A Northwoods Almanac for 10/10-23/2025 by John Bates
A Great Couple Weeks
There are times in one’s life that stand out as particularly rich, and late September was just such a time for me. I attended the Northeastern Old-Growth Conference at the Bread Loaf Conference Center near Middlebury, Vermont, where over 50 speakers held forth on their visions and their practical applications for restoring “wild” lands, along with older-growth forests, in the Northeast. I was taken by the number of organizations involved, their successes to date, and the energy and faith they are bringing to the table in what can fairly be described as difficult times for people trying to “re-wild” lands and waters.
New England is 81 percent forested, but only 3.3 percent has been permanently protected in what they define as “Wildlands.” Wildlands are “forever-wild” places, offering numerous benefits that include sequestering and storing carbon, preserving wildlife habitats, supporting biodiversity and ecological complexity, providing clean air and water, and offering spaces for spiritual and physical renewal. The roots of the word “wilderness” mean “will-of-the-land.” Thus, wilderness, or wildlands, is self-willed land, where natural processes direct the ebb and flow of life.
This significant gap in New England between total forest lands and those designated as wildlands has created a call to action for advancing wildlands protection as part of an integrated approach to conservation. This includes forests managed for wood products, natural spaces for recreation and renewal, and farmlands that produce local food – all existing among communities that rely on the health and beauty of the land that they call home.
Their vision is exceptionally ambitious calling for permanently protecting 80% percent of New England in a mixture of productively-managed woodlands (60%), natural wildlands (minimum 10%), farmland (7%), and other (up to 3%).
They’re knee-deep in it. The Northeast Wilderness Trust (https://newildernesstrust.org) has already protected more than 99,000 forever-wild acres across New England and Northern New York.
I was also able to participate in the conference as one of the speakers, presenting on “The Forgotten History and Uncertain Future of Eastern Hemlock in Wisconsin.” The Northeast (and Southeast) have been in the throes of devastation from the hemlock wooly adelgid (HWA), losing millions of hemlock trees, and HWA is knocking at our doorstep having made its way now to the far northern counties of lower Michigan. It’s coming, and the question we must try to answer is what we will do when it arrives.
Mossy Cascade Trail
Mary, Callie and I were able to take the last day that we were in Vermont and cross Lake Champlain into the Adirondack Mountains of New York, and into Adirondack Park. The Park was created in 1892 as one of the first “Forever Wild Forest Preserves” in the nation, a unique wilderness area and National Historic Landmark. At 6 million acres, it is the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States.
The state of New York owns approximately 2.6 million acres of the Park, while the remaining 3.4 million acres are devoted to forestry, agriculture and open space recreation.
Adirondack Park
The Adirondack Park is not a National Park. Instead, it’s the largest National Historic Landmark in the United States, covering an area larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and the Great Smokies National Parks combined.
A large portion of the Adirondack Park is made up of Forest Preserve, which comes with its own land-use codes and regulations. The land is designated as “Forever Wild” and protected under Article XIV of the New York State Constitution – “to preserve the exceptional scenic, recreational and ecological value.”
In other words, it’s utterly remarkable, at least as far the eastern U.S. goes.
The Mossy Cascade Trail goes up and up along Mossy Cascade Brook, with large, old-growth white pines scattered along the first mile or so. The diameters of the pines nearly all exceed three feet, so for dyed-in-the-wool lovers of white pines, we were in a bit of heaven.
Callie and Mary on the Mossy Cascade Trail
McCormick Wilderness
A few days after I returned from Vermont, I met up with three fellows and hiked the West Yellow Dog Falls Trail in the McCormick Wilderness located in the U.P. of Michigan northwest of Marquette. The McCormick Wilderness was designated as a Federal Wilderness Area in 1987 and covers an area of 16,850 acres in the Ottawa National Forest. It’s one of three such areas in the Ottawa, the others being the Sturgeon River Gorge Wilderness and the Sylvania Wilderness.
The McCormick Wilderness area
The McCormick family of Chicago (think Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaping machine) were the original owners, and they used it as a vacation retreat, having acquired the tract in small pieces between 1904 and 1920. The last owner, Gordon McCormick donated the family estate to the federal government in 1967.
