GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
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Sunny, sweltering. We’re going to be getting into the mid 20s, which by now should pretty much feel like t-shirt weather (though wind chills may make it feel like the deep freeze). With light winds, mostly sunny skies, and high pressure in place, it’ll be a fine day to be outdoors, even just for a bit. Clear skies overnight; we’ll be dropping well into the single digits below zero and into the minus teens in the hollows by morning.
10, 9, 8, 7… “This is a Ruffed Grouse launch pad, taken at 2,700 feet in Vermont’s Breadloaf Wilderness,” writes Peter Brooke. “In a five-foot area, the Grouse emerged from the snow, walked a semi-circle, and took off.”
The ice is great at Lake Morey. Drone artist William Daugherty was out above it on Saturday, with both the skating trail and the pond hockey rinks seeing plenty of action. Meanwhile, Nordic skating legend Jamie Hess notes that “Mascoma Lake now has even more miles of trails than Lake Morey (though the Mascoma trails are narrower).” Here’s the Mascoma Lake Skating Association’s FB page for updates. Thanks, PB!
After five years of legal wrangling, Peace Field Farm restaurant hoping for summer opening. The long-planned “farm-to-fork” spot on Pomfret Road hasn’t cleared all its hurdles yet, writes Tom Ayres in the Standard: Neighbors are appealing a zoning permit for the restaurant issued last summer. But farm owner/developer John Holland and farmer/restauranteur Matt Lombard are moving forward based on a favorable court ruling last August on an Act 250 exemption and their optimism that the state will grant a liquor license after the town selectboard agreed to one. Lombard says he hopes for a June or July opening, with themed dinners ahead of that.
Faced with national road salt shortage, Upper Valley towns forced to set priorities. Not all towns are equally affected, writes Sofia Langlois in the Valley News: Hanover still has 1,000 tons of road salt on hand. But many others, including Hartford, Royalton, Fairlee, Bradford, and Corinth, “are working to maintain snow-covered streets with limited melting resources from their main supplier,” sometimes receiving a fraction of the tonnage they ordered. As a result, they’re saving salt for bus routes, steep hills, and sharp corners, and using sand—which doesn’t melt ice—elsewhere. Langlois details the steps various towns are taking with plenty of winter left.
SPONSORED: Deadline soon for PoemTown Randolph! Vermont poets still have time to submit up to two poems for display and publication by PoemTown Randolph. Instructions for submission are at the burgundy link: the deadline is February 15. Poets who submit may receive financial support for continuing education to further their creative practice. If you’d like to be considered a grant, you’ll find the application form on the PoemTown website—deadline is Feb. 28, and PoemTown Randolph will select up to four recipients of $500 grants. Sponsored by PoemTown Randolph.
Two appreciations: Tom Porter and Bobby Gosh.
Porter, who for 35 years ran Upper Valley homebuilder G.R. Porter & Sons alongside his brother, Tim, died Jan. 19 of a heart attack. He was 61. “He was widely respected for his patience, humility, strong work ethic, and eye for design and detail,” his family writes in a Valley News obituary that ran this weekend. “He quietly helped many, often without being asked, and supported countless young people through coaching football, teaching at the Ford Sayre Ski program, and serving as a Boy Scout leader.” At work, he built “a culture that supported and respected his workforce. He had great pride in the longevity and skill of his foremen and skilled craftsmen.”
Bobby Gosh died at home in Brookfield on Dec. 31, at age 89. As Maryellen Apelquist writes in The Herald, Gosh—a renowned songwriter—”made it big, including literally. His vast and varied collection of songs includes ‘Welcome to Our World of Toys’ for the famed New York City toy store FAO Schwarz, a piece that features Big, the ’80s blockbuster movie starring Tom Hanks.” He kept a recording studio in his three-car garage: “He always said, ‘While I’m still around, I want to keep making music.’ He definitely didn’t believe in, ‘Oh, I’m too old for this.’ Or, ‘I’m tired.’ Not at all,” says audio engineer Vincent Freeman, owner of Randolph’s The Undergound.
