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10 weirdly named natural places in America and the stories behind them.

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The Grand Canyon. The Rocky Mountains. The Great Lakes. Many of the names of our American natural wonders are ... a little on the nose.

To be fair, back in the day when people were exploring 3.8 million square miles of largely uncharted territory, literally circling the wagons to brainstorm the name of a random mountain or lake probably got old fast. “Well, they’re pretty rocky, ain’t they? Rocky Mountains — boom. Done.”

But in this vast, amazingly diverse land we call the United States, there are still lots of pretty damn strange names of natural features that might make you say, “Hm, maybe I should go to that pretty place with the funny name.”


As an avid hiker and fan of our national parks, here are a few of my favorite of those pretty places with funny names — and some that are still on my list of places to go.

1. Bumpass Hell, Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

Bumpus Hell: when the neighbor's hounds eat all your turkey.

GIF via "A Christmas Story."

Bumpass Hell, on the other hand, is something very different.

Bubbling mud pots. Colorful steaming pools. Overwhelming stench of rotten egg. Lassen Volcanic National Park in the northern Sierra Nevada is Yellowstone's lesser-known cousin. Its biggest area of thermal features has a name that would make Sir Mix-a-lot proud: Bumpass Hell.

It gets its moniker from Kendall Vanhook Bumpass, an ill-fated late-1800s settler who fell into one of its boiling mud pits, severely burning his leg, which is one way to enshrine your name in history, I guess.

Today, you can avoid Bumpass’ fate by exploring the stinky-but-surreal area from the safety of sturdy, carefully placed boardwalks.

2. Big Bone Lick State Park, Kentucky

Whoever decided to put a sign for this park on the freeway clearly didn't have the best interests of teenage boys in mind. We may never know how many ounces of Mountain Dew were lost to the limitless guffaws this name has caused over the years.

Putting aside the adolescent yuks, Big Bone Lick is still just a weird name. Contrary to how it sounds, this place was not named for licking any kind of bones. It’s the site of an ancient salt lick — mineral deposits where mammoths, mastodons, and other large animals fed and died, leaving their big bones for William Lewis (of Lewis and Clark fame) to dig up.

Ha-ha-ha, Big Bone Lick.

3. Unalaska Island, Alaska

Is this an oxymoron? Actually, no. Despite its name, this island is, in fact, in Alaska — in the 1,200-mile-long Aleutian archipelago, to be exact.

Unalaska doesn't mean un-Alaska — it's more along the lines of “near Alaska.” The word “Alaska” goes back to Russian colonial times, when it referred to the mainland of, yep, you guessed it: Alaska. “Unalaska” is thought to be a combination of Russian and the Aleut indigenous language meaning “near the mainland.” And while Unalaska may be hundreds of miles off the coast of mainland Alaska, that’s just a little jaunt in Alaska terms.

3. Grand Tetons, Wyoming

The Grand Teton mountains are just ridiculously beautiful.

Yeah. Photo via tpsdave/Pixabay.

Early French trappers thought so too. So much so that these wondrous peaks reminded them of other beautiful things from back home when they first laid eyes on them. Legend has it that these early Francophonersnamed the peaks Les Trois Tetons — The Three Teats (or The Three Breasts).

Devil's advocate: These dudes were probably super homesick and lonely, like ancient mariners who imagined mermaids on long voyages.

Or, they were just French.

4. Dolly Sods, West Virginia

Finally, a national park covered in neatly manicured Bermuda grass! ... OK, not quite.

The strange name derives from an 18th-century German homesteading family — the Dahles — and a local term for an open mountaintop meadow — a "sods." The wilderness area is also full of sphagnum (peat moss) bogs due to its unique terrain and ecosystem.

It's gorgeous to look at — just watch where you step.

5. Mount Fairweather, Alaska

This 15,325-foot peak that sits on the border between Alaska and British Columbia has “the unofficial distinction of the worst-named mountain on earth” — as it actually has terrible weather.

