Blog and News

Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom recently adopted a new advertising slogan that urges visitors to “Embrace a Change of Pace.” If I were the ad exec I would have shortened it to…

There’s this recurring debate every election cycle about whether we need more or less government in our lives. And it’s never going to end because most of us are conflicted on the…

As I crested the hill, I raised my head and hit the brakes. Standing in the road just 40 feet in front of me was a female moose. In a car, this sort of experience is terrifying. But I was on a…

If you’re into nature, you may also be into skulls. And if you’re into skulls, you’ve probably struggled with skull processing. To do it right you need a terrarium and some…

If you find the sight of blissful ignorance in the face of near-death entertaining – and I think in this case most of you will – check out this video of a hapless (though kind of…

One of the hazards of working at Northern Woodlands is that people are constantly asking you tricky nature questions. There I’ll be, happily moseying along a trail and someone will…

For those of you who aren’t following the battle to ban bear baiting in Maine, here’s a quick recap. The Humane Society of the United States and a coalition of smaller local animal…

This April, as part of Northern Woodlands’ spring fundraising effort, we published a quiz with nine mystery photos and challenged readers to identify any three of them in a line…

Red and Georgia were sitting on the lip of a Long Trail lean-to together, while the rest of us were massed on a nearby picnic table eating lunch. Red was a 20-something Irish-looking kid with…

My partner and her son are both tech savvy, and both regard the fact that I’m a Luddite with amusement. They try to help me see the light but it rarely works. I won’t upgrade my…

Ask a teacher if touch is important in cognitive development and she’ll tell you yes, absolutely. There’s a whole discipline called kinesthetic learning devoted to teaching in a…

Trout season opened recently in most of the Northeast, and in the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share a fishing story in this week’s blog that I wrote in 2009. Good luck to…

I think we left off right about the time the weather broke and the sap started flowing. Well, flow it did. In nine days, we septupled the amount of syrup we made in the previous month. After…

And then it came. After weeks of historic cold, the weather finally broke on March 30. There’s a comic strip that hangs on the wall of our sugarhouse, where a sugarmaker drills a hole in…

We’ve boiled twice since my last blog post, and both times were in support of pretty minor runs. Our season total is 67 gallons of syrup, which puts us at about 8 percent of a crop. Last…

As our sugaring operation grows, it gets harder to tell where one season ends and the next begins. From a production standpoint, last season ended on April 9, 2013, which is a logical place to…

We hear all the time about how winter’s disappearing in this era of climate change (The New York Times recently ran a piece called “The End of Snow?”), so I can’t help…

I flew out of Albany, New York, the other day. It was nice and clear and you could look down and see the sprawl – the ordered, grid-like subdivisions from the 1950s immediately around…

One of the best things about winter is the sunsets. In the summertime, when the air’s soupy and thick, the horizon is often fuzzed out by a skein of haze. The sunsets can be nice, sure,…

This past November, as part of Northern Woodlands’ fall fundraising effort, we published a quiz with nine mystery photos and challenged readers to identify any three of them in a line (a…