Balsam Swamp is a sprawling state forest that stretches almost 5.5 miles east-west across 4 towns. The area is very rural, and the landscape surrounding the State Forest is predominantly forested. Balsam Swamp State Forest is comprised of a mix of native hardwood forests, hemlock swamps, and conifer plantations. There are no designated recreational trails on the forest, but there is ample opportunity for self-guided day hikes to explore the diversity of habitats represented on this State Forest. Additionally, the western section of Balsam Swamp State Forest is adjacent to Five Streams State Forest to the south.
The main attraction of this forest is Balsam Pond. The impoundment is approximately 152 acres and is a popular destination for fishing and paddle boat sports. Balsam Pond is a warm water fishery that contains a mix of largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, chain pickerel, yellow perch, brown bullhead and sunfish. Tiger muskellunge have been stocked in the past with the last stocking occurring in 1995. However, there have been very few reports of anglers catching any of the adult tiger muskies. A shallow gravel boat launch is suitable for launching small fishing boats.
A small rustic camp ground is also located at Balsam Pond. Camping spaces are available at no cost on a first-come, first-serve basis and there is no running water or electricity. A fire ring, outhouse, and picnic table are provided for each camping space. A sign on Balsam-Tyler Road in Pharsalia designates the entrance to the boat launch and camping facility. This is a carry-in carry-out facility. Please do not litter.
It needs to be said, that sugar coating the truth of climate change isn’t helping anyone except maybe short-term political expediency.
It bugs me when political leaders refuse to talk about climate change or acknowledge that humans are changing the climate, because only a stupid person would fail to acknowledge such an obvious fact. Every day when I look at the weather records, we are consistently above historical averages, and record breaking cold is almost unheard of these days. Almost all the cold records are 100 plus years old.
I understand the climate change activists are obnoxious people, advocating unrealistic goals, hoping for near ideal outcomes. Sure an ideal goal for not cooking the planet would be an emissions cut of 80% over 1990 levels, which conveniently now is described as keeping the yearly global average climate within 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures that were averaged out in the 20th century.
That would be ideal. Such levels have been judged to minimize serious damage to the earth’s climate, even though any realistic person knows that wouldn’t be possible without an impractical or generally undesirable crash diet on humanity’s use of carbon for energy and all other purposes. Renewables offer a lot of promise, but they aren’t a stand-in for our high levels energy consumption we get from fossil fuels. Even if we could make nuclear safe, it would bankrupt society before we ever made much of a dent in the climate.
If you were to eat a controlled food ration every day of year and never smoked, drank alcohol, or went out in town on Friday night, you could probably live a lot longer. You would be a lot healthier for sure. But we don’t live in such a world, but do make informed choices in our diet and lifestyle choices, and realize life is a compromise that you make. It’s not a bad idea to eat a little more broccoli, choose to not smoke, consume alcohol in moderation, exercise and not party too hard. But it would suck to give up on all that is fun and good in life. No cookies, no alcohol ever?
Reasonable adults would come to the table and weight the pros and cons of addressing climate change to different extents. There should be an informed dialog, one where we as a society get together and come to a consensus on what would be an appropriate amount of change – and not just an theoretically ideal number. We should harden our communities against obvious storm threats, like increased flooding and sea rise, as the climate gets warmer. We should take reasonable steps, like investment in roof-top solar and wind turbines and replacing old coal and nuclear plants with modern, efficient gas peaking and mid-load plants. We should be designing automobiles to be efficient while serving the purposes of their owners.
There are cost-effective solutions that would allow for economic growth, while ensuring people are comfortable and can do much what they currently do today. Climate change action should be about moderation not extremism, and should address the serious threats while balancing our contemporary needs.
State tax records list 86 homes that were built in Albany County prior to the Revolutionary War in 1776. Often these dates are wrong in the assessment records, but these still are some very old and historic properties in the county.
Any spatial dataframe you create in R, such as with tidycensus can be exported with write_sf to a shapefile.
I know this isn’t rocket science but it is a big time and headache saver. Sometimes joins don’t go quite right in QGIS due to your own silliness but if obtain the spatial data right at the same time as Census data using tidycensus geometry=True then you don’t have to manually join the data, deal with type issues or the wrong year TIGER line.
For example for the PA Poverty maps I poste on the Facebook:
library(tidycensus)
library(sf)
income <- get_acs(
geography = 'tract',
variables = 'S1701_C03_001',
state = 'PA',
geometry = T)
write_sf(income,'/tmp/pa_poverty.shp')
The median age of a man👨 in United States is 36.1 while the median age of women 👩 is 38.8 — women are nearly 3 years older on average compared to men.
This is largely due to the fact that men die earlier then women ⚰ — the median death age for men in our country is 76 years, while the median death age for women is 81 years.
The best state to live in for a long life is Minnesota 🐄 — men die there on average at 79 years, while women live until 83. In Hawaii though, women last even longer — the median life expectancy for women in Hawaii is nearly 85 years. 🏖
But the truth is Ground Hog Day is in the middle of winter – literally – and kind of cold. There isn’t a lot of camping areas nearby so there is a good chance that I’d have to stay in a hotel and I hate staying indoors when I travel. It’s such an early morning, high on a steep hill that this morning was probably quite icy with the snow that came down. So I’m kind of glad I just watched the celebration on my phone, even though it would have been a perfect day to go down there, being a Sunday morning.
I often buy large sizes when I buy frozen food because I figure it’s saves money and cuts down on trash. I’m always very careful to get things with as little packaging as possible, because it’s expensive and a pain to take trash to the transfer station at $2 a bag, and a 8 mile round trip drive on a Saturday morning.
Every week I try to include a significant portion of vegetables in my diet. When I’m home and when it’s off-season, I get a lot of frozen vegetables in large packages which provide a healthy treat but produce minimal waste when the packaging is discarded. I often buy two or three pounds frozen bags of peas, corn, blueberries, etc.
Getting a little bored with peas as my green vegetable of choice the other day I bought a massive 3 lb bag of lima beans. I like lima beans, and they’re really healthy, but god I don’t know how I will ever get through three pounds of lima beans. There not something I would necessarily want with every meal, although I’m sure eventually they will go.
It will be kind of like the three pound bag of frozen brussel sprouts that I bought in November or December in one year, and they were gone by April. So be it.
