Around Dusty Roads and WMEO are taking a moment of silence in remembrance of all those lost and affected by the tragedy of 9/11 — from the victims, to the first responders, to those who worked through the aftermath, and to the families left behind. This act of remembrance connects us with the lives impacted on that day.
Long‑time readers and followers of this space may have noticed a few changes this year — and the biggest one is posting consistency.
Around Dusty Roads has been around for 15 years. My first post was on Blogger back in 2011. I eventually moved to WordPress, and that’s where we’ve stayed ever since. I’m sure WordPress will tell me exactly how long when our anniversary rolls around — no plans to change that.
If you’ve been here from the beginning, you know I was never too consistent with my posts. I was pretty diligent on vacations, treating this space like an online travel diary, but once I got home and went back to work, Around Dusty Roads often got set aside.
Well… I’m retired now. No excuses.
So I made a commitment to posting regularly. And so far, I’ve posted every day for 415 days. That’s more than a year, but my goal is to make it through a full calendar year — so on January 1, we’ll celebrate one full year of daily posts.
Right after COVID, around 2022, I lost my domain — so Around Dusty Roads had to change. Instead of the original address aroundustyroads.com, we became arounddustyroads.com.
Yup, an extra “D.” Not cutesy, but honestly easier to remember: three little words all strung together, no missing letters this time.
We’ve grown, too.
WMEO has joined our little family. What started out as a stand‑alone fun post has turned into a recurring character. Banner and Balboa make excellent anchors for the feline news desk. You won’t see them every day, but they’ll pop in with observations and commentary from the cats’ point of view whenever something catches their eye.
Facebook NoticedI always share my posts on Facebook — and they noticed. I’ve been given Creator Status there. I’m not entirely sure what that entails, but I know it has to do with consistent, original posting.
So yay for me… or rather, yay for the Around Dusty Roads team and the newsroom of WMEO. Even though the “team” is me and two cats, I also have my AI editor, and that has made things run much more smoothly.
I’m trying to create a new logo. Old me holding a raptor doesn’t really capture the flavor of where we’ve grown. My AI partner says I’m a storyteller, so we’ve kicked around the idea of a rocking chair on a porch — but it isn’t quite gelling for me yet.
Still, my subconscious came up with a poem if we choose that logo.
I’m not much of a poet, and truth be told, I don’t like most poems. My two favorites are October’s Bright Blue Weather by Helen Hunt Jackson and Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. But occasionally my mind does weird things, and it woke me up with this one for Around Dusty Roads:
So pull up a chair,
while I tell you a tale,
a story of long, long ago…
where legends rose from a campfire’s glow
and wanderers found their way home
around dusty roads.
And now, we’ve sketched the first version — a rocking chair framed by a sunrise glow and a mountain horizon, with a dusty road winding toward the distance. It feels closer to the heart of Around Dusty Roads: simple, warm, and a little nostalgic.
I’d love to know what you think. Does this design feel like home to you? Would you change anything — or does it capture the spirit of the stories we share here?
Your Turn
Lots more is in the works, but if you have any suggestions or ideas for a logo, please share. And tell me how long you’ve been reading my little corner of the internet — I’d love to know if you’re a long‑time friend or a newcomer.
All are welcome. You are why I keep writing.
Any big plans for the holiday? Maybe a cookout, a last hurrah for summer, or just one final attempt to pretend the calendar isn’t about to flip into pumpkin season. Labor Day always feels like the unofficial “summer finale,” even when the thermometer is still insisting it’s 80° and humid.
Where Labor Day Actually Came FromLabor Day didn’t just appear out of thin air — it was created by the labor movement in the late 19th century and became a federal holiday in 1894. The date changes every year, but it always lands on the first Monday in September, giving us that sweet, sweet long weekend.
Back in the 1800s, the average American laborer worked 12‑hour days, seven days a week. And if that wasn’t enough, kids as young as five or six were working in mills, factories, and mines.
Honestly, I can’t imagine a modern 5‑year‑old doing anything for 12 hours straight except maybe watching Bluey or refusing to eat vegetables. The idea of them operating machinery? Absolutely not.
Today, the standard work week is 40 hours, shifts are typically 8 hours, and we get holidays, weekends, and actual time off. Things have definitely changed — thankfully.
So here’s to Labor Day: A celebration of the working man, the working woman, and everyone who keeps the world running.
Enjoy your cookout, your day off, and your well‑earned break.
The other night, as I was browsing through my streaming services for something new to watch, I stumbled across a documentary about how feathers developed in dinosaurs. I really enjoyed it — lots of AI‑generated dinos racing across prehistoric landscapes, parallels to modern birds, and a fresh twist on the whole “bird brain” idea. Turns out they were pretty intelligent.
Anyway, that got me thinking about dino digs, trackways, and all that good stuff. I actually visited a dinosaur dig in South Dakota once, and there’s that show Dino Hunters set in Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota. And of course there’s the famous dinosaur trackway in Texas. It always feels like we’re headed west to find the remains of these creatures.
Nope. If you’re New England born and raised, you can see dinosaur tracks right here in the Northeast. We have our share too. Not that a western trip isn’t a great vacation option — but let’s think about what’s closer to home.
