Little Inches Adoption Agency by Sean and Lee Dill

TO: Everyone@thepacificnorthwest.com

CC: Nikoncustomerservice@nikon.com, Cannoncs@cannon.com, Nickelback@nickelback.com

Subject: Think Before You CLICK!

Greetings and good tidings fellow outdoor enthusiasts. We at the Little Inches Adoption Agency™ (LIAA) hope that your new year is off to a wonderful and explorative start. We can tell you have been living it up outside this past year and we fully support that!  However, we would like to take this opportunity to have, what we affectionately call here at LIAA, a teachable moment. Specifically, we would like to address a longstanding question of the community that our organization has the answer to. This  question specifically relates to our organization's mission and the answer we hope will help solve our current Cuban Missile level crisis. What age old question do we have the answer to and how can this knowledge help you, the tree loving do-gooder, help a vast organization that's employees number in the tens?

Well, only the most important question asked by all hikers, naturalists, rangers, and mind-altered hippies for generations.

Where does Bigfoot come from? 

Yes, Bigfoot, Sasquatch, The beast in the trees. The most elusive folk legend in Northwest history. A mythical creature that has been frightening backpackers, and scaring first-time campers since time immemorial. Subject of a mildly respectable number of second-rate news articles, conspiracy blogs, campy one-off tv episodes, and coloring books. This creature of highly debated size, clarity, and hairiness has been trouncing through our minds and hearts filling them with dread and mystery for the better part of forever. So, where do they come from? Well first this bombshell, there isn't just one Bigfoot. There are just oodles of these folktale baddies running amok through the sparsely inhabited forests and mountains of well, just about anywhere with forests and mountains. We actually are in the middle of an epic overpopulation problem, which brings us to the next point. A Bigfoot doesn't just start out a big lumbering blur of overhyped hair follicles, it has humble, ignoble beginnings, and those beginnings my friends start with you. 

How could that be possible, you might ask?  “How could I, Breighdan or Ryleigh (super original BTW) So-and-So be contributing to an overpopulation crisis of such photographic proportions?  Well, every single Bigfoot now roaming around the wilds of our nation and creeping betwixt the seedy alleys of our internet, started off as a careless (mostly unintentional) bit of amateur nature photography.

“WAIT!” you might be saying, “I thought that Bigfoot was some kind of great-man-ape of legend roaming the PNW and posing for bumper stickers with reckless abandon propagating itself through popular storytelling and off camera hanky-panky?”

Well, if you said that you would be right, but before Bigfeet find their questionably corporal form as big hairy suspiciously vulcanized looking mountain apes, they start off as nothing more than a carelessly shaky hand snapping a poorly aspect ratioed photo of a waterfall. Crazy I know, but trust us it's just as scientific as Bigfoot! Every time a camera clicks there is a distinct possibility that its misuse has just popped a tiny little hair blur into existence. Think of it like Schrodinger's ape. We like to call these fuzzy possibilities ‘Little Inches.’ Hence the nom de plume of our organization (we think it's much more clever and original than just adding an E-I-G-H to some other boring old name.)  There are so many ways you might inadvertently be birthing tiny little myths without even knowing it.

A lonely Little Inch is born every time a photography 101 student tries to take a picture of a mushroom with questionable legal status without properly adjusting his F-stop. A dozen scared Little Inches come into this world every time a technologically inept Dad forgets to adjust the exposure on his brand new Nikon-DSLR. There are a hundred, maybe thousands of scared little blurs you created that have their moment of conception catalogued inside your lost micro-sd card. Every botched attempt at snagging the “perfect” mid-leap shot of a mountain goat with your iphone 11s, every 8 years old’s attempted 8x zoom squirrel portrait, every soft focused contrived hiking selfie (looking at you, influencers…not even a bead of sweat on those perfectly tweezed brows), carelessly creates another tiny smudged legend without any thought to who will care for it. Well, it's us guys. We care for all the wayward Little Inches that your thoughtless love of outdoor content creation makes.

This crisis used to be a manageable affair when the only people bringing cameras into the wilds were the folks over at National Geographic or the occasional guy who couldn't get over his divorce...errr…“birdwatcher.”  Whether driven by professional acumen or barely repressed rage those guys really knew their stuff. Now however, every person has what it takes to be supremely subpar at artistic expression right in their pockets.  Don't get us wrong, on one hand we think it's great. Do what you love and all that. But, on the other hand we are simply running out of space for all our lovely wards of the state.

We are running dangerously low on hairbrushes, and foot powder. Our interns are exhausted from un-ironically applying cruelty-free detangler. Recently the number of people who want to adopt a tiny little stinky, yes they smell, smudgy something-or-other is at all-time lows. Sure, when a Little Inch grows up and becomes a terrifying beast casting a shadow across a trail or leaving a nondescript footprint in the mud, people want everything to do with them.  But there just isn't enough room to let all these little ones out into the wild. Can you imagine? Every other photo would feature some grainy terrifying biped skulking about next to some guy with a Bluetooth speaker who thinks everyone on the mountain wants to hear Nickelback.  No, that just wouldn't do. Do you really want to be responsible for that type of chaos? Just think of all the conspiracy theorists that kind of world would keep employed. Nobody above a 6th grade reading level wants that.

What we do want however, is for Bigfoot to continue being an enticing folk mystery that's been co-opted by rampant consumerism, and not a mundane out of focus common occurrence that can no longer be used to sell novelty mugs. Think about how that would affect Temu’s profit margin!  And while we can't do anything about the Nickelback speaker guy, we can do something to help Bigfoot and those Little Inches. Before we go into the wonderful wilderness paradise that are our national forests, we can ask ourselves, ‘How many pictures do I really need to take?’

Help us at LIAA create a brighter future for the Bigfeet we have by not making any more Little Inches that we can't care for. Before you bust out that DSLR ask yourself: Does the world really need another picture of Mailbox Peak? Is four likes on Instagram really worth bringing a hopeless little orphan into this vast uncaring wilderness?  Dad, is the universe made so much more whole when you shoot an eight second 1080p video of whatever the heck it was you saw on Rampart Ridge?  Ryleigh, did the world find as much peace in that ironically contrived shot of you meditating in front of Mirror Lake as your parents found when naming you? Probably not. That's why we at LIAA this year are encouraging a Think Before You Shoot policy. This applies to all digital and analog media devices, and yes unfortunately, to Speaker toting Nickelback lovers too.

We can eliminate the creation of so many lost and forgotten Little Inches if we just take a moment before we snap that pic. Remember; A picture that isn’t blurry won't create a furry! So put down the Cannon, we have all seen St. Helens, and just take a deep breath and be in the moment in a way that makes you measurably better than Ryleigh who always pretends she's so PeRFeCT. Just breathe deep and know that if you practice selfie-restraint, you won't have contributed to our agency's increasingly astronomical hair product based credit card debt. Sometimes it's just best to leave it to the pros. So remember, let's keep our Little Inches in check so that they can grow up to become healthy, hairy, Bigfeet. A better world with appropriately worked interns is possible if you don't let Mee-maw handle your GoPRO and always, always keep your camera settings on AUTO. Thank you so much for your time. We hope this next year brings you so many more outdoor experiences and so much less outdoor “content.” 

Sincerely,

Hairy Henderson,

CEO, Little Inches Adoption Agency.