GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Daybreak is brought to you this week with help from MDVIP. Primary care physician Dr. Lorissa Segal opens March 31 in Woodstock, offering advanced screenings and diagnostics that can help identify risk markers. Timely appointments. After-hours contact. Learn more here.
Mostly cloudy, chance of showers. Showers of both types, in fact with a slight chance of some more snow showers this morning, rain this afternoon, and snow again late afternoon and evening; whatever falls will be light. We’ll be climbing into the upper 30s today, down into the mid 20s overnight.
Greeting the week with sun pillars. It definitely paid to be out early last Thursday!
Here’s Charles Koburger’s daybreak photo over Mascoma Lake, with a sun pillar reflected in the water;
And Christine Hoskin’s sun pillar shooting skyward in Hanover Center.
VT State U is axing its automotive tech program in Randolph. In a statement emailed to The Herald’s Maryellen Apelquist, a VTSU spokesperson cited declining enrollment and an “unsustainable” faculty-student ratio. But the decision, Apelquist writes, leaves students learning auto tech or diesel mechanics—including a soldier who’s currently deployed and others who work fixing tractors on area farms—in the lurch. They tell her that “VTSU officials have not answered their questions, have done little to market their program to prospective students, and have largely ignored their program” since VT Tech became part of VTSU in 2023.
Review of housing development in Lebanon raises questions about studio/1-bedroom overbuilding, city’s capacity. In all, reports Clare Shanahan in the Valley News, the planning department found 1,944 new housing units in various stages of planning or construction, with over half of them studios and one-bedrooms—prompting a City Council discussion last week about whether “the market has overshot the demand,” as one member put it. Just 80 units of the 1,944 are planned to be affordable housing. Shanahan surveys the developments in the pipeline and where they stand, including the Village Market project downtown and River Park in W. Leb.
Meanwhile, in Thetford, a look at the town’s “Capacity for Growth.” A new study, reports Li Shen in Sidenote, recommend areas in the five-village town “where more housing could be built that would be close to village amenities and transportation.” In particular, it singles out Post Mills (with Lake Fairlee, a library, church, and preschool); East Thetford (possible employment at existing businesses); and the long stretch between Thetford Hill and E. Thetford (close to schools and other resources). The study also goes into great detail on environmental constraints, parcels that can or cannot be subdivided, and more. Li offers a tour.
Girl-Scout-cookie suspect is in custody. Remember that $1,000 stolen from a Girl Scouts table at Walmart last month? Now, the VN’s Alex Ebrahimi reports, the Lebanon police say that their suspect is a 33-year-old Fairlee resident who’s currently locked up in Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield for probation violations; “Upon notification of his release in (Vermont) we will make attempts to get him processed on the warrant here in New Hampshire,” Leb Police Chief Phillip Roberts tells Ebrahimi. Meanwhile, the troop has received $1,400 in donations, $400 from the Lebanon Walmart, and a pledge from corporate Walmart for a $5,000 donation.
A pair of rescues. One for each state.
The first was late last week, when a pair of Rhode Islanders who’d been winter camping in the Whites got stuck near the top of the Flume Slide in Lincoln, calling for help after finding that “due to extremely icy trail conditions they were no longer able to ascend the trail and were in a location that they were no longer able to safely descend the trail,” NH Fish & Game reports. They were equipped with micro spikes, but not crampons, and rescuers hiked up with ropes, crampons and harnesses, then lowered the hikers to safety, reaching the trailhead late Thursday night.
Then, on Saturday, two young skiers “got themselves cliffed-out in the Notch,” reports Stowe Mountain Rescue. “They made the classic mistake of following others’ ski tracks into unfamiliar terrain, assuming that their mysterious predecessor was ‘in the know’.” On their descent, they found themselves in a gulley, took off their skis to find a way out, and got “stuck in an icy chute with no safe way up or down.” SMR teams set out from both below and above, and belayed the pair to safety. “They genuinely thought they might die up there and were reeling with relief, savoring the prospect of sitting down to eat a meal that night, alive,” SMR writes. “No way they’ll blindly follow tracks again.”
Final S. Burlington ICE raid detainee released. Camila Patin Patin, the 20-year-old sister of the Ecuadorean woman freed earlier last week, on Friday was ordered to be released by Chief U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss, reports Seven Days’ Lucy Tompkins. Said Reiss, “She was detained based on a warrantless arrest that does not appear to have been lawful.” Reiss also noted that Patin Patin, who entered the US by wading across the Rio Grande in 2023, “has not yet filed an application for asylum, which is required within a year of arriving,” Tompkins writes—though she did attend one immigration court hearing and has another scheduled next month.
Oops!!! Big apologies! I clean slipped up on including the weekly news quiz on Friday. So if you can remember all the way to the news last week, give it a shot! There are questions about Peyton Place, the Filling Station jam sessions, thixiotropy (of course), and more. Meanwhile, you’ll find NHPR’s New Hampshire quiz here, and Seven Days’ Vermont quiz here.
The Monday Jigsaw: The White Owl Diner. This week’s puzzle is a 1960s photo of the vintage 1932 Worcester Lunch Car, which, the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross writes on his Curioustorian blog, “survived the 1964 Lebanon fire, before being demolished for the new bridge on Route 120 as part of the make-over of Hough Square in 1970.” He includes a photo of what that intersection looks like now, along with a link to Nicole Ford Burley’s film about the fire. Meanwhile, Art Pease sends along a clip of a 1958 VN article about owner Harry Annuccilli and the annual parties he and his wife Teresa used to throw for the area’s kids: 650 hot dogs, 35 cases of soft drinks…
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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And for today...
Japanese acoustic guitar master Kent Nishimura with his version of the 1982 Toto hit "Rosanna".
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