Trail Improvements at Goose Pond

I heard recently that trail improvements were underway at Goose Pond in Keene and since I’m all for improving any trails anywhere, I decided to go and see what was being done. I stopped and got this shot of the island just after I got there. This is one of only two or three islands in the immediate area that I never camped on. Now I don’t think you’re allowed to camp on any of them.

It was clear right off that some serious changes were being made. This hauler was moving crushed stone to wherever it was needed. Since the trails here are very muddy in places I was happy to see it.

It looked to be inch and a half to two inch stone, which isn’t too bad to walk on because it packs well. It’s certainly better than mud.

Drainage diches, much like those used by the railroad, had been dug. It looked like they were already doing their job of giving any water on the trail a place to go.

Wherever there are breaks in the trailside growth the trails stay relatively well lit and dry but there are places where thick evergreens mean little sunshine, so the trail gets muddy. This trail mostly follows the contour of the pond, but there are a few places where you lose sight of the water and I’ve met people out here who were confused and had lost their way.

New trail signs should help people find their way.

The trails here have always been blazed with white blazes on the trees but many people lose sight of them easily. The way to prevent that is to make sure you can see the next blaze from the one you’re closest to, but in practice that doesn’t always happen.

There were many new bridges that had been built over streams and muddy spots and this was the longest and most elaborate. I tried to count them but I lost count at 7. If I had to guess I’d say there were twice that many that had been built. That’s a huge amount of work when you’re doing it way out here.

Other signs made sure people knew what was going on. I believe the city of Keene received a $45,000 dollar grant to pay for all of this.

This forest has always been a good place to find mushrooms and slime molds and I saw a few on this day. I really thought there would be more though, considering how much rain we’ve had. I did see lots of yellow finger coral fungi. They look like small yellow flames licking up out of the dark soil they prefer growing in.

I also saw a few blue staining boletes. Some of these get quite big and are easy to see.

The underside of the cap is what stains blue and you can see how my fingerprints have done just that. There are many boletes that stain blue and they are easily misidentified, so I’ll just say that this is a bolete that stains blue. Many blue staining boletes are also poisonous. Though there are gilled boletes most have pores or tubes on the undersurface as this one did. Sometimes the underside of the cap is a different color but the color of this one was fairly uniform all over.

Pretty little purple cort mushrooms are everywhere this year but this is the first one I’ve seen growing on a log. All the ones I’ve seen have appeared to grow in soil but there might have been wood buried just under the soil surface that I didn’t see. Purple cort fungi have a rather bitter slime on their caps and that most likely accounts for their not being eaten by squirrels or other critters.

What I believe is a coral fungus called Clavaria ornatipes grew up out of the soil in a darkly shaded spot. These fungi are spatula or club shaped, colored greyish to pinkish gray though these looked white to me. They often shrivel when they dry out and revive after a rain. There are usually hundreds of them and there were many in this spot on this day. Though I’ve searched for years now I can find no common name for this one.

Here was another new bridge, placed off to the side of the trail so the hauler and other equipment could get through. The bridges were being lifted into place by a small excavator; what used to be called a “steam shovel.”

A new bridge like the one in the previous photo had been built upstream from this one, which is out of sight to the left in this view. A new trail leg had been built to it, so it will apparently be a replacement for this one. You can just see the new trail coming down a small hill out beyond the bridge.

Many of the older bridges had been chained to trees to prevent their being washed away by flooding and I wondered if the people building the new bridges knew this. Surely they must. I hope so, otherwise the pond might be full of floating bridges one day.

I was sorry to see that this particular older bridge was going to be replaced, because this view from it out into the pond has always been one of my favorites. I doubt that this view will be able to be seen from upstream at the new bridge but we’ll see. Those are royal ferns growing in the stream and soon they’ll be turning yellow.

White wood asters bloomed in sunny spots. They will soon be followed by whorled white wood asters, which have leaves that do not grow in a true whorl. I’ve always wondered how the person who named them couldn’t have known what a whorl of leaves looked like.

