Online readers gravitated to stories about energy – especially how to save money – local businesses opening and closing, questionable police tactics and hikers who died in the White Mountains more than anything else we published in 2022.
A look at the most-read stories at concordmonitor.com in the last year shows a distinct trend, with a twist. A few of the top articles were published in years past but rose to the top again. Keep reading to the end to find out which ones those were.
Here’s a list of the Monitor’s most-read stories for 2022:
This column by David Brooks published in September illustrated the rising cost and demand for wood pellets, just as the price of almost everything else was beginning to skyrocket.
A ton of pellets at the time was selling for about $330, about $50 higher than the previous year. With rebates for efficient stoves and record prices for home heating oil and electricity, many were looking to either switch to a new source of heat or use it as a supplement. Others who already use pellets wanted to make sure they didn’t run out.
“A lot of people are new, coming into it to get away from ‘Our electric bill has basically doubled in cost, oil has gone up.’ People are looking for alternatives,” said Kyle McGarr, assistant manager at Stove Barn on Loudon Road. “Last year, a lot of gas fireplaces were being sold; this year it has jumped from that to wood and pellet stoves.”
Published at the beginning of the year in January, this Granite Geek column by David Brooks
This is a contentious matter. Many people steadfastly argue that keeping the thermostat constant is the best way to save energy based on the idea that furnaces are less efficient when racing to quickly raise temperatures back up than when moseying along and maintaining a constant temperature.
Others think that raising the thermostat up and down when you are home or away is the best way to save.
So what’s the answer?
“There’s no doubt,” said Dr. Alexis Abramson, dean of Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth. “Whenever you set the thermostat lower, you are saving energy – no matter what.”
The closing of Bath & Body Works store at Steeplegate Mall in January led us to wonder – how many stores were actually left in the ailing Steeplegate Mall? We walked through and counted to find 10 occupied storefronts of the 60 it was built to hold.
The 480,000-square-foot mall that opened in 1990 was anchored by four large retailers, of which only JCPenney remains. Over the years more and more tenants have left the mall even as other retail strip malls have flourished.
But that wasn’t the end of the story for the once-popular mall. Months later, the property owners evicted the remaining five interior tenants, including Jeweler’s Workbench, Blue Sky Hair Studio, Mt. Everest Goods, The Arch Threading and Spa and Wireless Zone. Some opened new locations, others closed for good. The remaining stores at the mall include the Hatbox Theatre, Zoo health club, Chico’s, Talbots and JCPenny.
That became its own story, with the headline “Steeplegate Mall tells all interior stores to leave to prepare for ‘exciting potential project’,” which actually came in as the 10th most read story of the year with 17,214 page views. As a result, this will be a list of the top 11 stories of the year.
The story of Pam Bales, a back-country specialist whose rescue of a would-be suicide victim from Mount Washington amid vicious weather in 2010, was turned into a major motion picture called “Infinite Storm,” with Naomi Watts playing Bales.
However, the movie was filmed in Slovenia on the southeastern edge of Alps, a country with a long history of mountain climbing and making movies about mountain climbing, where filming is less expensive than in the United States. Craggy peaks near the capital city of Ljubljana stand in for the less-craggy White Mountains and were used in many outdoor scenes.
This means that people familiar with the Jewell Trail toward Mount Washington’s summit, which Bales took on the October 2010 solo hike that launches the movie, will need to indulge in the willing suspension of disbelief that is often key to audience enjoyment of a real life story that is adapted for the big screen.
“I told my friends who pointed that out: just roll with it!” said Bales.
New Hampshire State Trooper Haden Wilber was fired after his supervisors determined he illegally searched the driver’s phone and made multiple false statements during an internal investigation about a controversial 2017 traffic stop.
In a letter to Trooper Haden Wilber, State Police Col. Nathan Noyes said he no longer trusted the trooper’s integrity.
“This investigation has revealed disturbing facts regarding your investigatory habits and overall integrity as a law enforcement officer,” Noyes said. “Your personal conduct as outlined herein reflects negatively upon your character, the law enforcement profession and is an embarrassment to you, your colleagues and the Division of State Police.”
On Feb. 10, 2017, Wilber pulled over a car on Interstate 95 in Portsmouth and arrested the driver, Robyn White of Avon, Maine. Wilber stated he suspected she was transporting additional drugs, possibly inside her body. White was held for 13 days, during which she underwent two X-ray scans and an invasive body cavity search, which found no drugs. After the charges were dropped, White filed a lawsuit in 2019 accusing Wilber of illegally searching her bag and “fabricating evidence,” which the state recently settled for more than $200,000 without admitting wrongdoing.
The long-awaited Market Basket supermarket that opened off Exit 17 of Interstate 93 dwarfed the other two stores in Concord.
At 81,000 square feet, the new store in the plaza officially named Merchants Way is two-thirds bigger than the Market Basket at Fort Eddy Road and nearly triple the size of the one on Storrs Street and includes more amenities, like a sit-down cafe with wi-fi and a larger selection of prepared and ready-to-eat food.
“It is just a much more modern concept,” said David McLean, operations manager for Demoulas Supermarkets.
In addition to three Market Basket supermarkets, Concord also has a Hannaford, two Shaws stores, an Aldi and a full supermarket inside Walmart. However, a recent Monitor analysis found that Concord did not have the most grocery stores per capita in the state. That title went to Bedford.
Vanderbilt College student Emily Sotelo, of Westford, Mass., was trying to reach the summit of all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-footers before she turned 20.
She set out alone before dawn on a cold November morning from the Lafayette Place Campground, with the goal of summiting several of the peaks along the Franconia Ridge, including Mount Lafayette, Little Haystack and Mount Flume, then getting picked up by her mother at the Flume Gorge parking lot by 3:30 p.m.
Sotelo never arrived at the parking lot, triggering an extensive search by numerous rescue crews who sometimes encountered waist-deep snow. Her body was found days later on her 20th birthday.
Rescue officials said Sotelo, an experienced hiker in good weather, was not prepared for winter in the North County mountains. Her family wants to set up a foundation dedicated to safe hiking awareness in her memory called the The Emily M. Sotelo Safety and Persistence Foundation.
Apparently lots of people are interested in new electric gadgets that can both heat your house in winter and cool it in the summer called heat pumps. They use the same technology as a refrigerator by absorbing heat in one place using condensing liquids, pumping that liquid somewhere else and then expanding it to release the heat.
Most home heat pumps consist of an outdoor compressor that looks like a ground-mounted air conditioning unit, with tubes that go into the building carrying liquid or vapor, generally ending up in wall-mounted units called mini-splits. Those are the units that blast out warm or cool air.
As New Hampshire’s summers get hotter this is a big selling point, said Austin Atamian, who owns Atamian Heating in Greenland.
“A lot of people call and say hey, I’ve got baseboard hot-water heat and looking to add A.C. When I let them know they can use this for heat and save money. it’s usually a huge perk,” he said. “Generally people are in search of A.C. and the heat is a bonus.”
And yes, modern heat pumps can keep us warm even in mid-winter, although they lose efficiency on the coldest nights and cost more to run. As David Brooks reported in another Granite Geek column, any doubters should consider that the technology is very popular in Sweden, where winters are at least as frigid as ours.
George Georgopoulos, the owner of Veano’s Italian Kitchen II, was forced to close his restaurant on Manchester Street in April after nine years in business.
His and two other businesses — Seams to Fit and a martial arts studio — in the little strip mall were told to close shop to make way for a massive development of commercial businesses and homes behind their 30 Manchester Street location.
In October, Georgopoulos resurfaced with a plan to work fewer hours for his son at Beanie’s Bar and Grill, which replaced the Hungry Buffalo restaurant in the small plaza at the intersection of Routes 129 and 106 in Loudon.
“We make plans in life and sometimes it does not work out, but I don’t want to work 80 or 90 hours a week anymore,” Georgopoulos said. “Life is too short. You’re only passing through once.”
A specialized State Police unit known as the Mobile Enforcement Team uses a legal but controversial tactic known as a pretextual stop to pull over drivers and search for drugs.
In reports and court testimony, troopers from the unit have said they found vehicles suspicious based on drivers’ and passengers’ body language, their use of rental cars, legal driving behavior like obeying the speed limit and, in one case, a car being unusually clean.
Often, those cars weren’t breaking any traffic laws when troopers first saw them. Instead, the troopers followed and monitored them — sometimes for miles — before observing a minor traffic violation that allowed them to legally make a stop.
Police often say such stops are an important tool for seizing drugs and guns. Many legal experts, however, argue they are arbitrary, prone to racial bias and end up stopping innocent drivers more often than not — claims supported by empirical research.
Three stories made it into the top 10 for total page views but they weren’t published in 2022. They are:
■A story about Allie Eckersley, a Concord homeless woman who has a very famous father who is a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Red Sox. The story, which received 61,845 page views and counting, explored the reality that homelessness can happen to anyone. Eckersley was back in the news this month after having a baby in a tent on Christmas. Coverage of that story made the article from 2019 spike.
■Another story by David Brooks explains plainly that people running out of heating oil can use diesel fuel. As heating oil prices rise or the weather becomes very cold, this story from 2018 continues to spike. This year it was read more than 40,000 times.
■Conway teen Abby Hernandez, who was kidnaped in 2013 by Nathaniel Kibby, detailed her story in an exclusive interview on ABC’s 20/20. A Monitor story from 2018 about the ordeal continues to attract readers. This year it was read online 27,532 times.