Outdoor Life Ranks Top 200 Hunting and Fishing Towns
Lewiston, Idaho has topped Outdoor Life's top 200 list of the best hunting and fishing towns. Marquette, Michigan came in second. You can see the Outdoor Life feature here.
Lewiston, ID
Marquette, MI
Idaho Falls, ID (tie)
Rawlins, WY (tie)
Pocatello, ID
Bismarck, ND
Sheridan, WY
Pierre, SD
Rochester, MN
Carbondale, CO
Outdoor Life has also made available an Excel file you can download of the 200 towns.
This is a pretty cool idea. Curated Magazine reports that Studiometrico helped Comvert convert an old theater in Milan into a store that contains a skate bowl on the top floor. Comvert designs clothing and accessories for snowboarding and skateboarding so the skate bowl is a perfect addition to their shop.
The K-Light is a solar-powered lantern that would be useful on camping trips. The K-light can be used for up to 20 hours after being charged in the sun. It can be used as both a lantern and a flashlight.
The K-Light is an innovative, eco-friendly solar-powered lantern, designed to stand up to the harshest environments. Approximately the size and weight of a can of soda, the unique combination of its solar-charging battery and bright, energy-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs), make the K-Light unlike any other product available today.
Small, lightweight and rugged, the K-Light is perfect for outdoor activities such as camping, boating and hiking. The K-Light is ideal as an emergency light, too. Highly water-resistant and designed to be used as either flashlight or lantern, the K-Light can be charged and used anywhere—no matter the situation.
A new tool developed at the University of B.C. helps cyclists plan safe routes away from traffic with low air pollution. You can find the cycle route planner for here. Check the Cycling in Cities website for more interesting studies.
iPhone Board Perfect For Skateboarding Apple Fanboys
This geeky iPhone skateboard is up for sale on Zazzle. It was clearly designed to resemble Apple's popular iPhone. It retails for $63.50. Someone should do the same thing with a surfboard.
Schwinn's Tailwind electric bicycle is billed as the fastest charging electric bike in the world. Schwinn had it on display at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas where they were offering test drives. The bike is currently available at authorized Schwinn retailers. You can find an outlet at schwinnelectricbikes.com . You can find more specs here.
There are worm vending machines in Poland that dispenses live worms. Reuters says it's a prototype on trial beside Nielisz Lake in the Lublin province of Poland and that it's popular with local anglers. Just don't bring worms to your daughter who is expecting a candy bar. Take a look:
The Sierra Club has posted an online quiz so you can test your Green IQ here at the end of 2008. The ten question quiz covers topics like whales, space, the Amazon rainforest, politicians and the Urban Chicken Movement. Good luck! (via The Green Life)
The amazing aurora above was photographed outside Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada by iReporter Dave Brosha. CNN has several more photographs here. CNN also has an article that lists some places to go (see end of CNN's article) if you want to see the auroras. Thousands of people have already made the journey to see witness the auroras first-hand and who can blame them? It looks beautiful.
"Usually it starts slowly as kind of a hazy greenish color -- like a mist -- building up in frequency dancing across the sky ... and to me that's religion," said photographer Dave Brosha of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, who's seen more than 100 Canadian auroras. "It's just one of the most incredible feelings a person can have -- sitting there watching that."
Missing Class Ring Turns Up Inside a Bass Twenty Years Later
The AP reports that the class ring a man lost 21 years ago while he was fishing has been returned to him. A fisherman found it - inside an 8-pound bass!
The fisherman who discovered the tarnished ring inside his catch contacted Richardson on Nov. 28 in Buna, about 100 miles northeast of Houston, after tracking him down with help from the Internet.
His fisherman hero asked to remain anonymous.
Richardson, 41, said he lost the ring about two weeks after his 1987 graduation from Universal Technical Institute in Houston. His mom had bought it for about $200 and wasn't pleased when it went missing.
What a hilarious story. At least Richardson's mom won't be mad anymore!
Gizmodo reports that a man lost his iPod in the river while he was fishing. The water destroyed the iPod so the man decided to make a fishing lure (see photo above) from the broken iPod's components.
