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West Bifurcation Cliffs from a distance
Wednesday, October 23 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
As part of my receiving a second round of unemployment benefits, today I had to attend a mandatory meeting at the local unemployment office, which seems to be part of the old IBM campus north of Kingston. At first I went into the wrong office, one catering to the needs of developmentally-challenged adults. (I got there just as a van full of such people arrived and was correctly directed to the right place.) The meeting was just me sitting with some employee at his desk as he filled out forms related to my qualifications. He suggested a few possible leads, including looking for NY State software developer jobs that he said apparently fairly easy to get. It only took about a half hour, but, distressingly, I have to return for another such meeting on December 6th if I still don't have a job by then (which I probably won't).
Back at the house, I quickly packed all the things I would need for a brief one-night stay at the Adirondack cabin so I could be there when the minisplit I'd ordered hopefully arrives. Then I got the dogs to stop sunning themselves in the driveway to get in the car so they could join me on this trip. Unusually, we didn't stop anywhere along the way. (I had a Planters peanut jar to piss in; it's a very convenient shape for that.)
It was an absolutely gorgeous day at the cabin, with clear sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s. I flung open all the doors to get as much of that warmth into the cabin while I took the dogs on a nice walk. We headed down the Lake Edward Trail sone distance, though I veered off it towards the north well before Quarterway Brook to explore terrain I don't normally walk through. The land is surprisingly rough in that direction, with shallow-but-steep ravines with wetlands at their bottoms that make it difficult to get through. (It turns out that the Lake Edward Trail avoids this by staying atop a narrow east-west highland.) Eventually, though, I made it to the top of a set of low cliffs that I knew ran to the south of a bend in Quarterway Brook. There I found some interesting crevices in the rock that were only a foot or so wide but tens of feet long and something like ten feet deep, like crevasses in a glacier and nearly as dangerous.
From there I continued mostly north and then east, following a similar route to the one I'd taken with Gretchen and the dogs on the 18th, though this time the loop was wider, taking us to that huge boulder I'd seen back on August 22nd and ultimately to the lower part of West Bifurcation Creek. At this time of the year with the leaves mostly gone from the trees, the West Bifurcation Cliffs were a stunning sight from some distance away. As I arrived there, I heard Charlotte off in the distance, perhaps near that massive boulder, barking at something like a crazed banshee. Charlotte is a 'fraidy cat and unlikely to tangle with, say, a mother bear with cubs (unlike much unlike the late Ramona). But I didn't like the sounds she was making. Fortunately, Neville didn't seem interested in joining her. It's also possible his ears are no longer as good as mine. So I called and called for Charlotte, eventually sitting down and waiting for her to arrive. When she did, she was soaking wet but otherwise perfectly normal.
Our parcel wasn't much further up the creek, and then we climbed the cliffs and steep escarpments along our boundary with Adirondack State Park to the cabin.
Back at the cabin, I made good progress implementing the front-end support in my ESP8266 Remote Control system for switching between the two weather graph views, the one which shows a graph for all the sensor data from one location to showing data of one type from multiple locations. Fortunately, all the work I've put into building timespan and date-in-the-past pickers works with this new graphing view just fine.
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The crevice described above.
Click to enlarge.
Neville walks along a massive stone wall.
Click to enlarge.
Neville approaches a rock with a bulbous overhang.
Click to enlarge.
A fairly large hemlock growing atop a large boulder. It has sent a large root down one side of the rock to get needed nutrients.
Click to enlarge.
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