My mid-April journey to Burlington, Vermont covered some 175 miles, with patchwork evergreens dominating picturesque mountain landscapes backgrounded by muted deciduous stands in their dullest spring pastel stage.

A straight shot up Interstates 91 and 89, both legs of my nearly three-hour trip were sweetened by CDs from the likes of Steve Earle (Transcendental Blues), David Grisman (Bluegrass Reunion) and Mississippi John Hurt (Today) to break the monotony of a solo mission.

I traveled to the North Country city on the shores of Lake Champlain to attend the Saturday session of the Eagle Hill Institute’s three-day Natural History Conference, held April 17 to 19.

The site for this year’s 16th annual program was South Burlington’s Doubletree at Hilton. Promoted as “the study and stewardship of the natural environment in the northeastern US and eastern Canada,” the conference attracted more than 608 naturalists of all stripes, among them my archaeologist friend Mike Gramly. I joined him for a Friday overnight to attend my second such conference, the other in Springfield before the COVID hysteria.

The Eagle Hill Institute is a teaching and learning center, situated on an isolated coastal peninsula in the upper Down East town of Steuben, Maine. Currently engaged in an ambitious $5 million fundraising campaign aimed at state-of-the-art facility upgrades, Eagle Hill is similar in focus to our own Rowe Conference Center.

Gramly was in Burlington to deliver a 20-minute presentation Saturday afternoon titled “Absolutely Dated Associations of Human Beings and Extinct or Extirpated Mega-Fauna in Northeastern North America 2014-2026,” summarizing his own groundbreaking mastodon discoveries that have upended conventional wisdom. I was there to take it in, along with other offerings of my choosing.

Upon settling into our motel room after supper, I previewed a jam-packed Saturday presentation lineup to plot my next day’s agenda. As it turned out, there was no need to labor. Five enticing morning presentations, under a “Poetry, Prose and Process” heading, were scheduled to precede Gramly’s 2:35 p.m. gig in the same Room F. How about that! Made to order for a retired outdoor writer. I could settle into one seat for the day.

The five pre-lunch presentations, scheduled between 10:35 and 12:15, included “Poetry and Nature: Another Way to Research,” by Scudder Parker; “Flyways, Snipe and Other Poems,” by Hayley Koldin; “Eco Essays: Big Ideas from Little Things in Nature,” by Brian Pfeifer; “Probing the Here and the Now with Poets in the Field,” by Tammis Coffin; and “Crossing Sacred Land,” by Rick Van de Poll.

Four of them turned out to be poetry readings and instruction, followed by short question-and-answer sessions. The fifth was basically a prose-writing how-to, followed by a Q&A for aspiring nature writers ready to dip their paddles into prosaic whitewater.

I found the prose presentation passé for such a progressive gathering – reminiscent of the Associated Press 101 programs I recall from regional overnight workshops I attended in the 1980s. Back then, newspapers like the one that employed me for 40 years could still afford to send staff to such craft-improvement workshops. Not here to critique that session, I won’t elaborate further.

Back to Gramly.

Nearing 80, Richard Michael Gramly is an active archaeologist, author, and speaker, not to mention a former college professor and museum curator. No stranger to conference-room and auditorium lecterns, this time he zeroed in on his recent discoveries and the scientific dating of cutting-edge bone, ivory, tooth, and antler artifacts he’s identified from five sites where he performed at least limited field work.

Gramly’s lecture fell into the conference’s “Paleontology and Paleoecology of Northeastern North America” category. It attracted the largest audience, by far, of the eight presentations I attended. Some of the materials he discussed came from his own 2014 “Bowser Road” excavation in Middletown, New York. Others were discovered over the past couple of years, at the Lower Blue Licks Battlefield site in Kentucky. The rest came from assemblages of previously unidentified or misidentified artifacts and portable art specimens that were uncovered decades ago, stored away and recently reassessed by Gramly.

Anyone familiar with Gramly knows he’s a straight shooter, not one to pull punches. He didn’t disappoint this time around. He was his normal outspoken self, sharing his many newest interpretations pertaining to late Pleistocene human interactions with mastodons, wooly mammoths, and whatever other megafaunal surprises have come to light at the 12,000- to 15,000-plus-year-old boneyards he’s dug and reviewed.

Once a committed excavator of Paleoindian archaeological sites such as the so-called Sugarloaf or DEDIC Site on Mount Sugarloaf’s southwestern skirt, along the Deerfield-Whately line, Gramly has moved on to the spiritual realm of ritualistic artifacts related to proboscidean worship.

He does not, and did not at the conference, hesitate to explain that shaman-supervised hunting parties of young men killing dangerous mastodons were not seeking meat. They were, instead, participating in performative, ceremonial, ritualistic, rite-of-manhood hunts performed every seven to 10 years. Because primitive man wasted nothing, of course the meat was processed, and so were bones, tusks, teeth, skin, sinews and you name it during an organized, post-kill salvage operation.

After more than 40 years of intensive, coast-to-coast field work digging for Clovis stone tools and weapons, Gramly has become unimpressed with such artifacts. Now, when presented with fresh lithic assemblages, even highly valued fluted spearpoints, his kneejerk response is, “Is that all you’ve got?” He’s soared past that to bigger, better, older, and in his mind more important, ritualistic objects not made of stone and honoring massive proboscidean prey.

Probably his most important discoveries are two ceremonial sled burials of what he believes were female shaman. Both shamans went to their graves in sleds with ceremonial ivory runners made from split proboscidean tusk. One of them, which no one wants to talk about, came from the Hiscock site. The other had been stored away and previously unidentified in a carelessly organized, century-old Kentucky museum collection Gramly revaluated at the insistence of his friend Denny Vesper.

And how about the diadem (headband) fragments Gramly found, identified, and reassembled from Lower Blue Licks? They were made of the peeled outer layer of mastodon or wooly mammoth tusk dating back more than 30,000 years before present, but collected from a site half their age. The still-unanswered question remains: Was this decorative headgear made in North America from an ancient salvaged tusk, or was it an incredible, ancient, ritualistic, hand-me-down that had crossed the Bering Strait from northeastern Siberia?

Either way, it is an extraordinary artifact, not to mention a remarkable piece of Gramly detective work. Though many other experts had laid eyes on the scattered pieces, not one of them recognized the diadem. Chalk it up to Gramly’s Old World archaeological experience, which familiarized him with Europe’s Upper Paleolithic Gravettian culture, 33,000 to 21,000 years before present.

There are too many additional fascinating discoveries to mention in this limited space or, for that matter, in his 20-minute Vermont presentation. Thankfully, every fresh detail is personally fed to me by Gramly during our weekly telephone conversations and his occasional overnight visits.

To be on the receiving end of these groundbreaking discoveries, I consider myself privileged – as, I suspect, did the folks in northern Vermont who attended his lecture and got to handle the three-foot Giant Ground Sloth ulna – a front leg or elbow bone – he had brought along to show how the thus-far-unidentified implement, recovered from a Florida riverbed, had been partially cut through by human hands and snapped off.