Margerie Glacier and Mount Fairweather during some fair weather. Image via Eric E Castro/Wikimedia Commons.

Its moniker wasn’t given ironically, though: Legendary explorer Capt. James Cook supposedly named Mount Fairweather from the comfort of his ship offshore in 1778 during a rare period of clear skies.

The rare badass who's climbed it would likely say otherwise.

6. Donner Lake and Donner Pass, California

They say fortune favors the bold. "They" are wrong, at least sometimes. Fortune certainly didn't favor the bold but ill-fated Donner Party in 1846.

California-bound, the Donner Party group of settlers gambled on a newly discovered shortcut through the Sierra Nevada, past what was then called Truckee Lake. They hit a wall of early snow at the pass and ended up stranded for months in the freezing cold. They soon ran out of food and, faced with starvation, eventually resorted to cannibalism. Rescuers finally reached the camp in late February, leading about half of the original 87 members of the party to safety.

Donner Lake from Donner Pass. Image via Frank Schulenburg/Wikimedia Commons.

Today, busy Interstate 80 traverses the pass between Sacramento and Reno. Take a moment on your drive to pull off at the gorgeous Donner Lake viewpoint, remember this grisly bit of history, and give thanks for your warm bed and three squares a day.

7. Pando, aka Trembling Giant, Utah

This natural feature is unique on this list: It’s a living thing — an 80,000-year-old living thing. Formerly thought to be largest living thing in the world (the actual largest living thing in the world is now thought to be a humongous fungus in Oregon), Pando is a massive grove of 47,000 quaking aspens in Utah that are all one life-form. The trees are genetically identical and all grow from the same root system. Wild.

Unfortunately, Pando isn’t doing so well. Overgrazing by deer and cattle is killing its young trees, which could lead to full collapse of the organism. Scientists, heroes that they are, are of course trying to save it.

8. Delmarva Peninsula

How do you name a peninsula shared between three different states? You combine their names, of course! The 170-mile-long Delmarva Peninsula, which forms the east side of the Chesapeake Bay, owes its name to the combination of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, all of which have a foothold on the landmass. Presumably, Virginia goes last because its sliver is the smallest. Hey, fair is fair.

Image via Planiglobe/Wikimedia Commons (altered).

9. Denali, Alaska

Denali. The stuff of legends. The highest peak in North America, at a staggering 20,310 feet.

Photo via skeeze/Pixabay.

Located in the eponymous national park in Alaska, this peak was recently in the news for a name change — or, more accurately, a name reversion. The word "Denali" means "the high one" in the local native Athabaskan language. What a perfect name, right? But as per usual, back in the day some greedy white dude mucked everything up by renaming it after newly elected President William McKinley, who these days is mostly known for being assassinated and succeeded by Teddy Roosevelt (sorry, Billy).

The national park was also called McKinley from 1917 to 1980. It was renamed Denali when it was combined with Denali National Monument. At that time, the Alaska state Board of Geographic Names also restored the mountain’s original name, but the U.S. Board on Geographic Names did not recognize it until President Obama put an end to all that last year, restoring it to its rightful name: Denali.

No word yet on whether President Trump will re-revert it to Mount McKinley. Or, knowing him, Mount Trump.

10. Glass Beach, Fort Bragg, California

Sometimes, one generation's trash makes another's paradise.

This beautiful beach is covered in litter. Seriously — it’s strewn with glass from a former city dump site. But the powerful California surf has shaped and polished millions of small shards into smooth pebbles, to colorful effect. (The red ones are old taillights.)

In a twist of irony, the glass at Glass Beach — which, again, is trash — is now protected by the California state parks as a “cultural feature,” which means you can’t remove any garbage from the beach.

Some of these places may sound made up, but they're very real, and they only begin to scratch the surface of what America has to offer.

If you're looking for a breath of fresh air and need something a little more novel than yet another trip to the Grand Canyon, give some of these breathtaking locales a try.

