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accurate cross-country compass navigation and deerflies
Saturday, July 8 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
All week, I've been using my custom detached Spelling Bee system to play the New York Times Spelling Bee so as not to step on Gretchen's game. But this morning, we played it together the way we traditionally do on Saturday and Sunday mornings. I wrote the letters on a piece of cardboard, which was what Gretchen looked at, while I had the game open to type in both our answers on a Chromebook.
After we'd worked on that for awhile, Gretchen impulsively decided to start pulling up the most noxious weed nearest the cabin, which is a plant I've had trouble identifying (it's also very common in our yard in Hurley) but which Gretchen thought (probably correctly) was mugwort. Unlike the similarly-tall sweet clover, mugwort doesn't fix nitrogen or produce bee-friendly flowers. It just stands there and gets in the way. I suggested Gretchen preserve as much soil as possible by banging the roots against the ground and disposing of the plants in the one place they were sure to die: in the shade of the patch of woods just to the south.
After she'd satisfied herself pulling up the larger mugworts, Gretchen headed down to the dock to spend as much of her day down there as possible.
Eventually I went beneath the decks along the cabin's east foundation wall to continue the excavation project down there. (It being Saturday, I didn't have to worry about my Microsoft Teams activity indicator turning yellow, as it does when I haven't clicked my mouse in five minutes or so.) I'd assembled (and waterproofed, using the lid from a five gallon bucket as a rain shield) a very high brightness lamp that I could hang from hooks I'd installed between every other deck floor joist near that wall. This gave me plenty of illumination exactly where I needed it. I saw that the tunnel I'd thought to have been made by a woodchuck and been fully restored since the digging I'd done two days ago (which had caused its entrance to collapse). Today I mostly dug around that tunnel, not wanting to disturb it quite yet.
After getting fairly sweaty from my digging, I walked down to the dock, followed slowly by the dogs. As I was leaving the cabin area, I saw that the dogs had apparently been trying to extract a varmint who had sought shelter inside the black corrugated HDPE drainage pipe that drains the cabin's foundation. They'd scratched away the gravelly soil covering the pipe and had left multiple bit holes in the soft plastic at the pipe's open downhill terminus.
Down at the lake, I'd prepared myself a travel mug cocktail containing pomegranate & blueberry juice with a hearty pour of gin. The travel mug was a Yeti-branded one, and it was far too wide at the bottom to fit in the cup holders of the River Run inner tube I was floating on.
Later, up at the cabin, Gretchen suggested she and I go for a more ambitious hike than usual, one we'd have to sneak out of the house to do, so our old arthritic dogs wouldn't try to follow us. When Gretchen suggested maybe walking through the trackless wilderness to the east shore of Lake Edward, I said that sounded good. I immediately strapped on a wrist-mounted compass, which is now my preferred way to navigate through trackless terrain. (Using a GPS device that lacks a compass always leads to unwanted straying from the desired route.)
We tried sneaking out without the dogs noticing, but our cloak-and-dagger behavior only made them more interested. So they ended up following us.
To the west of the cabin, I have a good trail established down the steep part of the hill that our cabin sits near the top of. But somewhere on the flatter terrain further west beyond a narrow swampy lowland, the trail gets lost. So from there, we just went magnetic west, periodically consulting my compass as we continued. Using subtle colored dots on trees, I'd marked the way when through this area back in May, and occasionally I'd see trees with these dots. But, unfortunately, the dots were not visible or frequent enough to follow on their own. Ultimatey, though, we ended up at he same spot on the Lake Edward shoreline that I'd gotten to in May, suggesting that following a compass results in a nearly-repeatable cross-country trek. Gretchen had been keeping track of time and said it had taken us 36 minutes to hike about 4000 feet (a little over 100 feet per minute).
By the time we reached the lake, we were all being mercilessly attacked by deer flies, so all of us (dogs and humans) walked out into the water. Though I just waded out a short distance on a lake bottom made of sticks and murky mude, Gretchen went for a real swim, though she only made it out a couple hundred yards towards the lake's primary axis. Ramona also did a little swimming near the shore. Meanwhile, off in the distance to the north across the lake, we could hear some bros having what sounded like a loud sausage party.
We weren't at the lake long before the deer flies sent us fleeing back homeward, this time using my compass to to hike towards magnetic east. It wasn't a bad hike until we reached the steep hill below our cabin. I've climbed that slope many times, but after hiking through so much trail-free wilderness, it wrung what little reserve energy we had in us. Still, even Ramona managed to drag herself up that hill. When she came out of the woods into our cabin's clearing, her limbs seemed to be flailing inefficiently. I scooped her up in my arms to carry her up the front steps of the cabin and shooed away the dozens of deer flies marauding her before getting her inside.
Since, with regard to our WiFi hotspot, we freaklishly still have many more gigabytes of download for this billing cycle than we can possibly use, tonight Gretchen used a Chromebook to watch several of the kind of television progams she likes on Netflix. (These were probably British detective shows.)
The dog-chewed end of the plastic pipe that drains the cabin's foundation.
Click to enlarge.
These wood chips are from a tree felled by a beaver near Woodworth Lake. I didn't expect them to be this big.
Click to enlarge.
Fallen hemlock needles from a tree partially-felled by a beaver near Woodworth Lake.
Click to enlarge.
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