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Michigan man gets jail, loses hunting license for good over wildlife crimes

SAULT STE. MARIE, Mich. — A Michigan man will serve a jail sentence and lose his hunting license permanently after pleading guilty to wildlife crimes for killing wolves and bald eagles in the Upper Peninsula.

Kurt Duncan was sentenced to 90 days in jail after making a plea deal in a Chippewa County court. He is banned from helping anyone in trapping or hunting activities and prohibited from hunting in 48 states listed as members of an multistate compact.

Duncan of Pickford was investigated by the state DNR and charged with numerous wildlife crimes, including illegally harvesting 18 gray wolves. He was also accused of killing and disposing of three bald eagles.

Bald eagles and wolves are protected under Michigan and federal laws.

Duncan, 56, expressed remorse Tuesday and said the eagles were not intentionally caught. Defense lawyer George Tschirhart said Duncan was trapping coyotes and “things got out of control.”

“This is a historical case for the division and department,” said Gary Hagler, chief of the DNR’s law enforcement division. “We hope this poaching case acts as a deterrent to criminals for committing future wildlife crimes such as this.”

Duncan won’t have to serve 30 days of the 90-day sentence if he timely pays penalties and meets other conditions while on probation. He’s required to pay $ 27,000 for the animals illegally taken and $ 9,240 in court fees and costs.

Chippewa County prosecutor Rob Stratton said lawmakers should consider stiffer penalties for poaching. Duncan’s crimes were misdemeanors.

Tags: Michigan DNR, Poaching

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Camping Tips, Tricks and Adventures

NEWS | Over 120 UK Campsites Awarded AA Covid Confident Status

2,500 hospitality establishments and leisure destinations including over 120 UK campsites have now been accredited as AA Covid Confident.

Greaves Farm Caravan Park
Greaves Farm Caravan Park, Cumbria

AA approved destinations include 814 self-catering properties, 572 guest accommodation properties, 449 hotels, 304 restaurants, 122 campsites and 74 pubs, with the full list of over 2,500 AA Covid Confident establishments listed and searchable at www.ratedtrips.com/list.

Devon currently leads the way with the highest number of AA CovidConfident accredited properties, at 265, followed by Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly with 210, North Yorkshire with 141, and Somerset with 108. Hot on their heels, Northumberland and London now both have 93 approved establishments, Cumbria has 85, Dorset has 80, Norfolk has 75, and Gloucestershire has 64.

Tom's Field Campsite, Dorset
Tom’s Field Campsite, Dorset

Designed to support the hospitality industry in re-establishing and rebuilding consumer confidence, while giving customers reassurance, AA Covid Confident accreditation indicates that establishments have the necessary protective measures in place.

Simon Numphud, Managing Director at AA Media, commented: “The AA team has been working hard to work through the thousands of applications we’ve received, and are delighted to reach the landmark of 2,500 properties now deemed COVID CONFIDENT. From assessing each application, it’s clear that the hospitality sector is showing incredible resilience, creativity, and care in ensuring they are doing all they can to protect staff and customers from COVID-19, while striving to rebuild their businesses.”

The AA has been trusted by the public as a source of hospitality ratings and recommendations, and by the industry as a benchmark for quality, for over 112 years.

RatedTrips.com lists over 12,000 AA and VisitEngland rated and recommended hotels, restaurants, pubs, B&Bs, self-catering cottages, caravan and campsites, and beyond, as well as offering travel inspiration via city guides, recommended things to do, information on local attractions, ideas for days out, and suggested places to visit.

#AACovidConfident

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Camping Tips, Tricks and Adventures

How to Cook Over a Fire with a Dutch Oven

Perfecting the technique of using a Dutch oven over an open fire gets you cooking outdoors, keeps your fire-building skills sharp, and, well, just feels like a good skill to have in the event of the End Times. 

Dutch ovens work effectively because they retain heat and cook evenly in the imperfect environment of an open fire, says Emily Rahravan, an editorial assistant at America’s Test Kitchen, where she’s also known as the camp cook extraordinaire. For four years she did much of the cooking for her outdoors club at Allegheny College, including many big-batch meals in Dutch ovens.