SPONSORED: Join COVER as our next Home Repair Program Coordinator! Are you a detail-oriented team player who is passionate about making a difference in our community? COVER is seeking an experienced, highly-organized professional to handle day-to-day operations of our Home Repair program so the team can focus on what matters most—ensuring that our neighbors have safe, warm, and dry homes. The Coordinator serves as the communication link between homeowners, partner agencies and the COVER team. Hit the burgundy link for details. Sponsored by COVER.
Car inspection panic overtakes NH mechanics. On Friday, the NH AG’s office announced that it will appeal last week’s federal court order barring the state from ending its mandatory vehicle inspection program. It’s extended the deadline for a state inspection to April 10 “for any vehicle with an inspection that has expired or will expire prior to March,” reports the Keene Sentinel’s Rick Green. Meanwhile, as one mechanic tells him, “the phones have been absolutely crazy.” “It was really never not required, it was just an expectation that it was going to end,” says another. “So a lot of people were forgoing inspections with that expectation.”
NH-based FIRST robotics org puts founder, inventor Dean Kamen, on leave. In a statement posted over the weekend, the youth robotics nonprofit wrote that its board “is aware of the recent disclosures released by the U.S. Department of Justice involving FIRST Founder Dean Kamen’s interactions with Jeffrey Epstein. The FIRST Board of Directors has engaged an outside law firm to conduct an independent review.” As NHPR’s Josh Rogers reports, “Kamen hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing related to his interactions with Epstein. But documents released last week show Kamen and Epstein were in regular contact, years after Epstein was a convicted sex offender.”
“If the weather’s good, you ski; if it’s bad, you go to school.” That, in a nutshell, was the attitude taken by Andrea Mead Lawrence’s parents when she was young and growing up at the Pico Mountain Ski Area, which they’d bought in 1937, when she was five. So maybe it’s no surprise that she never finished high school—or that, at the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, she became the first and still so far the only American alpine skier to win two gold medals in a single Olympics. In VTDigger, Mark Bushnell recounts Lawrence’s life and racing times, as well as her harrowing second gold—in a two-run giant slalom on which she actually fell twice during the second run.
The Monday Jigsaw. It’s an 1841 depiction of the founding of Dartmouth College, with Eleazar Wheelock teaching a rapt class in the middle of the woods. As the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross writes on his Curioustorian blog, it’s a nod to the upcoming Feb. 5 historical society presentation on Norwich and Hanover during the American Revolution. The link above takes you to a black-and-white etching; if you’d like to take the puzzling challenge down a notch, here’s a colorized version.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
At the Top of the Hop: “Always Something There To Remind Me: A Conversation with Mark Morris”. The celebrated choreographer and his company just finished a weekend of packed performances at the Hop. Now Morris takes on his Montgomery Fellow role and sits down with music prof Steve Swayne to talk over Morris’s homage to Burt Bacharach, The Look of Love, “their mutual love of Burt Bacharach, and the steps Morris and Swayne took to come to the Upper Valley. Join them around the piano to revel in some marvelous music,” the college writes. 5 pm, no charge.
At the Hanover Inn, UT-Austin law prof Steven T. Collis and Habits of a Peacemaker: 10 Habits to Change Our Potentially Toxic Conversations into Healthy Dialogues. Sponsored by the Dartmouth Dialogues, the First Amendment scholar and peacemaking expert, “will share practical ways to transform toxic conversations into healthy dialogue in our divided times.” 5 pm in the Hayward Room, registration encouraged.
Dartmouth’s Rockefeller Center hosts “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America”. ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl and ABC News investigative journalist Peter Charalambous (Dartmouth ‘20) talk over Karl’s new book with business prof and political scientist Charlie Wheelan. Part of Rocky’s "Law and Democracy: The United States at 250" speaker series. 5:30 pm at the Rockefeller Center and livestreamed. Registration encouraged.
And for today...
French classical guitarist Roxane Elfasci and flamenco guitarist François Aria join forces for “Parazulo", by Brazilian-Canadian guitarist and world music great Celso Machado.
See you tomorrow.
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