critter baffle

i kept seeing things like this in shelters along trails, but was having trouble parsing what they were for.

apparently it's some kind of critter baffle. you maybe hang your food from there and it keeps the mice and squirrels out. won't help you against bear, but presumably your other food is hanging ten feet in the air between two trees.

quiet, maybe

guys, it's not that i have nothing to say.

oh, wait. maybe i don't actually have anything to say.

i dunno.

i left the house to go camping three weeks ago and only occasionally show up at my desk. it seems like a lot of trouble to assemble pictures.

and thoughts seem to drain right out of my head.

so maybe i'll write.

maybe i won't.

it's very green out there, though.

flooding at waterbury center state park

about a month ago while i was staying on remote site 2 there was some rain. a LOT of rain.

like four feet of water rise in a day rain.

i went over to waterbury center state park in my boat and took some pictures.

2017 vermont venture: Cook a meal over a campfire

you knew this was coming.

i told you i don't cook on a fire all that often, but when i do, i do.

so last weekend i made this meal:

it looks less fancy than it is: it is roasted eggplant mixed up with hummus and cider vinegar to make a thing not entirely unlike baba ganoush, a perfectly baked potato, stuffed mushroom caps, ans roasted sweet corn.

deelicious.

2017 venture vermont: Start a fire with just one match. Bonus: use no matches

when i'm summer camping i don't make many fires. it takes a lot of firewood to cook potatoes, and i'm not keen on hanging about the fire when i could be inside by comfy bug net. plus i don't like to smell of smoke.

but if i have company, i'm happy to roll out the stops and make a fire and cook food (yes, you will hear about that later) because what seems like a waste of resources for one person making one meal seems reasonable as part of a larger entertainment.

so barb was out at the site last weekend and i made some food, but first i had to start a fire and my preferred way is with spark. i can DO it with a match, but i like using spark.

because i'm all fancy.

and it's good to stay in practice.

regrettably in this video it doesn't go up in one stroke the way i like, and i'm blaming it on breezy afternoon, shaky hands, and bad hand position.

anyway.

2017 venture vermont: Climb a fire tower

it was a thing i didn't do much, because hurty things.

but after i started playing ingress this year for fun and fitness, (join the BLUE team, boys and girls!) i started thinking "well, maybe i CAN do some of those firetower hikes."

plus venture challenge.

so this year so far i have been in the firetowers on mount elmore and on belvidere mountain.

others may follow.

woohooo!

me on the belvidere tower

same clown, elmore firetower

things you're probably doing wrong: office

this woman is editing a contract. if your working space does not look like this, you are doing something wrong.

open letter to people using mountain trails

dear people using mountain trails,

those rocks that look like somebody put them in the trail? somebody probably did put them there. they are not for keeping your feet dry, although they will certainly do that.

they are for protecting the trail from the erosion caused by your boots.

use them.

love, flask.

2017 venture vermont: sunrise, sunset

it says "Watch the sunrise or sunset from the summit of a hill or mountain" and this is a challenge for me.

because to schlepp myself up a mountain and be there in time for sunrise, i have to leave the house at like 0200. and to get up onto a mountain for sunset and THEN COME DOWN means i get home at about 0200.

unless i go in winter, which represents other problems.

like the venture challenge deadline is in october, anyway.

so i was kind of thinking that one was out of my reach, but then two things happened: i started taking a medication that works, and i started playing ingress for fun and fitness.

