A Rail Trail With a Lesson

Last Saturday I did a post about a rail trail that I had hiked in Winchester and in that post I mentioned that I was a bit anxious that the trail looked like it was no longer being maintained. The maintenance of many of these rail trails is handled by local snowmobile clubs. They volunteer their time and effort to keep these trails open for winter use but there is only so much they can do, and I’m afraid they might have had to let that one go. This post will show what happens to a trail when it is no longer maintained, and why the thought that some trails might no longer be maintained gets me a little anxious.

Two weeks ago we had a thunderstorm. It didn’t seem like anything special; we expect thunderstorms in June in this part of the world. It only lasted for maybe 20 minutes and as I say, it didn’t seem like anything special. Until I looked out my window and saw my neighbor’s huge old oak tree on my lawn, that is. Then I knew that this wasn’t just a June thunderstorm. In fact thousands of trees had been blown down all over the state, and close to 100,000 people lost power because of it. This day, on this trail, I saw at least 10 trees that had blown across the trail, but they had all been cleaned up. Do we ever wonder who does all the cleaning up? I wonder. Some trees fell where I work, and it took all day for two of us to clean up a single pine tree like the one pictured above. It was a lot of work, and that was just one tree.

There will be more tree work on this trail; I saw 3 or 4 trees that had fallen and gotten hung up on trees on the other side of the trail. These are called “widow makers” and I hope nobody is under them when they come down.

I’m still not seeing many fungi because of the dryness, but a little rain the day before was apparently enough to coax this yellow mushroom into fruiting. It had a little slug damage on the cap but it was still worthy of a photo or two.

A colony of heal all plants (Prunella lanceolata) grew in a sunny spot, still moist from the previous day’s showers. I love to see these small but beautiful orchid like flowers.

Other flowers I like to see are maiden pinks (Dianthus deltoids) and they found sunny spots to grow in too. At first I thought they were their cousins the Deptford pinks (Dianthus armeria) but the jagged circle in the center of the flower told the story. Deptford pinks don’t have this feature.  They should be along any time now.

There are lots of box culverts carrying streams under this rail trail but much of the rail bed was built on fill that was packed between two hills, and in some cases it’s a 50 foot climb down to see the culverts. This example was the only one that was just a few feet below the rail bed. That granite lintel stone over the opening is about two feet thick; strong enough to have locomotives roll over it for well over a century.

There are plenty of other reminders of the railroad out here as well, like this old signal box. I once had an asbestos abatement contractor tell me that these were often lined with asbestos, so it’s best to just let them be.

Old stone walls still mark the boundary lines between private and railroad property.

I’ve never seen a horse on this trail but you can tell that they’ve been here.

I was surprised to find many pinesap plants (Monotropa hypopitys) up and ready to bloom. I don’t usually find these until well after their cousins the Indian pipes (Monotropa uniflora) bloom, but I haven’t seen a single Indian pipe yet this year. The chief differences between the two plants are color and flower count. Indian pipes are stark white and have a single flower, while pinesap plants are honey colored or reddish with multiple flowers. Neither plant photosynthesizes. Instead they receive nutrients from fungi that are associated with the roots of oaks and pines.

I’m guessing this log must act like a sponge and hold water, because it had coral fungus all over it. I think the soil is simply too dry to support much fungi at the moment.

I think these were crown tipped coral fungi (Clavicorona pyxidata) but since I don’t have a microscope to make identification a certainty, please don’t hold me to that.

This is a great trail for groups of people to walk because it is so wide. I think 4 people could walk side by side over most of it. It is level over much of its length and mostly arrow straight as well. When it does curve the curves are so gentle you don’t even realize it.

And that is why this should tell you something; the railroad would have never built anything like this. It’s hard to tell but it goes steeply uphill and the curves are far too sharp for a train to follow. That’s because this is a detour around the actual railbed, which lies abandoned over there on the right.

If you were to ignore the detour and keep walking straight on, this is what you’d find; the original rail bed. After I climb over and under a few downed trees, we’ll have a look.

The original rail bed was another deep cut, with a man-made canyon hacked out of the stone hillside. I’ve explored it before and found that the far end is blocked by many tons of gravel, which was poured into the canyon when a road was built across it. It’s a confusing conundrum, because I’m sure both the road and railbed are very old. If the road was there when the railbed was built there should be a tunnel under the road. If the road was built later over a running railroad there would have been a bridge or trestle over the rails. In any event there is just a huge mound of gravel at the end, and that has caused the drainage ditches on either side of the railbed to fail, so I got very wet feet in here. I should have worn my winter hikers.

