TRAMPING REPORT

A Small Tribe of Wayward Grazing Goats
Wandering along the High Brook Ravine
22 January 2011

 

The sun is sparkling and winking behind snow-laden trees as it begins to sink behind the prodigious rise of the Acteon Ridge to our south; while we, a humble group of six, step our small steps into the deep snow, tramping in the shadows along the High Brook ravine. It’s cold, and the time is wandering away from the day; and so, I turn the group off the old Jeep Road, heading for what seems like the last patch of sunlight left in this part of the ravine. It’s a beautiful wood: hemlock, maple, beech and giant yellow birch trees. I’m looking for a log on which to sit, but there is no such place in the sun; and so, we stand, happily, and drink hot raspberry tea, eating nuts and fruit and chocolate, talking about the tramp: how it has been just great, winding our way through the few blow-downs that blocked our route, talking and stopping, the sky, a bright hard blue, and the snow-whitened hemlocks and pine trees, indicative of a windless day, standing still in the coldness. We are a sylvan community of man and vegetable, enough to make R.W. Emerson smile from somewhere very far away, as we stand snow-lit, the sun twinkling, and the shadows dancing in the current of the universal being.

As we begin our descent, losing the sun almost at once, catching it again fifty yards downhill, we weave through the seams of light and dark, the frozen brook now on our left, almost totally ensconced in snow and ice. Occasionally, a skidder road, coming down the hill on our right, offers a potential ski run for another day. The forest is quiet. Following our own tracks back, we talk about the joys of tramping off-trail, of cutting a new path in the snow, being pioneers with each soft step. On returning, there is a different feeling, a sense of ease and comfort that we are where we have already been, and we walk with confidence now, no uncertainties, no trepidations; but rather, we are content beneath a snow-drooped canopy of conifers, snowbound, and heading down a trail of our own choosing, our own making, toward home.

At the beginning of the hike, we came up through a former clear-cut, with the mountains of the western rim of the Mad River valley at our backs; but now, as we emerge from the woods, descending, the view of Welch and Dickey, Foss Peak, Green and Tecumseh, bursts across the sky in front of us, and I am struck by the irony of beholding the view at the bottom of the hike, rather than at some illustrious summit. This seems somehow profound, but I can’t quite put my finger on it: something about beauty revealing itself where it pleases, so that after we’ve reached our destination, and have somewhat reluctantly begun the journey back, our spirits are lifted once again by the mountains in our eyes, and we rise to an even greater height, a veritable snow-phoenix, born again out of it’s own white ashen powder; when in fact, all we did was walk up into the woods about as far as we could go, sort of doddle and linger a bit, then turn around and retrace our steps back down the slope, like a small tribe of wayward grazing goats…

Submitted by Dan Newton

TRAMPING RECORD

AMONG THE STONES AND POETS
Somewhere off the Dickey Mountain Trail

8 January 2011

 

“Years ago,” I tell the group, “My dog and I wandered off the Mt. Dickey Trail and found a wonderful outlook over to Cone Mountain.”

A somewhat worried face in the back says, “And there’s a nice view?”
“A fantastic view.”
“Course it’s snowing,” someone else says. “Too bad it's snowing today.”
“So do you know where we are now?” asks a concerned citizen, one of eleven intrepid wayfarers on this particular day.

I explain that we’ll continue like this for a distance and then begin heading uphill with more earnest, and eventually we’ll come to a paradisiacal place where we can see the mountains all around.

A very serious man mentions the “Importance of Being Ernest,” and others mumble things about how Wilde ones who wander off-trail can resist anything, except temptation; and with that, we continue deeper into not too distant fairy lands where mountains and men meet and find peace behind the busy days of lives.

Winding through a classic northern hardwood forest of Beech, Yellow Birch and Sugar Maple trees, mixed in with a towering company of Red Oaks, we come across the remnants of an old stonewall; and soon, having crested a small hill, we discover another stonewall. The proximity of these two stonewalls to each other forms a ghostly road between them, now grown thick with trees. Remembering as best I can the words of Tom Wessels, I explain how there are two types of stone walls: those built with small stones, which suggest that these were agricultural plots, because the stones were simply stacked as they came up from the ground with the spring tilling; or, those built with larger stones, which means they were fences to keep in the livestock, particularly sheep.

