Willard Pond

Last Sunday I was up before dawn with a mission in mind. It had rained most of the day Saturday and was due to rain again this day, but the weather people assured me that there would be a dry time until at least noon. With staying dry in mind I left as early as I could for Willard Pond in Antrim. The oaks and beeches are our last trees to turn and I didn’t want to miss them. If the road to the pond was any indication they were going to be beautiful this year.

This is the view that greeted me as I parked in the parking lot. The beech trees looked to be at their peak of color.

Willard Pond is a wildlife sanctuary under the protection of the New Hampshire Audubon Society and it is unusual because of the loons that nest here. There are also bears, moose and deer living here, as well as many bird species, including bald eagles.

Last year when I was here there were blue skies and white puffy clouds, and the sun made the forested hills burn with reds, yellows, and oranges. This time the sky was gray and the clouds darker, and the colors were muted but no less beautiful. After the drought we’ve had I certainly can’t complain about a few rain clouds in my photos.

Every now and then the sun would peak through a hole in the cloud cover and light the trees up beautifully. The thick dark line at the base of each stone in this shot shows how much water the pond has lost to drought.

At 108 acres in size Willard pond is not small. I doubted I’d get all the way around it and I didn’t even know if there was a trail all the way around, but I set off  to see what I could see.

The trail was leaf covered as I expected but the trees were well blazed, so there was no chance of absent mindedly wandering into the woods. Even without a trail and blazed trees it’s close to impossible to become lost on the shores of a pond or lake. At least physically. Mentally it’s very easy to lose yourself in the beauty of a place like this.

The oaks were doing their best but from where I stood the beech trees were stealing the show, and they were glorious.

Here’s a little oak sapling. As I said, they were trying, too.

Two or three bridges crossed long dried up streams but at least one still had water in it.

It seemed odd that other streams had dried up while this one still had so much water in it but that seems to be what is happening this year. I’ve seen good size streams with nothing but gravel in their beds.

Blueberry bushes lined the trail and wore various shades of red and purple. Blueberries have beautiful fall colors and are a good choice instead of invasive shrubs like burning bushes.

Surprisingly a few of the maples were still showing color. Most haven’t had leaves for a week or more.

The sky was quickly getting darker but the oaks and beeches still burned with their own light, and I was the only one here to see them. Though I am a lover of solitude it seemed too bad that so many were missing this.

Have you noticed how much yellow and orange there are in this post? Even the fungi were orange, but crowded parchment fungi (Stereum complicatum) are always orange.  They also live up to their common name by almost completely covering any log they grow on.

I don’t remember seeing this granite bench when I was here last year. I marveled at the ingenuity of the stone workers, getting such a heavy thing out here. The trail is one person wide and weaves through boulders and trees, so there was no way they could have used machinery to get it here unless it was a helicopter. They must have been very strong.

A large beech limb had fallen and lost its bark. It fell right along the trail and made it seem as if a carpenter had built a smooth, polished bannister to help people negotiate the rocky and root strewn trail. While I’m thinking of it, if you come here wear good sturdy hiking boots. This isn’t the place for sneakers or flip flops.

In places huge boulders seemed ready to tumble down the hillside, but they have probably rested in the same spot since the last ice age. This one was easily as big as a one car garage. The tree on the right has displayed remarkable resilience by shaping itself to conform to the shape of the stone.

This is truly a wild place, untouched for the most part except for the trail I was on and occasional evidence of saw cuts. Trees seem to fall across the narrow trail quite regularly and, except for cutting out the piece blocking the trail, they are left to lie where they have fallen. This makes for some interesting tree borne fungi.

Like tiny fingers of flame, orange spindle coral fungi (Ramariopsis laeticolor) leapt from a crack in a log.

I saw a lot of signs that beavers were once here in the form of blackened stumps that they had cut years ago, but I didn’t know they were still here until I saw this very recently gnawed beech tree. Since the tree was about two feet across I wondered if maybe they had bitten off more than they could chew. It’s going to make a big noise when it falls and I hope I’m nowhere near it.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) grows in great abundance here, all along the trail. As flowers go they might not seem very showy but when they are the only thing blooming on a cold day in November they’re a very cheery sight and their fragrance is always welcome. Tea made from witch hazel tightens muscles and stops bleeding, and it was used by Native Americans for that purpose after childbirth.

Henry David Thoreau said about polypody fern (Polypodium virginianum) “Fresh and cheerful communities of the polypody form a lustrous mantle over rocky surfaces in the early spring.” I would add that, since they are tough evergreen ferns they are there in the winter too, and that’s what cheers me most about them. They are also called rock cap fern or rock polypody because they love to grow on top of rocks, as the above photo shows.

Polypody fern spores grow on the undersides of the leaves in tiny mounds called sori, which are made up of clusters of sporangia (receptacles in which spores are formed) and are naked, meaning they lack the protective cap (indusium) that is found on many ferns. Once they ripen they are very pretty and look like tiny baskets of flowers; in this case yellow and orange flowers. More orange. Why is there so much orange at this time of year when there is very little during the rest of the year I wonder, and why has it taken me so long to notice that fact?

You don’t need a sign to tell you how special this place is because you feel it as soon as you walk into the forest. It’s the kind of place where you can be completely immersed in nature; where time loses importance and serenity washes over you like a gentle summer rain. It’s a beautiful place that is hard to leave; one where I can’t seem to resist taking many more photos then I should, and I apologize once again for going overboard with them. The only thing that stopped me from taking even more was the sky. It got so dark that it seemed to be early evening even though it wasn’t yet noon, so after about three hours I left without having made it even half way around the pond. There was just too much to see.

The serenity produced by the contemplation and philosophy of nature is the only remedy for prejudice, superstition, and inordinate self-importance, teaching us that we are all a part of Nature herself, strengthening the bond of sympathy which should exist between ourselves and our brother man.
~Luther Burbank

Thanks for stopping in.