Dickinson Forest / Muster Field

I have helpers that readers of this blog don’t ever hear from and who I don’t thank enough. They send me corrections when I’ve misidentified plants, reveal the names of plants that I don’t know, and pass along tips about places that might be worth a visit. One of the places mentioned recently was Dickinson Memorial Forest in Swanzey, which was once owned by a prominent local family. Since I’d heard of it but had never been I decided to visit.

When you’ve reached this point you have a choice to make; you can turn right and follow the trail into the forest or you can follow this old road into Muster Field, so named because volunteer firemen used to muster and train here. I followed both but my first choice was through these old gate posts.

I chose the old road because it follows the Ashuelot River which is off to the right, and because this is just the kind of place that I spent large parts of my boyhood exploring. Before I left this place my spirits had soared and I was feeling like a kid again and smiling from ear to ear. I’ve returned several times since because for me being out here is like walking into a time machine.

Old friends like striped wintergreen (Chimaphila maculata) told me that this land has been this way without being disturbed for a very long time. I’ve read that this plant won’t grow on land that has been disturbed within the last century. It grows either in the woods or just at their edges; places where the plow wouldn’t have gone. I rarely see it and I think this is only the third or fourth place that I’ve found it. It’s very happy here and is going to bloom soon.

Shinleaf (Pyrola elliptica,) another of our native wintergreens, grew in a large colony here. This plant’s common name comes from the way Native Americans used it as a poultice to heal wounds; especially shin wounds, apparently. It contains compounds similar to those in aspirin and a tea made from it was used for many of the same ailments. The nodding white, waxy flowers are fragrant and very hard to get a good photo of.

The river is doing what rivers do, which is eat away at their banks. Large sections of the silty embankment in this area have fallen into the river several times recently by the looks. In one spot it has fallen away right to the edge of the road. I drove out here one day not realizing just how close to the road the undercut embankment was, and I’m very lucky that my truck and I didn’t end up in the Ashuelot. Since then I haven’t driven past the gate posts in the second photo, but someone really should put signs warning people not to drive out here.

The reason I drove out here that day was because I was short on time and I wanted to see if the Canada lilies (Lilium canadense) that I saw on a previous visit were blooming. They weren’t then but they eventually did. I think that these plants succeed so well because they get tall enough to rise up above the surrounding vegetation to where the sunshine is. They soar to 7 feet tall sometimes and remind me of chandeliers at this stage.

In 1857 Henry David Thoreau was told by a Native American guide how the bulbs of this plant were cooked with meat in soups and stews to thicken them, much like flour does. Henry dug some and ate them raw, finding that they tasted somewhat like “raw green corn on the ear.” I’ve always been told that lilies were toxic when eaten so I’d say Henry was a lucky man. Cooking must remove the toxicity, which would explain how natives ate them regularly.

It’s nearly impossible to confuse the beautiful flowers of Canada lily with any other. Its large size, spotted throat, large red anthers and bright yellow petals and sepals make it unique among wildflowers in this area. We do have another native lily called the wood lily (Lilium philadelphicum,) but its blossoms are orange and point to the sky rather than nod like these do.

A family of Canada geese relaxed on the far bank of the Ashuelot. This photo shows how low the water level is.

A turtle was out for a stroll on the old road. She didn’t say where she was going but I’m assuming that she was looking for a suitable place to lay her eggs. She must have had quite a struggle to get up here from the river.

A spangled fritillary hid in the tall grass at the edge of the road. They and many other large butterflies love Canada lilies and like me were probably waiting impatiently for them to blossom.

In the Dickinson forest a dead tree had fallen across the trail and was hung up on some hemlock branches. This is a dangerous situation and I hope whoever maintains these trails will remove it. It wouldn’t take much of a breeze to blow it down and I hope there isn’t someone under it when it falls.

A boardwalk and footbridge crossed a seasonal stream, which just a muddy ditch at this time of year.

I didn’t see any deer but I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw me. This hoof print looked very fresh.

Whorled loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia) grew all along the river. This pretty little flower has quite a long blooming season and it and its cousin the swamp candle (Lysimachia terrestris) can be seen in moist areas throughout the hottest months. Its common name comes from the way its flowers and leaves grow in a whorl about the stem. Native Americans brewed a medicinal tea from the stem and leaves of whorled loosestrife to alleviate kidney ailments.

The plant also played an important part in the American Revolution. According to the book The History and Folklore of North American Wildflowers by Timothy Coffee “With the Revolution came the refusal to drink the tea of commerce and our four leaved loosestrife, being dried and steeped, was used in its stead.” And that’s why another common name for the plant is “liberty tea.”

