Not long ago, I was at the doctor’s office, wearing little more than underwear and an uneasy grin as my doctor frowned at me over my chart.

“So,” he said, making chitchat to ease the unease, “you work for the paper.”

I affirmed that, yes, I worked in the sports department.

“Oh?” he said, looking up. “I used to read your outdoors page. I don’t anymore. Your outdoors page : “

His voice trailed off, so I offered an ending to his sentence: “Stinks?”

“Yeah,” he replied with little hesitation. “Your outdoors page kinda stinks. You can get dressed now. You’re fine.”

The good doctor’s evaluation – of the outdoors page, that is – didn’t exactly catch me by surprise. I’d known that particular aspect of the paper had been, uh, lacking for some time.

Well, that’s about to change.

Starting today – this week, it appears on page 4C – and continuing every Monday, we’ll be running a new and improved outdoors page.

It will include the old standbys: the weekly fishing report, for example, and pertinent Wildlife and Parks news.

But it also will include more about, well, more.

See, in the past, we’ve defined “outdoors” in a more traditional sense: basically hunting and fishing. But we’re broadening our horizons and plan to bring you weekly features about other outdoors endeavors, like kayaking, hiking, camping, walking, bird watching, scuba diving, climbing, spelunking.

OK, maybe not spelunking.

But you get the idea.

I recently was given a report of a nationwide study that looked at Americans’ participation in outdoor activities and was somewhat surprised to learn that two-thirds of Americans said they participated in at least one outdoors activity each year.

In Kansas, that number was a whopping 71 percent. The state ranked 16th nationally in percentage, with close to 11â2 million Kansans claiming to participate in outdoors activities ranging from backpacking to trail running.

Though the methodology could be a bit misleading and the source a bit biased – it was undertaken by outdoor-industry interests – it still underscored the fact that a heck of a lot of people around here are spending a heck of a lot of time doing a heck of a lot of things outdoors.

Chances are good that you are among them, and we’d welcome any story ideas you might have.

Send them to ahartsock@ljworld.com, or call 832-7216.

Same goes for the traditional hunting and fishing stories.

Heck, send us pictures if you have them, and we’ll run what we can.

Just make sure you provide contact information so we can follow up as needed.

And that’s not all.

Starting next month, when the school year is over and we have a little more room and the outdoors season gets under way in earnest, we’ll move the traditional hunting and fishing content to its own page that will run on Sundays, and the new stuff will continue to go on Mondays.

Then maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to put out two weekly outdoors pages that don’t stink so much.