The Long View - Archive
The Long View
June 01, 2008
Unlike spring, summer, fall, and winter, mud season has no official start and end dates. Still, it is a predictable part of the logger’s year, signaling the temporary close to a season of work in the woods. When the snowpack starts thawing and the roads soften up, skidders get pulled out of the woods and log trucks get parked. Dooryards …
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The Long View
March 02, 2008
One sunny day last spring, I was prowling around the land in central New York where my ancestors had farmed. A few years earlier, my brother and my uncle had found the barn’s foundation, or what was left of it. I was hoping to find the cellar hole for the house.
The walls of the barn’s foundation, rising …
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Whiskey Brook
December 01, 2007
We left camp just before daylight. The air was thick with mist as we made our plans to hunt the ridge where Chuck had jumped a nice buck at the end of the day before. Our topo maps showed that the ridge ran generally north to south, and Carl, Chuck, and I were going to hunt the length of it, …
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Orange County Headwaters
September 01, 2007
Just as there is no grandchild who is not talented, clever, beautiful, and charming, the land that each of us calls home is never ordinary.
After Mary and I bought our land nearly 20 years ago, I gave up hiking and climbing mountains – something I’d done since I was a child – because I now had these …
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The Long View
June 01, 2007
Norm Lake, a Grafton, Vermont, logger, whose work in the woods began during the transition from axes and crosscut saws to chainsaws, died this spring at the age of 89. I had a chance to visit with Norm the year before he died, arranged by his granddaughter, Norah, who was doing an internship with Northern Woodlands at the time. By …
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The Long View
March 01, 2007
If you’ve ever walked in your woods with a logger or a forester, I bet you’ve heard some version of this speech:
“You should think of your forest as a garden. The trees are like your vegetables. If you don’t get rid of the weeds, your lettuce will be overgrown, and you’ll not have any to eat. And …
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The Long View
December 01, 2006
Even the first lamb had needed help, but delivering the second one required the expertise of someone with much more shepherding experience than me. Instead, on the coldest night we’ve ever had before or since (23˚F below zero), it was my responsibility to help get this lamb born, and the only lamb I had ever seen born was barely an …
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The Long View
September 01, 2006
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Editorial
June 01, 2006
My first encounters with black bears took place at the dump in Inlet, New York, not exactly what you would call a wild place. It was the early 1960s, and at dusk my brothers and I, along with carloads of summer visitors to this central Adirondack town, would head to the dump. Nightly, the bears would come and paw through …
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Editorial: Spring 2006
March 01, 2006
You’ll find three stories in this issue of Northern Woodlands covering the growing potential for biomass. If these improved prospects for producing more energy and other products from low grade wood are realized, it will provide opportunities for forest management that most foresters and loggers have heretofore just been able to dream about.
Particularly on small properties, the …
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