Local Features

For over a year, our local historian Gary Entz has uncovered why many towns in the Northwoods are named what they are. Some previous installments of A Northwoods Moment in History have included how the towns of Phelps, St. Germain, Sayner, and Rhinelander got their names. In this week’s installment, we hear how the town of Lake Tomahawk got its name.

Few drivers zipping along Northwoods roads probably think about the culverts they cross, culverts sending stream water underneath the pavement or gravel. Instead, it’s Jon Simonsen’s job to worry about the structures, which play a major role in both transportation and fish habitat. “People don’t give a culvert much thought, and they’ll pass over it. But they think about it a lot when the road is washed out and the road has failed,” said Simonsen, a DNR transportation liaison. “So that’s when it

For this week's A Northwoods Moment in History, Gary Entz remembers the late Klondike Theater in Hurley and the horrific fire in 1901 that resulted in its tragic end.

In this month's installment of Field Notes, Scott Bowe of Kemp Station discusses how the Lacey Act protects rare trees around the world. We can all appreciate the beauty of wood. Aesthetically by its color and grain and scientifically by its carbon negative environmental footprint. Substituting wood for non-renewables is wise choice for consumers. Last week I had the opportunity to see some beautiful wood samples on the UW-Madison campus in the USDA Forest Products Laboratory Wood Collection.

Do you know who to call about wildlife? Did you know you have more than one option depending on the topic? In this week’s Wildlife Matters, the Masked Biologist helps lessen the potential confusion about wildlife professionals.

Shanai Matteson poured three small cups of water for Mary Moxon last Friday, putting them on a wooden board, like a flight of beers at a craft brewery. “It’s very subtle, but water has different tastes, and it has to do with the mineral content of the water, the treatment of the water,” Matteson said. “Sometimes it has to do with the pipes or the container that the water comes in.” Matteson had just set up her table, called a popup Water Bar, at Project North, a music and sustainability festival

Sometimes things that didn't happen in the past can have a profound impact on the future. Such was the case with the dam that never was on the Wolf River. Gary Entz explains for this week's A Northwoods Moment in History.

Plastic straws are the latest poster child of environmental concern. The Masked Biologist examines the current cultural move away from the use of plastic straws in this week’s Wildlife Matters.

Twenty-one-year-old Kai Movrich has enough to worry about. On top of working at Contrast Coffee in downtown Ironwood, she owns and is an instructor at a dance studio in town. She didn’t need her tap water at home to be a problem, too. But she found something gross when she moved into a new house in July. “Through our faucet in our bathroom, when we turned the spouts on as soon as they turned our water on, we actually had sediment coming through our spouts,” Movrich said. “We’re talking rocks the

Rhinelander and Antigo football teams have always had a strong rivalry. In 1930 though, the annual Bell Game between the two teams got particularly competitive. Gary Entz has the story for this week's A Northwoods Moment in History.