volunteer trail crew...

patrolling with MOC... having passed my introductory trail maintenance instruction hike, craig sanborn gave us our first assignment, to cruise the skyland trail and clear the winter debris from south ridge of cardigan, over orange, brown, and church mtn.s, to the trailhead on the alexandria end. first craig helped me spot a vehicle on the far side and soon after we made it back to the summer parking lot on cardigan, students started to show.

we ended up with four students: olivia, ben, haily, and julia, plus skip and eben (the oldest pendleton boy and an early MOC alum). after an introduction to the tools craig was loaning us--folks, meet loppers, bow saw, and hand clippers--we took a traditional picture, loaded bags, and headed up the trail.

it was a lively bunch and i had a big smile listening to eben talking the "old days" when he was at mascoma, comparing that with what the others were telling him was going on now. it always amazes me that while things do change, they also stay the same.

some debris here and there, but basically things were clean. i started putting a stepping stone here and there in wet spots where i hypothesized things might dry out eventually, but not anytime soon. we crossed a couple extended in-trail pools that skip declared ripe for a "bog bridge"! constructing a good bog bridge is a lot of work, but when done right, where needed, just what the doctor ordered. the twist for this trail is that it is not hiked all that much and hours spent here don't 'pay back' as well as on other trails. i put it on my mental inventory to run by craig.

passing over the bald lookouts on orange mtn we decided to stop for lunch and take in the view. things being totally socked-in, i gave a lichen lecture with the two samples i found back on the trail and stuck in my pocket. as mentioned in an earlier post, Usnea and Evernia are similar Genera of foliose lichen, both growing in the tops of dead or dying firs.

a break on the trail...having lopped a bit of brush here and there, cut and moved only three or four blowdowns, hiking went pretty quickly. after orange mtn the trail is even less traveled. it winds along a ridge of sorts, over grafton's knob, crane mtn, brown mtn, and finally church mtn before dropping down to the trail head on a steep back road, church hill road, just north of alexandria four corners. it is a good path and in the early spring, very open, even in a thick fog. as you near the eastern end--in alexandria--there are some interesting features.



first, one sees a fair bit of old logging scars, mainly ruts and stumps, off to the sides of the trail. at some point in the past, a lot of trees were removed from this area

second, on a fairly flat area near the end, we came across a long abandoned log cabin with a collapsed roof about twenty meters off to the side of the trail. the group did a bit of exploring and i snapped a photo.

wet and happy...

about two inches of rain over the last two weeks. rode into hanover saturday, last day of april--also last full, bright sunny day-until today. my memory is probably 'clouded', but it does seem like there has been more cool and precip than warm and sun lately--like the april showers that were supposed to bring may flowers were a month late. wednesday i rode to canaan elementary in the barest of drizzles. but, coming home was downright wet. hiking with alan thursday he announced, totally serious, "if it starts to rain any harder, i'm bailing." with MOC saturday somebody who wasn't going out with us, commented, "looks like you'll be in the clouds and drizzle all day." with pam sunday morning i reminded her of last week, "hey, it's raining, let's go hiking." i could go on but you might think i was whining!

that ride into hanover was the swan song for long-er rides taken on my dear old pearl izumi saddle. last fall, about ohio, i started noticing toward the end of somedays my penis would be numb. i could still pee but it felt really weird. long story short, i got a new saddle with a cut out to relieve pressure on the perineum... sawyer had suggested this particular model, a brooks cambium 17, and i went for it. now it is on and i am happy so far, but don't have the long miles on it yet to tell if it will actually do the trick. one side benefit right out of the box was it is weather proof! brooks is legendary for its leather bike saddles which don't always appreciate getting wet. the cambium is rubber, cotton, "enhanced by a thin layer of structural textile"! in the week i have had it on it has been rained on three times.

one of those rainy rides was last wednesday. as i mentioned earlier, it was only drizzling on my way to the regular 3rd grade gig. an hour later going away, it was raining fairly hard and i actually turned into our road rather than go the extra mile and a half down to the high school for my it job. i parked the bike and grabbed the truck. i got into work, my jacket and tights pretty much soaked and wondered why i didn't go in the house and change?

the next day, i pedaled off wearing a rain coat. i was heading over to the lower shaker wildlife management area to hike a newer trail with al. he met me with his declaration of leaving if it started raining. i added, "you mean harder?" i threw in the standard dig about you won't melt. he just smiled and mentioned something about being old and a fair-weather hiker. i doubted we would stay dry on this jaunt as it was more than five miles and we always stopped to look at moss, lichen, and such. i kept my rain jacket on...

