outdoors

Consaul, a communications consultant, has painstakingly turned the lighthouse into her summer dream home in those 15 years since she ponied up $71,010 for it at a U.S. General Services Administration federal auction. She lives and works there from May to October, then returns to her winter home in Virginia for the remainder of the year. The following photos are a peek inside the historic light, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2025.

Born in Cleveland and raised in Fremont, Pollick displayed early interests in both the outdoors and writing. He soon discovered, through his high school English teachers, that he had an innate ability to break down complex concepts and make them easy for people to understand.  

He graduated from the University of Toledo and earned a master’s from Ohio State, then went to work as a general assignment reporter for The Blade. His editors noticed his well-researched, accurate stories, and offered him the coveted position of outdoors editor. He jumped at it.  

“Climbing combines physical activity — a sportlike activity — with a meaningful cultural experience,” he says. “It’s a reason to travel and experience new places. I’ve spent hundreds of days climbing in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Alabama, traveling to places that are remote. I’ve enjoyed meeting people there who are climbers and not climbers.” 

Shortly after he earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Washington, he and his wife, Laura Black, moved to Athens with their two kids to be professors at OU. 

Evans thought of all the Little Free Libraries that were springing up at the time, offering books for anyone to take, and thought that maybe a similar program might encourage more people to plant wildflowers. It was a project, he figured, that would fit right in with 3VCT’s mission. 

Three Valley Conservation Trust is a nonprofit group that promotes conservation measures in Butler, Preble, and Montgomery Counties. Its 250 members mainly work to secure land conservation easements and raise awareness of the importance of protecting natural habitats and resources. 

For instance, a very early Columbus resident and hunter shot 67 gray squirrels in one day from just one tree in the middle of a cornfield on what today is the Statehouse lawn.

Kerns grew up in a suburb of Columbus, and says she had an intense interest in the outdoors, even as a kid. “I took a summer course in marine biology during high school, and that experience really helped guide my future undergrad and postgraduate studies and ultimate career path,” she says. 

If you need a reminder that the world is held together by stone, then consider Ohio’s basement. You cannot see it except in the long strands of bored-out cores that have been extracted from hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface. The basement is composed of sedimentary rock, settled and compressed at the bottom of what was once a deep ocean. That bedrock dates to about 570 million years ago, geologists say. It’s called Cambrian period stone, named after Cambria (which is now called Wales), where the stone type was first described and given a name around 1835.

When Kline and his wife, Kris, members of Lancaster-based South Central Power Company, acquired the land, they weren’t sure exactly what they were going to do with it.

“We could cut for timber, but that didn’t seem fulfilling,” he says. Finally, they decided to fall back on what they know. Christopher has a master’s degree in plant biology from Ohio University and served as education director at the Grange Insurance Audubon Center in Columbus. He also was interpretation specialist at Franklin Park Conservatory, where he was known as “The Butterfly Guy.”

Perhaps the fiercest is Tom Korokney, a.k.a. “Doc Lyman.” He purchased the tooling, jigs, fixtures, and archived records from then-defunct Lyman during bankruptcy and moved it all to Lexington in Richland County. 

“I’ve used the tooling to duplicate parts through the years,” he says. “And the documentation — I’ve got all the original hull records.” Those records, Korokney says, are sought after by folks who desire historical papers, including certificates of authenticity, for their boats.