The Appalachian Trail Rangeley Maine

 Last week Karl, Theresa, and I spent a chilly, but nice weekend car camping on the shore of West Richardson Pond. 

We had a chance Saturday to hike to Piazza Rock

Great hike and fun weekend!

Ethel Pond

Bark Directions

Exploring the Caves

Signs at the Shelter Area

Nursery Stump

All Photos by Karl.

To Puppyville and Beyond

Puppys do not practice any known form of Social Distancing.  Yes someday, if this Blog somehow survives, someone will have to reference the InterWeb to decoded that sentence.

Let's tackle the matter of Puppys first.   This hike would take us from Gate 27 down to the road that Puppyville was located on.

J.R. Greene recounts a valley resident as saying "Puppyville and Millville should have switched names".  Because when they knew the villages Puppyville had no dogs and Millville had no mill. Puppyville at ,one time, did have a resident that had a lot of puppys.  Thus the name.  Turners Falls has a hill Rabbit Hill, the road  up the hill winds up a hill past several houses.  Locals on the hill were said to have raised large families.

Off we went to find a lunch spot.  Prioritization is a great skill to have when in the woods. 

  Certainly felt like Spring was coming. So light the stove and lets get lunch going!

Quabbin is such a great habitat for all kinds of species.  Woodpeckers or maybe just a solo woodpecker, had quite the trough chiseled out of this tree.

Theresa spotted something down the road.  Moose!  ( sorry no picture).  

We watched it wander into, what we thought were the woods, to the left towards the water.  It must have heard or smelled us and moved away at walk.

My sister in-law Mary spotted the first track.  The Moose had headed down the road.  Moose walking cover territory quickly.  Their long legs give them an amazing all-terrain capability. 

We wandered to the intersection and down to the waters edge our destination.

Wandering the shore we found this interesting root structure.  The was a similar toppled over tree during one of our last adventures here.

Forest Forensics once again.

The trunk of the fallen tree was a pretty significant food source. Unlike the other fallen tree we found there was no growth that looked active to my untrained eye.

Back we go. With Puppyville in the rearview mirror. All along the Quabbin the shoreline views are great.

What have we here? Dinner?  Have to put our prepper hats on in these times.

ShagBark Hickory.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carya_ovata

A whole row of them along the stonewall on the side of the road.
Another day of fine social distancing indeed.



Bob C

Historic Hikes of the Quabbin

We are tackling a number of hikes outlines in  J.R. Greene's book Historic Quabbin Hikes. 

 https://www.amazon.com/Historic-Quabbin-Hikes-J-Greene/dp/1884132014

The hike today started at Gate 30 and proceeded down the peninsula and looped back up to our starting point just west of the area shown on the map.

 We stumbled across the numerous cellar holes listed and some other interesting finds:

We did a little sleuthing and determined Mr or Miss Bear was rooting around for a spring snack. The bee's nest appears to have come from this tree.

We wandered along stopping at various scenic viewpoints.  Our lunch stop featured several bald eagles circling, diving for fish, and just being eagles having fun. The day was glorious.

During our travels we came across and interesting tree. The Hawthorn tree.
We will have to return to check out the fruit of this tree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crataegus

You can see where the torn part of the name comes from.

Those would hurt.  Survivalists use the thorns to fashion fish hooks. 

Our friend the Coyote is wandering the area. The scat left behind carries all kind of interesting clues. Here we see undigested bone fragments and hair.  Hair and small bone pieces are pretty common finds.  This piece was quite large.

Of course everyone was not having the best of days. This Shrew was not napping.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-minded-strategy-the-common-shrew-shrinks-its-head-to-survive-winter/

Larger mammals were evidenced as well.  Mr or Miss Moose is wandering the quabbin. 

The mosses were announcing spring with tiny blooms.

This is an interesting forest forensics exercise. 

Trees often fall and the fallen tree supports new vertical growth.  The crazy thing about this tree is that two different species of trees sprouted from the same fallen trunk. 

This was a very large scat. Wolves were hunted to extinction in this area.  This is a big coyote for sure.

All in all a great day of adventuring and discovery.

