Thanks for all the readers and followers I've had all these years - I hope you've been inspired to get out there and have some adventures mixed with history and science and good friends along. I hope you have some great hikes in the works for 2018!
Today I snuck out for sunrise (-3'F) while Bug slept in, cuddled in her blanket. Later in the day we went for a short hike at Kline's Run Park in Long Level on the Susquehanna. Her short coonhound coat is not very good at keeping her warm, so she wore her camo jacket but was still really cold (12'F) so I kept our hike short to about a mile.
Just before sunrise, my first day out of the house in a week due to a Christmas cold, headaches, and asthma (it's a package deal every time...) and it's - 3 degrees Fahrenheit on the bridge over the river, but I jump out of the warm car anyway and snap a picture. I'm reminded of how this was all sea bottom before the Big Collision between North American and North Africa...
Ancient seas had preserved their histories in rocks. In time, those rocks themselves would be preyed upon by newer seas, eroding history away again. But enough would survive to tell of life by then vanished, of the endless cycles of climate change and of the hidden poetry of our mutable world.
-Richard Forte, Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (1997)
Looking at the river rock contrasted by its dark color and the snow laying in layers I remembered the first fossil I ever found "in the wild" not far from here - a chunk of sandstone that contained hundreds of tiny fan corals and crinoid sections. I was eight. That was the beginning of my love affair with natural history and science history. I still have that hunk of stone, come to think of it...
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| Ridgetop woods. |
I thawed out with the heat on high blast in the car as I drove across the bridge to Susquehannock State Park for the sunrise. A group of Amish teenagers, their dad, and granddad were there to greet me "Alles Gute für das Neue Jahr!" ( All the best for the New Year!) - so I'm glad I didn't bring Bug because the carriage horses were right there hitched to the overlook fence. She would've had been a nutcase barking and baying at them and might have ruined the peace of the sunrise for everyone.
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| A peak at the Cold Cabin community. |
About twenty minutes was all I could do but I did get my First-of-Year birds at the top and below. In the woods walk back to the car I spotted a Ruby-Crowned Kinglet in a holly tree at the ridgetop then a Belted Kingfisher at the river walk below. As the sun rose a little higher a delicious mist began to rise from the river. I could see the Cold Cabin community between Turkey and Wolf Islands. Smoke was beginning to rise from the chimneys and I watched a duck hunter wade out (!!!) with his decoy set for a day of hunting.
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| Gray and red fox tracks? |
The river walk makes a great place to find tracks in a light snow and this morning was no exception. A small set of running canine prints made straight away for a leaning, hollow sycamore back from the edge of the river, while another larger set of canine tracks loped diagonally across the smaller prints. I can only assume that this is a gray fox heading for the tree, while the red fox came and returned to a hillside of talus stones. They had more sense to stay in their warm dens than I did down on the river! Gosh it was cold.
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| Decoy spread near a river blind. |
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| First ice fisherman of the day arrived at sunrise and 0'F. |
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| Full dawn lights up the River Hills. |
With full dawn now illuminating the river valley I drove up the wiggly river road to the crest and looked across as ice snapped and groaned on the river. This small amount of sunlight was enough to start the ice-a-poppin and the sound echoed back and forth across the mile-wide Susquehanna like a Star Wars sound effect. There were all those ocean bed layers lying one against the other like a deck of cards laid on edge across the river - how many millions of years did that deck of cards represent?
This history fingers back through hundreds of millions years, not an evolutionary tree so much as an evolutionary forest, and every branch possibly, or possible not, recorded in the rocks.
- R. Fortey (1997)
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| Old Bug gets her First Day walk and she's happy for the warm car after a mile. |
Come afternoon when the temperature had rocketed up to 5'F I asked Bug if she was ready for her First Day walk. Off we went - me coughing and she shivering. Troopers. We drove a few miles up the river and looked at the frozen expanses across the Turkey Hill water gaps, where river hydrologists have tracked the river running at depth through a deep slot gorge at the bottom that has yet to be precisely measured, but some hypothesize that 200' at bottom is conservative. Before the big dams downstream were built, this was an area of deadly falls, rapids, and swirling potholes.
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| Turkey Hill Gaps - site of the deep gorge. |
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| Looking north towards Columbia-Wrightsville Gaps. |
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| Canal towpath trees. |
At Kline's Run we explored the river bank. The ice has only just formed here so no dramatic pile-ups yet and compared to the river islands below, the wide frozen expanse was very quiet. We walked a section of old towpath and Bug had to explore each Red Maple multi-stem clump for all the smells.
Then - What! We found the York County Champion Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum)! At last measurement it had a circumference of 116 inches and a height of 80 feet. I know of another BC that may be bigger but have yet to send in its measurements for nomination. You don't find Bald Cypress this far north unless they've been intentionally planted so its kind of a treat to see one growing happily along the riverbank without any claim of having been put there on purpose. I had been looking for this tree too far south of here, so it was a great surprise to turn around and ta-da!
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| York County PA Champion Bald Cypress |
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| Kline's Run Sycamores |
There is nothing colder looking than a clump of frosty sycamores near a frozen creek with a classic German-built stone house in the picture. Everything screams of Andrew and N.C. Wyeth here - the hues and tones, bleak landscape, and massiveness of stone and big trees together. One of my New Year's resolutions is to find and document as many of the Big Tree champions on my hikes as I can so this was the perfect start to the New Year. Yay, trees!
We had one more place to walk so I looked at poor shivering Bug in the car and she winked at me, so off we went. I wasn't
sure either one of us was up to it - I was coughing like a sputtering old 2-cycle
engine and Bug was shaking for the two of us, but what the heck - up
we went to High Point Park above the river in a mad dash face-in to Arctic winds
(20pmh) until we got to the top on the Spiral Trail. We even did (sort of) the
labyrinth at the pinnacle. Poor Bug! She looked at me like I was crazy but - Lo! - the smell of some creature under the snow distracted her long enough for me to get a shot of the view north, where all this frigid wind was coming from. The midday temp was a warm and cozy 12'F but with the wind it was a slightly chilly at minus - 6'F. Time to go home and have some hot chocolate (for me) and warmed sausage treats (for Bug!).
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| Frozen Susquehanna from High Point. |
Notes:
My New Year's Resolutions include more big tree hunts and documentation. During both my long hikes in Northern Spain (2016) and in Northern England (2017) I was inspired to love the big and ancient trees more - if that's even possible...
The Ancient Tree Forum is an excellent organization in the U.K. that I've joined (they have a great Facebook page!) and have been inspired by their work. http://www.ancienttreeforum.co.uk/
We've also joined Trees for Life https://treesforlife.org.uk/
and hope to spend a volunteer vacation in Scotland to help with rewilding and reforestation projects there. They too have a nice FB page that tree folk will love.
For US tree enthusiasts, you can't go wrong to join American Forests, which I've belonged since the Ice Ages ended in 1990. Now they're back. http://www.americanforests.org/
America's Big Trees are catalogued by AF here: https://www.americanforests.org/explore-forests/americas-biggest-trees/
For PA folks our state foresry board maintains this website and searchable index by county
PA Big Trees http://www.pabigtrees.com
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