A cast-iron Dutch oven will also unequivocally survive the apocalypse. “I love Dutch ovens because they’re basically bulletproof,” says Matt Carter, chef and partner at Fat Ox, The Mission, and Zinc Bistro restaurants in Arizona. When Carter takes river trips, he packs two cast-iron Dutch ovens. They’re no worse for wear after getting a little banged around, he says, and when he’s done cooking, he simply scrubs them out with a little river sand. 

Here’s how to put yours to work. 

Pick Your Pot 

Sticking that gorgeous, $ 400 enamel-lined number you got for your wedding into a fire isn’t the best idea if you want to stay married. When Carter describes Dutch ovens as bulletproof, he’s talking about the cast-iron versions. Both he and Rahravan own models by Lodge, which are relatively affordable (they start at $ 49) and almost impossible to break. You can also often find them at secondhand stores and yard sales. 

If you do buy a used one, make sure it comes with the right sized lid—it’s important that it fits tight. The other features are optional. Rahravan has one with three stubby legs, which makes it easier to stuff hot coals under. But you can achieve the same effect by propping a pot up on a few rocks. Pot hangers, which dangle over a fire and make your Dutch oven look like a cauldron, are unnecessary, both Rahravan and Carter say. You will, however, want good heat-proof gloves or oven mitts (preferably constructed with silicone) and a safe tool for moving hot coals around, like a small shovel. 

Choose Your Recipe

There are few things that don’t work in a Dutch oven, but hearty recipes—think chili, stew, and pork shoulder—which can stand up to long, slow cook times, are a great place to start, says Carter. He almost always tucks a whole pork shoulder into the coals of a campfire before going to bed the first night of a camping trip. If you have enough hot coals, he says, it should be warm enough to keep that pork slow-cooking all night. The next day he feasts on tacos and pozole.

Of course, you don’t have to be a carnivore to dive into Dutch oven cooking. Rahravan would often make mushroom risotto on camping trips in college. (The trick is to stir regularly to keep the rice from scorching.) Soups are an easy, no-meat option too. 

The only thing Carter says he avoids making in a Dutch oven are eggs and delicate cakes. Both are likely to burn on the bottom before being completely cooked on the top. Any other recipe that was written for a Dutch oven at home, however, should work outdoors, says Rahravan. 

Build Your Fire

Cooking over a fire is a misnomer, since it’s not the flame so much as the coals you want. Rahravan says building a fire is usually her first step when she gets to a campsite. She’ll set up her tent while she waits for the fire to generate the glowing coals she’ll use for cooking. You know coals are hot enough when they glow red in the middle. “They should be kind of shimmery,” she explains. Or, if it’s daylight and it’s hard to see them glowing, Carter says they should have a greyish coating of ash on the outside. 

If you want to sit around your fire and cook on it, you’ll need a two-sided fire. Keep feeding half the fire, while letting the other half burn down to hot coals. Besides keeping you warm, a two-sided fire generates extra coals that will keep your Dutch oven toasty all night long. 

Put Everything Together

If you need to sear or sautee, place your Dutch oven on a squat little pile of coals and let it heat up. This direct heat is too hot for low-and-slow braising, but it works well for browning meat or turning onions translucent. Once you’re done with this step, though, you’ll want to chill things out a bit. To lower the temp, either place a wire rack over your pile of coals and elevate your Dutch oven, or place it on a few rocks. 

For dishes that will cook for a long time, like stew, avoid messing with the food once you put the lid on the pot. Each time you do, you’ll be releasing valuable heat, says Rahravan. For the most evenly cooked product, top the lid with more hot coals, so that just like an oven, heat is coming from all sides. Carter will sometimes seal the sides of the Dutch oven before placing it on the fire, wrapping foil around the lid and the lip just to be extra sure no ash gets in. Rahravan says it’s probably OK to skip this step. “I find the kind of person who is going to making shakshuka or a pork roast fireside is not that worried about a little extra carbon in their food,” she laughs. 

Be Patient

When adapting an indoors Dutch oven cooking recipe for outdoors, you’ll need to adjust expectations for how long it takes. Rahravan says things generally take longer over the fire—up to 20 percent more time, she estimates. 

When you get to about the time the dish would take to cook indoors, crack open the lid and take a peek. “Cooking over a fire definitely makes you a better chef because you start to learn the visual cues for when things are done,” she says. As a general rule, meat should be brown, stews should be bubbly, and veggies should be soft. If things seem are moving especially slowly, grab more coals (this is why you build a two-sided fire), and slide them underneath your pot. 

