News at Eleven (Back Page): Using a map originally drawn by a biologist

more than 40 years ago, [Lisa] Thornton leads me toward a wedge of forest on the cliffs. We clamber up a hillside over spongy soil until we reach a stone ledge covered in moss and fern--and a stately stand of 80-foot-tall hemlocks, perhaps 500 years old. The trees survived, Thornton says, because they were virtually inaccessible to Native Americans, European pioneers and timber companies. I'm reminded of Frost's poem "Into My Own":

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

from The Smithsonian: Vermont's Venerable Byway
also The Smithsonian: Vermont's Venerable Byway: Photo Gallery

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