A Q&A plus a bonus column

Editor’s note: Every quarter, Heart, Humor & Hope offers a Q&A in which I answer trivia questions. Here’s our 2026 third-quarter offering:

Q. In your recent series on the Mammoth-to-Yosemite backpacking trip (3H, Aug. 6-7, 2026), I was curious about the size of Yosemite National Park. Can you give us some perspective?

A. Yosemite is 1,187 square miles. Springfield and Eugene are a combined 60 square miles, so the national park stretches 20 times the size of those two cities or one quarter the size of Lane County, which has 4,722 square miles. In short, it’s big. Really big.

Q. Is there any chance you have footage from your father’s movie, Trout in the High Country, that you referred to in your recent series? If so, could you post all or some of it?

A. Thanks to son Ryan, a professional videographer (Alaskan Nets), we’ve salvaged a snippet of the 16mm footage. The original movie got lost in the years after Dad’s death in 1996, but we did find some footage, and Ry digitized a handful of scenes. What follows is four minutes of miscellaneous shots. No storyline. No polish. Just raw footage.

Q. Favorite novel you’ve read recently?

A. Theo of Golden by first-time author Allen Levi. A stranger moves into a small Georgia town and quietly lives out the power of compassion and encouragement — through art. A great read for anyone battered by the selfishness that pervades so much of our culture. And a reminder that it won’t be long, Dec. 31, before we’ll run our annual best-books-of-the-year list.