Woods Wanderer

There comes a day every winter when I have to drop everything I’m doing and head for the hills. That day came yesterday. I loaded my dog Matika into the car and drove an hour to my favorite place to snowshoe: a mountain brook where few people go.

I hiked half a mile up a packed logging road before putting on my snowshoes. Two feet of pristine powder lay before me. I figured it would be tough cutting tracks through it but didn’t realize how tough until I got going. My snowshoes sank 6-8 inches with each step. Matika stayed on my heels for the most part. Smart dog. I pushed forward, trying to set a steady pace, but was unable to go more than fifty yards without stopping to catch my breath.

I tramped for a little over an hour that way, following a mountain brook that barely murmured beneath the snow. I marveled at the silent forest – no birds, no trees creaking in the wind, nothing but my own heavy breathing. “This is why I come out here,” I kept thinking. Silence and a beautiful stillness.

When the going got really tough, I stripped down to shirtsleeves. I sweated profusely anyway. I was tiring but with temps in the teens and my thermal undershirt soaked with sweat I didn’t dare stop. Instead I pushed up a steep, narrow ravine, groping slowly back towards the logging road. Fallen trees blocked the way. At one point I passed beneath one. It showered me with snow in the process. Matika scrambled up the slippery sides of the ravine without success. Then she fell in behind me as I plodded forward, one carefully placed step after another.

What a relief it was to get back to the packed logging road! I took off my snowshoes then strapped them onto my pack. I stopped long enough to feed my dog some kibble and wolf down an energy bar with a half-liter of water. The walk out was as pleasant as it was easy.

Completely exhausted, I went to bed early last night. Tough outing but well worth the effort. I flushed a lot of gunk out of my system in the process and am now in a better frame of mind to resume literary work. No surprise there.

Tags: bushwhacking, forest, mountain stream, silence, snowshoeing, winter

It’s a dry day with temps in the 60s – a perfect day for hiking in the woods.  I put Matika in the car and drive to the mountains.  Before noon I am bushwhacking along Preston Brook, headed upstream.

There’s no snow in sight. Just grey rocks, the bleached brown of forest duff, the dark gray/brown of naked trees, and the occasional splotch of pale green conifers, moss or ferns that have wintered over. Not exactly a lush forest, but this time of year I’m happy just tramping the ground again.

The stream is clouded by silt and roiling with snowmelt. To avoid mudslide areas, I cross it a half dozen times while making my way upstream. The first few times I rock hop across, but eventually I get wet. I get muddy as well. No matter. I welcome this elemental immersion.

The sky overhead is mostly blue. A woodpecker knocks in the distance, otherwise all is quiet.  Just the steady rush of water obeying gravity, and the occasional creak of a tree swaying in the gentle wind.

Matika is so busy sniffing that I lose track of her a few times. I lose myself in dreamy, early spring reverie. When finally breaking a sweat after tramping a mile, I can’t help but smile.  Compared to thrashing around in snow, hiking like this is easy.

Thirty years, I figure after doing the math.  That’s how long I’ve been following this brook. Sometimes I have a fishing rod in hand, sometimes I carry a daypack. I stop by a favorite camping spot and find the fishhook that I pressed into the bark of a young tree years ago. Yeah, this brook and I have history.

A couple miles deep, I reach the small, narrow bridge where the dirt road in this valley crosses the stream. I follow the road back to my parked car, occasionally stopping to look around. Not a spectacular hike but a pleasant enough afternoon in the woods all the same. In another month or so, once the trails have dried out, I’ll go higher.  Until then, these mountain stream rambles will do.

Tags: bushwhacking, hiking, mountain stream, reverie, springtime

Instead of hiking a well-maintained trail as planned, I changed my mind yesterday morning and opted for a bushwhack along a favorite mountain brook. Glad I did. A great weight lifted from my shoulders the moment I stepped into the trackless forest.

A carpet of foamflower in full bloom was there to greet me. The mountain brook, bank-full from the previous night’s storm, roared nearby. The intoxicating smell of ozone and raw earth hung thickly in the air. And when a vireo called out, its wildly undulating song filling the trees, I too felt like singing.

