Al and I are getting to know the area between Bailey Brook and Kulish Ledges pretty well, having hiked it many times as we plot out a route for a trail to connect the two places. This past Monday, we returned to follow a possible route. We traveled over some terrain that was not familiar to me, but Al had been there before. He had even given a name to one part of the trail; he called it "stove ridge." That seemed like a pretty arbitrary name to me and I said so. "Why did you call it 'stove ridge?'" "Oh, I don't know; it needed a name." Well, I found out farther along--a rusting wood stove with a cast iron pot was sitting in the woods just off the trail. I knew there had to be a reason for the name. Here are a few pictures of the stove and the somewhat leaky pot.
The view from the vantage point overlooking White Swamp, Nubanusit Lake and Spoonwood Pond was obscured by the fog on this misty morning so once we reached that point, we chose not to linger. In the woods, I could see evidence of porcupines at work: trees stripped of bark. We decided not to follow the marked trail to Kulish Ledges, but to venture into some unknown territory. We looked for more evidence of the porcupines, but didn't find it. But we did find our way to a favorite spot which I call "Jigsaw Ice Falls" for the way that the rocks have fallen off the ledge like pieces of a puzzle and the water that drips off the ledge to form interesting icicles.
A few pictures don't do justice to the beauty of this place.
Along our way back, we moved through a very thick spruce woods, with young spruce, which I characterized as toddlers spruce, older trees--teenagers, and the mature spruce-middle-aged and elderly. Of course, getting through the toddler and teenage spruce was difficult, not unlike those years of parenting, but where the mature spruces were predominant, the way was a lot easier.
We found an interesting oak tree, the main trunk of which has grown in a triangular shape closest to the ground. We wondered what could have caused the tree to grow this way and then to correct its growth further up the trunk. It would be interesting to get a cross section of the trunk someday.
Sometimes, it is a good idea to pause in the woods to look around and listen. So much is missed when one is intent on "getting somewhere." At one point, Al and I stood still, looking and listening. I looked at some oak leaves that I could hear rustling in the woods. They hung down from the top of the tree: why hadn't they fallen off? Well, I was looking at a "bear nest." Bears climb oak trees and break off the branches while the leaves are still on the tree. These branches hang down from the top of the tree and don't lose their leaves. We found faint claw marks in the rough bark at the base of the tree. It is so much harder to see marks in a rough barked tree like oak as opposed to beech, in which the claw marks remain clear and discernible years after the bear climbed the tree for the tasty beech nuts. We found a few branches on the ground, with bear chew marks in them. The bear had visited this tree and another within sight of the first tree this past fall. It wasn't a particularly good "mast year" for the oaks and beeches, that is, the trees didn't seem to produce many nuts, but these two trees must have had enough acorns for one bear.
No dead cows today, no thick sphagnum moss, nothing overly spectacular, but the "little things in nature bring me back" (Tara Greenblatt) just the same, even on a misty, wet day, with just a bit of snow to make it interesting.
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