Dish Up and Enjoy

By the time you’re done, you’ll have that woody smoke smell in your hair and a bowl full of hot, nourishing food. Bonus: you’ll know that even if society breaks down completely, you can, at the very least, cook a damn good meal.    


A fresh corn chowder is one of Rahravan’s go-to dishes for campfire Dutch oven cooking. She adapted the following recipe slightly for outdoor cooking from Cook It In Your Dutch Oven, an America’s Test Kitchen cookbook. For this dish, place your Dutch oven over a fire on a metal grate or rack, which will be hotter for sauteeing. If you don’t have a grate, let the fire burn down, and then bury the oven well into the coals so there’s plenty of heat.  

Fresh Corn Chowder

  • 10 ears corn, husks and silk removed
  • 4 slices bacon, finely chopped (optional)
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme or 1/4 teaspoon dried
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 3 cups chicken broth
  • 2 cups whole milk
  • 12 ounces red potatoes, unpeeled, cut into 1/4‑inch pieces
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
  • Salt and pepper
  1. Working with one ear of corn at a time, stand each of four ears on end inside a large bowl and cut kernels from the cobs using a paring knife. Grate the remaining six ears over the large holes of a box grater into a separate bowl. Using the back of a butter knife, scrape the remaining pulp from all the cobs into the bowl with the grated corn.
  2. Cook bacon over medium heat until crisp, five to seven minutes. For a vegetarian version, swap in a tablespoon of vegetable oil instead—if you do, heat until oil shimmers. Stir in onion and cook until softened, about five minutes. If you don’t hear sizzling when you add onion, the pot isn’t hot enough and you need to move it closer to the heat or build up the fire. 
  3. Stir in garlic and thyme and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. 
  4. Stir in flour and cook for one minute. 
  5. Slowly whisk in broth and milk, scraping up any browned bits and smoothing out lumps. Stir in potatoes, bay leaves, and grated corn and pulp mixture. Bring to simmer. If your soup is actively bubbling or boiling, move your Dutch oven away from the heat by raising your tripod or shifting it further away on the grate. Cook until potatoes are almost tender, about 15 minutes.
  6. Stir in remaining corn kernels and cream. Cook until corn kernels are tender yet still slightly crunchy, about five minutes. Discard bay leaves. Stir in parsley and season with salt and pepper to taste.

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Camping Tips, Tricks and Adventures

Stop Driving 5 Miles per Hour Over the Speed Limit

Speed kills.

In the United States, roughly 40,000 people die in traffic every year. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, motor-vehicle speeding killed over 9,000 people in 2018, which means around a quarter of all traffic deaths in this country are speed related. The NHTSA attributes our speeding epidemic to four factors: traffic, running late, anonymity (drivers become detached from their actions while in their automotive cocoons), and disregard for others and for the law. This is all a diplomatic way of saying that people who drive too fast are selfish assholes.

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But while it’s easy to blame the douchebag in the BMW who flies by you in the right lane at 97 miles per hour for this national epidemic, the truth is, we’re all a bunch of assholes when we drive. It’s just that what each of us considers speeding is relative. While the legal speed limit on any given stretch of road is generally fixed and unambiguous, there’s also the speed at which most people actually drive on that stretch, which may be well in excess of whatever number is posted on that little white sign. 

For practical purposes, here in the U.S., we’re pretty unconcerned with speeding just as long as we’re going the same speed as everyone else and we don’t think we’re going to get caught. No doubt there’s a fancy traffic-engineering term for this phenomenon, but comedian George Carlin articulated our approach to gauging our own speed better than any transportation-policy wonk possibly could: basically, anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

If you’re a law-abiding driver, you’ve no doubt been honked at (or worse) by a fellow driver enraged by your insistence on motoring along at a responsible speed. Driving too fast has become so ingrained in our culture that we treat speeding not as a choice made by individual drivers but rather as an immutable force of nature more akin to the ocean currents or the jet stream. 

