Ripton volunteers planning emergency response

Ripton's volunteer squad is rethinking emergency response plans, a year after hurricane Irene. According to VPR:

Ripton's Select Board has decided to create an inventory and database of the Addison County town's resources - something that town officials hope will be updated often.

At a select board meeting earlier this month, town and rescue officials identified those areas of town most vulnerable to floods as well as other natural disasters.

The group looked at how Irene cut off nearby Rochester from the rest of the state for more than three days as it considered what resources would be available if Ripton were cut off for a similar amount of time. The town also discussed establishing neighborhood communication hubs with two-way radios, the importance of social media and the likelihood that the town would be without power.

Now, Ripton is charting alternative ways in and out of town in the event of another storm like Irene.

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This season in the Ripton community church

Here's what's going on in the Ripton community church over the next few months:

Sunday, May 13th @ 4:00PM. Middlebury College Professor James Calvin Davis will talk on “Politics, and Civility: Can These Three Things Really Go Together?” The talk will explore incivility in American Politics and ask whether religion is a cause or a solution to the problem. Included in the talk will be some examples of religious communities trying to chart a different course for our political debates.

Sunday, May 20th @ 4:00PM. Traditional service open to all faiths with Pastor, Rev. Dr. Mary Kay Cavazos. The topic to be announced.

June 1st @ 7:00PM. Frost & Fire presents traditional Celtic & New England music, plus their own tunes. The line-up includes Addison residents Viveka Fox (fiddle & percussion) and Peter Macfarlane (fiddle, low whistle & vocals) of the well-known local band Atlantic Crossing. They are joined by Aaron Marcus from Montpelier (piano, concertina, banjo, vocals & feet) of The Turning Stile and Giant Robot Dance, and Hollis Easter from Potsdam, NY (flute, whistles, bagpipes, guitar & vocals), formerly of the National Youth Pipe Band of Scotland. All four musicians are inspired by the joy of sharing the music which they love.

Sunday, June 10th @ 4 pm. Warren King will use slides to present “Birds of Ripton”. Warren is a conservation biologist with a background in ornithology. He worked as an ornithologist for the Smithsonian Institution, which published his book The ICBP Bird Red Data Book: The Endangered Birds of the World in 1980. He serves on the board of Audubon Vermont and the board of the Otter Creek Audubon Society. He also serves on the board of the Vermont chapter of The Nature Conservancy and was chair from 1998 to 2000. His interests include botanizing, bird watching, animal tracking and canoeing. He has received numerous awards and recognition from Audubon, Nature Conservancy and the State of VT.

Sunday, June 17th @ 4:00PM. Traditional service open to all faiths with Pastor, Rev. Dr. Mary Kay Cavazos. The topic to be announced.

(thanks to Charles Billings)

Long Trail education site launched

A new Web resource on the Long Trail just launched. www.LongTrailBound.org offers information for students, teachers, and hikers in general.

One local educator's opinion:

Ripton teacher Susan Ogilvie, an educator who has utilized the Long Trail Bound activities, said, “I find the Long Trail Bound guide to be extremely useful in teaching my third and fourth grade students about the Long Trail. The lessons give each hike a focus making them a powerful learning experience.”

Here's one video introducing the project:

Community school discussion

Don't forget to come to the Ripton school tonight.  We're having a community discussion of the school's future!

Our Green Mountain forests

A good article in the Burlington Free Press highlights how the Forest Service cares for Vermont's protected forests.  It also focuses on Ripton's lands.

A visit to just one corner of the Green Mountain National Forest, along a dirt road called Natural Turnpike in Ripton, reveals the complex dance the National Forest Service does with the landscape’s ecology, the changing, fragile state of the wildlife and plants in the forests, and the often-conflicting goals of the people who love the forest so much there’s a danger they could love it to death.

The road originally was built in the 1960s for timbering, but now has vacation houses and a few year-round homes tucked into small yards at the edges of the forest. Logging trucks occasionally rumble by. Usually, in the winter, people come up the road to access snowmobile trails and smaller, separate trails for snowshoing and cross country skiing.

The snow cover was oddly thin in the forest in mid-February. Much of the Green Mountain National Forest is a working landscape, almost as much as a farm might be. The forest around Natural Turnpike Road shows wide-ranging signs of human activity. Despite the lack of snow, there was evidence of half-hearted attempts at snowmobiling and skiing. Footprints in the mud alongside the road, some leading off into the forest, meant hikers have been around. A low rumble off the far end of the road came from a logging operation....

Riptonite in TIME

Ripton resident Bill McKibben receives a glowing profile from TIME magazine.

Bill McKibben misses winter. the 51-year-old environmental writer turned unlikely activist is marching through a frosting of snow outside his Vermont home, dodging the jabbing branches of spruce trees. McKibben has lived in and around the Adirondack and Green mountains since leaving New York City some two decades ago, and he remembers winters sunk “with a cold so deep, the trees would snap at night.” But not this year. Scientists are already predicting that this winter could be the warmest in recorded history in the Northeastern U.S. In its place–thanks in part to man-made climate change–is something different and likely more dangerous. As McKibben walks through the woods, on land originally owned by the poet Robert Frost, he recalls the damage inflicted on Vermont by Tropical Storm Irene, one of 12 record-breaking billion-dollar disasters that hit the U.S. last year. “The climate has already warmed 1 [Celsius], and if this is what 1 produces, more warming is going to be impossible to deal with,” he says. “We can’t let this happen. We won’t let this happen.”

Following a death in Ripton

Fallout from the Duclos story continues. The Vermont House Governmental Operations Committee is holding hearings on the poor man's death, focusing on the State Police response.  Meanwhile various state politicians are requesting new procedures to improve Vermont's rescue operations.