"Seeing it was the river that took it from me, it's gonna at least catch me some fish," says Maker Captain Ahab (perfection in a handle). He used the screen polishing cloth for the body, the USB logicboard connector for the legs, touchscreen inreface wires for the head and wings, and various other harvested components to craft this beauty.
It might be flashy enough to attract fish. Even if it does work it's way too expensive of a lure to make repeatedly.
Focus Designs has come out with an electric unicyle that does all the difficult looking balancing and pedaling for you. Focus Designs says the bike uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to control the unicycle's movement.
The SBU is an electric self-balancing unicycle which uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to control the forward and backward movement with an electric motor. Basically, it pedals for you. It's an experience like no other. They're in limited market testing right now, go to focusdesigns.com for availability.
They look very interesting. As Gizmodo suggests it would be a way to check unicycle riding off your bucket list. You can find the website for the SBU here. Below is a video.
Burton snowboards has a controversial new line of boards called Coalition Love which feature images of partially nude Playboy models. Snowboarding.com has information and photos of the boards here. WPTZ interviewed people on the street in the CNN video below and some were not impressed with these new boards. Burton says the snowboards will be sold to people 18 and over.
The wreckage of Steve Fossett's plane was found in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains near Mammoth Lakes on Monday. ABC News reports that a hiker who found the wreckage first noticed dollar bills.
"Out of the corner of my eye I caught some cards, some white cards, and some money," Morrow said. "So I got closer and it was hundred-dollar bills."
The hiker's discovery triggered a renewed flurry of activity in the search for missing adventurer Steve Fossett -- resulting in an announcement this morning that wreckage of the aviator's long-lost plane had finally been found.
"Late last night, just about the time we were going to call off the search, the aircraft from Yosemite National Park spotted what they thought was wreckage on the ground," said Sheriff John Anderson in a morning press conference at the Mammoth Lakes Airport. "The search team, they were planning to spend the night in the mountains, they got the GPS coordinates of the aircraft, they went in, and they did locate an aircraft which we have now confirmed is the one that Steve Fossett was flying when he disappeared last Labor Day."
Governor Sarah Palin Encouraged Aerial Wolf Hunting
Slate has an article about the controversial practice of Aerial Wolf Gunning, where wolves are hunted and shot from an aircraft. John McCain's vice presidential pick Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska supports the practice and proposed cash incentives to encourage more of it.
Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and John McCain's vice presidential pick, is an enthusiastic hunter who has proposed legislation and cash incentives to encourage aerial wolf gunning, the controversial practice of shooting wolves from an aircraft. Do people in Alaska really shoot wolves from planes?
Yes, but only with the government's permission. Aerial shooting yields better results than traditional hunting, since it allows the hunter to cover a lot of ground quickly and track target animals from a clear vantage point. Historically, hunters also used planes to drive animals-polar bears in Alaska and elk in Montana, among others-toward gunmen waiting on the ground. But many hunters found the practice unsportsmanlike, since it violates the "fair chase" ethic, and animal rights activists call it inhumane, since airborne gunmen rarely get a clean (i.e., relatively painless) kill. In response to concerns like these, Congress passed the Federal Airborne Hunting Act of 1972, which made it illegal for hunters to shoot animals from a plane or helicopter.
A CNN story from 2000 quotes the Alaska Department of Fish and Game commissioner who says wolves are often chased to exhaustion when this hunting tactic is used.
"To track and spot a wolf from an aircraft, land and then kill it, is not considered to be a fair chase method," said Alaska Department of Fish and Game commissioner Frank Rue. "We know from past experience that the practice leads to other abuses such as chasing wolves to exhaustion, herding wolves and shooting them from the air."
This certainly does seem like an inhumane practice. There's another article about it here. You can see a video below (and here) that is against Aerial Wolf Hunting from Defenders of Widlife.
Lewiston, Idaho has topped Outdoor Life's top 200 list of the best hunting and fishing towns. Marquette, Michigan came in second. You can see the Outdoor Life feature 
The K-Light is a solar-powered lantern that would be useful on camping trips. The K-light can be used for up to 20 hours after being charged in the sun. It can be used as both a lantern and a flashlight.
