GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
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Slight chance of showers, some cloudiness. With arctic air swinging through the region we could get either rain or snow, or both, though the chances of anything falling are slim. Mostly, we’re looking at a cool day with highs in the low 40s, with some sun throughout but clouds building in over the middle part of the day. Once that boundary’s gone, things will dry out but it’s still going to be cold for a couple of days: lows tonight in the lower 20s.
And speaking of weather… Before we get too far removed from last Thursday night’s spectacular thunderstorm and Orange County tornado touchdown, Allison Belisle sends along this video from Brookfield of what the lightning looked like. It gets especially intense around the 1:13 mark. Here’s NBC5’s story on the tornado just up the road in Williamstown, which the weather service categorized as an EF-1 and which snapped trees and was accompanied by golf-ball sized hail.
Late-night high-speed chase comes to abrupt stop in WRJ. It began last night around 11 pm in Claremont, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak, when a police officer there noticed a pickup driving without lights on. The teen driver took off and headed up I-91, reaching speeds up to 90 mph. Claremont police radioed ahead, and Hartford police officers laid down spike strips on the highway, which shredded the truck’s front tires. The truck got off at the WRJ exit and “rolled to a stop on Sykes Mountain Avenue in front of the McDonalds, where the driver surrendered to the pack of police cruisers behind him,” Eric writes. The driver, from Orford, was arrested.
SoRo deli to reopen with mother, daughter at the helm. In a way, it’s a homecoming for Ellen Trottier and Lyndsey Stender, reports Marion Umpleby in the Valley News: Both worked for RB’s Delicatessen when they were young. It closed late last year and now, Trottier and her daughter have teamed up to create LJ’s Scoops, an ice cream window in the old RB’s spot due to open on May 2, and then the new Royalton Deli, opening later. Trottier tells Umpleby that she’ll be guided by a lesson she learned from her father, who owned the L.F. Trottier & Sons tractor dealerships: “how important it is to treat people in the community well.”
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Thetford group to buy land in Union Village Dam area. In Sidenote, Krista Karlson writes that the Thetford Trails Team—the town’s all-volunteer trails committee—is purchasing a 93-acre parcel that sits at the heart of trails crossing the land upstream from the Union Village Dam, including the Back 9 and the far end of the Mystery trail, in a spot that “provides ecological connectivity” between the East and West Branches of the Ompompanoosuc. Once the sale is complete, Karlson writes, “we plan to pursue a conservation easement to protect public multi-use access while conserving the parcel’s important ecological functions.” The group has raised about $60K toward a $100K goal.
Kevin Chap on Wild Foods: “I’m so grateful that I’m not the only one that wants to watch it.” The Stockbridge native’s show about foraging premieres nationally Wednesday on PBS, and The Herald’s Maryellen Apelquist recently caught up with Chap to ask about it. Its genesis, he tells her, came after he moved back to VT from NYC—much to the bewilderment of his big-city friends in film and TV. But then, Chap says, “I would send them videos of me fishing or foraging and cooking this amazing food. And, of course, all of my friends are in the business, so they said, ‘Kevin, this would make a great show.’” For a (metaphorical) taste, here’s a bit on ME wild blueberries.
A pair of weekend rescues in the Presidentials. Both involving hikers from Massachusetts.
The first came Friday night, when NH Fish & Game officers were alerted to three women in their 20s from Haverhill on the Falling Waters Trail below Franconia Notch. “The trio had run out of daylight and could no longer follow the trail and felt that they could not safely cross Dry Brook, which the Falling Waters Trail crosses five times,” Fish & Game reports. They lacked the clothing they needed to spend the night, were wearing sneakers, and had no light sources. An officer reached them at about 11 pm, and led them through a bushwhack to the trailhead a bit after midnight.
Then, on Saturday night, rescuers found two teenagers from Plymouth, MA on the summit of Mt. Washington—where they were trying to find shelter amid high winds, temps in the 30s, and with snow approaching. A state park employee was able to find them and bring them inside a building, and about an hour later a conservation officer arrived in a four-wheel-drive pickup to take them down the mountain. Amid the usual social-media pile-on, 17-year-old Khang Nguyen explains that the pair was well-equipped with gear, but a leg injury forced them to slow down above treeline—and make the decision to push for the summit, where they thought they could find help.
VT sugarmakers saw a broad range of results this season. Some, reports VTDigger’s Charlotte Oliver, broke their own sap-flow records on particular days. Others fell short of their goals. In all, state ag secretary Anson Tebbetts tells her, Vermont likely produced about 3 million gallons of syrup, which is on a par with the state’s annual production since 2023. That output “is more than half the syrup produced in the country,” Oliver writes. Sugarbushes across the state are in a range of different terrains and weather conditions, VT Maple’s Allison Hope says, with slope direction and a range of other factors influencing production.
The Monday Jigsaw: Phineas Gage. “Phineas was born in Lebanon, injured in Cavendish, recovered in Lebanon, worked in Hanover,” writes the Norwich Historical Society’s Cam Cross—but of course, he became world famous after a tamping iron was blown through his head and he not only survived but went on to work first at the Dartmouth Inn’s livery stable and then driving a stagecoach over the mountain in Chile. On his Curioustorian blog, Cam tells the story and links to a range of accounts.
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
This is your chance to meet the Brave Little State team. The popular VT Public show’s producers—Josh Crane, Sabine Poux, and Burgess Brown, along with co-creator Angela Evancie—will be at Northern Stage at 6:30 pm “for a behind-the-scenes look at how they answer our (brave little) state’s most pressing and peculiar questions.” They’ll talk about how they create the show, take a look at its future, and, the publicity says, “maybe even share some bloopers.” Doors open at 6.
And for today...
Turkish guitarist Utkan Aslan and Colombian clarinetist Jacobo Mayo with a sprightly, “swing” version of Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca.
See you tomorrow.
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