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At first it sounds completely strange to relocate the beavers with airplane and parachute. But this story reminds me again how little I know about the vast rura

At first it sounds completely strange to relocate the beavers with airplane and parachute. But this story reminds me again how little I know about the vast rural areas of other countries. In Germany we have no spot that can not be reached via car and foot in a day. It's hard for me to imagine how big the rural Areas in America are. A plane is the most efficient transportation vehicle for those.

Mashimo 3y ago
Also 1940s and 50s rural America. Predating the Eisenhower highway system thingy. Bad roads with bad car suspension. That would stress any beaver out.
- lolinder 3y ago
  Also predating much of the growth in the Rocky Mountains. The population of Idaho in the 1950 census was 589K, compared to 1.96M today. Idaho is still a very low density state, but at the time there were an average of 2.7 people/km^2, just over 1% of modern Germany's 233/km^2.
- monkeynotes 3y ago
  I wonder if a plane flight, and a parachute drop into unfamiliar territory is stressful at all.
kstrauser 3y ago
We lived in the US midwest. My in-laws live in a New England state, but on the end farthest from the coast, i.e. closest to us. That was a 15 hour drive, not counting meal and gas stops. One time a group of friends and I drove from San Diego to Denver and back. It took 38 hours, and that was averaging 60.0 miles per hour according to hours_total/miles_total. We never left the western 1/3 of the US. The US is large.
- astrojams 3y ago
  I live in Texas. It takes about 8 hours drive to get out of Texas regardless of the direction I go. That's just one state. Texas is the only state that has 8 different climate zones.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    The drive from El Paso to Los Angeles is 813 miles. The drive from El Paso to Brownsville, TX is 829 miles. El Paso is closer to LA than to another city in Texas.
    - kurthr 3y ago
      Yeah, but once you get to El Paso, you're almost half way there!
    - brudgers 3y ago
      Although El Paso is closer to Los Angeles than it is to the Mississippi River, by Interstate it is 200km closer to Dallas and slightly closer to Houston and Austin. But all those drives are 900km or more.
  - dkasper 3y ago
    Texas is obviously bigger but California also has 8 (or more depending on which classification scheme)
  - prpl 3y ago
    I don’t know where you got that climate zone information, but I don’t think it’s true. New Mexico has more koppen climates areas than Texas, and Arizona too (and also California). Texas is undeniably huge though - I have driven El Paso to Beaumont on the way to Louisiana
    - sandworm101 3y ago
      And Alaska. It is big enough that there have to be at least eight different zones falling somewhere between coastal rainforest and arctic pack ice.
arrowleaf 3y ago
In this situation it's not necessarily how 'big' the rural area is, it's the topography. As the crow flies, the basin in the SNRA these beavers were dropped into isn't more than ~60 miles away from where they were picked up from.
philip1209 3y ago
This is also why trains are so hard to build in the USA between the coasts.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dmoy 3y ago
> In Germany we have no spot that can not be reached via car and foot in a day. I know this story was about Idaho that has, at least today, relatively fewer places that are completely inaccessible. But if you go to Alaska, there's enough territory that's inaccessible by car that is 3x the size of all of Germany (that is, I think there's well over 1 million square kilometers of inaccessible places in Alaska). The lower 48 is much less so, especially today. Still if you get up into the mountains, in the crazy wetland areas (parts of Florida everglades, parts of extreme north Minnesota, etc), it can get impossible to traverse by car, and very difficult by foot.
- monkeynotes 3y ago
  Lower 48 has vast deserts, mountain ranges, large national parks. There is loads of inaccessible wilderness in the lower 48, especially when compared to Germany.
  - dmoy 3y ago
    True, I just mean that (a) most of that you can get to by car and then foot it just sucks (b) it's not like Alaska where literally 80% of it is inaccessible
bombcar 3y ago
"On foot in a day" gives you about 10 hours of hiking - let's say 20 miles (a 10 hour day 20 mile hike is pretty good, trained hikers could do further and people run marathons, but let's take an estimate). So even from a single trailhead (end of road) you have a 1,257 sq mile circle! (Pedants would say that it's less because the road has to get inside your circle, and points on the circle would be closer to the road elsewhere.) Very quickly places become basically unnavigable by humans even today, and even in places you'd think of as "not rural". I'm sure there are places even in Germany where things could go missing forever. Amusingly enough, large swaths of the "unaccessible backlands" of America is BLM land in the desert or high desert, and quite accessible to off-road vehicles, because it's basically flat dirt and so if you plow a road across it, the dirt road lasts nearly forever.
brudgers 3y ago
It's hard for me to imagine how big the rural Areas in America are. Part of that is that the most vast vastnesses are not rural. They are wildernesses. Humans don't live in them. And they don't have infrastructure to encourage or facilitate visitors. In the US, you can't drive a car, ride a bicycle, fly a drone, or sail a sailboat in a designated wilderness. You can ride a horse or burro, however. But need to carry feeds free of invasive species seeds. Then there are vast public lands where you can in theory ride a bicycle, etc. but climate and terrain make it a bad idea for most people. Much of the Mojave Desert for example (maybe search HN for "Death Valley Germans" if you want a rabbit hole to dive down). Then there is Alaska, where airplane is the most practical and often only means of travel to and from and within. Or to put it another way, if you thought of Siberia as part of Europe, then the scale of Europe would be more like the scale of the US. But it seems Western Europeans usually mean Western Europe when they say "Europe." And not the Balkan countries, let alone Azerbaijan.

