Time for a Climb

I think it had been a year or more since I had climbed the High Blue trail in Walpole so last Saturday that’s where I went. It’s more of a walk than a climb but still, it’s enough to get someone with tired lungs huffing and puffing. It was another beautiful spring day and there is a lot to see there, so I was looking forward to it.

There are a lot of ruts in the old logging road that starts the climb and many of them still had rain water in them. Salamanders took advantage of the small ponds, swimming in them as these two did. New Hampshire has eight native salamanders including the red-spotted newt, and I think that’s what these were. The larva are aquatic and so are the adults, but the juveniles are called red efts and live on land.  They eat just about anything that is small enough, including earthworms and insects. As I walked on I heard the quacking of wood frogs and the trilling of spring peepers, so there is a lot of water in the area.

Coltsfoot plants (Tussilago farfara) were blooming by the dozens.

Striped maple buds (Acer pensylvanicum) are getting bigger each time I see them. They’ll be opening soon.

Hobblebush buds (Viburnum lantanoides) are going to bloom early this year, I think. Normally they wouldn’t open until May but these warm days are accelerating everything.

The early warmth has wreaked havoc on the maple syrup industry. The last article I read said one of the larger local producers was down more than 10,000 gallons below average. This shot shows how most of the big producers collect sap these days; with food grade plastic tubing.

It’s very simple really. The tapper drills a hole in the tree and the black piece seen above is inserted into the hole. The syrup flows through the blue tubing to the green tubing and from there to the collection tanks. Vacuum pumps are sometimes used to pull the sap through the tubing.

It’s nearly impossible to get lost up here with signs like these directing you.

It isn’t far to the summit but as slow as I walk, it takes a little while. I walk slow purposely as I’ve said many times before. Adopt a toddler’s pace and then you begin to see all the things in nature that you’ve been rushing past all these years.

Black knot grew on a young cherry tree. Infected stems swell up and produce hard black knots like those seen here. They will eventually become serious wounds and will eventually kill the tree, so infected limbs should be pruned off 2-4 inches below the knots and buried or burned before bud break the following spring.

Woodpeckers had been gouging out the wood of a dead birch.

This pile of shavings at the base of the tree showed that they had been working hard.

I saw that they were still growing corn here. When I first started hiking here this was a meadow full of wildflowers including orange hawkweed, which is hard to find.

I always wonder who gets the most corn, the farmer of the animals. I think that bears eat a lot of it. I’ve followed game trails away from the cornfield and have found whole stalks that have been dragged off. It takes strength to pull up a corn stalk and I doubt deer could do it.

Willows bloomed off in the distance across the cornfield.

Two or three red maples, all male flowered, bloomed along the trail side of the cornfield.

This is very stony ground up here with ledge outcrops like this one fairly common. I’ve always thought of features like these the bones of the forest.

This outcrop was mostly quartz and rock tripe lichen grew all over it. Rock tripe lichen (Umbilicaria mammulata) gets brownish and curls up when it is dry like these were. You can see the back of it , which is black and pebble textured in this photo. The Umbilicaria part of the scientific name comes from the Latin umbilicus, meaning navel, because of the way they attach themselves to stone with a single attachment point that looks like a navel. It sticks itself to stone by way of this single, navel like attachment point and the rest of the lichen hangs from this central point, much like a rag hanging from a peg. Rock tripe is edible and eating it has saved the lives of people who were lost and starving in the past. Though I imagine they must taste like old rubber, these lichens were a source of emergency food for Native Americans and saved the lives of many an early settler. Even George Washington’s troops are said to have eaten rock tripe to survive the brutal winter at Valley Forge in 1777.

Running club moss (Lycopodium clavatum) is also called stag’s horn clubmoss. This plant gets its name from the way it sends out long, horizontal stems. All along the horizontal stem erect stems form at intervals and roots form where it touches the ground. All of this happens under the leaves so it can be difficult to tell this club moss from others. I can’t say that these plants are rare here, but I don’t see them too often. For you people who have the app, Google lens identifies it as stag’s horn clubmoss.

The remains of an old foundation always make me wonder about the people who once lived up here. It’s easy to forget that just one hundred years ago most of these hills were cleared and used as pasture land. Once the industrial revolution happened people left the farms to work in the mills and ever since the land has been going back to forest.

These people worked hard, whoever they were. This stone wall runs off into the distance as far as the eye can see.

The pond that lives up here already had duckweed growing on it. And it was full of singing frogs.

I’ve seen these what I think are insect egg cases before but I’ve never been able to identify them. If you’ve ever seen a Tic-Tac candy mint, these are the same size and shape that they are. In other words, quite small. Google lens kept trying to identify the shrub instead of them. Apparently it couldn’t see the egg cases.

The sign at the overlook lets you know how high up you are…

…and the view is always blue, hence the name High Blue. The view was a little hazy but I could see the ski trails over on Stratton Mountain in Vermont, which is just across the Connecticut River Valley. I was surprised to see snow on them, because where I was sitting it was about 74 degrees. Far too warm for this early in spring but as anyone who spends much time in nature knows, you have to be at peace with what nature gives.