These photos show what our rail trails would look like if the maintenance on them were to suddenly stop. When I say that we owe our snowmobile clubs and all of the other volunteers who keep these trails open a huge debt of gratitude, I’m not joking. I think it took me over two hours to pick my way through the entire length the first time I explored it, and this section isn’t even a mile long.

The woods have a luminous quality out here but even so this part isn’t a very pleasant walk. I spent far more time climbing over trees and avoiding walking in standing water than I did actually walking so I decided not to follow the canyon to the end. Standing in ankle deep mud taking photos isn’t much fun, so my only thought was to get out of here.

I grew up in a house that was just a few yards from a Boston and Maine Railroad track that freight trains ran over twice a day, so when I saw them tear up all the rails and take them away it was traumatic enough to keep me off rail trails for a very long time. Seeing a dirt trail where the trains once ran was a hard thing but finally after 30 years or so I convinced myself that it was time to get over it and I’ve been walking these rail trail ever since. In that time I’ve discovered what a great gift they are. For a nature lover who wants to get far into the woods without having to cut a trail, there is simply nothing that can compare. I hope we will all do our best to keep them open, even if it is simply telling a town or state representative how much we enjoy them. To stand aside and watch nature reclaim something so unique and valuable would be a real tragedy, in my opinion.

It’s amazing how quickly nature consumes human places after we turn our backs on them. Life is a hungry thing. ~Scott Westerfeld

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Fall Fungi (and Friends)

There are many types of coral fungi in the woods at this time of year. They can be very hard to identify without a microscopic look at the spores but I think this one might be cockscomb or crested coral (Clavulina coralloides.) Crested corals have branches that end in sharp tips and these tips will often turn brown as the ones in the photo have done. I don’t see these as often as I do other types of coral fungi.

The branch ends on this coral fungus are blunt and yellowish so I think this might be a golden coral (Ramaria aurea.) These are common here and can get quite large. This one was 4 or 5 inches across. It’s always exciting to find such beautiful things coming up out of the dead leaves.

 

Turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) start to show up when the leaves that hid them fall off the lower branches of shrubs. They come in many colors, the most common being shades of shades of brown, but sometimes you can find purple or blue ones like those pictured here. Turkey tails are bracket fungi that always grow on wood and they are always worth looking for.

Dyer’s Polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) is also called the velvet topped fungus because of its hairy appearance. These fungi are parasitic on the roots and heartwood of living white pines in the eastern U.S. and cause root rot. I usually find them on logs though, and have never seen one on a live tree. This fungus changes color as it ages. If found when young it can be used to dye wool a soft yellow or orange and older examples will dye wool brown.

This is what a young dyer’s polypore looks like. As you can see the color difference between young and old examples is dramatic.  Some of these mushrooms can get quite large but this one was only about 3 inches across. Though they sometimes look as if they’re growing on the ground as this one does, they’re really growing on conifer roots or buried logs.

 

Golden pholiota (Pholiota limonella) mushrooms grew on a beech log and looked like scaly puffballs, so it took a while to identify them. They can grow on living or dead wood in the summer and fall and usually form clusters. Their orange-yellow caps are slimy and covered in reddish scales. The late afternoon sun really brought out the golden color of these examples.

Lemon drops (Bisporella citrina) look like tiny lemon candies that have been sprinkled over logs, but they are sac fungi with stalked fruit bodies. The term “sac fungi” comes from microscopic sexual structures which resemble wineskins. There are over 64,000 different sac fungi, including cup and “ear” fungi, jelly babies, and morel mushrooms.

Lemon drops start life as a tiny yellow disc and look as if they lie flat on the log, but a closer look shows that each disc hovers just above the surface on a short stalk. As they age each disc will become cup shaped. The “citrina” part of the scientific name comes from the Latin citrin, and means “lemon yellow.” Lemon drops live up to their name and great clusters of them can often be seen on stumps and logs from quite a distance. Single examples are extremely small and very hard to get a sharp photo of.

I’m not sure what this misshapen mushroom was. It looks more like a truffle than anything else but it was growing above ground and truffles grow underground.

