Pennsylvania Game News - July 2012 - 53

be more intact than most areas he had seen. After all, we do have evidence, both on trail cameras and from personal observations, that our property hosts every possible mammal species that lives on wild Pennsylvania mountains. Still, our land has suffered and continues to suffer from a variety of tree and shrub diseases, for example, hemlock woolly adelgids and a leaf fungus that is killing much of the mountain laurel understory, as well as from invasive species such as garlic mustard, Japanese barberry, privet, ailanthus, and multiflora rose. But Davis was impressed by our original intact oak forest on Laurel Ridge that we are not managing except for keeping a trail system open for our use and the Sapsucker ridge top and trail-less, forested land reaching down to Interstate 99. He was not impressed by the numerous roads in Pennsylvania and called our state “a roadkill hotbed,” on his blog. Because he cycled on back country roads, he saw a lot of dead animals —“visible nearly every mile of road”— not only in Pennsylvania but throughout his journey. According to the Wildlands Network, our nation has 4
JULY 2012

million miles of roads and motor vehicles that kill one million vertebrates a day. Yet, most collisions could be prevented if transportation planners included wildlife crossings such as the underpasses beneath our interstate. We asked Davis what gave him the idea for TrekEast and he told us that he was inspired by his friend and the author of The End of Nature, Bill McKibben, when Davis rowed and hiked with him on another wildways journey that led to McKibben’s book Wandering Home. Davis lives in Essex, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, so he knows wilderness. He’s been a lifelong wild lands advocate, conservationist, writer and explorer. He edited Dave Foreman’s Rewilding America, another inspiration to him and, of course, his mother’s work in old-growth eastern forests also influenced him. In fact, her final word was “wonderful” after she learned of his “great explorations through southern Florida, looking for vestiges of primal Nature she had documented.” In August 2003 he won the “Distinguished Achievement in Open Space Protection” award from the Adirondack Council for his habitat protection work in the Split Rock Wildway. From 1991 to 1996 he co-edited our favorite and now defunct journal Wild Earth and is a cofounder of the Wildlands Network. Right now he is getting ready for his planned 2013 TrekWest, with the same message of connectivity that he had for TrekEast. Davis spent a couple nights with us before getting back on his bike and pedaling to State College where he delivered a talk about his vision to conservationists and then headed north in the brutal heat. “I could not forget about climate change as I pedaled north, finally finding shade and cooling water along the Pine Creek railtrail in northcentral Pennsylvania, during one of the worst heat waves on record,” he wrote in his blog. Most conservation biologists agree with
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Pennsylvania Game News - July 2012

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