Year-around Roughing It. In Duluth, Minnesota?

For more than three years, fourteen-year-old Isaac Ortman hasn’t slept in his bed. This Minnesota teenager has camped out continuously (“weathered”?) in blizzards, thunderstorms, and minus 38-degree nights.

Why? “It’s just fun!” His bed varies from a packed snow quinzhee to a hammock. 

This summer, Isaac will attend a Boy Scout jamboree in West Virginia and also visit Washington, D.C. While there, he says he hopes President Joe Biden will invite him to sleep on the lawn of the White House.  

Sources: World Magazine, February 25, 2023, “Sleeping Streak,” page 25; “Minnesota Boy Has Slept Outside For More Than 1,000 Nights, No Matter The Weather,” Jan Wesner Childs, Weather Channel News, February 09, 2023 (retrieved April 25, 2023).

Quiz Answers

• A giant coastal redwood named Hyperion is over 380 feet tall. That is longer than a football field and about the height of a thirty-five-story building!

Source: Answers in Genesis (Kids Answers), Oct-Dec 2022, p. 29

• It takes about an hour for most snowflakes to fall to the earth.

Source: Answers in Genesis (Kids Answers), Jan-Mar 2023, p. 15

Have Black Bear / German Shepherd – Will Travel

A female black bear was misbehaving at Great Smoky Mountains National Park (invading camp sites to steal food). Dubbed “Bear 609,” she was trapped and relocated to the South Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee, about 70 miles away. 

The bear was tagged so she could be tracked. Four states and 1,000 miles later, within six months, the bear had returned to the very same campsite where she had been captured. She continued her journey, too, before finally returning again to the area from which she was originally removed. Obviously, she was smarter than the average bear!

An Analogy from Nature: The Dragonfly Gospel

As a biologist and a Christian, Dr. Don Bierle found an analogy about dragonflies particularly meaningful in an article by Lynn Vincent, executive editor for World Magazine.

Dragonflies begin their life as “nymphs” (bug-like and wingless) underwater, usually for one or two years. One day, an unknown stimulus prompts them to climb out of the water and begin to breathe. What follows is truly a molecular marvel, as she described: