Publication archives

Ivan Booker remembers fields dotted with round, shiny nuts and prickly burrs. He was 8 years old then and the path to school through the Gifford Farm in North Fairfield was full of towering chestnut trees. "My brother and I would fill our pockets with sweet chestnuts and munch on them all day," Booker recalled. It was 1918.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District, and the U.S. Forest Service, Chippewa National Forest, will host five public meetings Aug. 21-24 in northern Minnesota to review a preliminary draft of the proposed Headwaters' reservoir operating plan.

Rural counties will be spared from steep cuts to school and road budgets, and national forestlands will not go on the chopping block -- at least for another year -- under a deal struck Monday.

Helicopters are ferrying out tons of fire hose, water pumps and personal gear from the Cavity Lake fire, as efforts switch from fighting the fire to watching it die and making sure it doesn't recover. Later today, all but two 20-person ground crews will have left the fire, down from more than 500 people fighting the fire at its peak.

The chief of the U.S. Forest Service has upheld the revised land management plans for five southern national forests, including the Cherokee National Forest in East Tennessee.

The predominantly Douglas fir forests of the Wood River Valley could be in for a shock. The "most widely distributed and destructive defoliator of coniferous forests in western North America," the western spruce budworm, is at work in the Smoky Mountain foothills on the west side of the valley.