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A Memorial Day Weekend Hike on Mount Nittany
Leon Kolankiewicz, Mount Nittany Conservancy board member and organizer of the Mount Nittany Hikers Meetup group, led a natural history hike up Mount Nitany on Sunday, May 28th. The hike was led on behalf of Centred Outdoors, a project of the ClearWater Conservancy and drew more than 30 participants. Leon led about a 3-mile loop…
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Mount Nittany Trails Added to Google Street View
Thanks to the generous donation of time and resources from Mount Nittany Conservancy board member Brian Stouffer and his company TurnKey Logistics, all of Mount Nittany’s public trails are now captured on Google Street View. Whether you are a regular hiker or haven’t made it up the Mountain in many years, you can explore all…
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Mount Nittany Hikers Meetup.com Group Launches
The Mount Nittany Conservancy recently formed a group on Meetup.com — a platform designed for members of local communities to meet new people and pursue their mutual passions together. The group, called Mount Nittany Hikers, hopes to organize all who love the Mountain and the outdoors. The service will coordinate group hikes for those who…
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Joseph Carroll and the Mount Nittany Vineyard & Winery
The Mount Nittany Conservancy mourns the death of Joseph Louis Carroll, the founder of Mount Nittany Vineyard & Winery, who died last November, shortly after the winery’s 31st anniversary. Joe had been an amateur winemaker for years before starting construction on his business in 1987 in the shadows of Mount Nittany’s southern slope. What began…
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Bog Turtle Brewery’s ‘Evan Pugh Vanilla Porter’
Penn State’s first president Evan Pugh was born in 1828 at Jordan Bank Farm, three miles south of the city center of Oxford, Pennsylvania, an hour west of Philadelphia, in Chester County. One-hundred eighty-nine years later, an Oxford brewery is honoring one of the preeminent champions of public higher education in the form of a delicious…
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Why Honoring Joe Paterno Still Matters
Writing anything about Joe Paterno at this point is futile. If you’re reading this, your mind has already been made up. If you are not a Penn Stater, we’re an unapologetic cult. If you are a Penn Stater, you’re probably nonplussed, irrationally angry that the news about Paterno being honored before the Temple game is too little too…
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The Week that Restored Penn State Football
By Kevin Horne & Chris Buchignani “They’ll be enjoying the tailgating afterwards, with a 30-point win.” On that note, ABC’s Brad Nessler wrapped up the national broadcast of Penn State’s October 1, 2005 win over 18th-ranked Minnesota, a 44-14 shellacking that featured two standout plays that would endure for years among the program’s most memorable…
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Blue-White 2005: Prelude to a Comeback
By Kevin Horne & Chris Buchignani There are certain successes that everyone from the outside can predict. These are victories worthy of celebration, for sure, but movies aren’t made and books aren’t written about the events that everyone sees coming. The stories that inspire us the most and linger in our memories are often the…
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Graduate School and the Value of Extended Time in the Nittany Valley
“5… 4… 3… 2… 1… HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” I hear that same countdown every night, a few seconds before midnight, from my Beaver Avenue apartment, although its consistency makes it no less painful to digest. The commotion, of course, is coming from the line outside the local bar known for catering to belligerent 21st birthday crowds.…
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Remembering Joe Paterno’s 1983 Board of Trustees Speech
“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” When I visit Joe Paterno’s gravesite, as I have done on occasion over the last two years when I’m in need of some ethereal inspiration or peace, I’m always struck by the above line from Robert Browning on his headstone. The…