But a quick warning: Like many of Earth's greatest treasures, a few of these spots are in danger from climate change and other forms of human impact. (Glass Beach is basically made of garbage, for cryin' out loud.)

Visit them while you can — or, at the very least, let those catchy names be a constant reminder to always, always act in service of the planet.

Joy

Woman builds an elaborate hotel in her yard for stray cats to stay cozy through the winter

People are calling it "Hotel Catifornia" and "The Fur Seasons."

A woman in China provides a cozy home for stray cats in her neighborhood.

As winter approaches, people may wonder how stray animals stay warm and safe. Stray cats in particular are highly adaptable creatures and their home is the great outdoors, so most of the time there's not much that people need to do to protect them. But when temperatures dip to dangerous levels, caring humans naturally want to make sure strays have a place to go to get out of the harsh elements.

One woman has taken that desire to a whole new level with an elaborate cat apartment she built for the many stray cats in her neighborhood. We're not just talking about a shelter–it's like luxury hotel living for her feline friends. The apartment has multiple rooms, cushy blankets that get taken out and cleaned and even a temperature-controlled water source so they're always able to find drinking water in frigid temps.

Check this out:


The woman who built the apartment actually lives in China and shares videos on TikTok.

Welcome to the Meowtel Catifornia

Of course, the clever hotel jokes and puns started rolling in first thing:

'Welcome to the hotel catifornia."

"Such a lovely place."

"They can check out any time but they won't ever leave ^^"

"I prefer Hotel Calicofornia."

"Meowriott."

"Given my skill, mine would be more like Meowtel 6."

"Pawliday Inn.'

"The Fur Seasons."'

"Meowne Plaza."

People loved seeing the care and ingenuity she put into the "meowtel," as well as how happy the cats seem with the arrangement. In fact, some people were sure their own house cats would move out just to go live in this kind of cat commune.

"My cat just looked at me and sighed…"

"All the neighbours be looking for their cats and they’ve bailed to live at the kitty motel."

"They’d pack their little bags and move in without a second thought."

"They wouldn't even wait to pack their bags."

"Alright Carol it’s been real but we’re gonna head out. Found a great deal on a luxury apartment so yanno… take care."


@5fimnl9m

Create a single apartment on the third floor of a four story winter cat shelter for stray cats#fyp #cat #cute #Straycat#salvation

Cats live where they want when they want

Those people may have been joking, but several people shared that their cats really did ditch them to go live with neighbors who had more desirable living situations.

"I’ve had two cats do this. One was annoyed at our second dog’s puppy energy so she moved in with an older lady a street over. We used to see her all the time until she passed. The other missed our kids being little so she moved next door where there’s a little girl. We talked to both neighbors and said if they get sick of them to let us know and we’ll take them back but both lived the rest of their lives with their new families."

"One of our cats moved next door because he loves children and wanted to be with the little girl next door. Because it’s a very small village, he goes to the school most days to wait for her and they come home together. School is 3 buildings away."

"We had a cat do the same thing about 20 years ago. She hated the barks of our new puppy and would put her paw on his mouth to try and stop it. One day, she slipped outside and I found her a month later, two streets over, hanging with a couple who didn’t have a dog. They said she just showed up at the door and moved in. I gave them all her cat food and hope she had a nice quiet life."


@5fimnl9m

After two months of production and renovation, the basic facilities for wintering stray cats in the courtyard are almost complete#fyp #cat #cute #Straycat #salvation

Is it a bad idea to feed and shelter stray cats?

People have differing opinions about whether it's good to feed stray cats or not, as cats can cause problems for local wildlife and it's not great to encourage an increasing stray cat population. However, there are responsible ways to care for stray cats, which includes spaying and neutering those in your area.