The biggest surprise here was finding false hellebore. It grew quite a distance from the river, which I thought was odd because it usually grows as close to water as it can. False hellebore is one of the most toxic plants in our forests. Eating just a small amount can be lethal and people have even gotten sick from drinking water that it grew in.

Even more surprising than finding the false hellebore was finding that it was flowering. That told me that these plants had grown here undisturbed for quite a while. Only mature plants will blossom and can take 10 years or more to do so. The bright yellow anthers were missing so I knew these flowers had nearly gone by. I never realized that the flower’s green petals and sepals are as pleated as the leaves are. There are pairs of nectar glands at their bases and ants visit the flowers to feed on their sweet treats.

Forget me nots lined the river bank. There were thousands of them, far more than I’ve ever seen in one spot. Forget me nots or no, I won’t forget this place. In fact I’m having a hard time staying away.

A ditch somewhere – or a creek, meadow, woodlot or marsh…. These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin.… Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches and the field, the woods, the ravines – can teach us to care enough for all the land. ~ Robert Michael Pyle

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Fall Comes to the Ashuelot River

The leaves are starting to turn in this part of New Hampshire so I thought I’d take a walk or two (or three) along my favorite river, the Ashuelot. I grew up on its banks and have been walking them since I was a small boy because there is so much to see.

The word Ashuelot is pronounced either ash-wee-lot or ash-will-ot, and is supposed to mean “place between” in Native American language. Between what, I don’t know; possibly between the hills that surround the Connecticut River valley that it flows through.

In some places ferns are just starting to take on their fall color and in others they’ve all but gone by.

Canada geese seem to use the river as a navigation aid and can often be seen following it in the spring and fall. They also have a few favorite places where they stop and rest.

 

Plants grow along the Ashuelot that I’ve never found growing anywhere else. This cocklebur (Xanthium strumarium) is a good example. The small oval burs aren’t quite as sticky as burdock burs but they will catch on clothing. Cocklebur leaves require long nights to trigger production of the chemicals needed to produce flowers, so they are considered “short day” plants. Their leaves are so sensitive that any light shining on them at night can keep the plant from flowering.

Virginia creeper vines (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) climb high in the trees along the river bank to reach as much sunshine as they can. They aren’t noticed for most of the year but when their leaves start to turn they can’t be ignored.

Virginia creeper berries are poisonous to humans but many birds and small animals eat them.

This is one of my favorite views found along this particular stretch of river.

One late afternoon the wind was blowing hard enough to make the trees creek and groan, and this great blue heron decided to wait it out on a log rather than be blown out of the sky. It was too cloudy for anything but a soft shot of him across the river.

 

A few days later he was in the shade so I took another soft shot. We haven’t had much rain throughout September and this photo shows how much riverbank has been exposed due to the dryness. The water level is a good three feet lower than it was at the end of August. It’s amazing how fast it can drop, but even more amazing to think that it can gain back what it lost with one good rain storm. .

 

At the spot where I often take photos of curling waves the flow has been reduced to little more than a trickle.

The mallards don’t seem to mind the low water. I think it makes their finding food a little easier.

 

Bumblebees have felt the cooler weather and their flights from aster to aster have slowed enough to make it seem like they will simply drop to the ground in mid flight.

Nodding smartweed (Persicaria lapathifolia) gets its common name from its drooping flower heads and the very sharp, peppery taste of the stems, which makes the tongue smart. It doesn’t seem to bother ducks, geese, and all of the other animals that eat it.

Witch hazel (Hamamelis virginiana) is the last native shrub to flower in our forests and it has just started blooming along the Ashuelot. The flowers are below the leaves so you have to look closely to find them if you are searching before the leaves fall.  There isn’t another flower that I can think of that is quite like them, so searching is worth the effort.

 

I love to come to this spot in the late afternoon at this time of year to just sit and watch what the setting sun does to the trees. They burn with a blaze of color that becomes more intense as the sun slowly sets, and it is an amazingly beautiful thing to see.

The first act of awe, when man was struck with the beauty or wonder of nature, was the first spiritual experience. ~Henryk Skolimowski

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Rail Trail Discoveries, Part Two

As I said in the last post, rail trails are excellent places to find rare and hard to find plants, including pink lady’s slippers (Cypripedium acaule.) I know of one trail where they grow all along one side of it. How can you witness something so beautiful and not feel grateful to simply be alive?

This old depot in Ashuelot, New Hampshire, just south of Keene, isn’t as elaborately adorned as some that still stand in this area but it has been taken care of and seems to be fairly complete, except for the wooden platform it surely must have had. The train would have stopped just a few feet out from that red door. This was on the Ashuelot branch of the Cheshire Railroad, which was part of the Boston and Maine Railroad system. The Cheshire Railroad ran from Keene to Brattleboro, Vermont, and from there north into central Vermont or south to Massachusetts.

