SuperCat Stove

There are many reasons why you might want a lightweight stove that's powerful enough to boil water.  I carry one on backpacking trips, but one would also be handy if the power goes out at your home (hurricane or other natural disaster).

Andrew Skurka has a page showing you how to make the awesomely simple and very efficient SuperCat stove, so called because you make it from a cat food can.  Seriously.  I can vouch for this design because it's the exact same stove I use when camping.

Check it out.

Backpack Info

Courtesy of REI, a nice little infographic on selecting, packing and adjusting a backpack.

Cloud Appreciation

If you take the time to really look at them, clouds can be incredibly cool. You might see shapes in the fluffy ones. They can evoke emotion, such as dread in a darkened sky just before a big storm breaks. With experience you can read them to get clues about the coming weather, and scientists create man-made clouds with sounding rockets to study the upper-atmospheric winds.

Here's a website devoted to all the various types of clouds: The Cloud Appreciation Society. Click that link, look at their photo gallery and be prepared to be amazed.

Sky Maps

Each month, Skymaps.com publishes a free, printable map of the night sky to help you identify stars, constellations, planets and more. Seriously cool.

iNaturalist.org

Mostly, we believe that you should be outside as much as possible, playing and being active. It would be foolish though to act as if the internet didn't exist, especially when you find an interactive website as cool as iNaturalist.org.

Follow that link and you'll discover an ever-expanding library of plant and animal observations from around the world. Suppose you find an interesting fungus while hiking, you can take a picture (or sketch it and make notes like early naturalists did), go online and identify it. If you can't find it there, post it yourself and other folks can help you discover what it is. There are a staggering number of types of living things in our world, and it's a good feeling to be able to identify some of them for yourself.