According to the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, here are the best practices for feral and stray cats:

- Spay/neuter to prevent additional litters

- Find homes for friendly cats

- Feed outdoor cats on a schedule

- Remove food & dishes when they are done eating

- Pick up scraps and keep the feeding area tidy

- Provide fresh water

- Provide a warm place for the cats to sleep

So go ahead and care for those kitties and keep them warm through the winter—just make sure they can't make any more kittens.



Culture

Nathan Fillion shared a sweet pay-it-forward story after a Costco employee helped his mom

Well done, Les from Costco. Well done, Fillion family. Thanks for giving us the boost of faith in humanity we need right now.

In a time when we've watched people fight over toilet paper, argue over mask-wearing and storm government buildings with firearms, a nice random act of kindness story is always appreciated. And when that random act of kindness happens to someone who is famous-adjacent, the impact somehow seems all the more pure.

Actor Nathan Fillion, best known for his starring roles in the TV series Firefly (and subsequent movie, Serenity) and Castle, shared one such story on Facebook back in 2020—and people are still loving it. After all, two things will always remain timeless in our collective hearts: Nathan Fillion and Costco.

He wrote:


"The other day in Canada, a woman buying gas at a Costco had trouble with her credit card. The attendant bought her gas out of his own pocket and asked only that she pay it forward. That Costco was in Edmonton, that attendant was Les Thompson, and Les? That woman was my mother. You restore my faith in humanity, sir. My dad and I are sending three iPads and headphones to a nearby senior care facility so that folks there can visit with their families. Right now, we could all stand to be less afraid, and a little more Les. (Canada, Costco, Les, iPads, and my mom not pictured.)"


Fillion's post has been shared nearly 30,000 times, and commenters have expressed their gratitude for highlighting the fact that there are lots of good people out there. Some said they were proud to be Canadian. (Canada is well known for the general kindness of its people.) Others said the story reminded them that hope is not lost, even in the face of fairly constant bad news. Some inquired as to whether or not Fillion was married. (He's not.) But most simply thanked him for sharing a seemingly small, but oh-so-meaningful story about the power of a simple, selfless act of generosity.

Well done, Les from Costco. Well done, Fillion family. Thanks for giving us the boost of faith in humanity we need right now.


This article originally appeared on 5.27.20

An unsuspecting guy at a shopping mall Zales got the surprise of his life back in 2021 while trying to pay off part of his engagement ring.

As the young man talked with the clerk at the jewelry store counter about how much he still owed for his ring and when he'd be able to pay it off, an extraordinarily large hand handed the clerk a credit card. Shaquille O'Neal, the 7' 1'' basketball legend known colloquially as "Shaq," overheard their conversation and decided to take care of the bill himself. No big announcement. No fanfare. He just handed over his credit card, shook the stunned customer's hand and patted him on the back, and that was that.

Someone caught the moment on video and shared it, which prompted Shaq's co-hosts on NBA on TNT to ask him about it the next day.


One of the first questions was, "You went to the mall, and went to Zales?!?" Not exactly where one would expect a person with a $400 million net worth to be hanging out on a Monday, but Shaq pointed out that he has a jewelry line at Zales. He went in to get some hoop earrings. Alrighty.

The young man at the checkout counter was so shy, Shaq said, and when he heard him talking about paying for his engagement ring, Shaq asked him how much it was and offered to pay for it.

At first, the guy refused, but Shaq insisted. And apparently, he does these random acts of generosity all the time.

He said he was recently in a furniture store (seriously, do multi-millionaires not shop online?) and saw a mom with an autistic daughter buying furniture. He just took care of their bill, just because.

"I'm into making people happy," he said. "I didn't mean for that to get out because I don't do it for that...I'm just trying to make people smile, that's all."

Shaq's generosity is well-documented, despite his preference to keep much of it under wraps. In a 2015 interview with Graham Bessinger, he explained how his father's charity—despite their family not having a lot of money—influenced him.

After giving the family's bag of hamburgers to a homeless veteran, his father got into the family car and told him, "If you ever make it big time, make sure you help those in need."