The dripping understory soaked my pants. Soon my shirt was damp with sweat. I crossed the brook several times to avoid the mudslides on steep slopes, thereby drenching my boots. After tramping for an hour and a half, I knelt down beside the brook and dunked my head to cool off. Then I was wet from head to toe.

I howled with delight as my eyes drank in the brilliant green world surrounding me.  I reveled in the wildness of it all – the mud, the bugs, unfurling ferns, rotting wood and leaf litter, moss-covered stones, songbirds, wildflowers and all the rest. I was crazy happy, or was it only the ozone going to my head?

Springtime in the Green Mountains. It doesn’t get much better than this. I hiked out a much healthier man.

Tags: bushwhacking, Green Mountains, mountain stream, springtime, the forest, wildflowers

There’s a woodlot on the edge of town that I like to visit whenever I’m the mood to wander about aimlessly without having to drive very far. When I was a child growing up in Ohio, I used to roam fallow fields and woodlots where few people ever went. Doing so nowadays takes me back to my roots.

The woodlot isn’t very big – no more than a half mile square if you count the adjoining fields full of briars and scrub. The heart of it is a cedar swamp of sorts where the water table is often just above the surface level. That’s why a day like yesterday is ideal for visiting the place. With no snow cover and temps just below freezing, walking is easy. All I have to do is follow animal tracks threading through saplings and downed trees.

Hares, chipmunks, squirrels and all sorts of birds live in this woodlot. I got up close and personal with a barred owl here a few years ago. I’ve chased deer out of these woods and spooked ruffed grouse more than once. My dog loves the place because there are lots of interesting smells. Aside from a homeless fellow who once resided here, I’ve never seen anyone in this woodlot. Yet all I have to do to access it is leave my car in a grocery store parking lot and follow a track through illegally dumped trash and into the trees.

Towards the end of my ramble yesterday, I heard the hum of heavy equipment in the distance. After following an ATV trail to a field where I usually pick up the track heading back to the parking lot, I saw something that rocked my world. A huge building had just been erected in the field and all kinds of construction vehicles were moving around the place. The brand new WalMart, of course. I forgot about that. Developers broke ground last fall, shortly after clearing the last legal hurdle. Progress. Soon everything around the woodlot will be developed – perhaps even the woodlot itself. Yeah, just like the Ohio of my childhood. That’s why designated wilderness areas and forest preserves are so important. The almighty dollar changes everything.

Tags: backyard nature, bushwhacking, development

It’s amazing how a good walk alone in the woods can clean out the corners of one’s mind, cluttered as they might be with the petty frustrations of daily life. I hadn’t expected as much. I knew only that I had to jump off the merry-go-round for a while.

After driving an hour into the mountains, I left my car at the bottom of an unimproved road then followed a set of truck tracks back to a favorite jump off point. I stepped into the trackless snow beyond a closed gate, following an overgrown logging trail down to the iced-over brook.

A lone chickadee welcomed me. My dog Matika ran ahead, sniffing out wild animal sign. I tamped down four inches of heavy wet snow with each step I took, glad to have left my snowshoes behind. They weren’t made for these conditions.

The brook gurgled beneath the ice. That and the sound of trees creaking in an occasional gust of wind was all that broke the silence. Snow clung to tree branches, whitening the world all around me. I prefer being immersed in a green forest, but a white one will do in a pinch. The stark beauty of it worked its magic on my frayed nerves.

I stopped after bushwhacking for a mile and a half and turned my foam pad into a makeshift seat. Then I sat down. A strong gust of wind shook snow from the trees, chilling me to the bone. That cut my lunch break short. No matter. I sat there long enough to reboot.

The afternoon walk that followed was effortless – one slow step at a time. Not so much hiking as simply meandering through the woods, marveling at the silence and stillness of nature in winter.

Eventually I tagged the unimproved road and hiked out. But I was not the same man who had entered the woods a few hours earlier. I had reverted to my old, wild self and was happy for it. Too bad this frame of mind can’t be bottled.

Tags: bushwhacking, nature in winter, renewal

Too restless to sit down and focus on any literary work this morning, I went to French Hill with my dog Matika. I felt guilty about not working as I slipped into the woods, which is a little odd when you think about it. How else is an outdoor/nature writer supposed to gather his or her material?

