Articles

On a recent sunny day, Jeff Tarling, city arborist with Portland, Maine’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Facilities, pulled his truck to a stop at Pine Grove Park, a 12-acre green…

After climbing a steep, winding road through a gap in Vermont’s Green Mountains, my car descended into Addison County, rolling past fields bright with purple aster and goldenrod. A black…

Loving the woods, loving working in the woods – it’s difficult to do either without an appreciation of history; after all, the forest we see today reflects the actions of those who…

If you listen casually to the news about the so-called gig economy these days, this idea of people freelancing instead of working for a big, stable company can seem like a new phenomenon. And…

Extreme weather was a big theme in the 2018 news cycle. People died from heat waves in Montreal and Tokyo, of all places. Parts of the Carolinas endured their third “historic”…

Each year that we run the West Branch of the Penobscot into the big lake, I think, this will be the last time. Our canoes packed for the four-day trip, we slide into the river at Old Roll Dam…

Upstairs in the Northern Woodlands office hangs a copy of Charles Joseph Minard’s map depicting France’s 1812 invasion of Russia. It’s a remarkable work, both for the story…

En plein air is the French term for painting outdoors; it translates as “in the open air.” This method of painting became popular in the late nineteenth century with the Dutch…

Maintaining a sharp chainsaw chain not only makes for faster cutting, it also reduces wear and tear on the saw and the sawyer. Given those obvious benefits, it still surprises me to see people…

THE LOSS OF ASH IS FELT BEYOND THE FOREST With snow on the ground in mid-March, trees in Connecticut’s Naugatuck State Forest presented a dense network of bare branches against a sky the…

Once upon a time, skiers had to hike uphill for the exhilarating reward of gliding down through the trees. The earliest ski trails in New England were cut through forests in the 1930s –…

My New Year’s resolution is to not allow political despair to affect the allure of the moon. Yesterday at about 4:30 in the afternoon, just before dark here in late December Vermont, the…

George Bellerose, a photojournalist from Weybridge, Vermont, has spent the last five years documenting the experiences of people who work in the forests of Addison County, Vermont. The Vermont…

The sound of the gray jay evokes an image of the deep North Woods: dark green spruce trees, spire-like balsam fir, and bare-branched tamaracks silhouetted against a raw, slate-colored sky; the…

Temperatures may plunge to 50 degrees below zero on Nunavik Quebec’s Ungava peninsula. But there, at the northernmost edge of our northern woodlands, lives a species of bird that toughs…

Photographer Roger Irwin spends considerable time trekking around the Northeast, in all seasons and conditions and terrain, in search of wildlife. His journey to get this photo was…

People don’t like to talk about money for all sorts of sensible reasons. But since the financial details of a story are crucial to our comprehension of it, there’s a point when…

Scene: A cold day at the Northern Woodlands office. Our heroine, a 40-something woman, sits at her desk, squinting at the computer screen. She’s reviewing printing costs. She looks…

Chaloux Brothers Firewood has been providing hardwood to central Vermonters since 1979. That adds up to a lot of firewood, probably more than 30,000 cords, according to Roger Chaloux, 62, who…

The familiar red fox is the most widely distributed carnivore on the planet. Throughout North America, I’ve admired these handsome animals in arctic Canada’s barrenlands, southern…