Shaq remembered those words and engages in charity in a range of ways, "because of what a man who made $30,000 a year taught me," he said. "And a woman who was a secretary who probably made $20,000 a year—they taught me that."

His giving comes "from the heart," he said. He's not looking for attention or accolades—he just wants to make people happy.

"I'm doing this because this is what I was taught," he said. "I'm doing it because to walk in there and see a family, put a smile on their face for a day, that's just awesome to me."

Shaq on helping others when no one is lookingwww.youtube.com

"That's my thing. I just want to make you smile," he said.

Shaq once asked a restaurant server how much of a tip she wanted, and when she quipped "$4,000," he gave it to her. When a 12-year-old was paralyzed by a stray bullet in a shooting, Shaq donated a whole house to his family. A fan who saw Shaq in a Best Buy offered condolences to the star for the untimely death of Shaq's friend and former teammate Kobe Bryant, as well as Shaq's sister Ayesha, who had recently passed away from cancer. He was treated to a new laptop—the best one in the store.

Many of us like to daydream about what we'd do if we had more money than we know what to do with. And many of us like to picture ourselves being generous with our wealth, helping out random folks who could use some help.

Charitable giving looks like a lot of different things, from funding organizations to distributing money through a foundation to handing over a bag of burgers to someone who's hungry. It's just delightful to see wealthy people who not only support official charitable organizations with money and time (Shaq serves as a national spokesperson for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and is a member of the national Board of Directors for Communities in Schools in addition to raising and donating millions of dollars to various causes) but who also just help out random people everywhere they go.

Kudos to Shaq's parents for teaching him so well, and kudos to him for taking their lessons to heart.


This article originally appeared on 4.7.21

via ABC Action News

It's never too late to find your family. That's the heartwarming message being shared by Leah Paskalides and the daughter she adopted in 2021, then-19-year-old Monyay.

At the age of 11, Monyay was placed into a foster care group home. The pain of having to go through life without a family was always difficult, but it hit hard in her senior year of school. "My senior year is when I went through one of those, 'I don't want to do it anymore, I'm done,'" she told ABC News.

Monyay finished school a year early and took the extra time to focus on volunteering with foster children like her. But she faced a tough road ahead, as she was about to age out of the system.


According to the Children's Home Society of Minnesota, the 23,000 children who age out of foster care every year without families face many challenges. Only 3% earn a college degree, half will develop a substance abuse problem, 60% of boys are convicted of crimes, and 70% of girls become pregnant before the age of 21.

After she turned 18, it looked like she would have to enter the real world as an adult without any real support. But then her caseworker and mentor from the Safe Children Coalition stepped up.

Leah had always wanted to adopt Monyay but it was a conflict of interest with her work.

"She always said, 'I wish you could adopt me, wish you could adopt me,' and I couldn't because of the job and then I was watching a documentary where the person had been adopted as an adult, and I had never really heard of it," Leah said.

So she decided to adopt Monyay as her adult daughter. "It was important to me that she knew that she was wanted by somebody, that somebody loved her," Leah told Fox 13. "I could say that as many times as I want, but actions speak louder than words."

On Tuesday, a judge signed the paperwork making the adoption official.

Rose Rising on Twittertwitter.com

"Being told 'no' so many times, to hear that 'yes' and to hear them pronounce her as my mom, it's something that's like, oh my gosh, this is for real," Monyay told Fox 13.

The funny thing is the two didn't hit it off at first. Five years ago when Leah was assigned her case, Monyay didn't like her. "She told me what she was going to be doing and helping me out with my case, and I didn't like her; she'll tell you that," said Monyay.

But over the past five years, the two forged an unbreakable bond.

"She was very motivated and had aspirations for a future, and so I knew she just needed support," Leah said. "She was always a kid that did not deserve to go through life without a support system of a family."

The newly-formed family is sharing their story to bring hope to children in the foster care system by letting them know they can be adopted as adults. "It's never too late because I'm grown but I'm still being adopted," Monyay said. "Just because it didn't happen then it doesn't mean that it won't happen."