Mashimo 3y ago

Also 1940s and 50s rural America. Predating the Eisenhower highway system thingy. Bad roads with bad car suspension. That would stress any beaver out.

lolinder 3y ago
Also predating much of the growth in the Rocky Mountains. The population of Idaho in the 1950 census was 589K, compared to 1.96M today. Idaho is still a very low density state, but at the time there were an average of 2.7 people/km^2, just over 1% of modern Germany's 233/km^2.
monkeynotes 3y ago
I wonder if a plane flight, and a parachute drop into unfamiliar territory is stressful at all.

kstrauser 3y ago

We lived in the US midwest. My in-laws live in a New England state, but on the end farthest from the coast, i.e. closest to us. That was a 15 hour drive, not counting meal and gas stops. One time a group of friends and I drove from San Diego to Denver and back. It took 38 hours, and that was averaging 60.0 miles per hour according to hours_total/miles_total. We never left the western 1/3 of the US. The US is large.

astrojams 3y ago
I live in Texas. It takes about 8 hours drive to get out of Texas regardless of the direction I go. That's just one state. Texas is the only state that has 8 different climate zones.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  The drive from El Paso to Los Angeles is 813 miles. The drive from El Paso to Brownsville, TX is 829 miles. El Paso is closer to LA than to another city in Texas.
  - kurthr 3y ago
    Yeah, but once you get to El Paso, you're almost half way there!
  - brudgers 3y ago
    Although El Paso is closer to Los Angeles than it is to the Mississippi River, by Interstate it is 200km closer to Dallas and slightly closer to Houston and Austin. But all those drives are 900km or more.
- dkasper 3y ago
  Texas is obviously bigger but California also has 8 (or more depending on which classification scheme)
- prpl 3y ago
  I don’t know where you got that climate zone information, but I don’t think it’s true. New Mexico has more koppen climates areas than Texas, and Arizona too (and also California). Texas is undeniably huge though - I have driven El Paso to Beaumont on the way to Louisiana
  - sandworm101 3y ago
    And Alaska. It is big enough that there have to be at least eight different zones falling somewhere between coastal rainforest and arctic pack ice.

arrowleaf 3y ago

In this situation it's not necessarily how 'big' the rural area is, it's the topography. As the crow flies, the basin in the SNRA these beavers were dropped into isn't more than ~60 miles away from where they were picked up from.

philip1209 3y ago

This is also why trains are so hard to build in the USA between the coasts.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dmoy 3y ago

> In Germany we have no spot that can not be reached via car and foot in a day. I know this story was about Idaho that has, at least today, relatively fewer places that are completely inaccessible. But if you go to Alaska, there's enough territory that's inaccessible by car that is 3x the size of all of Germany (that is, I think there's well over 1 million square kilometers of inaccessible places in Alaska). The lower 48 is much less so, especially today. Still if you get up into the mountains, in the crazy wetland areas (parts of Florida everglades, parts of extreme north Minnesota, etc), it can get impossible to traverse by car, and very difficult by foot.

monkeynotes 3y ago
Lower 48 has vast deserts, mountain ranges, large national parks. There is loads of inaccessible wilderness in the lower 48, especially when compared to Germany.
- dmoy 3y ago
  True, I just mean that (a) most of that you can get to by car and then foot it just sucks (b) it's not like Alaska where literally 80% of it is inaccessible

bombcar 3y ago

"On foot in a day" gives you about 10 hours of hiking - let's say 20 miles (a 10 hour day 20 mile hike is pretty good, trained hikers could do further and people run marathons, but let's take an estimate). So even from a single trailhead (end of road) you have a 1,257 sq mile circle! (Pedants would say that it's less because the road has to get inside your circle, and points on the circle would be closer to the road elsewhere.) Very quickly places become basically unnavigable by humans even today, and even in places you'd think of as "not rural". I'm sure there are places even in Germany where things could go missing forever. Amusingly enough, large swaths of the "unaccessible backlands" of America is BLM land in the desert or high desert, and quite accessible to off-road vehicles, because it's basically flat dirt and so if you plow a road across it, the dirt road lasts nearly forever.

brudgers 3y ago

It's hard for me to imagine how big the rural Areas in America are. Part of that is that the most vast vastnesses are not rural. They are wildernesses. Humans don't live in them. And they don't have infrastructure to encourage or facilitate visitors. In the US, you can't drive a car, ride a bicycle, fly a drone, or sail a sailboat in a designated wilderness. You can ride a horse or burro, however. But need to carry feeds free of invasive species seeds. Then there are vast public lands where you can in theory ride a bicycle, etc. but climate and terrain make it a bad idea for most people. Much of the Mojave Desert for example (maybe search HN for "Death Valley Germans" if you want a rabbit hole to dive down). Then there is Alaska, where airplane is the most practical and often only means of travel to and from and within. Or to put it another way, if you thought of Siberia as part of Europe, then the scale of Europe would be more like the scale of the US. But it seems Western Europeans usually mean Western Europe when they say "Europe." And not the Balkan countries, let alone Azerbaijan.