“Or maybe they’re just to delineate the borders of the people’s land?” suggests a woman from behind her scarf.

“Good fences make good neighbors,” someone else says.

And with that, we resume our tramping, chanting mellifluous fragments from a number of Frost’s pastoral poems: “Mending Wall,” “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” and “West-Running Brook.”

The grade steepens, and, with a few trampers right there with me, we look down along the white-powdered rocks and the frozen effluences of springs that coat patches of the hillside as if to freeze time, and see the brightly colored jackets of the rest of the group winding through the grays and browns of the tall trees below us. It won’t be long now. Soon we’ll be there.

We have just one place to find, one nook in the woods that will give us passage to our day’s summit; and yet, as is often the case when hiking these woods, the summit yields not without a fight; however, working together as a team against the seen and unseen forces of the universe, we eventually find our Providence, it seems, with the cliffs on Cone behind us, and the invisible sun beginning to set behind the tumultuous clouds in the west. And so, after a photograph, feeling like conquerors of some great Himalayan peak, we smile, and begin to descend.

…with miles to go before I sleep…

TRAMPING RECORD

ON A DAPPLED MOONSCAPE
Tramping to the Tecumseh Brook Ledge

1 January 2011

An enthusiastic group of ten trampers convened at 12:30PM in the Town Square, and, after signing in, amidst a flurry of well-wishing for the new year, we departed, reconvening 5 minutes later at the Livermore parking lot. We then walked with our snowshoes in hand up the Tripoli Road. The snow cover was thin, yet ubiquitous. We continued past the Osceola Campground turn-off, and after cresting the hill and walking a short distance, we knelt, as if in prayer, to don our snowshoes. 

Angling off the road, we tramped up the gentle-grade of an old logging route, moving well, as we headed into a sea of hardwoods that afforded expansive woodland views ahead of us; and, over one's shoulder, through the branches of the trees, the Tripyramid peaks against a steel-gray sky.

To our surprise, the farther we ascended, the thinner the snow became, so that we found ourselves searching for avenues of snow among the leaf-covered pillows and cradles of the forest. It soon became apparent that we would have to amend our plans, because, as the snow receded, armies of low-slung hobble bushes, that would normally be buried in snow, began to muster their forces and hinder our progress. Turning south, we came over a rise to find more snow, and, happily, some craggy scaurs that seemed familiar to the fearless leader; and sure enough, moments later, the Tecumseh Brook ledge rose into view, signaled by a thick twisted widow-maker, bent-over at a ninety-degree angle, bridged to the top of the rock. After the ensuing chorus of ooh’s and ahh’s [who knew rock could be quite so beautiful!], we moved in next to the ledge, marveling at the healthy appearance and concomitant size of the rock tripe lichens that cover the wall. The biggest of these lichens is significantly larger than my outstretched hand!

After some munching, and the gurgle of uplifted water bottles, we noticed a nest-like tangle of branches at the top of a nearby beech tree, discovering that a bear had been up the tree some time ago, when it was full of beech nuts, and broken the branches in toward the trunk, so that he or she could eat them without “going out on a limb,” and; in so doing, get the nuts before they fall and the deer and other ground feeders can eat them. They’re called “bear-baskets,” because the broken-back limbs, plus the tenacious brown leaves of the beech, which often remain clinging to the branches well into the winter, make it look like a basket up in the tree.
 
Descending the near side of the ridge we had come over, we found consistent snow to bring us home, angling back in a northern direction across what came to look like a sort of moonscape of dappled white and brown terrain, until we returned to the precise spot on Tripoli Road at which we entered the woods, feeling quite pleased at the good exercise, the good conversation, fascinating flora, and the interesting sign of fauna we found on this short, moderate ramble through some of Waterville Valley’s local unknown woods.

Dan Newton