NOTE: Two visitors have identified this fungus as an aborted entoloma (Entoloma abortivum). Thanks guys!

When the remains of the 5000 year old “Ice Man” were found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, one of the things he carried were dried pieces of tinder polypore (Fomes fomentarius.) Treated strips of the fungus made exceptional fire starting material. Because it burned slowly it could also be used to carry fire from one camp to another and it even has medicinal properties, so it would have been a very valuable possession in 3,300 BCE.

I found these odd shaped black fungi on a white pine log. I don’t know if they started life black or if they turned black as they aged. They were very rubbery like a jelly fungus.

 

September has been a dry month so I haven’t seen many slime molds, but I do have a few shots of some that I found. I think this one might be Badhamia utricularis forming fruit bodies before going on to produce sporangia, which simply means that it’s going through the process of releasing its spores. Some slime molds consume fungi and this one seems to prefer crust fungi.

One of the most fascinating things about slime molds is how they can move. They are thought of as a giant single cell with multiple nuclei which can all move together as one at speeds of up to an inch per hour. They can also climb and often do so to release their spores. In this photo the sporangia (fruiting bodies) of Leocarpus fragills have climbed a twig so the wind might better disperse their spores. The twig was little more than the size of a toothpick, so that should give you an idea of how small the sporangia are. They are often so small that I can’t see any real detail by eye, so I have to let the camera see for me-quite literally “shooting in the dark.”

One of the frustrating things about slime molds is that there seems to be very little in print about them so they can be very hard to identify. However if you can get beyond that and just enjoy them for their beauty, then a whole new world that you never knew existed will open up for you. But wear your glasses; each of the tiny white “pearls” pictured was barely bigger than the period made by a pencil on a piece of paper.

Stuff your eyes with wonder … live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. ~Ray Bradbury

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Time for a Climb

I’ve heard a lot over the years about 912 foot Hewe’s Hill in Swanzey New Hampshire and about the 40 ton glacial erratic boulder that sits atop it, so recently I decided to finally climb up and see it for myself. It’s called Tippin Rock because according to legend “with a shove of your shoulder under the right spot” you can make 40 tons of granite rock gently, like a baby’s cradle.

The trail starts out as little more than a game trail, single file narrow, until it widens just a little as the above photo shows. Even though it’s a little wider here than where it started it’s still one person wide. Tall tree seedlings crowd in on both sides, obscuring any view into the forest.

Finally it widens out to road width and steepens, and you can see deep into the forest ahead and on both sides. When bears are fattening up for hibernation I feel a lot more comfortable on a trail like this than I do on a close, winding trail where you can only see a few feet directly in front of you. There is less chance of being surprised.

I found some violet toothed polypore (Trichaptum biformis) growing on a log. I don’t see these very often so I wasn’t thinking about getting a shot of the undersides, which are toothed. I like their purple edges.

I also saw coral mushrooms (Ramariopsis kunzei) as white as the snow that will soon cover them. I always wonder how something that has just come up out of the ground can be so clean. Coral fungi get their name from the corals that grow under the sea.

Before too long the canopy thins and sunlight gets through, and you know that you’re near the top.

The sign proves it. I had to laugh at the way it stated (and pointed to) the obvious.

So this is Tippin Rock? It’s only as big as a delivery van, so I wouldn’t have guessed. It’s a good thing the sign was there!

A glacial erratic is defined as “a piece of rock that differs from the size and type of rock native to the area in which it rests.” You have to wonder where this one came from.

Of course I immediately (before anyone could see) “got my shoulder under” every likely spot on the 40 ton behemoth and shoved and grunted and sweated and swore, but I couldn’t get it to move. I crawled under it to see what made it tick and found that, as the photo shows, it has a keel much like a boat. Who would have ever guessed that a glacier could set a 40 ton boulder down on a sheet of granite on a mountain top, in exactly the right position so it would rock back and forth? At least, it rocks for people who know the secret. I thought about finding a log and prying it, but then decided that doing so would be cheating. It would be hard to claim that I had tipped Tippin Rock knowing that I had cheated.

Did this lady tip it, I wonder? Actually, maybe I’m better off not knowing. I found this photo on line and what I find most interesting about it is how the visible side of the boulder is covered with rock tripe lichens. Rock tripe is a lichen that loves to grow on very large boulders and it can often be found on mountain and hill tops. It’s similar to toadskin lichen which we will see a little later. The lady’s outfit and the fact that the first really affordable camera-the Kodak Brownie-came out some time around 1900, means that it’s very safe to assume that a hundred years ago there were lichens on this rock face.

