The Long Pond Trail - Part 1

There were no flowers, few leaves and no bird songs in these woods. Most of the wild residents had gone into winter mode. The winters are quite cold and snowy in these parts and I imagine that all of nature was braced for winter to begin. But brilliant emerald green patches of mosses on rocks caught my attention and I began noticing the different forms they took. The moss on this rock looked to me like tiny ferns:

While a nearby rock had three different types of moss - the tiny fern type, a star shaped type and another which I imagined looked like tiny bushes. While I studied a lot of wildlife and trees, I never managed to learn anything about mosses (bryophytes). Maybe when I'm retired I can have time to learn more. For now I just have to admire their beauty and diversity and move on:

I saw a small stream rushing downhill and knew it would lead us to Long Pond, visible by that time through the trees. So we began following it:


Seamus heard hikers off through the trees as they walked the shoreline trail:

All the dogs then went on alert and wanted very much to run over and greet the hikers. I figured this would be a bad idea, so I put all four dogs on leashes temporarily:

But soon the hikers had moved on and we reached the edge of Long Pond:

The shoreline was gorgeous and, in spite of the few hikers which had just passed by, we seemed to be alone in the forest. I saw a pair of ducks out in the lake:

These red leaved bushes were, I've learned from the nature blogs I follow, blueberries. I've seldom seen fruit on the high-bush variety, though low-bush blueberries are extremely productive. But I must say that the color these bushes add to autumn woods and shorelines is wondrous:

We began hiking the shoreline trail and enjoying the views out across the lake:

Daphne and Clover, the two Papillon puppies, are best friends and tend to stay together as they run and play. Well, we were just getting started. I'll post more tomorrow:

We Arrive At Grafton Lakes State Park

I was making a photographic record of the rural Rensselaer County scenery while driving to Grafton Lakes State Park to hike with four of my dogs. I'd made it to the Grafton, New York area and noticed what I thought was a flock of sheep up on a hill. I stopped the car to take a photo and then realized that this was a flock of white turkeys inside a fence. This was probably a movable fence, relocated daily so that the turkeys had fresh grazing:

This very old house and adjacent barns brought back memories from when I lived and worked in the area. A friend had told me that it was the home of bachelor brother farmers. It seems that I later heard they'd all died and the home had fallen into disrepair. But I noticed on this day that someone had lights on inside and had placed a jack-o-lantern in the window. Apparently there's still someone living there:

And since I was making this a memory tour, I turned up the road to what used to be the Fitzgerald Brothers gravel bank. This tiny road snaked up a mountain to the gravel bank and I was once driven up it and over the top as a shortcut to another mountain where the logging crew on which I was working would be cutting that day. But all things change. The gravel bank now has a new owner and is fenced and gated. One can no longer drive to the top or continue on to the roads on the other side of the mountain. I did, however, catch this one view from the side of the mountain:

But my trip down memory lane eventually ended as I arrived at Grafton Lakes State Park. The hiking trails are accessed not from the main park entrance, but from a back road which passes by a series of lakes. The first one I passed was Mill Pond, a popular local swimming hole in days gone by:

And then we passed Second Pond, a lovely spot which most visitors to Grafton Lakes State Park are never privileged to see:

Second Pond's trees were mostly bare, but the shoreline was dotted with blueberry bushes and their flaming red leaves:

And then on toward the far end of Long Pond and the entrance to a whole series of hiking trails. I'd planned to hike the Spruce Bog Trail, not because I knew anything about it but because it looked interesting on the map. However, as I began passing trail heads I also began seeing these warning signs. Hunting season was open and hikers would have to share the trails with hunters. I was dressed in black and brown and would be hiking with four dogs. This was beginning to look like a very bad idea:

I kept driving and eventually noticed that all the signs warning of hunting were on the right side of the road. There were signs on the left side of the road proclaiming it a no hunting zone. My plans changed immediately and I parked my car and entered the woods with the dogs. We began in what I thought was a trail but turned out to be cleared strip for telephone lines. It was pleasant nonetheless, but I knew that Long Pond was just downhill from us, so I entered the woods and began bushwhacking down toward the lake:

The forest was quiet and there were no sounds other than the running dogs and the crunchy leaves underfoot:

There were occasional bursts of colorful leaves or emerald green moss in this otherwise brown landscape. But to the dogs it was just a giant playground:

The dogs can't appreciate the color and I can't appreciate the scents which their noses can pick up. I watched with wonderment as they investigated one spot or another as we traipsed through the fallen leaves. We were descending what the locals would call a "side-hill" (I've never understood why) as we made our way down to the shoreline of Long Pond. I'll post more tomorrow: