

The Eternal Lightness of Backpacking
Ultralight is nothing new
by Drew YoungeDyke

To read most backpacking resources, you would think that the ultralight concept is as modern as the internet. New synthetic fabrics are introduced each year which allow backpackers to continually reduce pack weight with minimal losses in function. Innovators create new lightweight pack and shelter designs each day, but the concept is as old as our species. 

Ötzi, the “Iceman” mummy found in 1991 in Italy’s Ötztal Alps, may have been the first documented “ultralight” backpacker. He lived over 5,000 years ago. Items found with him included a hazel wood backpack frame, a bow stave, a quiver, arrows, a knife, a hatchet, a net, a prehistoric lighter, various tools, and birchbark containers theorized to be lightweight alternatives to pottery. Scientists think he may have been a hunter, a prospector, or a shepherd; whichever his profession, he carried a thoughtfully selected overnight kit. That he chose birchbark containers over heavier pottery indicates a conscious consideration of his pack weight, and a preference for the lightweight alternative. 

Here in Michigan, the Odawa travelled lightly in canoes up and down the coast of Michigan between their summer residence at Little Traverse Bay and their winter homes, which ranged from Chicago to the Muskegon River. According to Andrew J. Blackbird, an Odawa chief who wrote History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan in 1887, they carried light cedar poles in their canoes. When they camped on shore each night, they stretched marsh reed mats or sewn flags over the cedar poles to make small, portable, waterproof wigwams – tents, basically - which were lighter to carry than the larger permanent birchbark wigwams they lived in at home.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, numerous treatises, magazines, and guidebooks were published about wilderness travel. The writer and outdoorsman George Washington Sears, pen name Nessmuk, wrote in his seminal 1884 treatise Woodcraft, “Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest materiel for health, comfort, and enjoyment.” 

The 1910 Boy Scout’s Hike Book outlined a scout kit that weighs 23 pounds, and described the nineteenth century northwoods pack-sack kit which weighed no more than 30 pounds. Horace Kephart, in 1919’s Camping and Woodcraft, described numerous light tents and a simple tarp-tent to be used for “shifting” camps, when “cumbersome affairs are out of the question.” 

Kephart spent pages on the most lightweight and waterproof materials of the day to be used for tent construction, at that time waterproofed silk, which reminds me of modern blog posts about dyneema and ripstop nylon. He described pack/shelter and sleeping bag/pack combos, though he doesn’t give them a very ringing endorsement, and even a 7-pound European pack kit, though he didn’t recommend it for use in deep wilderness. For a 10-day solo hunting trip in fall weather, he outlined a 28-pound pack, 42 with provisions, but when you consider that he allotted eight pounds for his sleeping bag, you realize that it really was a lightweight pack for the available materials. 

My own ultralight obsession began in high school during football practices when we had to run up and back down a sand hill before every water break. Soon I replaced my 15-oz. cleats for 10-oz. versions that looked like soccer shoes, my one-inch-thick foam hip pads were replaced with lighter hard-foam ones half as thick, and I traded my bulky running back/linebacker pads for quarterback pads which weighed much less but definitely allowed me to feel the full brunt of defensive ends’ fury after I made an option pitch. Despite the reduced impact protection, I felt a definite advantage running up that sand hill four times a day. When I began backpacking, I applied the same principles and compiled a lightweight, if not ultralight, kit, due to the ridiculous prices charged for modern ultralight materials. By taking into account the principles described in these century-plus-old texts, though, a light pack can be assembled with the gear you probably already own. Most of the texts are available online through Google Books due to expired copyrights. 

While packs of 25-30 pounds wouldn’t be considered ultralight now, they were definitely ultralight in their day. The modern obsession with light pack weight may sometimes seem like a fad akin to barefoot running, but it’s really neither modern nor a fad. From 5,000 year-old Ötzi substituting birchbark for pottery, Michigan Odawa canoeists substituting woven reed mats for birchbark, or a modern backpacker substituting a sil-nylon tarp for a dome tent, the principle hasn’t changed since Nessmuk told us to “Go Light.”

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    AUTHOR

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    Drew YoungeDyke is an award-winning freelance outdoor writer and  a Director of Conservation Partnerships for the National Wildlife Federation,  a board member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, and a member of the Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers and the Michigan Outdoor Writers Association. 

    All posts at Michigan Outside are independent and do not necessarily reflect the views of NWF, Surfrider,  OWAA, AGLOW, MOWA, the or any other entity.


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