Calvert Marine Museum

Nature center offers canoeing, camping, yoga Bear Branch Nature Center at Hashawha Environmental Center offers informative programs for all ages. An overnight canoe trip will be taken from 10 a.m. Oct. 2 to 3 p.m. Oct. 3. The group will canoe Saturday afternoon, then have time to fish, hike or relax. Supper will be cooked by the river. Tents will be provided for sleeping. After breakfast Sunday, there will be more canoeing and a picnic lunch. Participants should take a lunch for Saturday.

Ailene W. Hutchins, a former educator and Orphans' Court judge who wrote widely about her native Calvert County, died in her sleep June 23 at her home in Prince Frederick. She was 86. Ailene Williams was born and raised on her family's farm near Barstow, and graduated from Calvert County High School. At 19, she earned a bachelor's degree in 1939 from Western Maryland College, now McDaniel College. She taught French, English and drama at Calvert County High, and was the school's guidance counselor from 1951 to 1963.

Patricia "Tricia" Kummerow, a retired teacher who helped raise funds for local charities and educational institutions, died of a stroke Tuesday at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center. The Ruxton resident was 68. Born Mary Patricia Brosnahan in New Rochelle, N.Y., and raised in Chicago, Cleveland and Darien, Conn., she graduated from the Madeira School, near Washington, D.C., and received an English degree from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass. Mrs. Kummerow moved to Baltimore in 1973 and began her career teaching and tutoring dyslexic students at the then-new Jemicy School.

SOLOMONS - To be an amateur fossil hunter you have to learn to read topographic maps and tide charts. You have to approach property owners and persuade them to let you romp around on their land. You have to give up your weekends to go wade through knee-high muck. To be the 22-year-old amateur fossil hunter who found an 8-million-year-old whale skull, your girlfriend has to be willing to go with you. Jeff DiMeglio, a stone carver from Alexandria, Va., found the skull on the banks of the St. Mary's River in Southern Maryland.

Envision escaping to a secluded island destination where even your iPhone doesn't roam. Paradise. Images of idyllic, uninhabited beaches and authentic local fare instantly flood your brain. Then you start thinking about long flights, passports and pricey accommodations, and the idea quickly flees your mind. Wait — come back! Did you know that there are exotic islands just off the coast of Maryland? Yes, really. We've uncovered three remote retreats, all within a three-hour drive from Baltimore, where you can unplug, recharge, and, blessedly, not know a soul.

The discovery of 10 million-year-old whale bones poking out of an eroding cliff face in Calvert County seemed a windfall for science. That's certainly how Shmuel Rotenstreich saw it when the bones appeared almost two years ago below the cliff-top home he shares with his wife, Debora Linzer, in Chesapeake Ranch Estates. So when someone from the Calvert Marine Museum asked if he'd object if the museum's paleontologists excavated the skeleton, Rotenstreich, 63, a computer scientist at George Washington University, did not hesitate.

Midmorning. I roll off Route 2 at the last exit before the Patuxent River Bridge in Southern Maryland, relieved to be out of dual-lane traffic. As I coast off the ramp, I come to a stop at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons. Sitting before the museum's carved wooden sign and renovated old schoolhouse, I feel transported to another era, to a time when barefoot boys trudged down the road with fishing rods slung over their shoulders and the neighbors popped in to share homemade pies. Tiny Solomons is a peaceful place.

It was interesting to read Frank Roylance's article of September 10 on the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons excavating a recently discovered whale fossil from the Calvert Cliffs near Chesapeake Beach ("Calvert Cliffs fossil recovered, identified"). We have owned our home on the Calvert Cliffs since 2000. While we appreciate the contributions the museum makes to our community, we are very concerned with the way government officials allow the museum to handle fossil excavations. Our first concern is safety.

R.J. "Jim" Holt, a Honeywell Corp. executive, came to know and love the Eastern Shore and its maritime heritage while spending summers with his family in Bozman. Holt, who was named the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum's first full-time director in 1971, died last month at an Easton retirement home. He was 85. The Philadelphia native, who learned to sail as a child, later earned a degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During World War II, he served as a gunnery officer aboard the USS Saterlee, a destroyer, and participated in the Normandy Invasion on June 6, 1944.

The sandy precipices of Calvert Cliffs and the Chesapeake Bay meet to form some of Maryland's most striking geography, but many of the beachcombers at Calvert County's Flag Ponds Nature Park barely lift their eyes from the sand to look at the scenery.That's because they're looking for fossils -- imprinted remains of plants and animals found in rock -- that nestle among the pebbles on the beaches at Flag Ponds and nearby Calvert Cliffs State Park.Those geologic formations are common in Calvert and St. Mary's counties, but Flag Ponds and Calvert Cliffs State Park "are the only public accessible beaches for fossil hunting," according to David Brezinski, a geologist for the Maryland Geological Survey.