Wisconsin Musher Mel Omernick plays with one of her 25 dogs. She and her father have different views on what’s causing weird weather in the North Woods, leading to a third of winter sled dog races to be cancelled. Photo by Meera Subramanian
Pogo pressed her paws into the ground impatiently, the sound of her yelps joining with those of the three other Alaskan husky mixes that Mel Omernick and her husband, Keith, were hooking up to their tug lines. It was the first weekend of November in Pearson, Wisconsin, and mushers had come from all over the region, and as far away as New Hampshire and Quebec, to race their dogs. They had parked their vehicles across the field at the Ma-Ka-Ja-Wan Boy Scout Reservation—the young women in a Prius, the Trump supporter in a huge trailer emblazoned with “To the victor the spoils.” All year, the mushers had fed and watered and trained and cleaned up after their teams, awaiting the moment when they could let them loose across the starting line. Now the big weekend had finally arrived, though it had gotten off to a rocky start. Once again, the weather was to blame.
Read the full piece, published on InsideClimate News and a shorter version also ran on The New Yorker Elements blog.
Be sure to check out the great accompanying video done by Anna Belle Peevey:
I always try to deny dawn. She slips under my eyelids and I reach for my eye mask, craving one more hour of unconsciousness. But I hear birds. Knew the light was illuminating the unexplored forest behind the house I now find myself living in. Discovered myself pulled up and into clothes warm enough for the cool morning, lacing up my hiking shoes before I quite realized it. My eyes don’t read so well in the morning anymore, but before I walk out the door, I squint at the map for the Perimeter Trail that loops around Sewanee, hugging the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and figure it should be due west of the house. Why walk along the lanes to find a proper entrance? I tuck my pants into my socks (the default fashion for us in Cape Cod’s tick-infested landscape. Are they here or am I liberated?) and cross the bit of backyard grass and enter the woods. Ten steps in, I flush a herd of white-tailed deer twenty strong, their cotton-burst butts bounding down the hill of the small valley, then up the other side. A hundred feet in and I find a brook I can step across with one stride. Twenty more paces and I’m on the trail. I take a right and go. It’s good to be back in church.
Just before I left Knight Science Journalism fellowship up in Cambridge, 
Here on the edge of the plateau, there is the added orientation ease of heading towards the almost horizon that appears between the boles of upright trees, that indicates the drop-off of slope and the potential payoff of views. It’s why I went right. But I am distracted. A russula mushroom there in the duff. A widow-maker tree defying gravity until her uprooted roots decide to give out completely. Rounding a bend and finding myself below a sandstone overhang like a chiseled layer cake of rock, seeps staining spots dark, the smell of iron in the air. Did I gasp? I think I gasped. At a fork I go left, each rock outcropping greater than the last. I scramble up a rock to pass through a tunnel of stone and then the sound of water pulls me forward until I’m below the spray of Bridal Veil Falls, oxygenated, awake. [update: that wasn’t Bridal Veil, I discover later. Just some unnamed cascade. Just as lovely, if not as spectacular.]