An Indian cucumber root plant caught in a sunbeam looked as if it was floating in space. I can’t think of a better example of a true whorl of leaves than what is seen on this plant. All leaves radiate from a single point on the stem and wrap around it so if seen on edge they will look like a single line. Sepals, petals, stamens, and other plant and / or flower parts can also grow in whorls.

Something that was very surprising was seeing this swamp loosestrife blooming here in a spot I must have walked by at least 50 times. I got here a little late but there were a few flowers still in bloom. This plant is rare in this area in my experience. It is also called water willow.

I’ve never seen a goose on Goose Pond but I know they come here because I’ve seen their feathers. That feather on the right has a fishing spider on it but I didn’t see it until I saw the photo, otherwise I would have zoomed in for a closer look.

One of the dancer damselflies was tired of dancing and rested on a sun warmed stone. Google lens says this is a spring water dancer but I haven’t been able to verify that. What I can say is the spring water dancer likes to congregate around springs and seeps and there are plenty of those here.

I don’t see many fungi growing on stone but here were some small corals doing just that. Of course they were actually growing in the accumulated forest litter that had broken down enough to support them. It shows that some fungi don’t need much soil to grow in. I think these were crested corals.

When I visit Goose Pond I always follow the trail clockwise for no particular reason and when I do that this stone is one of the last things of interest I see. This stone is an enigma because it isn’t natural and doesn’t seem to have a reason for being here. I used to build stone walls and I’ve worked with enough stone to be sure that it took some time and effort to get 90 degree smooth sides on this one, especially in the 1800s. Since it is buried under tree roots its hard to know its length or if it has any hardware holes in it. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing – just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park? ~Ralph Marston

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Bridging a Dangerous Crossing

When I was a boy growing up in Keene, New Hampshire I spent a lot of time following the railroad tracks that ran just a few yards behind my house. These tracks crossed a lot of roads if you followed them long enough but the hardest one to get across was always route 101, a main artery which runs the width of the state, east to west from Keene to the seacoast. A lot has changed since then; the railroad tracks are now a rail trail and the highway has become so busy that you can hardly get across it.

This view of the rail trail looks north toward the house I grew up in, but also toward Keene State College. Off to the right, unseen in this photo, is the college athletic complex. The students use the rail trail as a convenient way to reach the athletic fields without having to drive to them, so this trail can get very busy in warmer months. Of course all those students have to cross the very busy route 101 to get here and that can be dangerous, so the town came up with a solution: build a bridge over the highway, and this section of rail trail has been closed while that project is completed.

A side trail leads from the rail trail to the athletic complex, but most enter by way of a gate a little further down the trail.

Long before the college built their athletic complex the electric utility ran their high voltage wires through here. I used to spend hours playing under and around these power lines when I was a boy and never gave them a thought, but in April of 2014 one of the wires fell to the ground and tragically, a college employee was electrocuted. For me, who once spent so much time here, the news was a real blow and woke me up to the dangers I faced as a boy without even realizing they existed. I told myself then that I’d never walk under these power lines again and I haven’t but many, especially dog walkers, still do.

Hazel catkins danced in the sunlight. They are the male flowers of the hazelnut shrub, in this case American hazelnut (Corylus americana.) The tiny crimson threads of the female flowers won’t appear until late March and by then the male catkins will be showing signs of shedding pollen.

One of the catkins was deformed and looked like a cartoon animal paw.

The seed heads of the native clematis that we call virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana) decorated a fallen tree. Chances are it once grew to the top of the tree and fell with it. This vine is toxic enough to cause internal bleeding but it was used it as a pepper substitute and called was called “pepper vine” by early pioneers. Native Americans used it to treat migraine headaches and nervous disorders, and for skin infections. Herbalists still use it to treat the same illnesses today.