A few minutes into the woods I was fine, though. The forest doesn’t give a damn about creative output. And when I’m wandering through it, neither do I.

After thrashing through a tangle of brambles covering what used to be a logging road, Matika and I broke into the relatively open forest. A deer path took us to a familiar gap in the old stone wall. From there it was an easy walk along the semblance of a trail, so I started daydreaming.

Soon I found a place to sit down and groove on the woody surroundings. The sound of leaves rustling in the gentle breeze cleared my mind of all thought. Then I was hypnotized by early morning light breaking through the green canopy. The shadows of trees danced across the forest floor. Time passed.

When finally I snapped out of my reverie, I got up and hiked out at a good clip, completing an unintentional circumnavigation of a largely unseen beaver pond. I picked up a turkey feather along the way and held it as if it were a quill pen. Then my brain kicked into gear and I started working.

The boundary between grooving on the wild and writing about it is vague indeed. Sometimes I slip back and forth over that frontier as if there’s no real difference between mind and matter. Sometimes I wonder if there is.

Tags: bushwhacking, inspiration, nature writing, reflection, wild beauty

At first I was only looking for a place to go for an easy day hike, but when I saw Bone Mountain on the map, I felt an old, familiar urge to push myself to the limit again. So I grabbed my rucksack, loaded my dog Matika into the car and headed for that rugged high ground.

There are no trails to Bone but a brook tumbles from a notch between that peak and Woodward. I tagged the brook and followed it until I was a mile or so away from the road.

As I recalled from a bushwhack many years earlier, the notch between Bone and Woodward is so cluttered with rocks and fallen trees that one can’t actually touch the ground while traversing it. Not good for my dog, so I left the brook long before reaching the notch. I started moving uphill through the trackless forest, following a compass bearing east southeast, towards a shoulder of the mountain.

Hobbled by hobblebush, sweating profusely, and stopping frequently to catch my breath, the climb was as hard as any climb can be. More than once I dropped onto all fours to negotiate steep pitches. Matika did better than me as a rule, but it took my eye to find a route up through cliff walls. When finally we reached the summit, we were both played out and running low on water. That’s when I caught a glimpse through the trees of another peak half a mile away – one that looked more like Bone than the summit I was standing on.

Bone Mountain has taken on religious significance for me over the years precisely because it’s so damned hard to reach. I’ve only been on top of it a few times, having missed it more often than not. As I sat on that false summit, stewing in humility, I realized that I’d missed it again.

The descent was long, steep, and hard on the knees. Once I had to rescue my dog from a cliff’s edge where she got stuck. After that it was a tiring slog down to the brook that took us out.  I was happy to see the car again, but just as happy to have done the bushwhack. After all, I got what I was after.

Tags: adversity, bushwhacking, mountain climbing, spirituality

Despite the fact that I was still tired from a tough shift at the hotel the evening before, I donned thermals and wools yesterday morning and went for a hike. Falling temps and a winter storm were in the forecast, so I figured this was my last chance to tramp around for a while. Besides, holiday hoopla had kept me indoors for the past couple weeks. I desperately needed to get outside.

I didn’t wander far from home. I’ve been spending too much time in the car lately so I drove no farther than necessary to reach the woods. A small patch of wild country only ten minutes away did the trick.

What started as a hike quickly turned into a bushwhack. I followed a logging trail to a yard full of lopped off tree limbs then stepped into trackless forest. Fine by me. Meandering about aimlessly suited my mood. I tramped through the snow-covered woods, stopping every once in a while to look around. I marveled at the way new fallen snow clung to tree branches. I saw some kind of weasel slip into the remnants of an old stone wall – a black flash against white. My dog Matika sniffed at fresh squirrel tracks. None appeared.

Just to stay oriented, I kept my eye on a large beaver pond clearly visible through the trees. Consequently, I ended up circumnavigating it. On the far side of it, I encountered a smaller beaver pond apparently blocking my path. It’s dam provided an easy way to the other bank, though. I like this about bushwhacking. The landscape tells you where to go.

During the rest of my walk I followed a soft, muddy logging trail covered by several inches of heavy, wet snow. More like early spring than early winter. I didn’t mind it. Breathing hard is good sometimes – a reminder that existence is fundamentally organic despite all abstract thought. There’s more to life than working, eating and indoor entertainment. That’s a good thing to keep in mind this time of year.

