Mt Pierce

We are back and yes wandering through the winter landscape once again.

Here is one of our 4000 footers in NH.

Windy

We went up to Jerusalem hill in Wendell and did a trip around the pond as well this weekend. It was about 15F with a 25 mph wind. A perfect day indeed, no bugs !

Beavers

Winter is always a good time to check out the local animals. We took a walk down by the CT River to see how high the water was and saw that there is and active beaver in the area. The fog was rolling in and the temp was around 47. Hardly snowshoeing weather at this point..

Frost on its way ?

We have had frost warning for the past several nights but nothing yet. Time to start thinking about trips.

Snakes on a plain

We stopped at the Dana town common: Dana .
We have been there before and wandered over to the location that was the Graveyard. Next to it was I believe the church. All thats left is the foundation and we were checking it out and spotted 4 black racers. They were about 2-3 ft in length. This was the baby at the top of the foundation. Where the heck is St Patty when you need him. Only kidding snakes rock ! Anything that eats mice gets my vote.

Let us show you

Well its not exactly a salad bar but we were walking along and saw this piece of moss. At least we think its moss . Pretty cool. Probably good with blue cheese on it, but then again would tree bark would be passable with blue cheese..

Houston we have a Problem

Or at least this pilot did. We knew there was a jet crash site in Quabbin after looking at Geocache logs. We couldn't find the site during the fall, but we were obviously successful this time. We talked the ranger who said the crash happened in the 50's. The jet was a trainer and was lost in a storm heading back from N.Y. He radioed he was low on fuel and apparently the protocol is to ditch in Quabbin. Here is a link to a great site about the crash . Jet. Thanks Karl. I guess its the biggest wilderness area in MA. Anyhow they "cleaned up the site ". Its amazing how much is left. Must have been a big old mess. We checked around and figured out this was the approach the plane took. The pilot bailed out as was safe but the plane needs a little work around the edges.

Having a Ball

The temps started to rise and what happens is the snow of course gets sticky. This means the crampons ,on the bottom of the snowshoe bindings ,get full of snow and form a nice ball under your foot. Its like dragging five pounds of extra weight along and results in the snowshoe sliding around. So you have to "bare boot it" as we say. Lucky for us we were on the way down so we only had about a mile of bare bootin.

At the beach

The Beech trees seem to hang onto leaves a long time. It was cool listening to the wind rattling the leaves up here. The area had a pretty good population of Beech and Birch.

Shadow puppets

Just a shadow puppet show.