Geomapping & Geocaching: Happy Trails!

Now that the autumn foliage is turing all kinds of impossible colors, many people are “hitting the trails” to enjoy some brisk outdoor exercise while viewing the autumnal crazy-quilt as it brightens day by day. Both city dwellers and rural denizens have embraced the union of the Rails to Trails projects locally, across their states, all over the nation and crossing international boundaries with the recently popular pastime known as Geocaching.

What, readers may ask, is this “geocaching” thing? According to its official website, geocaching is “a real-world outdoor treasure hunting game. Players try to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, using GPS-enabled devices and then share their experiences online.” Because of the unique location of my homestead within ‘spitting distance’ of the Mount Mitchell trail from Graphite, abutting the Pisgah National Forest and comprising the interior of the primary omega loop of the Round Knob loops of the Norfolk-Southern grade over the eastern continental divide, we have known about this geocaching phenomenon for years. There are at least three caches within 5 miles of us, and there are summer camps just up the road near the trail-head that ‘specialize’ in organizing geocaching expeditions for teenage campers. Thus for geocachers to join with the Rails to Trails projects is a match mae it… natural world heaven!

According to the geocaching website there are 1,540,286 active geocaches at various obscure spots worldwide, and more than 5 million active geocachers who spend time seeking them out. Some are bikers, some are hikers, all enjoy the outdoors and being able to pinpoint their position on the globe via satellite device. How these interests work with the Rails to Trails projects is to enlist dedicated geocachers to help the Conservancy produce GPS-accurate maps of various landmarks along their converted trails. Once mapped the trails then become popular destinations for geocachers, who just might set up some caches here and there for others to find. Win-win situation all around.

The Rails to Trails Conservancy offers a site called TrailLink that uses your current GPS position to return a map overlay leading to its trails in your immediate area. Or it can be searched for any area you may be planning to travel to for an autumn break and some dedicated leaf-looking. In my neighborhood a mountain biking group recently purchased a lodge nearby educated to the many mountain bikers who use our trails and bikeways and such during the ‘nice’ 9 months of the year, including the annual “Assault on Mount Mitchell” and the later descent from, which makes those days not a very good time to try hiking. They have a nice geocaching station with its own GPS and really nice heads-up displays, and regularly updates its trail and road maps with GPS data collected by bikers who stay there.

Almost every state has a Rails to Trails organization working to buy up the right-of-ways to old, no longer used railroad lines that are converted into trails. This gorgeous October weather beckons, and the trees are busy putting on their most colorful gypsy costuming for your delight. So grab a pack and some hiking boots – or your handy-dandy bicycle – and your cell phone GPS, and head out into the countryside to enjoy the season’s fine offerings. Some of you may enjoy it so much you start thinking seriously about joining us homesteaders out in the boonies where we get to enjoy all the seasons and all the ‘best-of’ our regions have to offer.

Happy trails!

Links:

Rails to Trails Conservancy
Geocaching.com
TrailLink
Good Roads, Rails & Trails

New DIY Solar from Westinghouse

Andrew Burger at CleanTechnica blog reported Monday [September 26, 2011] that Westinghouse Solar has introduced new plug-and-play solar panel kits for do-it-yourselfers, which can be purchased off the shelf at Lowe’s. These kits come with built-in AC inverters, brackets, roof flashings and panel splices, connecting easily to each other. Each panel is rated at 235 watts, making the basic 4-panel kit (~$1500) come in at just under a kilowatt.

Homesteaders are nothing if not do-it-yourselfers, and most of us would dearly love to be supplying our own power. Maybe even selling clean green energy back to the electric company by generating more than we normally need! And since we tend to live out in the boonies… er, countryside, we are often last in line to get our outages taken care of after storms or other problems cut electricity. It would be great to have alternative on-site sources for at least some electrical demands when the commercial power’s out, preferably not a gasoline generator that uses petroleum, contributes to global climate change, and is loud enough to be a public nuisance.

The price of solar panels has been coming down steadily over the past few years, as more companies get into producing the materials for them, and with China investing heavily to develop their domestic industry. There are still state and federal rebates and incentives available in the U.S. to help cover the cost of going solar, so now would be a good time to buy. Those rebates and incentives won’t last long once the price comes down to honestly competitive.

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Nuclear Energy: Florida Rate-Payers May Get a Break

Now that my terminally wrinkled fingers have finally recovered from the tomato harvest – two bushels dried and half-dried, a third bushel variously canned and frozen – I can get back to enjoying the break (finally!) in this summer’s all-time record heat wave that had us here in the mountains suffering 95º+ temperatures daily for two and a half long, long months. Back to more normal now with low to mid 80′s during the day, mid 60s at night. I love all the seasons for what they have to offer, but readily admit spring and fall are my favorites. Because by February I’m darned sick of ice and snow no matter how pretty it is, and by August I’m more than ready for fall’s crisp clarity and cool nights.

