Today's adventure began before sunrise on Old Stoddard Road, just above the Sawmill trailhead. We headed into the woods right across the street from Peter Reichel's house and came early upon a stream flowing from a sizeable wetland. Al observed that the beavers had been quite industrious, using stones to build their dam. Actually, the dam was probably used to control the water flow for the sawmill downstream, but the beavers have kept it in good working order for their own purposes.
The trail that Al is planning to lay out from Old Stoddard Road to Kulish Ledges will likely follow the shoreline of the wetlands before heading up the hill toward Osgood Hill and the Ledges. I imagine that the wetland is an active place in the spring and summer, but this early morning, all was quiet.
Early on in our hike, we spotted a deer in the woods ahead of us. The white tail flashed as it disappeared into the woods. Al led me to a cellar hole which he had found on a exploration a few days ago. We heard a snort not far away. "That's deer number 2," said Al. We heard another snort and some twigs snapping, but couldn't catch sight of the deer.
Soon, we headed up the hill to an area where the view opened up a bit. We watched the sun rise over the saddle between Holt Hill and the eastern side of Osgood Hill. Looking northeast, we could see another mountain north and east of Holt Hill, Willard Mountain, perhaps. A level area to the west offered a view of Pitcher Mountain and the windmills in Lempster. Further west, we could see the McGovern's house and Bethan Kendrick's field. Perspective is everything. I had imagined Kendrick's field west of McGovern's house because the road leading to her house and land is west of the Peery/McGovern driveway off of Old Stoddard Road, but from our vantage point we could see that the Kendrick's road curved around behind the McGoverns so that the field is to the Northeast of their home. Interesting!
We came upon an perplexing stone wall configuration: a short wall, connecting two parallel walls. What was the purpose of this configuration? We don't know, but the parallel walls, varying from 30 to 60 feet from each other, offered a nice pathway up the hill. In fact, there was a trail of sorts, a narrow footpath created by a surveyor at some time.
At one point, we observe a large quartzite rock in the stone wall and discovered that the rock had little to no lichen or moss growing on it, while the granite rocks around it had fairly rich crops of both moss and lichen. Why was this? I surmised that the quartz didn't attract the moss and lichen because its surface is much cooler than the surrounding granite. Just a guess, but clearly, the quartz, like marble, is much colder to the touch then the granite. Why is that? One must investigate the properties of various rocks and minerals and discover the answer. We decided that a snack would aid in our skills of deduction and had a slice each of the pumpkin loaf cake that I had brought along for just such a purpose (and because we always get hungry!).
I should mention that at this point we were at the edge of a sizeable spruce wood. Because it looked so inviting, we decided to explore this area. Since once last year, we found an antler in a spruce wood, we also concluded that if we split up a bit, we might find another antler today. No such luck, but we still enjoyed the journey. Some day, we will find another antler. The deer and moose have to shed them somewhere.
(To be continued...)
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