A sister train to the Flying Yankee pictured here would have carried passengers on the Cheshire Railroad from 1935 until its retirement in 1957. The gleaming stainless steel streamliner with “Cheshire” on its nameplate ran over 3 million miles in its history as a state of the art diesel passenger train. Its second car was a combination baggage / mail / buffet dining car and the third car was coach seating and had a rounded end with 270 degrees of glass for observation. It carried 88 passengers. Thanks go to the Troy Cheshire Railroad Depot Commission for providing this information, and to Wikipedia for the photo.

I know that a lot of freight was hauled over these rails but I was surprised to find these old boxcars slowly sinking into the earth outside an old abandoned paper mill. There was a lumber yard and warehouses across the tracks from my grandmother’s house and when I was a boy I used to play in and on boxcars just like these. That was back when the trains were running so I also used to get chased out of them frequently.

These cars were from the Green Mountain Railroad, which still runs as a scenic railway through parts of Vermont.

The old boxcars weren’t coupled correctly, so if you moved one the other wouldn’t follow. Can you see what the problem is?

This is how knuckle couplers should look when coupled to move the cars in tandem. The parts with the holes through them should always front to back as they are in this photo from Wikipedia. Or side to side, depending on how you choose to look at them.

I recently found the largest colony of fringed polygala (Polygala paucifolia) that I’ve ever seen growing out in the middle of nowhere, alongside a rail trail.

It’s always a pleasure to see these little winged beauties. It took quite a bike ride to get to them but it was worth the achy knees.

New Hampshire used to have a lot of paper mills but many have gone out of business. This one seems to be slowly crumbling. I’ve watched buildings like this crumble before and it always seems to start with an unrepaired leak in the roof. The water coming through the roof rots the roof rafters, floor joists and sills, and finally the rotting building is too weak to handle the snow load and, usually after a heavy snowfall, down it comes.

You can find many old rusting railroad artifacts along these rail trails. I took a photo of this object because I didn’t know what it was, and I still don’t. It was about a foot long and quite heavy.

In my 50+ years of being in these woods I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite so strange as this-whatever it is. I call it rock slime because it looked slimy but I was surprised when I poked my finger into it, to find that it felt like cool water and wasn’t slimy or sticky at all. It hung down for about a foot under a rock overhang that constantly dripped water, so that it couldn’t dry out. If you’re reading this and know what it is, or if you’ve seen something like it, I’d love to hear from you.

This is a close up of the rock slime. The back looked the same as the front. Are those eyes I see in there?

Sometimes, rarely but sometimes, you run into a dead end on a rail trail. This fallen tree marked the end of the maintained part of this trail and it reminded me that this is what they would all look like if it wasn’t for the dedicated, hardworking volunteers that keep these trails open for the rest of us. Here in New Hampshire it is mostly snowmobile clubs that do this work all summer and they accept donations. If you use the rail trails in your area, why not find out who maintains them and consider making a small donation or volunteering some time? I’m sure it will be greatly appreciated. Just think of what strange, interesting, and beautiful things we’d all be missing if they weren’t kept open.

Go outside and walk a bit, long enough to take in and record new surroundings.  Enjoy the best-kept secret around – the ordinary, everyday landscape that touches any explorer with magic. ~John R. Stilgoe

Thanks for coming by.

 

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After the Thaw

Though the January thaw was a week long, welcome relief from the biting cold it seemed to pass as quickly as an October afternoon. Hot on its heels came a snowstorm that the weather people told us wouldn’t be anything more than a dusting, but turned out to be several inches of wet, heavy snow that stuck to every branch and twig. The tree in the distance is the one that great blue herons sit in, but even though one of them stayed until it snowed this year, I haven’t seen him or his kinfolk in over a month.  I know if I had wings I’d be heading to someplace a little warmer.

I was up before the sun came over the eastern hills, wanting to make every minute count because there was a strong wind forecast for that afternoon and I knew would it blow all of the snow off the trees. I should have stayed in bed though, because there was no sunshine to be seen and the first few photos I took were dark enough to be unusable. Disappointed, I returned home and waited impatiently for the sun to make an appearance. In the end it decided to take the day off, but the skies finally brightened just enough to get a few shots in.

 

I thought I’d visit some of my favorite places along the Ashuelot River, starting south of Keene in Swanzey and ending north of Keene in Surry. As can be seen in this photo, the January thaw had stripped it of any hint of ice.

This view is from a bridge in the northern part of Keene. It was so quiet here I could hear the slight whispering ripples of the Ashuelot against its banks.  I’ve always thought that winter was so quiet because the snow reflected sound waves and bounced them back where they came from but scientists say that it’s just the opposite-that pores in the snow actually absorb sound waves. If you would like to learn more about snow acoustics you can visit the scientists who make up the Snow Interest Group by clicking here.