 

So where did all the lichens go? This is the same face of the boulder shown in the previous circa 1900 photo, and it’s as clean as if it had been scrubbed. Did the trees grow and shade them out? Did they all die and just fall off? Did the weather wash them away? Tests have shown that lichens are tough enough to survive even the vacuum of space and tenacious enough to etch glass for a foothold, so how and why they disappeared from this rock face is a real mystery.

I leaned my monopod against it to give you an idea of how big this stone really is. Fully extended the monopod is about 6 feet long. I’m guesstimating the boulder is about 9-10 feet high, 18-20 feet long and 8-9 feet wide.

 

After you’ve worn yourself out trying to tip Tippin Rock you can follow a small side trail that leads to a lookout, and these cliffs are one of the things you pass on the way. Though it doesn’t look it in the photo it must have been 30 feet or more to the top. I wasn’t able to back away from them for a better angle because there was another even longer drop behind me which it wouldn’t have been good to test. People come up here to rock climb, and I can see why.

Toadskin lichen (Lasallia papulosa) decorated several boulders and I was happy to see it. This makes two places that I’ve found it now. Both take quite a climb to get to, so I wonder if altitude plays a part in where it will grow. It had just rained the night before so these examples were plump, pliable, and pea green. The black parts are their fruiting bodies (Apothecia) and these lichens were fruiting heavily.

The views from up here look south toward Massachusetts and are some of the best I’ve seen. This is a place that makes you feel small and that’s a good feeling to have every now and then. Sometimes feeling small reminds us just how big the universe is.

This beautiful view, taken as I had my back against the boulder that the toadskin lichens grew on, is my favorite. Every time I look out over such vast expanses of unbroken forest I realize that I’m seeing fairly close to what the early settlers would have seen. I wonder what they thought when they climbed a hill and found something like this before them. How daunting it must have been to know that you had to carve a homestead out of that wilderness with a single axe-your most valuable possession. I can’t help but wonder what I would have done. Would I have had the strength and courage to go on or would I have turned around and gone back to where I came from?  Still more questions which (thankfully) I’ll never find the answers to.

A man does not climb a mountain without bringing some of it away with him and leaving something of himself upon it. ~Martin Conway.

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More Fall Mushrooms

Before nature interrupted this nature blog with its show of colorful leaves and frosty flowers I was hunting for more fall mushrooms. What follows are a few of those I found.                       If you wear glasses you might want to keep them handy, because some of these mushrooms are quite small. These worm like coral fungi (Clavaria fragilis) were just about the size of toothpicks.

This puffball was blue. I can’t even guess why.  These two couldn’t have grown much closer together. I think the coral fungus might be cockscomb coral (Clavulina cristata.) The mushroom looks like one of the amanitas, some of which are deadly.

These lemon drops (Bisporella citrina) start out orb or disc shaped like in the photo, and then become cup shaped as they age. None of those shown was larger than a pencil eraser. I put a nickel on this pine dye polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) so you could see how big it was. It was about dinner plate size. I’ve never seen this one, but I loved the colors in it. Pholiota squarrosoides doesn’t seem to have a common name but can be recognized by their scaly, slimy caps. These were growing out of a crack in a log. This bracket fungus is one of the most showy that I’ve seen. I can’t find its identity. 

Pinwheel Marasmius (Marasmius capillaris) have been abundant this year-possibly because the oak leaves started falling early and they need oak leaves to fruit on. 

Quite often if I see a purple mushroom the woods are full of them. The same is true with orange mushrooms, but for some reason yellow mushrooms usually appear singly as this one did. I think this might be a Hygrocybe ceracea, which is one of the wax cap mushrooms.

Even mushroom experts agree that small brown mushrooms can be hard to identify so they are often lumped into a category known as LBMs, or little brown mushrooms. Little brown mushrooms are found everywhere and in all seasons. Some, like the Galerinas, can be deadly, so they are a good thing to stay away from.

A Connecticut woman just poisoned herself and her entire family by feeding them mushrooms she picked in her back yard. Doctors say that they are lucky to be alive. If you are interested you can read the story by clicking here.

People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering ~ Augustine

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