Local Features

Tribal members from the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe are getting ready to harvest wild rice from the lakes of Northern Wisconsin. But this year, there's less rice to be found.

Wayne Valliere is an artist and award-winning birchbark canoe builder with the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe.

Dead Pike Lake, a sparsely-populated lake in Vilas County, has been the source of contention for years. Now, it has gotten political.

Railroad accidents were common in the late nineteenth century. Because safety was an issue, some train robbers in the Northwoods thought they could use it to their advantage.

The Wisconsin River is a tamed river, but in the past, before the dams, the river ran wild, and loggers found Grandfather Falls near Merrill to be a difficult obstacle to overcome.

Matthew Stapleton was head of one of Rhinelander’s oldest and most distinguished families. Stapleton settled in Rhinelander in 1883 and worked as an overseer of the Brown Brothers’ boom operation. In 1904 he was elected mayor of Rhinelander and later went on to serve as postmaster. Despite all that, it was his daughter Beatrice who made history during World War II.

Atmospheric PFAS is falling as rain even far away from industrial sites. Plus, a nonprofit has identified 42,000 places in the U.S. as possible PFAS sites.

A chance encounter with a common bird in an unexpected place inspired the topic for this week’s Wildlife Matters with the Masked Biologist.

Ambling down a path through the forest to a serene lake, Greg Krueger explains why he likes this area.

Organized labor’s campaign for a ten-hour workday gained momentum in the 1870s and 1880s. The often-violent response to union demands in places like Chicago and Milwaukee served to make the public more open to union ideas. The Northwoods was slow to accept the inevitable, but by 1892 the push for a ten-hour workday hit Rhinelander.

A point of land, sitting on the north side of the Vista Flowage, was Zeke Jonas’ favorite spot.

Ole Catfish and his family led quiet, unassuming lives in their home at Lac du Flambeau. They were not remarkable in any way and not the type of people whose names one would expect to find splashed across national newspapers. Yet that is exactly what happened in 1934 when Catfish’s life intersected with that of one of America’s most notorious gangsters. Historian Gary Entz has more:

On a pleasant morning last week, Sara Sommer and Chris Ester paddled to the deepest point of Luna Lake, a 64-acre lake in northern Forest County surrounded by National Forest.

In this month’s Field Notes, Susan Knight of Trout Lake Station tells us about the genetics of apples and the real story behind Johnny Appleseed.

On Monday, John Lampereur guided his white U.S. Forest Service pickup truck over bumpy dirt roads in northern Oconto County near Lakewood.

Steph Shaw starts the outboard motor of the small, flatbottomed boat, and takes off toward the middle of Katherine Lake in Hazelhurst.

Last week, ground-penetrating radar sensors glided across the grass near Rhinelander wells 7 and 8, attached to a customized four-wheeled cart.

Thousands of children come to the Northwoods each year to participate in organized summer camps. While many camps are storied with long histories, there was one distinctive camp that had a short life but did much good in its nine years of existence.

Many of us have wood interiors in our homes. It is the norm rather than the exception. My home has wood doors, wood floors, wood cabinets, and wood base and window trim. It is a beautiful material, and I really enjoy living with and working with wood.

On a steamy summer day in early August of 1960, two teenage boys living in Warrensville, Illinois, John Hudetz, age 15, and Peter Jonssen, age 14, were at home and talking about the good times they had in past summers at their uncle Ted Jonssen’s Rustic Lodge on Muskellunge Lake just north of McNaughton. While chatting they decided what a great idea it would be to pay Uncle Ted a visit. The two boys took their sleeping bags, a single change of clothes, and slipped them into packs hung over the handlebars of their bicycles. On August 8, three days after coming up with the idea, they hit the road.