Sally loves to dig holes. Today her face got especially dirty.
I was expanding the network at the Stone House People's office today and I saw that a large flock of Snow Geese was still encamped on the shoreline of the pond across the street. According to Ms. Stone House, they'd been there for at least a week. I'd never seen such a large flock of geese that wasn't Canada Geese. Most of these were still in their winter plumage, that is, completely white.
In other network expansion news, I've been working on a new trail through the nearby forest. It's another route defined by sticks piled along either side, and it runs from the uphill farm's driveway westward up a series of steep inclines to the top of the plateau, where it intersects an old logging road. This logging road turns out to be a shortcut to the abandoned go-cart raceway, which in the past we could only get to by walking past our uphill neighbor's farmhouse. I took Sally and Eleanor there today and, as usual, Sally investigated several chipmunk mining claims. (If the oil industry had been as successful with their claims as Sally is with hers, we'd all be riding horses and bicycles.) On the map below, the newly-discovered logging road is the segment of orange leading north from the go-cart track and my new trail is the short segment of purple connected to that. The red X marks the location of our house. The map's grid is in kilometers.
Looking at the topographic map, I've determined that there must have been an ancient river that cut a three mile long valley running straight from the northeast to the southwest. You can see remnants of this valley in the map below. It starts in the middle of the map's top edge and runs in a straight line to the lower left-hand corner. It's long since been captured by a number of lesser streams eating their way up into the plateau from the Esopus Valley below.