about a mile up the trail i lost the rain jacket and despite the constant drops of fairly cool rain on the bare arms, it was much more comfortable. looking at the map above, from the parking, follow a solid line heading west, away from the lake, until you get to the dotted line, about a mile up hill. the dotted line runs somewhat north-ish for a couple of miles until it hits another solid white line. we stayed to the right when it forked again and ended back at the top of the upper field and finally t-ed into the main trail headed down and back to the parking area. it is mixed hiking and both alan and i thought it would be a good 'long' loop for the shaker snowshoe fest!

http://www.vernalpool.org/images/105-2YS-egg.jpg

 along our merry way, we veered off-
 trail a bunch. a couple of those times  we went after vernal pools, checking  for salamander eggs. there were  blueish-grey blobs in both looked at, which  made alan quite happy.

where the west side dotted line is bisected by the solid white trail, alan took me off the trail again and showed me a beech with a bear's claws had scarred the bark going up and down it. you can tell the down ones by the lengthy skid marks.
(i will get a better picture soon.)









we were toward the far side of trail, when we came upon a fir that stood out from its neighbors. it actually looked like it had pom-poms at the end of large sticks attached to the trunk instead of uniformly needled branches. pam and i had run across a tree just like this up behind our house on town hill. smaller needled branches littered the ground below both that tree and this one. i picked up a couple and was able to see they had been snipped off--probably with teeth...porcupine(s)! being a fairly heavy animal, they are limited as to how far out onto a branch they can feed. the needle bunches left at the ends of branches clearly showed that. it looked pretty bizarre.

double 'stump' in middle--
one fallen top in foreground...

one last foray off-trail ledus by what i took to be the tree that fell in the woods (a month or so back--scroll down in the "april fools" post) and definitely made a sound as i was there to hear it. about a 100 yards down the hill from where i originally heard it, we found two large downed tops. a double trunk, broken off about thirty feet up, stood a fair ways off, but that made sense as it was really windy that day they fell. the picture i got is not that great, but it shows one of the tops and you can see the trunks in the background.

we got back to al's truck and my bike about four hours after we started. and even though it rained or drizzled most of the way, alan never "bailed". as i rolled down to 4-A, i was already planning to bring pam out on the weekend.

turns out it was raining saturday and sunday. saturday the MOC trail crew, with skip and eben, did our first patrol. we hiked up the south ridge on cardigan and turned south on the skyland trail. i am planning to write something on that day alone--a grand day out deserves its own post!

not that these other days are less grand, in fact sunday was even wetter--how great is that! being mothers' day and having been invited down to sadie's and otavio's for a mid-day dinner, we left the house early and made it onto the trail about 9:30. that may not sound all that early for some, but considering that pam is often just getting out of bed at that time, at least on the weekends, it was for us. and yes, it was raining. nothing a raincoat couldn't handle, but fairly steady. i took her the short, direct way up to find the 'bear claw tree'. (most of these trails have names but i can't remember them.) we snapped a few pictures of that and one of a pileated woodpecker project. the huge pile of chips below the ten foot stump made me laugh, that bird was busy! turned out we watched the movie 'concussion' that night and dr. omalu--brilliantly acted by will smith--mentioned how woodpeckers' tongues wrapped around their brain and acted as shock absorbers. the shock absorption is still up for debate, but they do have air pockets about the brain which help them limit the impact. it was an interesting connection...

and speaking of interesting, we followed the same loop heading north alan and i had, looking for a really ancient sugar house complete with pieces of the evaporator. al and i had taken it out of the duff and set it up on the stone foundation where the trail passed. it looked really cool and you can still read the company name. i tried researching it on the web but didn't find much beyond the mention of the pat. given to the "hartford sorgum machine co." manufacturers of "cory's sugar evaporator"

the rain seemed to be coming down harder and we figured it was about time to turn back, get home, and clean up some. pam was also pretty excited to show me her little "moss mouse house" she had spotted a ways back. it was indeed cute, but looking at the picture we realized, things are just better when you see them 'live'!

"just better...live" does have its limits though. sadie and otavio, sawyer and hannah, gave pam a wonderful mother's day but when we tried to go outdoors to have our cake and eat it too, it started raining. oh well, the company was excellent--it was live after all, inside or out.