Homesteaders tend to make real sacrifices for as much self-sufficiency as possible even while our most major projects proceed over a period of years in a perpetual “work in progress.” We like to tread lightly on the earth, though as the temperatures steadily rise a lack of air conditioning certainly can make summer a miserable season. So thoughts of course turn toward more necessary projects for energy self-sufficiency that are bigger than just completely redoing the water system for a ram jet and gravity feed. Solar panels are still too expensive for my family at this time, but I have discovered some nifty wind projects we could build on-site without the multi-thousands of dollars it takes to even think about solar.

That of course being a big project for sometime down the road (still working on the water), but please do check out the Homemade Wind Turbine Plans site to get yourselves dreaming in the right direction. In the meantime, there’s good news for Florida utility customers this week, which may even end up helping out utility customers in Georgia and South Carolina as well.

If you’ve driven cross-country in the past year you may have noticed that the vast American Midwest is sprouting windmills at a fast pace. Given this year’s nuclear horror at Fukushima – and associated nuclear unease across the entire planet – you may be happy to know that it became official over the past year that renewable energy sources now produce more electrical generation capacity in the U.S. than nuclear. The statistics are that wind, small-scale hydro, solar and biomass energy production came to 381 gigawatts of capacity, compared to nuclear’s 375 gigawatts.

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Food Waste: Compost or More Food?

Following a useful group series called Living Simply: Zero Waste has me thinking about what goodies from the kitchen gets tossed into the compost pile and how much of it might be useful for some other purpose. The series deals with all kinds of waste, of course, the things that go into our trash cans versus what goes into recycling, etc. And readership includes mostly people who live in urban environments. Things like food packaging and general trash items, getting those down as far as possible by recycling things like used batteries, those ‘planned obsolescence’ disposable electronics, plastics, glass, etc.

We homesteaders who have to haul our own trash and recyclables to the “Inconvenient Center” whenever we’ve got time while the darned dumpster station is actually open are pretty good at doing the separating. Especially for things like metals that can not only be recycled, but which we get paid for by the pound. But the question of food waste is quite pertinent this time of year, as crops start coming in and spring beds are cleaned out for fall crop planting. Which I definitely need to do, and would have already done by now if it weren’t so blasted HOT. At any rate, let’s look at the various compostables for what they might be put to best use for, considering how valuable compost actually is for purposes of growing things.

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The Last Mountain: A Call to Action

The Last Mountain is a new documentary film detailing the gross environmental destruction of mountaintop removal [MTR] coal mining, featuring interviews with some of the activists most involved in trying to save the beautiful Appalachian mountains from King Coal.

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Water, Water Everywhere but Not a Drop to Drink

As my family begins work to re-engineer our water system by tapping a new spring and installing a ram pump to a new cistern on the ridge, I am once again thankful for our semi-abundant supply of clean, fresh water on our mountain homestead via two clear-running creeks draining the National Forest uphill to the continental divide. I realize that we have something real and valuable here to work with that way too many people who aren’t lucky enough to live here do not have – a nearly endless supply of water pure enough to drink without filtering, fresh and cold enough to host ample populations of native trout, and fast enough to escape the winter freezes on its way to the piedmont’s rivers and lakes.

Serious shortages of fresh potable water across entire regions of the Middle East, Africa, central and south Asia have long been in the news as conditions grow worse with the advent of global warming. Extended droughts have caused increasingly destructive wildfires in Australia, Russia and here in the United States, where fires so far this year in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have charred millions of acres of land.

To get a picture of how bad the situation is getting – and how agricultural policies, municipal waste and unsustainable consumption levels affect the clean water we Americans tend to take for granted, consider the fact that the mighty Colorado River no longer flows to the sea because every drop is diverted along the way. Running 1,450 miles through seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, the river and its tributaries have been impounded by 20 dams along its length to provide water to cities in the parched southwest and water for irrigation, golf courses, desert green-spaces and such. Some researchers are saying that Lake Mead, the source of water for 22 million people, may be dry by 2012.

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Human Pedal-Powered Power

As part of our plan to revamp our water supply system to get rid of the energy-sucking 220 pump and replace it with a ram jet, and concurrently installing geothermal collectors to supply a steady supply of cool air in summer and warmer air in winter, I’ve been checking into other ways of cutting our grid energy use. It will be years before we’re in a position to purchase solar panels or a wind generator to get the homestead off the grid entirely, so every little bit of electricity we don’t use from Duke Energy helps our bottom line.

A friend in Arizona long known for his bicycling prowess sent me a link to David Butcher’s Pedal Powered Generator website, which is chock full of information about getting a little exercise while charging up some batteries used to operate things like LED lights, computers, televisions, electric motors on your assisted transportation (Moped), even a washing machine. Though that last takes some real muscles for the spin cycle. I’ve often thought that as I’m sitting here at my desk surfing around on the internet I should be pedaling a stationary bike to power the machinery that lets me do that.

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Inventing a Geothermal System

As plans for the new water system move forward, we find ourselves in sudden possession of quite a lot of high-end good-sized PVC piping of various lengths, assorted odd couplings, some strips and scraps of new carpeting (good for insulation of trenches), and a surprising amount of aluminum ductwork. Salvaged from various places. Not being content to leave what look to be perfectly good but not immediately needed lengths of such pipe and ducting behind, we’ve been rescuing as much as we can get from the dumpster-side repository at the contracting facility next door to hubby’s day job.