 

This covered bridge crosses the Ashuelot River as it winds its way through a local golf course and was built for golf carts. It’s only about one half the size of a standard bridge, but it’s impossible to see that in a photo.

  

Quite often this is a good place to see an example of how even bare trees can block snowfall, but not on this day. The prevailing winds are from the right side (north) in this spot and often the ground on the left side of the line of maple trees and stone walls is almost bare.

There was snow on every tree as far as the eye could see, but by midafternoon the wind had blown most of it away.

I’m sorry that many of these photos have such a bluish cast to them, but that’s just the kind of day it was and no amount of fiddling with the camera would change it. In her blog Breaking New Ground in Zone 6 Annie explained that the blue cast is “due to the density and heaviness of the wet snow. Snow is colorless. Dry, fluffy snow contains more air bubbles to reflect light out, thus looking whiter. The heavy, wet snows absorb more red light and the more red that is absorbed, the bluer the snow.” I don’t know about you, but that’s something I’ve been wondering about for years and I was glad that Annie explained it.

 

In Surry the snow on the trees was so heavy the Ashuelot disappeared beneath them.

  

No matter what angle you viewed it from, the snowy trees almost completely obscured the river. People who have never lived in or visited New England might think scenes like this are common here, but they really aren’t. Many times the snow is quite dry and, though it sits on tree branches it doesn’t stick to them, and it’s that stickiness that seems to make the difference in how beautiful the scenery becomes.  I’d guess that we only see one or two storms each season when everything comes together in just the right way to create scenes like this.

It wasn’t long after this shot of the river that the wind started gusting hard, and it didn’t take long for it to spoil views like this one.  It was a brief but beautiful outing.

There is nothing in the world more beautiful than the forest clothed to its very hollows in snow.  It is the still ecstasy of nature, wherein every spray, every blade of grass, every spire of reed, every intricacy of twig, is clad with radiance. ~William Sharp

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Winter Light

 

I called this post winter light because the light has been so unusal over the past week or two. Or maybe it’s just that I’m noticing it more. It is easy and gentle on the eyes and I pay particular attention to it in the afternoon, hoping for any signs of a lengthening day.

 

This was taken late one afternoon after a snow storm. “Late” afternoon actually means about 4:30 right now.

This was the view out my back door after a recent snowstorm that quit at about mid day and let the sun come out. With such weak sunshine and no wind the snow stayed on the tress for quite a while.

  

The Ashuelot River hasn’t frozen over yet but border ice is forming along its banks, growing slowly in towards its middle. I call these ice shelves, and if you aren’t familiar with the lay of the land on the shoreline, they can be dangerous once covered by snow. Twice last year I found myself standing on ice shelves when I thought that I was standing on dry land. Thankfully, they held my weight each time, but I’m being much more careful this year. Walking on frozen rivers is a dangerous game.

  

In the shade, patterns could be seen in the ice. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website tells me that this ice is called columnar ice because of its column shaped grain. This ice is very clear and usually grows in areas with slower flow. Once the river has been covered bank to bank with ice the crystals continue to grow downward, thickening the ice cover.

  

On a slightly warmer day I tried to get shots of some interesting waves on the Ashuelot. There’s a rhythm to a river just like with most things in nature, and if you tune in to that rhythm you can get shots of cresting waves every time you click the shutter. If you watch a certain spot and only that spot you find that the river does almost the same thing over and over again, just a few seconds apart.

I could see from quite a distance that Mount Monadnock had snow on it but I wanted a closer look so I drove to Perkin’s Pond in Troy, which is a favorite viewing place. The pond was completely frozen over and the only sunshine to be had was up on the mountain. The wind often howls down the length of this pond in winter, making this a very cold spot. Still, I’m sure that it was much colder on the summit.

Snow makes the mountain even more beautiful. It could be ankle deep or shoulder deep. It’s hard to tell from here, and I’m not going to climb it to find out.

 

In summer I’m usually worn out from traipsing through the woods long before the sun sets, but in the winter the days wear out before I do. When you’re out there with a camera on a cold winter day and everything is going well and you feel that you might be getting some good shots, it’s hard to watch the sun set so early.

The setting sun turned the Ashuelot River falls into a golden ribbon one afternoon. I was surprised that they hadn’t frozen.

The river was also colored gold and had frazil ice pans forming in it. Frazil ice forms in super cooled water and then floats to the surface where it clumps together to make various ice formations .They were a sure sign that the water was frigid, no matter how hard the sun tried to hide it.

Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself. Annie Leibovitz

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