There are many elms along this trail that have died of Dutch elm disease and invasive Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) vines grow into their tops and slowly pull them down. The bittersweet wants full sunshine and it climbs to the tops of trees to get it; it doesn’t care if the tree is living or not. There are several broken limbs hanging from vines in this view and many downed trees buried in vines along the trail.

In what would have been a short while if I hadn’t kept stopping to look at things I reached the bridge, which is still closed while the freshly poured concrete deck cures. The deck is wrapped in plastic and gets heat pumped up to it from truck sized heaters on the ground below.

I had to wait a while before I could get a shot of the bridge without cars under it. I drive this way each morning on the way to work and I can vouch for the busy-ness of this road. Traffic is almost nonstop at any time of day and I can imagine it being very hard to walk across. It was hard enough when I was ten. I didn’t know it until I saw this photo but the center of the bridge is far to right of the center of the road from this vantage point. It was built in I think 4 pieces and lifted into place by crane.

An invasive burning bush (Euonymus alatus) still had plenty of fruit on it. I was happy to see that the birds weren’t eating it and helping it spread. Studies have shown that 170- 700 seedlings per acre can grow from a single fruiting shrub. If you have hundreds of them fruiting then you have a real problem, and we do. The shrubs get large and shade out native plants and since deer won’t eat them they have virtually no competition or control, so they’re free to form large monocultures where nothing else grows. That’s why planting and / or selling them is banned in New Hampshire.

The bark of this black cherry tree had large areas covered with mealy firedot lichen (Caloplaca citrina.) This yellow to yellow-orange crustose lichen grows on wood or stone and the book Lichens of North America says it is very common lichen that rarely produces spores. The mealy part of its common name comes from the numerous granular soralia, which are used as a vegetative means of reproduction. They are meant to break off and start new lichens.

As you can probably imagine if you brushed against this lichen tiny pieces of it would easily fall from the tree and might even stick to your clothing for a while so you could transport them to another place. Many lichens use this method of reproduction and it appears to be very successful.

This view across a cornfield faces west toward Brattleboro, Vermont and I had forgotten how the wind comes howling over that hill. I used to walk south from my house to a friend’s house on the road that is in front of the hill but can’t be seen, and my right ear would feel just about frozen by the time I got there. When I went back home it was my left ear. Of course it wasn’t cool to wear a hat in those days, but I was wearing one when this photo was taken.

The wind had torn the seeds out of this milkweed pod. It’s not too late; milkweed seeds need at least 3-6 weeks of cold to grow to their best.

There were a few cobs left on the corn plants and they were at just the right height for Canada geese, which land here in quite large numbers in the fall.

Keene sits in a bowl with hills as the rim on land that was once swampy ground, so farmers dug drainage ditches to dry out the fields. They were a ten year old boy’s dream come true and I still walk along them occasionally even today. There are some beautiful wildflowers that grow on their banks, including some of the darkest purple New England asters I’ve seen.

I saw one of the tiniest bird nests I’ve ever seen. It could have just about hidden behind a hen’s egg and I have no idea what bird might have built it. A hummingbird maybe?

A dime size (.70 in) spot of white on a tree caught my eye and when I moved closer I saw that it was covered with blue dots. It was a beautiful sight and I didn’t know it at the time but its name is (I think) the frosted comma lichen (Arthonia caesia.) The unusual spherical blue dots are its Ascomata.

Ascomata are the fruit bodies of lichens and contain the spores, which can number in the millions.They are most commonly bowl-shaped (apothecia) but may take a spherical (cleistothecia) or flask-like (perithecia) form. This lichen has spherical ascocarps so they must be cleistothecia. They’re also very beautiful, and are the only truly blue fruit bodies I’ve seen on a lichen. Some, like those on the smoky eye boulder lichen, can be blue due to the slant of the light falling on them and I found a completely blue lichen recently but it had turned blue because of the cold. This one is naturally blue and I loved seeing it.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road. ~Stephen Hawking

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