Sugar Hill Reservoir in Goshen — more commonly referred to by the name of the structure that created it, Goshen Dam — has always been one of my favorite Vermont waters to paddle a canoe and cast a fly, especially in autumn.
It was my garden and yard that kept me off the local trout streams the past few weeks, along with several trees that came down on our property during Hurricane Debbie.
The boat hadn’t even left the dock for our 7 a.m., eight-hour tour of Glacier Bay in Alaska when we began to spot the sea otters. Not just one or two shy otters seen from far off, but dozens of them swimming casually past within a few dozen yards of our b … (read more)
It’s 5 a.m. on Aug. 2 — my second morning at Eaglerock Cabin in Alaska’s Ernest Gruening State Historic Park.
If we had noticed a weather alert with wind gust warnings of 70 mph — as had the folks in the RV two sites away from us who decided to vacate the campground for a few hours — we wouldn’t have stayed in the tent.
When the day began, we had no idea that our greatest danger would come from marmots. Bears perhaps, or winding mountain roads. But marmots?
My cousin-in-law Ken likes to go for swamp walks in the Florida Everglades, making his way from one hardwood hammock to the next through the knee-to-waist-deep waters of the famed River of Grass.
The first alligator I saw in the wild was somewhat anticlimactic.
One of numerous sad stories of environmental devastation in Florida has been its many efforts spanning well over a century to drain its wonderful wetlands, including even the famed Everglades. So it’s encouraging to hear stories of creative problem-solvin … (read more)
It was only my second cast of the day: a little weighted nymph imitating a mayfly larva that I drifted along the bottom of a thigh-deep hole.
A year and a half ago, my wife, Deborah, bought an Extractigator. What on earth is an Extractigator? The short answer is that it’s a device for yanking plants (think shrubs or small trees) out of the ground, roots and all.
The phrase “wicked problems” has been around since at least the early 1970s. It refers to challenges that typically have no correct solution, but only different options of tradeoffs and costs: problems for which any proposed solution will have likely nega … (read more)
Earlier this week, my wife and I took our two-year-old grandson B to the ECHO Leahy Center for Lake Champlain to see some fishes and turtles and frogs and snakes.
It was early January 2018, a year we actually had winter. Our Christmas present to our three sons that year was taking them and their significant others on a three-day, two-night, lodge-to-lodge cross-country ski trip at the Appalachian Mountain Club prop … (read more)
There aren’t a lot of similarities between Matthew Dickerson’s work as a computer science professor at Middlebury College and his literary endeavors as a published author.
