I’m standing on the snow at Rikert next to my wife Deborah, clicking my cross-country ski boots into my bindings.
The same climate change that is dramatically shortening the season for outdoor skating across the north — including places like the Rideau Canal Skateway — is also opening up new habitat for Burmese pythons to move northward.
As soon as I hit “send” on last week’s column, I began pondering various works of literature that illustrated the virtues of walking and which have inspired me over the years to be more appreciative of the practice.
My wife Deborah and I like to go walking. We are not interested in walking the Appalachian Trail. Nor even the Long Trail. Although we both find longer walks in new places enjoyable, most of our walks are just 20 minutes long on familiar trails in the woo … (read more)
Even before stepping out onto the ice of Bryant Pond 30 minutes before dawn on New Year’s Day, I could tell it was going to be an unusual opening to Maine’s ice fishing season.
It’s probably not accurate to say that fish taught me anything. Numerous fishing outings on which I failed to interact with any actual fish is evidence that I don’t even understand their language.
The natural world can be brutal.
When it comes to films and works of fiction, we often think in terms of character development. Did the main characters change? If so, how and why? We don’t always ask that of non-fiction. But we ought to.
I sat on a wide chair atop a tall ladder, leaning against a pine tree with a mature oak growing around the back side of the tree, its brown and brittle leaves mingling with the green needles of the pine.
This was our seventh new Vermont state park of 2022 — far and away the most Vermont state parks to which we have made a first-time visit in a single year.
So what exactly is a salt chuck? That was one of the questions I had when I arrived at Ernest Gruening State Historic Park.
The history of the place was inspiring, and I soaked in as much as I could. But it was the surrounding scenery and landscape that moved me the most.
I’d only been out on the river once all month. So after dinner, when the river calls my name, I heed the call.
My wife and I are trying to visit all of Vermont’s state parks together. Recently we made a southern swing through the state.
A lone sockeye salmon sits in the stream in front of me under a low canopy of alder. The stream is wide, gravelly and shallow: only two to three inches deep and a few feet wide.
