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Outdoor Recreation Web Sites

© Kenneth Friedman

For those of you with cabin fever--that pent-up, sun-deprived feeling that has you looking at gardening catalogs-you've got an alternative now, you can browse the web and dream of outdoor exploits from, well, AT to WV. Read that Auto Touring to Wildlife Viewing, with biking, boating, climbing, camping, fishing, hiking and lots more in between. All this is yours at Recreation.gov.

This is a catalog site of recreational activities on government land. What you do is this. You enter your state or that state you wish to visit and press "search." This gives you a list of recreation areas in your selected state that belong to any of the federal agencies: The Army Corps of Engineers, The Bureau of Land Management, The Bureau of Reclamation, The Fish and Wildlife Service, The Forest Service and The National Park Service.

When you pick the recreation site you think you want to look at, you'll get a simple screen with a changing photo on it and a description such as this one: "Blue Marsh Lake is a Philadelphia District project designed to provide flood control, water supply and enhanced water quality. It offers extensive recreational opportunities and attracts over a million visitors yearly. Located near historic Gruber Wagon Works and Union Canal. From Reading, approx. 5 mi NW on PA 183 to Bern Church, then left following project signs to the lake." Coincidentally, as I was typing this review for Suite 101 when a television news preview announced pending coverage of how the eastern Pennsylvania drought is affecting water levels at Blue Marsh Lake. Talk about coincidence! I could have picked from among 40 other sites in Pennsylvania.

If you like the list of activities you see at the recreation site, you can locate the site on a road map starting at its largest scale and then zooming in at a slower-than-desired rate until you get a road map good enough for you to follow or at least to find your site on a regular paper map. You also can get a weather forecast and in some cases an e-mail address if one is available.

If the recreation area has its own web site, you can make this jump. Blue Marsh is only a reservoir operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so it doesn't have its own web site but when I clicked on the nearby Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area I found a great deal of information.