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cliffs above Middleburgh
Sunday, July 23 2023
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Gretchen had spent the night in the upstairs bedroom, sleeping on the unwashed sheets of our houseguests (because they're probably cleaner than we are). At around 9:00am I went to check on her due to the melancholy she'd mentioned last night. She seemed better, though it might've been mostly due to the xanax she'd taken at some unspecified time in the past (I know when I take them before going to bed, their effects last into the next morning). I said that the only effect I ever get with xanax is sleepiness, that it doesn't really do much for my anxiety. Gretchen replied that for that reason I shouldn't be taking any of her pills, a controlled substance that her doctor doesn't always seem excited to write refills for.
After another fairly typical weekend morning at the cabin, Gretchen went down to the lake while I installed a full sheet of styrofoam (in one piece this time) into the space I'd made for it just west of the Bilco doors. I only had to trim about three quarters of an inch off the top of the eight-foot-tall sheet to get it to fit, though of course I'd managed to trim off too little when I went to put it in place, forcing me to awkwardly saw away at the top while standing over the hole in the ground that it reached to the bottom of. This sheet was adjacent to the Bilco doors, where smaller concrete wing-walls come out of the foundation wall at a 90 degree angle to form the side walls of the "air lock" below the metal doors themselves. As I had with the east Bilco wing-wall, I glued a sheet of thinner (three quarter inch) styrofoam recycled from the packaging of a furniture delivery to the outside of the west wing-wall so it wouldn't lose much heat through the ground in the vicinity of where it attached to the foundation wall proper, thereby limiting the amount of heat being conducted away out via the wing-walls.
Once I'd completed that work, I celebrated by filling my mug with gin & lemonade and walking down to the dock with the dogs. As usual, Gretchen had already been down there for some time. As I joined her, I saw a flat-bottom boat with several fishermen in it some distance away across the lake. Gretchen said she hadn't known anyone was on the lake and had been swimming and then sunning herself completely naked. Something about remembering she needed to save her swim cap from falling in the water made her see the fisherman as they approached, giving her time to conceal herself behind one of the zero-gravity chairs so she could put some clothes on.
After floating around for awhile on one of the hammock-like floats near the dock, I decided to take Ramona for a canoe ride. (She'd been whimpering with FOMO as she watched me paddling around in the water-hammock, and I hadn't taken her on a ride in the canoe in some time.) I paddled all the way to the beaver dam at the lake's outflow, and that was where Ramona decided to get out. She didn't seem all that interested in getting back in, so I paddled back to the dock without her. Ramona managed to find her way back via the shoreline trail only a minute or so after I'd returned.
Back at the cabin, I did a little experimental digging in the spot where the next sheet to the west along the north foundation wall will go. In this spot is a narrow two-foot gap between the foundation wall and the pad on which the Generac generator sits, and I'm leery of digging all the way down to the footing in this narrow gap as I have for all the other sheets of styrofoam so far. It's not just that there will be a heavy generator and concrete pad sitting at the top of the precipice of any trench that I would have to be at the bottom of in order to dig, it's also that there are gas lines routed though the here soil as well, and these will require special attention to work around. I figure that if I can dig down several feet below the surface in this spot, that would be a sufficient depth for insulating the foundation wall there given the difficulties. To get a sense of how difficult this would be, I did a little preliminary digging, throwing all the resulting dirt into the ditch beside the styrofoam sheet I'd just installed earlier today. It felt effortless compared to the ditch digging I've been doing recently, which is hardly surprising since the material I was removing only had to move sideways and downward.
At about 5:30pm, Gretchen and I packed up the car, closed down the cabin, and started driving back to Hurley. We decided to take the route Lisa and Bill had taken through the northeast Catskills, completely bypassing the Thruway until we got to Saugerties. Our route took us down to Fonda, where we cross the Mohawk and continued southward on previously untraveled roads to Schoharie and Middleburgh. The former had a bunch of beautiful houses, and the latter was in a deep valley with forested ridges on either side striped by vertical stone cliffs. From there, the terrain gets rougher and rougher as one approaches the core of the Catskills, though the road we were driving on never experienced any steep grades or dramatic curves. At some point the Schoharie Creek disappeared and we were in the headwaters of Catskill creek, which I already knew drains into the Hudson (which Schoharie Creek also does, though it has to do it after flowing north into the Mohawk). The drive was at least a half hour longer than it would've been via the Thruway, though the route was 12 miles shorter. The biggest difference, though, was how little it impacted the Chevy Bolt's battery. We started with a range of 206 miles and ended with a range of 136 miles, meaning the 98 mile drive only used 70 miles of "average" range. This was entirely due to the lower driving speeds, which were mostly under 60 mph.
Ramona on the canoe in the Woodworth Lake outflow bay.
Click to enlarge.
Butterflies (or maybe skippers) on thistles growing in the beaver dam at the Woodworth Lake outflow.
Click to enlarge.
Queen Anne's lace in front of the cabin.
Click to enlarge.
A flying bee near some flowers near the cabin's front door.
Click to enlarge.
A mullein flower spike in front of the cabin.
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