One of our favorite recent pieces was Tony Donovan’s photo essay on Amos Congdon, which ran in the Spring 2013 issue. Amos was a woodsman from Lyme, Connecticut, who ran a sawmill in the…
Features
July 10th 2014
Predators with Personality
A living jewel hangs suspended beneath the microscope. An emerald sheen shifts with its every pulsing breath over iridescent silver, gold, and bronze swirls. Aquamarine legs hang poised,…
July 3rd 2014
The Nulhegan We Knew: Recounting the Last Years of a Working Forest
When the calendar says it’s the first day of spring, no one is fooled in the North Country. Those first, yellowish daffodil leaves at the edge of a melting snow bank? Best to ignore…
June 27th 2014
Exotic Larch: Not Your Grandfather’s Hackmatack
In the 1980s, in the midst of the last spruce budworm outbreak, the pulp and paper industry in Maine and eastern Canada faced an unprecedented softwood shortfall. The insect was killing…
June 3rd 2014
When the Trees Took Over
Retracing Reforestation on an Old Carriage Road For years, the sign “Old Carriage Road” marked an overgrown length of abandoned roadbed halfway up the road to the summit of Mount…
May 15th 2014
Night Flyers: North American Silk Moths Face Invasive Challenge
Days, sometimes weeks, before a luna moth hatches from its cocoon, it starts to move within its winter shell. Quiet bursts of rustling accompany the cocoon’s sporadic movements.…
May 7th 2014
Where the Wood Flows North (And south. And east. And west.)
Wood knows no boundaries. Not just wood as forest, which straddles arbitrary political boundaries throughout the globe, but wood as logs and lumber. Since humans first learned to turn trees…
March 28th 2014
The Pisgah Forest: Harvard’s Living Laboratory
One irony of ancient forests and wilderness areas – known for their absence of human imprint – is that their names conjure up associations with people. In the Sierras, the Mariposa…
March 18th 2014
A Maple Bubble? How the Syrup Market Works, and What It All Might Mean
After the leaves fall in October, the mountains that rise toward the Canadian border north of Jackman, Maine, begin to wear their maple like a fuzzy, gray wool blanket. Sugar and red maple are…
February 13th 2014
A Cabin in the Woods
We carefully rolled the big spruce log with our peaveys, and it settled into place with a thunk, fitting almost perfectly over the log beneath it. A little fine tuning with axe and chisel and…