Delivering the conservation message is one of the most important tasks for anyone that considers themselves a steward of our natural environments. Unfortunately, that message sometimes is delivered in a way that seems to be asking the reader to add another task to the already long list of responsibilities that life brings their way, without reminding us in a compelling way why conservation remains such an important charge in our rapidly changing world, but incredibly rewarding.

Day After Tomorrow

In yet another piece of beautiful writing, Hal Herring poses a rarely asked question: is teaching our children and others to have a passion and love of wild places a pointless task, as those places continue to be overtaken by the unstoppable growth of human population? In answering this question, Hal takes us through his childhood in backwoods Alabama, years on a pre-tourist boom Outer Banks of North Carolina and his last few decades making a life and raising children in the wilderness of Montana's Bitterroot Valley.

We don't often feature grip and grin shots here, mostly because they're not all that interesting. The image seen below, in my opinion, bucks that trend. Taken earlier this summer on a glacier-fed creek just north of Juneau, Alaska in the Tongass National Forest, it is a testament to the staggering biomass of the Tongass.

Singles? Sure. Doubles? Sure. But what the hell do you call seven? (photo: Matt Smythe) Click to enlarge.

As I wrote in a post I made while on the road in southeast Alaska earlier this year, salmon overwhelm the rivers of the Tongass. When you consider that the moment captured in this image -- the result of seven anglers swinging streamers and all hooking and landing pink salmon fresh from the saltwater within moments of each other -- was neither the group's first nor last opportunity of the day to record such an occurrence, the hope is that it helps illustrate or qualify just how plentiful the bounty of these rivers is.