Last minute Christmas gift idea for the Alabama nature lover

Five Star Trails: Birmingham, my newly published hiking guide to Birmingham, should be available this weekend at Little Professor Book Center in Homewood, Church Street Coffee and Books in Crestline, Neighborhood Hops and Vine, Mountain High Outfitters, and now at Alabama Outdoors in Homewood. Books-A-Million and Vulcan Park have also carried it.

You'll find a kind mention of the book, plus a lot of other ideas at Joe's Outdoor Office Gift Guide on al.com.
All merchandise available from local merchants.
Couple of other ideas: I highly recommend River Dreams, a film chronicling Hunter Nichols voyage from Birmingham down the Cahaba and out to the Gulf of Mexico. Beautiful, fascinating, sort of makes you want to do it. Except that it looked really tough at points.



 Another great documentary film is America's Amazon, an exploration of the Alabama's remarkably biodiverse river system. You may have read about it recently in print editions of The Birmingham News.