Go Gansett

You can't beat a dead horse, or a dead horse racetrack, but apparently you can beat a dead beer back to life. The Narragansett Brewing Company won the Bronze Medal at the 2008 World Beer Cup. It's the latest coup in a series of honors for Gansett, which was originally established in Rhode Island around 1890 and eventually became New England's largest brewery, earning a 65 percent market share in the six-state region during the 1960s. The beer's fame grew with its "Hi Neighbor, have a Gansett" advertising campaign and three-decade sponsorship of the Boston Red Sox. But ultimately it couldn't compete with the national lagers, especially when Budweiser muscled in, building a plant in New Hampshire. The Narragansett Brewery in Cranston closed in 1981. Production was moved to Fort Wayne, Ind., but the water there was no match for the Scituate Reservoir. A few old-time Rhode Islanders still swore by their cans of "Nasty Gansett," but the beer was dropped from the taps and considered by many to be undrinkable. Enter Mark Hellendrung, previously the head "Juice Guy" at Nantucket Nectars, who rounded up a group of local investors and revived the brand three years ago, re-launching it with its heritage recipe and new packaging. According to Beer Advocate, Narragansett is now the highest-rated premium domestic lager in the country.

Personal note: While researching through Life magazines from the 1960s, I was struck by how prominent the Narragansett beer ads were, appearing on pages with JFK, Apollo astronauts and Frank Sinatra. The revived lager is a huge improvement over the Indiana-watered-down beer, but it doesn't quite match the original. Marketing surveys influenced the revivalists to make the beer slightly less bitter to satisfy the masses (but not confirmed hopheads like me). So here's a thought: Narragansett Classic.

Lost in Cyberspace

Anticipating tonight's season finale of "Lost" inspired a little Google play: When you Google "Lost Rhode Island," the first listing chronicles the demise of four Ocean State ski areas. That means Little Rhody, a state with no mountains, once had five places to go downhill skiing. The only one left is Yawgoo Valley, but at one time Rhode Island also counted Diamond Hill, Neutaconkanut Hill, Pine Top and Ski Valley as slope-worthy, a ski belt that stretched from Cumberland through Providence/Johnston and into Escoheag and Exeter. (In typical "Only in Rhode Island" fashion, Ski Valley and Diamond Hill shared one side of the same Cumberland hill, even though they were two separate ski operations.)

What does this have to do with "Lost?" Nothing. In fact, I'm hard-pressed as a weekly "Lost" watcher to think of any time the TV show made reference to Rhode Island culture (except remotely as part of the Jack-is-a-Red-Sox-fan-who-still-can't-believe-they-won-the-World-Series running gag). In that way, "Lost" has nothing on the cool years of "The X-Files" (early-to-mid Mulder), when one episode was set in Chepachet, another featured flashbacks to Mulder's childhood summer cottage in Quonochontaug and a later show mentioned that his mom was in a Providence hospital.

Blueways and Greenways

In March 2000, several months before I returned to Rhode Island to cover arts and culture for the Independent, I took my old touring bicycle on a rambling journey along the East Coast, wayfaring from Key West, Fla. to Lubec, Maine, with detours and diversions in between. (All recorded in notebooks that have yet to see the light of day. Perhaps I'll blog it someday: "Bike on the Half Shell" anyone?) The trip was hazardous in spots, often lacking good shoulder, courteous drivers or a way to ride safely from point A (Florida City) to point B (Miami). Little did I know when I settled down to my sloppy desk in Wakefield, R.I. later in the year that someone was already working on a solution - creating a 3,000-mile ribbon of bike-friendly trail from Florida to Maine called the East Coast Greenway. (Now 20 percent completed and counting.) To top it off, headquarters for the national grass-roots organization was right here in Wakefield.

But the East Coast Greenway is only one of the ways Rhode Island is going green. And with local efforts toward opening up more woods, wilderness and trails to recreational enthusiasts firmly established in the state, someone decided Rhody should go blue, too. It's a great escape: Kayaking the Wood River in Hope Valley, listening to the plaintive cry of a red-shouldered hawk overhead, or cycling the William C. O'Neill (South County) Bike Path through the Great Swamp, watching a snapping turtle the size of a flying saucer emerge from the murk into the sunshine. The call of the wild. The journey of the paddle and the wheel. And the best part of Rhody's blueways and greenways? No highways.

Peak bagging

Dr. Tim Warren became the first Rhode Islander to climb Mount Everest last Friday at 11:15 p.m. Eastern Time. The Warwick chiropractor scaled the world's highest mountain (29,035 feet) on his second attempt, helping to raise money as part of his "Klimb for Kids" campaign for the children of A Wish Come True, the wish-granting organization founded in Tiverton in 1982. In a brief blog chronicling his excursion, he notes:

"I have been where humans are just not supposed to be and the corpses are in plain sight as a reminder."

A few years ago, those same words might've applied to the highest climb in Rhode Island, the 882-foot summit at Jerimoth Hill in Foster. The hiking isn't hard, but the shotgun-wielding landowner made life difficult for anyone who attempted the feat. Thanks to the work of Highpointers (people dedicated to climbing all 51 of America's tallest-per-state peaks - D.C. included) and new property owners, walkers are allowed to hike Jerimoth Hill from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. 52 weeks a year. Surprisingly, Rhode Island's little molehill of a mountain isn't the smallest in the U.S. Little Rhody looms above the highpoints of Mississippi (806 feet), Louisiana (535), Delaware (442), Washington D.C. (415) (although climbing the steps of the Washington Monument will get you up to 555 feet) and Florida (345).