|
|
Virginia Pond Saturday, June 1 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
After the usual routine in the cabin I took the dogs for another epic walk that, as we the others this weekend, began with a walk down to the dock. From there, we hiked across the Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek through the site of an old Boy Scout camping site on our parcel and then mostly north and then northeast. The goal was to hurry through porcupine country as quickly as possible and get to the unnamed east-west creek that flows through the Six Acre Marsh and follow it upstream to a beaver meadow I'd seen in the Google satellite view. The last time I'd been in this area, Charlotte had encountered a big porcupine up in a tree. That time I'd mistaken a small side-branch of the East Bifurcation Creek for the big unnamed east-west creek. But this time I had my phone with me and it was giving me an accurate sense of where I was on the map, and when I crossed that little branch, I still had a ways to go to get to where I intended to go. As I walked, I tried to keep Neville nearby, since (as I'd mentioned) he was the only dog in the pack with a personality likely to get him severely quilled. Since he moves slowly, if I heard barking from the other dogs, I could grab him and keep him from doing anything he might regret.
But there were no porcupines on our route. This is not to say we didn't pass a lot of rock faces with missing and displaced blocks, producing the kinds of voids that porcupines like to occupy. Somehow the landscape guided us further east than I would've preferred, and as we approached the beaver meadow, I saw we were actually coming at it from the east (that is, upstream). I also noted that the clearing (43.127516N, 74.334530W) looked similar to a map of Virginia (that is, the way it's looked since West Virginia was split off it during the Civil War). So I decided to call any pond we found in the meadow "Virginia Pond." And, since the creek it is on is (as far as I know) unnamed, I decided to name it Virginia Creek. The clearing in the woods is less than a half acre in size, though the sudden appearance of such a big hole in the canopy is striking. The meadow had an additional oddity in that all the hemlocks around it had recently died. They still had all their needles, though the needles had dried out and turned a light greyish brown. The meadow had a few patches of green, but most of it was the same light greyish brown as the hemlocks, as thought it had been flooded with standing water until very recently. Perhaps the beaver dam had been taller recently and failed in a flood. While the dogs and I checked it out, the beaver pond was only a several hundred square feet in size, though the dam blocking its outflow was still raising the water level by a couple feet. There were a few partially-cut-down trees, but not much sign of recent beaver activity. I did find one indication of human activity: a folding canvas camp chair someone had left behind; perhaps it belongs to a fisherman or the rare person like me who doesn't have to harm wildlife in order to enjoy being outside. That said, I was killing plenty of deer flies as they tried to burrow through the hair on the top of my head. Occasionally I kill one sucking blood from one of the dogs as well. Deer flies only come out when temperatures are at least 70 degrees Fahrenheit, which it hadn't initially been.
From Virginia Pond we hiked down the shallow-though-steep-walled gorge carrying the newly-dubbbed Virginia Creek, encountering occasional pools big enough for a human to swim in. I even found a place where Virginia Creek briefly bifurcated around a non-trivial island. It was an astoundingly beautiful landscape, and I felt lucky to be the one of the few people in the world with easy access to it.
When we arrived at Woodworth Lake's east bifurcation, we walked that back up to Woodworth Lake and then back to the cabin.
Later this afternoon, I took the big eighteen-inch Kobalt chainsaw, a beer, and some bungee cords down to the lake. Charlotte and Jack came along, but Neville was too exhausted from the hike to Virginia Pond and back. The beer was to drink while and bungee cords were to make a permanent part of one of the kayaks to increase its freight-hauling potential. But the little nubs I wanted to attach the hooks to weren't prominent enough for that job, so I had to attach them a different way. I kayaked out to the outflow dam, parked it in the water above the beaver dam, and proceeded to work for awhile in the creek. Yesterday and last weekend I'd done some work improving the second beaver dam (the one that forms the pond immediately downstream from the lake. This afternoon my work mostly went into improving the stone causeway that allows for an easy foot crossing of the outflow creek (though it also serves as something of a third dam). I prefer stone walkways to be fairly flat and for the individual stones to not move at all when I step on them. With this in mind, I added a number of additional flat stones to improve the crossing experience. I enjoy puttering round like this with both rocks and moving water; it reminds me of how I entertained myself as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s without a television or video games. It turns out that such play remains just about as fun for me fifty years later.
As I was playing in the outflow creek, I happened upon a small (three or four inch long) crayfish in the outflow creek, the first crayfish I'd ever seen in New York State (though they were common in Folly Mills when I used to play in it as a kid).
When I climbed back into the kayak and paddled back to our dock, I saw that the dogs who had followed me down from the cabin were gone. So I continued
along the east shore of Woodworth Lake nearly to the public dock, inspecting the shoreline and seeing what Ibrahim is now doing at his dock (answer: not much had changed). Meanwhile a group of men (they looked like maybe they were professionals, as they all were wearing bright orange shirts) deployed Pyotr's floating dock system for the year. (We'd deployed ours something like seven weeks ago!)
On the walk back to the cabin, I stopped at a large sugar maple that had fallen across the trail and which I'd cut a piece from in order to reopen the trail about two years ago. I used the chainsaw to cut out an eighteen-inch-long segment and then proceeded to cut that piece in a way that would've turned it into a stool with four legs. This involved cutting out a pattern between the legs that resembled a thick cross with arms of equal length. But the battery ran out before I got too far into the project. Still, it went better than expected. Often when I have an idea to do something creative like this (for example: a dragon made with welded-together bottle caps for scales), the mismatch between theory and practice is so dramatic that it cautions me against similar such projects in the future. The cautions in this case were regarding the known difficulty of achieving parallel and perpendicular cuts in multiple planes, particularly when working without jigs or any measuring devices. There was also the general difficulty of using a chainsaw as a precision tool. Somehow, though, the saw seemed to be making exactly the cuts I needed.
Meanwhile erosion has continued carrying away sand from the cabin's northeast corner despite my stick-and-leaf anti-erosion measures. It was looking like I was going to have to be more proactive. What I needed was landscape fabric, that black material that lets through water while holding back soil. So I decided to drive into Gloversville and get some at the True Value hardware store. I figured I would need a road beer for the drive back, so I put a Voodoo Ranger Juice Force hazy imperial IPA in the lower part of the Bolt's console. But something jarred it loose and then something put a tiny pinprick in the can. As I was driving, I wondered why the car smelled like a frat party. That was why. So I was forced to drink it before I'd originally intended to.
In Gloversville, I found the True Value was closed. This forced me to drive to the Johnstown Ace Noble hardware store, which would be closing in about forty minutes. This time I gave in to the desire of the staff to help me, and soon I had both my landscape fabric and a some hardware for mounting four by four posts on a flat deck.
On the drive back to the cabin, I impulsively made a left turn onto Route 29A in the hamlet of Meco as I was heading north on Highway 122. (The car's batter had been completely filled with free solar energy, so I felt justified in going on something of a joy ride.) Route 29A soon climbs the Adirondack escarpment and enter Adirondack State Park near the southwest corner of Peck Lake, and at 1370 acres, it's much bigger than either Woodworth Lake or Lake Edward. It's also manmade, though it might flood one or more natural lakes. It's also where all the water that flows into Woodworth Lake and Lake Edward eventually ends up (its surface is a little shy of 1400 feet above sea level, while Lake Edward is 1500 feet ASL and Woodworth Lake is 1650 feet ASL). I was curious what it looked like. Was it crowded with cabins? Were there businesses nearby? What did the dam look like? I never got out the car; I drove to the north end of Peck Lake Road and past the dam (a squat brutalist structure) and then back to 29A. I got a few glimpses of the lake, which is a dramatically-large body of water (and seeing the trace of it that I can see from the cabin in the winter time doesn't do it justice). I saw a few cabins and resots, but it wasn't congested like some of the hillbilly lakes one sees in other parts of the Adirondacks. Also, the whole north end of the lake appears to be wilderrness, which keeps that part (the part visible from the cabin) from being lit up like a Christmas tree.
Later this evening, taking advantage of the stimulation from pseudoephedrine I'd taken around noon, I worked out most of the rest of the bugs resulting from the Friday's improvements to my remote controller code. I didn't want to wake up with a hangover, but it would've been my third night of taking diphenhydramine had I taken that (which would've rendered it ineffective) so I managed to track down a xanax, the one I'd thought I'd given to Charlotte before removing her porcupine quills three weeks ago (but that had actually been an estrogen supplement).