(remember, boys and girls, you want to join the BLUE team. we're the RESISTANCE.)

so now i go marching up and down mountains like 30 years have been removed from me - okok, i'm slower than that, but my point is that i can DO it- and suddenly because of that and because i have some new lightweight camping gear i'm thinking that one-night backpacking excursions are no longer off limits to me.

so i pack up my stuff and head on up the long trail south from appalachian gap because i'm thinking stark's nest would be a dandy place to watch the sun set and rise from.

now, that is some rough terrain up thar. it's got a bunch of climbing and a whole mess o' staples and ladders and a couple places you WISH it had staples or something but instead it's got some sad-looking roots and a crack in the rock and you realize EXACTLY why you got turned back that one time you decided to try this hike on snowshoes last winter.

uh, anyway.

so i got up there in PLENTY of time to see the sunset (and read half a book) but that was anticlimactic because it had gotten cloudy in advance of the night's storm and it was filthy windy wet weather on the way down in the morning, so i decided to go around the long way and take the stark mountain trail down as far as the sunnyside chair before rejoining the long trail, which adds almost a mile to the trip but cuts out the worst of the difficult descent, and provided a welcome shelter at about lunchtime.

and of course there are pictures.

staples

cave bypass trail? no thanks.

view from theron dean shelter

view OF theron dean shelter

there was a lot of this nonsense.

no, no an elevated treehouse it's a sled shed. i
n winter the ski patrol stores a sled there.

sunset facing west

sunrise facing east

filthy weather

ready to go

mmm, slippery when wet.

it's very green here.

often when i am in these fantastically green places i think of hundewanderer, whose lovely hiking photos are all taken in a landscape so different than mine.

strider bikes

you've probably all seen this clip of the dutch kid turning around to ride the course again.




yeah, the kid has the proper attitude to life.

but i want to talk to you about balance bikes.

they are awesome.

used to be we had trikes and then bikes with training wheels and learning to ride the two wheeler was scary and bruising.

and then some genius realized that if you put tykes on little bikes with NO PEDALS they just scoot along. they develop balance skills way ahead of kids not on strider bikes and those little duffers pull their feet right up and they are FAST. many of them ride much more proficiently than they walk, because being able to coast makes them much faster on a bike than the are on foot.

then when they're big enough, you can get them a bike with pedals. since they will already have acquired bike balance skills, adding pedals is no big deal.

i know this because little kids with balance bikes are all over the place at my weekly mountain bike race venue. some of those little dudes to an entire 2.5k lap.

fairy lights

i have a pretty low profile on a campsite, which means that people coming in late day often assume my site is vacant and try to camp there.

also, i like pretty lights in the evening.

when i am on the res i enjoy looking at the lights and fires of my neighbors. it gives a nice feel to the neighborhood.

so i have these:

signs of summer

i saw these in my neighborhood:

welcome to west bolton

a piece 

of paradise

hope you packed the

BUG SPRAY!

2017 venture vermont: Hike to a waterfall

if i have to be fully truthful about this, really i wasn't hiking TO a waterfall so much as i was hiking up a mountain with the intent of going BY a waterfall, which i think should count.

although the stark mountain trails have awesome maps, there's not so much in the way of summer trail markings, so it's easy to be on a ski trail that you think is probably the right one but really isn't.

at least that's true for some of the lower parts of the mountain.

so when i saw this waterfall, i assumed it was a problem of summer dryness (because yes, there was a whole week of dry weather) and it was nice and all that, but i did not see why anyone would label it "the waterfall".

but then on the way down i was on the right trail and saw this:

hike to a waterfall: check.

gear review: mountainsmith tour with strappettes

reminder: nobody ever asks me to review gear, but i use gear and sometimes like to tell you how it performs. i do not receive gear from merchants or manufacturers to try out.

there.

a long time ago (like, i was either still in college or just out of it) i bought a handsome mountainsmith lumbar pack. i loved it and used it for all the things, making it my de facto purse. in those days, there was only one model of mountainsmith lumbar pack, and i had it.

but then as more and more people had these bags and used them, mountainsmith came up with design changes that reflected how people were using the bags, like an improved shoulder strap.

and i saw these improvements and wanted one of the newer bags.

problem: my old bag was still in good shape and worked just fine. so i told myself i would use it hard and rough and wear it out and get me a new one.

twenty years later i still have not succeeded in wearing it out.

apparently this is a common story among fans of the original mountainsmith bag.

so this spring i decided to JUST GET A NEW ONE ALREADY, especially because the new one has more carrying space to hold my junior naturalist materials.

i bought the mountainsmith tour and a set (pair?) of strapettes, which are mountainsmith's packpack-style straps that can swap in and out for the shoulder strap to stabilize a large load for a longer hike.

my mom did the ordering, which is significant, because i didn't much care which color came, so she ordered huckleberry, which she judged to be the most handsome. this is only significant because she also apparently decided to nickname the bag "huckleberry", because a bad needs a nickname.