Some of these lengths of thick-walled new pipe are 3 or 4 inches in diameter, so I’ve been considering how we could use them as we head into this major project, other than as the ‘head’ flow from the new spring to the ram jet in the pumphouse. Given as it’s nearly July, I have also been scouting around for some form of air conditioning that doesn’t require an air-tight home and way more not-cheap electricity than we care to use. We only need it occasionally during the hottest hot-spells of summer and only at times when it’s inconvenient to spend the afternoon in the basement, out under the shade trees, or down at the swimming hole. As part of that research, I’ve been looking at geothermal engineering concepts and technology as well as at modern iterations of good old evaporative cooler (a.k.a. “Swamp Cooler”). Which looks great and works well in places like Arizona, but is not so great here in the southern Appalachians where it’s around 85-90% humidity all the time. Geothermal still looks good, so…

A Do-It-Yourself heat pump! But without the compressor/heat element assist. This could work.

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Odd Weather & Funding Cuts

Sigh. As the Kabuki in D.C. continues into yet another week/month of grandstanding on the budget and raising the debt ceiling, a good many of us homesteaders are watching our state governments engaging in the same kind of bad budgetary theater as summer hits hard (and early). This year it looks a lot like neither the weather nor government policies care to offer any help to rural America, where the ‘Great Recession’ is a whole lot more like a Great Depression.

In Washington the drastic budget cuts are of course not hitting ADM or Cargill or any other giant Agribiz subsidies – mostly used to grow bioengineered corn, soy, etc. for animal feed. Rather, cuts in the USDA, EPA and FDA budgets are targeted at conservation, extension, research, renewable energy and rural development programs. Less money for inspections and enforcement, less for policing big livestock operations, less for wetland set-asides, etc., etc., etc. The slashing goes on and on, and bodes ill for just about everything that counts in this world. As if this wholesale gutting of all programs geared towards sustainable agriculture, responsible land use, regulation of pollutants and development of alternative crops isn’t bad enough, they’re also slashing food assistance programs like WIC and food stamps.

The Rodale Institute has a very good overview of how the Republican’s scorched earth policy is targeting small-scale farmers, organic growers and specialty farm/homestead programs that have been important to those of us actually engaged in trying to live sustainably on the land. With $39 billion in cuts to conservation programs aimed at protecting environmentally sensitive areas and $350 million for the Organic Transitions Research Program, it seems quite obvious that today’s politicians don’t have much of an appreciation of what it takes to grow and market nutritious food.

Meanwhile, here at my homestead where the summer crops were planted late due to too much rain and some concern about fallout deposition of cesium from Fukushima (which was high in this area), the rain finally did slack off. To nothing. Haven’t had more than a few drops in over a month, and issues with the cistern have us on water rationing in the household – there’s nothing to irrigate with. That hasn’t been an issue most years given that average rainfall here is ample, but this year’s shaping up to be hellishly hot and dry. I can do nothing but wait and see which crops make it through to the next rainy spell, keep some potted seedlings in reserve to plant REALLY late if need be. If it’s to be a super-hot summer, it could last well into November. That’s enough time for most things, even if planted late.

Below are some good articles and resource collections so that we who will be most affected by what Washington (and our state governments) do about the coming second dip of the Great Recession. I urge all my readers to educate themselves to what’s happening nationally and locally, and get involved. Call your representatives. Write letters to the editor. Bring up the important issues at the farmer’s market and at church and at any other community meetings where people who are also affected can be found. Money is just paper and computer data these days. Wall Street’s paper is even less than that. But everyone has to eat, and if there are no food producers people will starve. Our land, our labor, our crops are much more imp We must speak out. We must speak loudly. And we must enlist all the help we can get.

Links:

Agri-Pulse Communications
Rodale Press
Rural Resource Guide [NC]
American Farmland Trust

Letter to the New Farmer in Chief

There is a resurgence of hope across America in the wake of Tuesday’s election of Democrat Barack Obama as President, promising a new direction of change for the future of our nation. Those of us who have been paying attention to the global financial meltdown, increasingly severe food shortages in the wake of global warming, and the outrageous poisoning of our citizens and livestock/pets by corrupt Chinese producers (a glaring example of globalization’s failures), are hoping that a new dawn in America will bring with it the serious changes to our agricultural policies that have grown increasingly necessary through decades of decline.

Now, politicians don’t generally talk much about agricultural policies while they’re stumping for votes in big cities. And they’re often so ignorant of agricultural issues that even rural dwellers – actual farmers – get nothing but pablum and platitudes in response to their questions. Luckily, journalist Michael Pollan wrote a great ‘open letter’ in the New York Times in October entitled, Farmer in Chief. This is a must-read for all of us committed to self-sufficiency, locally grown foods, the viability of family farms and homesteads, and the future health of an environment we all depend upon for life.

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