Woodworth Lake from the dock today. Click to enlarge.

A bluegill sunfish and his shadow guarding his lake-bottom nest near the dock. There are five or six other bluegills doing the same thing nearby. I read somewhere that only males do this. They're still wearable. Click to enlarge.

This pair of Crocs is something Gretchen bought me back in 2005. They were fully intact until this past fall, when Charlotte chewed on one of them. They're still wearable. Click to enlarge.

Dogs lounging and sniffing the ground just above our dock. Charlotte had just exposed some cool earth by digging and then lay on her side in it. Click to enlarge.

Neville and Jack took turns soaking in the Outflow Pond, a small pond between two dams just downstream of Woodworth Lake. They're still wearable. Click to enlarge.

A prime porcupine den on the uplands between the West Bifurcation and Virginia Creek. They're still wearable. Click to enlarge.

Jack cooling off in a swimming hole in Virginia Creek just upstream from the beaver pond and clearing. Click to enlarge.

Looking downstream into the clearing at Virginia Pond. Click to enlarge.

The dead hemlocks and formerly-flooded soil at Virginia Pond. Click to enlarge.

The beaver dam at the outflow of Virginia Pond. Click to enlarge.

The rocky gorge of Virginia Creek some distance below Virginia Pond. Click to enlarge.

Lilypads in the outflow bay at Woodworth Lake. Click to enlarge.

The southwest corner of Peck Lake looking northeastward. Click to enlarge.

Peck Lake's brutalist concrete dam. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?240601 feedback previous | next |