Every episode begins with a question submitted by our audience. Today, a question from Anne Wallace, in Bristol:. Note: Our show is made for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. Transcripts are generated using a combination of robots and human transcribers, and they may contain errors. Now, whenever I have friends or family visiting, I try to get them out on a hike. And pretty often, that means I take them to the trail at Gile Mountain.
I know it well. I learned this because town forests are the focus of today's winning question. And it turns out town forests are all over Vermont. Literally, I went for a pretty short drive earlier today, and I swear, I passed signs for, like, three different town forests. We tasked Lexi Krupp to learn more about town forests.
Lexi Krupp: There are cities and towns in Vermont. Anne Wallace: We are extremely non-methodical about it. But we go to places that we don't know much about and have never maybe even heard of.
And then, some places had town forests. Lexi Krupp: Town forests. These are usually just what they sound like: forests owned by towns. Often pretty big β sometimes hundreds, or even thousands of acres. But not always. As Anne kept seeing signs for them on her tour of towns, they became these mysteries on the municipal landscape.
Anne Wallace: I thought, what is the deal? I mean really, literally, what is the deal with town forests? Why are they there, or why not? Lexi Krupp: There's no complete accounting of all the town forests in Vermont. But as best we know, about two-thirds of towns have one. Many have more than one. And each town forest has its own idiosyncratic history of how it came to be.