"huckleberry was shipped!" she'd tell me.

or "huckleberry's here!"

so me 'n' huckleberry, we're tight now.

we've carried a lot of stuff up a lot of mountains and i will tell you that this bag is tough like the original, has more carrying space, and the strapettes make it a comfortable carry for long days even with two full water bottles, a field guide, and a pair of binoculars.

and part of what i love about the strapettes is that if you don't need them and you just want to carry the bag as a purse or with fewer straps, they pop right off.

so yeah. would recommend.

be sure you like the color, though, because you're going to have the bag a LONG time.

random views at camp 3

rather a lot of pollen

and this is after i rinsed it out.

things you see on the res: swimmers

i am still cleaning up old photos and videos that at the time i thought i would make into blog entries but then i couldn't be arsed to put them in chronological order or anything, so this is about a thing i saw back in may when i was living on site 3.

i was hanging out at camp and i saw this guy come through swimming and a canoe was following him with a wonan and two children in it, and they kept stopping to take water temps and they stopped for a minute or so to discuss that and the follow distance and some other things and they weren't far from my shore so i asked what he was training for.

to swim the english channel.

from the sounds of their accents this was their vermont vacation but that's no reason for the training to stop.

the next time they went by the crew was in three kayaks, but otherwise the same and they said they didn't mind me shooting video.

so here it is.

hanging out in the rain

during the time i was living on remote site 2 on waterbury reservoir, it rained.

like it rained a LOT. it rained so much that they eventually had to close the dam and let the water rise because after all it is a flood control project, but that's for another post.

one day i went out in the morning to visit my house and have a shower and so some laundry and then i went back to camp to hang out in the rain because even a rainy day on  the res is still a day on the res.

here's video:

outings: mushroom walk

i told you about the time i accidentally went birding with the richmond/bolton/huntington senior center.

even though i'm not yet 60 i am retired and therefore fall into their demographic population, so i'm on their mailing list and sometimes go to activities.

anyway, i went to the mushroom walk with motown mushrooms.

it is a lovely outing at black barn farm in bolton, which is that farm right next to the upper potholes.

the nice young man takes you an a lovely scenic walk through woods that will have some wild mushrooms and some cultivars he has planted, including some that have naturalized. you go out in the woods with knives and big bags and then you bring the haul back to where the grill is already hot and you eat your fill of fresh grilled mushrooms and anything you don't eat, you can divvy up and take home.

pretty spectacular.

upper potholes 

raised bed with inoculated log borders

dye mushrooms

inoculated logs

fuzzy

oysters

our haul

grill.

2017 venture vermont: Go on a day-long outdoor adventure. Take pictures of all that you do!

my adventure day wasn't all that exciting.

and it wasn't entirely outdoors, although to be fair i have a lot of day long outdoor adventures and it was hard to pick one in particular so i woke up one day and said to myself "imma take a lot of pictures today and call this my day-long outdoor adventure."

and so i did.




so for starters, i played some ingress on my way over to stark, and then i messed with my gear and stuff and started walking up the mountain. i'd never been up the stark mountain trail, plus there's a waterfall up there (more about that later) so woo! jam-packed day!

trail signs

little violets growing wild

above the birdcage

kent thomas nature center. thomas kent? i always get it mixed up.

lunch inside, because the blackflies are outside

always read the log.

view of camel's hump

up the singlechair from midstation

water barrel at stark's nest

stuff on table.

feet up

long shadow, way down.