We ended back at Gate 30 with it's keystone bridge.

https://quabbinvalley.wordpress.com/2017/01/03/gate-30-keystone-bridge/

On to the next adventure.

The Boat House - That was Easy- Not!

Theresa and I set off recently with my friend Karl to explore and old boathouse at the Quabbin. We had found this in 2008 and it looked like this at that point in time:

So off we went armed the a map and the UTM of the location. 








Should be a piece of cake for two Search and Rescue guys! I remember it being right on the shore. We hiked along a couple of roads and headed down to the shore. Took a left and started looking for the structure.  On we went looking around every corner until we were at the powerline !   What ?? 



How could we have missed it?  Wrong UTM?  That didn't seem likely but what the heck let's wander back up to the end of the cove.  It was a glorious day after all and the frozen reservoir was booming and groaning. Along the way Karl snapped great pictures of stumps, which were submerged many years ago and have now surfaced and drifted into little areas where eddies exist.








All around us was very cool driftwood.




Karl takes great pictures without a doubt.


Well we reached the end of the cove and still no boathouse!   The lost-boys conferred.



It didn't just disappear.  Or did it? 

We entered the Lat/ Long and double checked our UTM and the description from the Geocaching site we had used in 2008 to find it. The site said the cache had been removed.   We shot and azimuth and low and behold found a small area along the shore were it had been.  DCR must have removed the decaying structure at some point.  Mystery solved.  We headed off to find a lunch spot.






Ah nothing like a sunny spot for lunch.   We broke out the WhisperLite and cooked some grub.





After that we finished the hike in the usual fashion.  A good old bushwack using a combination of terrain association, dead reckoning, and compass skills.  A fine day indeed.

Snow!

Snow

Wow the first big snow dump of the season and it is only early December. What will winter bring? The forecast is saying 50 degrees and rain in the next few days so time to get out there now kids! 

Back to the old stomping grounds to find a "cave".  This one is similar to Indian Kitchen in the Quabbin.  Both are big slabs that have fractured off of larger sections to form large rooms.  We have been there before and wanted to take our friend Karl along to show him the cave and the area. 

We headed off into the snow the temp was 6 degrees Fahrenheit. 

This area is home to lots of critters. Deer tracks are everywhere and we came across bear tracks crisscrossing various areas. They have a distinctive lumbering gait signature. Claws were visible in some tracks. The bear tracks were a day or so old.  They are still roaming around and looking to that last bit of nourishment prior to deep winter.

Of course winter hikers burn through lots of calories and one of the joys of snowshoeing is that you get to eat a lot of good food.

"According to an independent study conducted by the University of Vermont, snowshoers can burn 420-1000 calories per hour. “Snowshoeing is an effective, low impact, and safe form of exercise to change body composition"

Karl was trying out his new stove. We both rock MSR stoves. They are like jet engines and really throw lots of heat. No simmer possible just hardcore BTUs.   That is what you need when it is below 20F out.

Tasty treats abound!

 We finished lunch and headed back bushwhacking through the woods.

Almost to the top we intersected the road. Once on the road we met a lone skier heading downhill.  He was perhaps in his late 70's and accompanied by his dog Thelma.  We chatted for a while and he had a keen interest in where we had been, being curious and wanting to explore new areas. We drew him a snow map which Thelma proceeded to run through.  We told him to follow our tracks once he was in the upper field and not to follow our uphill slog to the road. It was really steep in some places.

 He commented that he felt the need to get out and experience the snow cover as global warming was certainly affecting the amount and quality of snowfall. He said who knows it could be the last time he sees this quality of skiing snow.  Sobering but true.  

As I bushwhacked off the road once again I couldn't help but feel sad for future generations and sad for the current human population.  The old man said they have the most wonderful experience in the world fed to them through their cell phones. Why go outside? 

 We pondered that and relished the fact that we had actually seem another human being outside- in the woods- in the winter- enjoying themselves. Crazy right. 

Who in their right mind goes outside when you could sit on the couch and watch the world go by via your digital crack pipe?

 On the way home Karl commented that those Direct TV satellite dishes look like hungry birds waiting for Momma bird to shovel some more crap down their digital throats. 

Yum Yum Kids Enjoy!

Get outside!

 https://www.rei.com/opt-outside