The mystique of the Catamount Trail (CT) lured me to Vermont in the 1980s. I was living in Boston and had heard of the new 300-mile trail that traveled the length of the Green Mountains, from…
Magazine Series
The Winter Caddisfly
On a late winter afternoon in 1994, I accompanied Professor Jan Sykora, my thesis advisor, on a field trip to the Carnegie Museum’s Powdermill Nature Reserve in Pennsylvania’s…
Lessons Gleaned from the Forest
It’s an unseasonably warm February morning in the northern Adirondacks. Just two weeks prior, temperatures had been in minus territory. Today, however, is a balmy 40 degrees, and the…
Resources to Improve Stream Crossings
For Safer Communities and Benefits to Fish and Wildlife Throughout the Northeast, local, state, federal, and tribal agencies partner with communities and landowners to upgrade stream crossings…
Harvesting Timber in the Adirondacks
In March 2021, upstate New York-based photographer Erika Bailey joined members of Paul Smith’s College Timber Harvesting Crew for a day to document their harvesting activities in a stand…
The Making of a Ski Glade
In 2016, a group of skiing enthusiasts in the White Mountains established the Granite Backcountry Alliance (GBA), with a mission to develop ski glades in collaboration with private landowners,…
Managing Diversity
Today’s forests must respond to a changing world, with stressors ranging from fragmentation and pollution to invasive pests and a shifting climate. One of the best things we can do to…
Open Country
I don’t know how the snowmobiles make it up or down the short, steep hill at the edge of the cornfield that borders my driveway. But their tracks drop from the top of the hill into…
Building a Bucking Stanchion
Using a bucking stanchion not only keeps the wood off the ground (and your chainsaw out of the dirt) but also allows you to cut multiple logs or slabs at once. The design I use is sized so…
Floodplain Forests: Nature’s Flood Relief
Ten years ago, Pam Brown stood across the road from her house in Bethel, Vermont, and watched the rain fall on a field of tall, green corn. The bridge out of town had been closed, and she had…