Mount Cube with a dusting of snow.
It has been a warm week, complete with rain, sleet, and drizzle. Bleah – much of the beautiful snow we had last week has compacted, and the frozen ponds and rivers are looking rather soft. Nonetheless I was eager to get out on the trail, so I headed for an old standby, Mount Cube. The sky was cloudy but I was rewarded with views both close and distant. Read on!
A gem of the upper valley.
After another week of snow and cold weather – that allowed the snow to remain soft and powdery – it was time to get out on the trail again. Some friends suggested Wright’s Mountain, outside Bradford VT. It has a lovely network of trails, maintained by local volunteers. It’s not a tall mountain, nor are its trails long, but on a single-digit kind of day it makes for a nice morning outing.
It has finally snowed – two or three good dumps of snow, over the past two weeks. Although it rained on the snow last week, it stayed cold all this week, so last week’s snow was compressed and hardened by the rain, and this week’s snow formed a wonderfully fluffy powder on top of that base. Today I had a chance to get out skiing, for the first time this season. A friend here in Lyme provides an incredible community service – he grooms several kilometers of trails for nordic skiing, classic style. These trails are a short drive from my house, and they wander through the farm fields and timber forests of central Lyme. I made a quick couple of loops in the lower fields this afternoon… just me and the breeze and a light falling snow. Deer tracks criss-crossed the field, and a barred owl soared silently over the meadow.
I hadn’t been out hiking for a month, so I was itching to get back out in the woods. It snowed (a lot!) last weekend, but this week’s rain compacted and froze most of that snow into a hardpack. Nonetheless, Tim and I headed out this morning for a quick hike. An overnight snow squall had dusted the forest with a fresh, thin layer of snow, which made for pretty scenery. We chose Sunday Mountain, a forested bump of about 1800′ elevation up in Orford, NH, along the Rivendell Trail.
The core part of hunting season ended in early December, and the Lyme forest settled in for a long winter. Or so one might think; the weather has been so warm, and largely snowless, that it hardly seems like winter yet. I left two cameras deployed – one at the trail over the summit, as it has been since late October, and the other in two locations, first at a trail intersection and later at a vernal pool. December’s video includes many captures of deer, as you might expect. Most exciting was a short clip of two coyotes trotting over the summit just before midnight, in early December, and a bear scampering past the summit on Christmas Day. (Isn’t he supposed to be asleep for the winter?)
I was back in South Carolina for the Christmas holiday and had a chance to explore some of the wildlife around Kiawah Island and Magnolia Plantation, both near Charleston. The gallery shows some of my favorite photos from that week… deer, ducks, alligators, herons, and seagulls. I especially enjoyed watching a pair of blue herons going about the construction of their nest. They seemed to be taking their time, slowly building it one tiny stick at a time.
David Kotz 