It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. There was a time early in the last century when pedestrians ruled and cities called for speed governors on cars. But the automobile industry successfully flipped that paradigm and instead created the concept of the jaywalker to criminalize the act of walking. Now it’s the vulnerable road users—pedestrians and cyclists—who pay the price for speeding, because it’s much easier to blame the victims who drown in this roiling sea of recklessness than it is to blame the sea itself. Check out this video of an NYPD officer giving a cyclist a ticket: after the cyclist explains that he had to take evasive action to stay alive, the officer justifies ticketing him for his maneuver because, hey, the drivers on the bridge are speeding. (Presumably, it’s easier to stop a single cyclist under the pretense of safety than it is to stem the tide of maniacal motordom by ticketing the drivers.)

In urban bike- and pedestrian-advocacy circles, there’s widespread recognition that we’ve got to curb speeding in order for walking, bicycling, and life in general to flourish. As part of its Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic deaths, New York City lowered the citywide speed limit to 25 mph in 2014, thanks in no small part to the efforts of those advocates. In so doing, the New York City Department of Transportation noted that a pedestrian struck by a driver at 25 mph is half as likely to die as a pedestrian struck at 30 mph—which is an astonishing statistic. Short of banning cars altogether, it’s hard to think of a change that would pay more dividends in terms of safety than getting drivers to slow the fuck down. In any sane society, that would be the top priority. 

However, among the wider culture—and this includes plenty of cycling enthusiasts—most of us are similarly velocitized. We’re driving to our rides, and we’re doing so in cars that get more powerful every year. Since 1990, average motor-vehicle horsepower has increased by about 70 percent, and the next generation of cars is only going to up the ante—a Tesla Model 3 does zero to 60 in under four seconds, and word is that GM’s electric Hummer is going to have positively stupid levels of horsepower and torque. Moreover, we’re a country with a fairly abysmal road-safety record given our wealth and status as a world leader, and yet our automakers continue to market their products by evoking intimidation and fear. As consumers, we squander money on gratuitous horsepower (can’t buy the model with the base engine, it’s underpowered, dontcha know), and we remain singularly unconcerned with the implications. We may be vaguely aware of the dangers of speeding, but we’re more inclined to gawk at the viral videos than really do anything about it.

It’s tempting to say that autonomous vehicles will fix everything, and that one day algorithms will shepherd us all about without exceeding the speed limit, but don’t hold your breath. A far more pragmatic and readily available solution is automated enforcement; data from New York City’s speed-camera program indicates that drivers do in fact slow down once these devices have been deployed. Nationwide, opponents of this technology love to deride speed cameras as “revenue raisers,” but this only reveals their profound sense of driver entitlement—namely, that how they comport themselves on public roads should be entirely at their discretion. (Plus, New York City’s school-zone speed cameras only pop drivers who are going more than ten mph over the speed limit, which means you’ve really got to be trying in order to get caught.)

Recently the city took its fight against speeding a step further with the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Law, which will allow it to “seize and impound vehicles with 15 or more school speed camera violations or five or more red light camera violations during a 12-month period unless the registered owner or operator completes a driver accountability course.” (Before the new law, drivers could run up unlimited camera tickets with no consequences, just as long as they paid the $ 50 fines.) This will potentially allow the city to intervene before these drivers have a chance to maim or kill, and while no doubt someone out there will see this as yet another sign we’re sliding into a Minority Report dystopia, the reality is that speed cameras reveal the egregious degree to which drivers routinely exceed the speed limit. Up until now, we’ve only been finding out that killer drivers are sitting on a mountain of camera tickets after it’s too late to do anything about it.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, speed limits are creeping upward as a result of state laws designed to protect drivers from “speed traps.” In Texas, governor Greg Abbott banned speed cameras statewide. He also boasted about it on Twitter, which is a pretty audacious thing to do when you’re the governor of a state where the 2018 traffic fatality rate was almost 13 per 100,000 people. (That’s more than double the rate in New York State the same year, so he has no reason to be smug.)

As cyclists, we should be acutely aware of the dangers of motor-vehicular speeding, and we should all drive accordingly. However, that’s not going to make a dent when there’s a tsunami of traffic behind you and all the drivers are laying on their horns. It’s going to take a massive movement of people who refuse to accept the carnage (such as the Stop de Kindermoord protests in 1970s Holland that led to reforms there, including the widespread adoption of the “Dutch reach”). It’s going to take traffic-calming street design. And, just as crucially, it’s going to take technology. So until we’re ready to smile and say cheese for the speed cameras and cop to our speed addiction, we’re just going to keep spinning our wheels.

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Camping Tips, Tricks and Adventures

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