My Favorite Small Outfitters, Mahoosuc Guide Service, Newry, Maine
I’m very excited this week to divulge my favorite regional outfitters, the small guys who have no budget to advertise and create a catalog, but know their locale like the back of their hand. In fact, many of the larger outfitters hire these guys to take their groups out. First up, Mahoosuc Guide Service, based in Newry, Maine. The best introduction to Mahoosuc is to simply share the intro of the article I wrote about paddling the Maine Woods for Sierra Magazine. Wearing a felt hat, plaid shirt, and a graying beard, Kevin Slater sits in the back of his canoe, looking as comfortable as most men his age are reclining in a Lazy-Boy. His stroke is short, fluid, with a short inward snap at the end to steer him exactly where he needs to be in a river dotted with boulders. In front of him sits his faithful companion, a peach-colored husky named Kara. Several months from now, when the maples grow barren and the pines are heavy with snow, Kara will be in a raucous team of her fellow Yukon brethren pulling a dogsled through the melt. But now, at the peak of fall foliage in northern Maine, with the maples and poplars on the hillside radiant with splashes of yellow, plum, and purple, Kara can rest and she does just that with her head jutting out over the edge.
Like the paddles we hold in our hands, the 17 ½ and 20-foot long wood and canvas canoes we sit in were all created by Slater. It takes more than 120 hours of work to carve one of these delicately ribbed beauties out of northern white cedar and cherry wood, using only native varieties.
“I was taught that you can find anything you need to make in these woods,” says Slater.
His skilled craftsmanship was passed down from his mentor, who Slater refers to simply as the “Old Timer.” As in, “after paddling the entire Allagash, the Old Timer told me to go to the local store and get ten days of supplies. I was going to go back upstream on my own. That’s how I learned how to canoe these rivers.”
Slater is the latest in a long line of teachers and students who learned to live in the Maine woods and to navigate the maze of blue waterways, a seemingly countless number of lakes, rivers, streams, and ponds that branch off in every direction to form this capillary system deep in the forest. The baton, (or in this case, a paddle) has been passed over the generations from the Wabanaki Indians to European fur traders to a growing legion of naturalists with familiar names like Emerson and Thoreau to the timbermen of the 20th century, and lastly the recreational paddlers like you and me who yearn to get lost in a timeless bubble far away from the hyperkinetic mindset of modernity.
Travel and Leisure just came out with their 
Like Vermont, New Hampshire has also received a good amount of early season snow, over 3 feet in some ski areas. 
Last June, I was fortunate to spend six days in Nova Scotia with my sister, Fawn. We took the Nova Star Ferry from Portland, Maine for the 11-hour crossing. The Nova Star ended its service last October and it was just announced last week that the much faster twin-hulled CAT would return, cutting time in half. The service will begin on June 15 and will depart Portland daily at 2:30 pm, arriving in Yarmouth at 9 pm. The ferry will depart from Yarmouth the next morning at 8 am, arriving back in Portland at 1:30 pm. The CAT will be able to carry some 700 passengers and 280 cars. I’ve been to Nova Scotia 3 times in the past 5 years, traveling from Yarmouth in the south all the way to Cape Breton in the north. It’s one of my favorite places to be in Canada, combining stunning scenery with incredibly fresh seafood and live foot-stomping music. I’m happy to design an itinerary of my favorite lodgings, restaurants, and activities for anyone who wants to take advantage of the current rate of exchange, US$1 to CAN$1.30. 
Yesterday, as I was taking a spin to the local coffee shop on a Vespa, I was thinking how great it is to cruise on any form of transport in weather this sublime, be it a moped, bike, skateboard, or car. On Sunday, I plan to bike along the Charles River to grab my chicken shawarma sandwich at 
We wake up to blinding sunshine at Buck’s Harbor in South Brooksville, best known as the spot where children’s book author and illustrator Robert McCloskey (“Make Way for Ducklings,” “Blueberries for Sal”) summered. FDR would also stop here on his way to Campobello Island for a short ice cream break. We found some of those famous wild Maine blueberries in our pancakes that morning before hoisting the sails and setting a course for that hump atop Big Spruce Island. Each one of these Penobscot Bay harbors and islands has a legacy and Big Spruce Island is no different. This is the place where artist Fairfield Porter and his brother, photographer Eliot Porter, would spend their summers and there’s still a working artists’ community on the island today.