One of the upsides of the current situation is that I’ve tended to look closer to home for outdoor opportunities, and that means I’m returning to some of the local gems I’ve not visited in a decade or more. Yesterday I took a walk around Boston Lot Lake, a small pond in West Lebanon not far from the river at Wilder Dam. Its network of walking and biking trails are popular with local runners and bikers, even on this gray Saturday morning.
Ice and reflections on Boston Lot Lake, NH.
The lake was skimmed with ice., though the temperatures were beginning to rise above freezing, so it would not last long.
Ice and reflections on Boston Lot Lake, NH.
In one spot, some kids had been clearly been tossing rocks at the ice – some of which went through, and some of which were trapped in the ice.
I had a chance to walk to a prominent outlook in Vershire VT, with two of my oldest and bestest friends. While we’re still suffering from a near-total lack of snow down here in the river valley, Vershire’s hills were covered in several fluffy inches of the freshest snow Vermont can make.
Fresh snow draped on every twig and branch.
With the sun now setting shortly after 4pm, as the days tick closer to Solstice, the late-afternoon clouds added a bit of color to the quiet woodlands through which we walked.
The long-distance views from this hill – merely a hill, but with a clearcut view to the northeast – presented a fine opportunity to pause while our conversation wound around the topics of the day.
A walk through winter wonderland in Vershire, VT.
Indeed, though it was lovely to hike through some of the season’s first good snow, the real treat was the time it offered to catch up with good friends. Looking forward to more such outings to come…
Every year, the creative chefs at Dartmouth’s Hanover Inn painstakingly construct a massive gingerbread-and-fondant creation, each year on a different theme. It’s always a marvelous sight, on display in their lobby throughout December. This year, the theme is The Polar Express.
It’s about ten feet long, with incredible attention to detail. It involves a massive number of ingredients!
Every year we visit a nearby Christmas-tree lot run by a Lyme family to choose and cut a tree for our home. So, on Sunday, we found ourselves out in a field dusted with fresh snow, searching for the perfect tree. We quickly found one we liked, and the boys cut it down even faster by using two saws at once.
John and Andy cut our Christmas tree with two saws!
When we set it up at home, we discovered a small birds-nest tucked into the higher branches.
Last night it was extremely windy, with large gusts barreling down the river valley. The forecast was for 2-6″ of snow, but we ended up with only a dusting as the nor’easter storm held mostly to the south. Our solar tracker, however, decided it was better to spend the gusty night horizontally.
Seen from above.
The panel has an anemometer on the upper-right corner – seen here in the right-most corner, on a gimbal so it stays upright regardless of the panels’ angle – and when it detects high winds or strong gusts, moves the panels into a horizontal position to protect itself. It spent the night this way.
Seen from the deck.
Normally, it spends the night in a vertical position, to avoid accumulating snow, ice, or dust. This morning, the winds are calm; when the sun rose , though invisible behind the clouds, the tracker steered into its normal sun-tracking mode.
Yesterday was a brilliant sunny day – a nice late-fall day when it should be an early winter day – so it seemed like another great opportunity to get outside. A short drive brought me to the small town of Benton, just west of Moosilauke, and the steep climb to the rocky ridge known as Black Mountain. From its granite ridgeline there is an expansive view across a nearly roadless wilderness to Mount Moosilauke. In the photo below, Moosilauke’s extended north-south ridge is at center, with the Kinsman range at far left and Mount Lafayette’s white-capped peak peeking out behind the Kinsmans.
Views of Mount Moosilauke from Black Mountain summit.
You’ll see it far better in a full-screen version, in the photo gallery… where I include three or four more photos.
Hike stats: distance: 5.6 km gain: 473m time: 2h 0m
Map of my hike ot the summit of Black Mountain and return. Elevations in feet, distances in meters.
I happened to be walking along the Green in Hanover at the moment when Dartmouth was raising its annual Christmas tree. This year’s tree was selected from a tree farm in Wallingford, VT. Soon it will be decorated with lights and adding cheer to this quiet campus!
raising the tree…settling the tree into its underground base.
A delightful ascent of Moosilauke in unseasonable conditions.
On this day, very nearly the last day of November, the forecast was for a purely sunny day with temperatures well above freezing – weather decidedly un-November-like – so I decided it was high time I went back to Moosilauke. Yesterday it rained much of the day, even at altitude, so I was concerned the Moosilauke summit may have been glazed with ice today. But I was pleasantly surprised, as I climbed the familiar Glencliff trail, to find the muddy conditions of the lower sections giving way to a dusting of snow and, higher up, nearly an inch of fresh snow on the ground and trees decorated with fresh powder and rime ice, backed by a deep blue sky. Read on, and check out the photo gallery.
Happy Thanksgiving! We are very thankful that all three of our children are home for the holidays, and we’re all healthy. Pam did a wonderful job on the Thanksgiving turkey…
and my parents and brother were able to join us via Zoom for a while.
Granny and Grandpa join us a Thanksgiving over Zoom.
My job was to make some pies, including a gluten-free maple-pecan pie.
If last week was momentous in lighting up our home with solar power, this week felt even more momentous in lighting up our home with a fiber-optic Internet connection. We’ve finally entered the 21st century!
One of the longstanding challenges of rural living is the dearth of high-speed Internet service. I remember when we moved from our home in Lyme, NH to the middle of Bangalore, India, we were thrilled to leave behind our dial-up 28.8kbps modem and finally have “high-speed” DSL service; that was 2008. On return, we bought into a local one-man start-up company that provided fixed-wireless Internet service – a dish antenna on the side of our house, aimed at a small tower on the opposite of the river. After some upgrades, that brought us up to 1Mbps, and even 2Mbps. But when it snowed heavily, the signal would degrade. Cellular telephones barely work in our neighborhood and most of the town is a dead zone. There simply aren’t enough towers to cover this hilly terrain.
So I have been following for years, with great anticipation, the tireless efforts of a set of dedicated Lyme townspeople who have been striving to develop a town-wide fiber-optic network. The broadband market has essentially bypassed our little town – there is no cable television (let alone cable Internet), virtually no cellular telephone network, and even DSL is only available only to the handful of residences located in the center of town. No ISP has ever shown serious interest in building out the infrastructure needed to provide Internet service to every home, let alone high-speed Internet service.
Retired experts like Steve Campbell and Rich Brown, who once built and operated Dartmouth’s campus-wide network through the early days of AppleTalk and later Ethernet and Wi-Fi, and who now live in Lyme, worked through the complex state regulations, and the creation of innovative community-focused business plans that can finance a town-wide infrastructure that can serve everyone for the foreseeable future. We are indebted to their tenacity and creativity!
The result is uniquely interesting – a community-focused corporation, with its top priority being service to the community.
After years of anticipation, we were excited to see the fiber truck pulling cable along River Road, and then to install the ‘drop’ to our house.
This week, we were visited by another technician who installed another fiber-optic cable from that exterior box, through the wall and into our basement.
I helped him string the cable through my existing cable chase across the basement to our switchroom, where he terminated the fiber-optic cable at their (provided) Wi-Fi router. They even provide a UPS to keep the router powered during short power failures.
Shortly after he left, I ran a speedtest and was delighted to see, even over Wi-Fi, an impressive 300 Mbps up and down. (I could have paid for more.)
From that router, I connect into our existing home Ethernet network.
For more information about LymeFiber see their FAQ.
David Kotz 