Once you start looking into it, you realize New England has some genuinely amazing prehistoric secrets tucked between its forests, highways, and old mill towns. One of the best examples is right in western Massachusetts:
This place is a gem. It’s an 8‑acre stretch of sandstone along Route 5 where hundreds of Early Jurassic dinosaur tracks are preserved exactly where the animals walked about 190 million years ago. No casts, no replicas — the real deal.
It’s incredibly easy to visit:
Once you’re there, you can wander along a simple trail and see:
A couple of rules keep the site safe:
If you want to make a day of it, the Amherst College Museum of Natural History is nearby and has the world’s largest collection of dinosaur tracks — over 1,700 specimens, many from the Connecticut River Valley. Granby, MA also has additional track sites if you’re in full dino‑detective mode.
Even when you’re in western Massachusetts, you’re still kind of “going west” for dinosaur tracks — just not that far west. Holyoke, Granby, Amherst… they all sit along the Connecticut River Valley, which turns out to be one of the richest dinosaur trackway regions in the entire country.
Follow that ancient rift basin south, and you hit one of the biggest dinosaur track discoveries in North America.
🦖 Dinosaur State Park — Rocky Hill, ConnecticutIf Massachusetts gives you a taste of New England’s prehistoric past, Connecticut serves the full entrée.
Dinosaur State Park is home to over 2,000 dinosaur footprints, most attributed to a three‑toed carnivore called Eubrontes. The tracks were discovered in 1966 during construction work — imagine being the person who looked down and realized the bulldozer had just uncovered a dinosaur highway.
Only a portion of the site is visible under the geodesic dome, but thousands more tracks remain buried for preservation. It’s one of the largest trackways ever found, and it’s only a short drive from anywhere in southern New England.
The park also has:
It’s the perfect example of why this post had to become Dinos in New England, not just Dinos in Massachusetts. The whole region is part of the same prehistoric story.
So go west, you dino hunters of today — just don’t go as far as you thought. Explore western Massachusetts and the Connecticut River Valley. Wander the sandstone, follow the ancient rift, and let those fossilized footprints pull you straight back into the age of dinosaurs. All of it waiting right here in our own backyard.
If you’re craving something a little more fantastical after all that real science, you can also check out Dino Safari at CambridgeSide. It’s a walk‑through adventure featuring life‑size animatronic dinosaurs, hands‑on fossil digs, a scavenger hunt, and even a virtual‑reality experience. It’s a limited‑time exhibit, closing on September 7, so don’t wait too long to visit.
Growing up in New England, we had a beaver colony on our property that turned our backyard into a yearly battleground. The beavers kept damming a small brook and flooding the area, and my mother — armed with determination and whatever tools she could grab — kept tearing the dam down. The beavers rebuilt. She tore it down again. They rebuilt faster. This went on year after year, a stubborn standoff between one determined woman and a colony of equally determined engineers.
Eventually, the beavers disappeared. Maybe my mother finally won. Maybe Fish & Game quietly stepped in and relocated them. All I know is that today, the old homestead is beaver‑free.
But while our family’s beaver drama played out the usual way, Idaho took a very different approach. A much more dramatic approach. An approach involving… parachutes.
After World War II, Idaho faced its own beaver problem. Development was booming around Payette Lake and McCall, and beavers — being beavers — were busy damming streams, flooding yards, and chewing through anything that resembled a tree. Removing the dams didn’t work. Moving the beavers by truck wasn’t possible. The Chamberlain Basin, the perfect relocation site, had no roads leading into it.
So Idaho Fish & Game got creative.
With surplus WWII parachutes sitting in storage, a Fish & Game employee named Elmo Heter devised a plan that sounds like folklore but is absolutely true: parachute the beavers into the wilderness.
Heter designed special wooden boxes that would hold a beaver securely during the drop and pop open on impact. Then came the test subject — a beaver affectionately named Geronimo.
Geronimo was dropped again and again to perfect the technique. He survived every jump. He even seemed unfazed by the whole experience, which is impressive for an animal that normally prefers to stay on the ground building dams.
Once the system worked, Idaho loaded up the rest of the beavers — more than 70 of them — and parachuted them into the Chamberlain Basin.
Amazingly… yes.
All but one beaver survived the drop. The relocated colonies thrived. And the Chamberlain Basin became a beaver paradise — full of streams,
ponds, and wetlands shaped by their engineering.
In 2015, Idaho Fish & Game released archival footage showing the actual parachute drops — tiny wooden boxes drifting down like odd little airborne packages carrying very confused beavers.
The Beaver Drop wasn’t just a quirky stunt. It was early, innovative wildlife management — a humane solution to a growing conflict. Instead of killing the beavers, Idaho found a way to give them a new home, even if it meant dropping them from the sky.
And it worked.
From my mother’s annual dam‑tearing battles in New England to Idaho’s airborne beaver brigade, the Beaver vs Human Conundrum has always required creativity. Sometimes that creativity looks like persistence with a shovel. And sometimes it looks like parachutes drifting over the Chamberlain Basin.
Either way, it’s a reminder that wildlife management can be messy, surprising, and occasionally hilarious — but when done right, it gives animals a second chance and ecosystems room to thrive.