It’s a very rugged area with only two real access points into the interior – one is on an old road coming up from the south, and the other is the unmaintained West Yellow Dog Falls Trail. The vast majority of the tract was logged, but the West Yellow Dog Trail winds through quite a bit of mature to old-growth forest, most of which is big yellow birch, sugar maple, red oak, with a few scattered remnant white pines.
A big white pine in the McCormick
I was with two foresters and one wildlife biologist, so the conversations were broad and insightful, and as one might expect with such folks, we were slow to get anywhere – too many reasons to stop and reflect on what we were seeing, what it represented, and to simply gaze in appreciation.
And for a bit of trivia, did you know (I didn’t!) that the Wisconsin Historical Society holds the McCormick-International Harvester Collection, which consists of more than 12 million manuscript pages, 350,000 photographs and 300 films, the largest single collection held by the Wisconsin Historical Society Archives? In addition, the Society's museum, library and historic sites hold thousands of books, agricultural newspapers, machines, models, toys and pieces of clothing that were donated by the McCormick family and International Harvester.
The Many Small Lives in a Single Tree
A recent study published in the journal Nature found that the woody tissues of trees contain a trillion microbial cells above and beyond the actual tree cells. These are communities of bacteria and one-celled organisms found in specialized parts of the tree. The sapwood, for instance, is dominated by microbes that require oxygen, while the heartwood is dominated by microbes that don’t require oxygen.
Specific microbe communities also live in specific tree species. The microbiome of sugar maples has more sugar-eating bacteria, whereas the microbiome of oak trees harbors microbes that aid fermentation (thus the reason oak is used in wine barrels). Both examples, according to the study, show how tree microbes affect “our everyday lives in sort of unexpected ways.”
The complexity of what a tree really is just took a quantum leap! One of the researchers summed it up this way: “What looks like one thing is a trillion and one organisms living together.”
Gray Wolf 2025 Estimated Population
Wisconsin has an estimated 1,226 gray wolves in 336 packs in 2025, according to a recent news release from the WDNR. This estimate represents a slight decline from the previous two years and suggests the state’s wolf population is reaching an equilibrium around its biological carrying capacity.
Over the last five years, the Wisconsin wolf population estimates were 1,175 in 2021, 985 in 2022, 1,277 in 2023, 1,328 in 2024 and 1,226 in 2025.
The average wolf territory size was 54 square miles in most of the state’s wolf range (wolf management zones 1 to 4), but a more condensed 33 square miles in the central forest region (Zone 5).
The DNR is currently monitoring 41 wolves statewide with active GPS collars, about twice as many as a year ago.
Fall Colors Have Peaked
Every autumn has its own story, its own color palette, its own calendar of when and how trees change. I’ve given up trying to predict the timing and the intensity of this most majestic of paintings, and now just let all the colors soak in. Give yourself the time to just sit with this most glorious of seasons.
And the full glory of the gold of tamaracks is still to come.
Sightings – First Dark-eyed Juncos and Acorns
Red oaks have produced a bumper crop of acorns this year, so much so that some trails have become a tiny topography of acorns constantly underfoot.
Tim Kroeff sent me a note saying he had seen a flock of dark-eyed juncos passing through the Green Bay area on 9/29, and wondered if it was rather early for them. One way to check on this is to see what the migrating songbird count has been at Hawk Ridge in Duluth, and to date (10/3), only a few have passed over the ridge. Mary and I did see a small flock of juncos on 10/1 in Manitowish Waters, so a few are coming through, but the big numbers are yet to come. We’re at the southernmost edge of their breeding range, but the vast majority nest far north of here – their population is estimated at 630 million!
Dark-eyed junco, photo by Bev Engstrom
On a separate note from Hawk Ridge, the counters tallied 1,965 sharp-shinned hawks passing by the ridge on 9/23, their fourth highest single day count ever. That’s an amazing number of sharpies!
Sharp-shinned hawk
Celestial Events
By 10/14, we’ll be down to 11 hours of sunlight.
Cold is coming! Our average low temperature drops to 32° as of 10/17. The last time our average low was 32° was April 27. Minocqua averages 194 days with low temps at or below freezing – that’s 53% of the year.
On 10/19, look before dawn for Venus four degrees above the waning moon.
The new moon occurs on 10/21 as does the peak Orionid meteor shower.
Thought for the Week
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.” – Jack Kerouac
