Blog and News

I think I speak for all of us in expressing thanks for the natural order that’s been restored by January’s cold. Two weekends ago I was still afraid to walk on the lake ice around…

Editor’s Note: This blog is by our friend Don Wharton; check out Don’s story on Adirondack hermits in our Winter 2015 issue. Six or seven years ago, a friend and I made a concerted…

I help parent a teenage boy, who’s hard at work developing a portfolio of unassailable convictions. If my parents were to read this they’d smile and say: gosh, that all sounds…

Rangifer tarandus var. rudolphus, also known as the aerial caribou (or aerial reindeer in Europe) lives most of the year in more northern latitudes. However, its appearance in the United…

We hung a grizzled old deer in camp this year who was in less than ideal condition, meat-wise. He was sort of randy smelling in general – just all rutted up and glandular. That a shot…

Earlier this year I had a chance to try out some electric (battery-powered) chainsaws. My expectations going in were pretty low: I figured that they would either be laughingly toy-like in…

Consider the givens in life, those moments of predictability that stand out in a constantly changing world. The sun rises in the east, for instance. The sky is blue. Or how about this one:…

By now, hunters around the Northeast are counting the days until (deer hunting) rifle season. In the spirit of the season, we thought we’d share this series of pictures that we took on…

We’re still recovering from our big annual Writers & Readers Conference, while also putting the final touches on the winter issue of the magazine. So this week, in lieu of an…

A couple weeks back our friend Mike Batten, a logger who lives down the road from our office, dropped off a century-old journal he thought we might find interesting. It was kept by Ernest…

I went to a group-think exercise the other day where participants were asked to envision what the landscape in Vermont would look like 40 years from now under various scenarios. It was my…

We see a lot of game camera pictures of deer, bear, moose – the big charismatic animals that people love. And so to be different we wanted to camera trap an otter, an animal that’s…

Like a lot of kids who grew up rural, I was introduced to many of the wonders of nature through hunting. Specifically squirrel hunting, which is how most kids get their start. I don’t do…

Mr. Trefry was my seventh grade industrial arts teacher and an avid fisherman. He showed me how to cast lead jigs, which I used over the years to catch a pile of perch. Trefry was paranoid…

Welcome to the new Northern Woodlands Game Camera blog! We were inspired by all the great game camera pictures readers have sent us over the years, so we got two game cameras of our own and…

Spend time in northern Maine, and you’ll likely get an earful of two seemingly incompatible complaints. The first is the scarcity of jobs. The shuttering of the Verso mill in Bucksport…

G and I were out for a walk the other night, talking about and wondering why the sky has been so beautiful for the last month. Evening after evening of just impossible grandeur. Every night…

We’re doing a big story on white pine blister rust in the Autumn issue, and in tracking down art for the piece came across a cool old type-written report on eastern white pine that was…

The birch bark peelers arrived in a pickup pulling a covered trailer. There was a 4-wheeler in it, a smaller trailer, and sheets of cardboard and stickers for the bark. They unloaded the…

I went on vacation this past week down to southern Massachusetts, a place that’s really a different world to a guy from Vermont: the land flat or gently rolling towards the sea; the…