Monyay hopes to one day open her own group home for teens to help children who grew up like she did.


This article originally appeared on 4.28.21

Wellness

Justine Bateman boldly embraces her aging face, putting a new spin on 'aging goals'

"I find it wrong that women absorb the idea that faces need to be fixed. That it's being treated as a matter of fact."

Aging is a weird thing. We all do it—we truly have no choice in the matter. It's literally how time and living things work.

But boy, do we make the process all kinds of complicated. The anti-aging market has created a 58.5 billion-dollar industry, with human beings spending their whole lives getting older spending buttloads of money to pretend like it's not happening.

I'm one of those human beings, by the way, so no judgment here. When I find a product that makes me look as young as I feel inside, I get pretty giddy.

But there's no doubt that our views on aging—and by extension, our perspectives on our own aging bodies—are influenced by popular culture. As we see celebrities in the spotlight who seem to be ageless, we enviously tag them with the hashtag #aginggoals. The goal is to "age well," which ultimately means looking like we're not aging at all. And so we break out the creams and the serums and the microdermabrasion and the injections—even the scalpel, in some cases—to keep the wrinkles, crinkles, bags, and sags at bay.

There's a big, blurry line between having a healthy skincare routine and demonizing normal signs of aging, and we each decide where our own line gets drawn.

This is where Justine Bateman comes in.


The 58-year-old actress/filmmaker is turning the idea of #aginggoals on its head by simply, boldly embracing her face as it is. No apologies. No avoidance. Just a simple message of "Yeah, this is my face."

She hasn't always had such radical self-acceptance. After Googling herself during the writing of her first book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, she saw that the autocomplete after her name read "looks old." So she looked at the photos people were sharing of her 40-something-year-old face as "evidence."

"I thought my face looked fine," she told PEOPLE. "Because of some of the fears I had, unrelated to my face, I decided to make them right and me wrong....I became really ashamed of my face, ridiculously so."

"I looked the same the day before as I did the day after," she said, "and yet I felt totally different about my face...The only difference was that I had read the criticism."

That experience led her to explore how society views women and aging, a topic she explores in her new book Face: One Square Foot of Skin. It also led to her truly embrace her face, just as it is.

Instead of fighting the aging process like many of us do, she decided to fight the fear attached to it.

"I hated the idea that half the population was perhaps spending the entire second half of their lives ashamed and apologetic that their faces had aged naturally," Bateman writes in her book.

She also shared with PEOPLE how she feels about society painting the physical signs of aging as inherently negative.

"I find it wrong that women absorb the idea that faces need to be fixed," she said. "That it's being treated as a matter of fact. I feel that we've skipped over the phase where we talk about whether or not we should criticize women's faces as they get older."

"I think getting all this plastic surgery is just people pleasing," she continued. "You don't want people to criticize you anymore so you appease them. The more you do that, the further away you get away from your true self. It doesn't work for me. If somebody said to me now we could do some surgery, wouldn't I be signaling that I'm super insecure? To me, it would."

In her book, Bateman describes what people are really seeing when they look at her face in its aging glory:

"You're looking at f***ing determination and truth and creativity. You're looking at loss and sorrow and the effort for a deeper perspective. You're looking at satisfaction and happiness. You're looking at a manifestation of a connection so deep and rooted that it's more real than I am. You're looking at my face."

YES. What a refreshing perspective to add to the conversation surrounding beauty and aging. It's odd that seeing a woman simply accept the lines in her face is inspiring, but it really is.

Perhaps we should recalibrate #aginggoals to be more about how we feel than how we look. After all, if anyone is "aging well," it's the woman who feels—as Bateman told Vanity Fair—"empowered to walk out in the world with an attitude that says, 'Fuck you, I look great.'"

Right on, Justine Bateman. Thanks for helping us embrace our faces just as they are.


This article originally appeared on 4.15.21

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