A beautiful life is not a place at which you arrive, but the experience you create moment by moment. ~Lebo Grand

Thanks for stopping in.

Read Full Post »

Time for a Climb

Sometimes when you live in a forest there is a feeling of closeness, so I like to occasionally visit more open areas to balance things out. Hill climbing usually widens the viewpoint so on Saturday I decided to climb the High Blue trail in Walpole. From up there, I knew there would be nothing blocking my view of the horizon.

There were plenty of flowers to be seen along the way, especially asters and goldenrods. They must have mesmerized me because I got home and discovered that I had no photos of the trail itself, so I have to ask you to imagine walking on your favorite forest trail as you scroll through this post.

Some aster blossoms were about an inch and a half across and that told me they were most likely New England asters. There is no other native aster as big that I know of that will grow in dry places. Some come close in size but they want wet feet and grow on stream banks.

They’re always beautiful no matter what their name or size.

Years ago there was a substantial colony of coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) here that bloomed heavily each spring. They were the most coltsfoot plants I had ever seen in one place but a logging skidder plowed them up and I haven’t seen one bloom here since. I saw plenty of foliage on this day though, and that tells me that they’re making a comeback.

In all the time I’ve been coming here this large plot of land has been a hay meadow, but all of the sudden it’s now it’s a cornfield. I was here last June and the field hadn’t even been plowed, so I was surprised to see so much corn.

In spite of the drought the corn looked good, with large ears showing. Animals had found it though, and they were helping themselves. Possibly raccoons, or maybe turkeys or crows, or maybe all three.

When I was a boy walking along the railroad tracks I saw (and played in) many cornfields, so this field made me feel young again. The corn must have been 8 feet tall.

Fall had been sprinkled on the sarsaparilla plants (Aralia nudicaulis) along the trail.

A reflector button on a tree reminded me that archery season for white tail deer had started two days before. There are plenty of deer in this area and most likely plenty of hunters as well, but I didn’t see any. Bow hunters often sit up in the trees.

 The old foundation on the summit and the deer hunters made me wonder what the settlers who once lived here must have eaten;  probably plenty of venison, as well as moose, bear and other animals.

If you’re interested in history the following is from the book Walpole as it was and as it is. 1749 to 1879.

“The flesh of the deer and bear afforded the settlers many a delicious repast. Wild turkeys were trapped and shot, and quails and pigeons caught in nets, in great abundance. The brooks were filled with trout and dace, and the river abounded in salmon and shad.“

Clearing this place of all the stones in this wall as well as all of the trees that once grew here was hard work when all you had was an axe and a horse, or oxen if you were lucky, so I’m sure eating well would have been all important.

The small pond on the summit has shrunken to about half its size due to the drought but at least it still had some water in it. If the hoof and paw prints in the mud are any indication a lot of animals drink here. Though the pond’s surface was mostly covered by duckweed the dappled sunlight on it was beautiful. It was like  looking through a kaleidoscope.

This place is called High Blue because it’s higher than the surrounding terrain and the view to the west across the Connecticut River valley is always blue, without fail.

As expected the view was blue this day and there was little haze. I could see Stratton Mountain over in Vermont clearly, and that was a surprise. I’ve noticed that it can get very hazy here and sometimes you can barely make out the mountain.  I also noticed that some of the trees were getting taller, and I wondered who maintained this overlook. Whoever it is has some work ahead of them.

It was clear enough to just make out the ski trails on the right hand end of Stratton Mountain. I’m not anxious to see snow on them but I’m sure they’ll be covered by mid-November, either by man-made or natural snow. Thanksgiving always comes with a school vacation and that’s a busy time for the ski slopes.

I saw that there are now four piles of stones here, not only marring the landscape but also interfering with the space that people have to stand and look at the view. There isn’t much room to begin with and these piles take up half the available real estate, so I’ve decided that I will dismantle them. I could understand building them if they marked a trail or had some other significance, but up here they are just a nuisance. I almost tripped over one of them when I was trying to find the best spot for taking a photo.

The place I’ve come to call fern gully because of all the ferns there was both green with live ferns and brown with dead ones, with a little orange and yellow to mark the halfway point between them.

Some of the lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) were at the white stage; which is the last color they turn before becoming brown and dry. Lady ferns are also called ghost ferns because of this habit. Unfortunately they don’t all turn at the same time. If they did fern gully would be a wondrous sight at this time of year.

The hobblebushes (Viburnum lantanoides) warned that fall was right around the corner, and in fact tomorrow is already the first day of autumn.

Later that night I thought I’d take a photo of the harvest moon. I haven’t taken a photo of the moon in so long I can’t remember when the last time was, so I thought it was about time. But after a summer of cloudless skies one cloud floated in and parked itself right in front of the moon. It was the slowest moving cloud I’ve ever seen; I waited nearly two hours for it to float away so I could take this photo.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn.” ~ John Muir

Thanks for coming by.

Read Full Post »