Tags: bushwhacking, hiking, nature in winter

After a week on the road, I wanted to reconnect with my home turf.  French Hill seemed like just the place to do that, so I parked my car in front of a closed gate yesterday and tramped into the quasi-public reserve there.  I went looking for signs of spring, of course.  It’s that time of year.

Matika ran about, wild and free.  She was absolutely elated to be in the woods again.  My reaction was a bit more subdued.  I felt relief, pure and simple.  The world is mad.  The quiet forest is the only thing that makes any sense to me.

Nearly a thousand feet above the Champlain Valley, the high rolling ground around French Hill is still recovering from winter.  Patches of snow linger on the forest floor, and both beaver ponds are still half covered with ice.  I visited the larger one first since it was close to the logging trail.  My boots sank deep into the mud.  My tracks filled with water.  Here in Vermont, you don’t enter the woods this time of year unless you’re okay with mud and water.

A few peepers chirped from the edges of the large pond – hardly the chorus I had hoped for.  Spring is coming late this year, thanks to all the snow that fell this winter.  That’s okay.  It felt good to have soft earth underfoot regardless.

I had to bushwhack to reach the smaller beaver pond.  I followed the tiny stream flowing down from the larger pond then approached smaller one slowly.  Three mallards were floating there.  I didn’t want to disturb them so I kept Matika behind me.

Woodpeckers had been busy digging in a dead tree along the edge of the pond.  The beaver lodge on the far end of the pond had a few new sticks piled on top of it.  The mallards swam over to the icy half of the pond then went for a short walk.  I watched them for a while before following a fresh set of deer tracks back to the logging trail.  Matika and I spooked the deer a few minutes later.

Before leaving the smaller pond, I found the bright green shoots of false hellebore breaking through the forest duff.  I almost stepped on them.  Didn’t think much about it until I reached my car, but those shoots were the first new vegetation I’ve seen in the Vermont woods this year.  John Burroughs once wrote that the first signs of spring are always down low in the wet spots, not on the high, dry ridges.  It makes sense really.  After all, mud and water is what early spring is all about.

Tags: bushwhacking, hiking with dogs, signs of spring, wildlife

It wasn’t easy getting up for a hike as rain gathered on the windshield of my car, but I knew I’d see things differently once I was in the thick of things.  My dog, Matika, didn’t care.  She’s up for a hike anytime, anywhere, in any weather.  So I parked my car, grabbed my rain hat, and stepped into the woods.

At first I thought I’d just follow the overgrown skidder trail a short distance beyond the beaver pond, then turn around.  But my legs wanted more.  Despite the bugs, drizzle and tall, wet grass, I was enjoying the walk.  So I kept going until I reached a small clearing illuminated by gray light.  There the skidder trail fragmented into several sketchy paths shooting different directions.  And there, true to my natural inclinations, I chose the path less traveled and ventured deeper.

I recognized the path.  I had walked it a year earlier until it had completely disappeared into the brush.  Shortly after that, I had been turned around for an hour or so.  With that in mind, I checked the compass dangling around my neck.  Yeah, this time I was ready for the wily ways of French Hill.

I followed the fading path until it crested a ridge.  Then it vanished.  I bushwhacked down the far side of the ridge until I came to a long, narrow wetland.  I was tempted to cross it and almost did out of sheer impulse.  My sense of direction told me to turn right.  My compass told me to turn left.  “That can’t be right,” I mumbled.  My dog waited patiently for me to make a decision.  I followed my compass.

Anyone who has ever been in this situation knows the rest of the story.  The compass was right, of course.  I soon tagged a game trail that veered back towards the beaver pond.  When I passed through a familiar gap in an old stone wall, I knew where I was again.  And I was back to my car fifteen minutes later.  Of course.

A compass isn’t infallible, and a certain amount of skill is necessary to use it properly.  Yet it has served me well on countless occasions when my “sense of direction” would have led me astray.  There’s a lesson to be learned here, no doubt, regarding subjective and objective thinking.  But I’ve said enough already.  I’ll leave it to others to draw whatever conclusions they so desire.

Tags: bushwhacking, land navigation, reason