My niece Amy and I ventured out to explore the Upper Gunpowder River where it is at its most wild and scenic. The day was predicted to hold a few showers and be mostly cloudy, but it turned out to offer broken blue skies and gentle breezes. We were both happy and feeling very lucky to have this day to put aside the crazy-making world of post-Covid year office jobs and enjoy a long awaited day of hike-and-dawdle.
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| Trail post intersection with the Highland Trail. |
There were so few people out that we almost had the river and hills to ourselves, save for a handful of fly fishermen and day hikers. I was relieved not to see the parking areas packed with cars and the road leading down to the old iron span bridge absent packs of loud people. Honestly, I have been avoiding many of my favorite hikes this past year and a half because of the crowds so I was relieved to see this area so quiet.
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| Upper Gunpowder River |
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| Cold and gold the river flows. |
Almost 60 miles long, the Big Gunpowder (there's a Little Gunpowder, too) runs from Southern York County, PA, to the Chesapeake Bay. It provides Baltimore City with its drinking water and gathers in the Loch Raven Reservoir downstream. The Prettyboy Reservoir above us with its impressively steep dam serves as the backup supply should levels at Loch Raven become too low. The system is charged by rain and snow melt. The forested watershed is protected by state and city authorities.
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| Warbler's demise |
Colors popped under muted skies. Gold and yellow stole the show. Signs of "casual" beaver activity made us giggle. A great blue heron stalked for fish and migrating warblers, tanagers, and flycatchers kept us busy ID-ing as they fluttered through the woods.. My only complaint was how thick and almost impenetrable the banks of Japanese Barberry (Berberis thunbergii) and Burning Bush (Euonymus alatus) had become. Where we saw native plants like Wild Ginger, they were buried under solid walls of the stuff. It really was a nightmare
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| Sycamore bark |
We came to the Highland Trail post and turned uphill on an old charcoal wagon road that was so deeply incised into the hillside it reminded me of the ancient u-shaped holloway roads of northern England and the Borders of Scotland. No wider than heavy horse and his wagon, some holloways are so deep that a walker can remain unseen to sheep and cattle grazing in fields above. I've walked many sunken roads in England and Scotland as segments of old pilgrimage paths, some so deep with hundreds (sometimes a thousand or more) years of foot and hoof travel that vegetation forms a tunnel of green overhead and the enfolding high banks cradle the treadway at bottom.
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| Amanita |
We talked about how we've come to really love the shoulder seasons of not-quite-full-on-autumn and the raw yet hopeful late winter/ early spring where transition is subtle, almost secretive. We both love the austerity of the muted winter palette with its symphonic surprises of pure sound and color against background of ochre, brown, and grey. But today was about yellow and gold. We were in no hurry, stopping to notice every little thing so that despite the upward pitch of the old road we were never short of breath. The air turned slightly cooler and a breeze drew up the valley as dark clouds slipped past overhead but there was no rain. We admired an old pasture fence and some old sugar maples that once grew in the open sunshine, limbs outstretched and with thick trunks "eating" old wire and planks.
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| Haircap Moss |
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| Highland Trail |
Near the top of the hill the trail split away from the charcoal road and skirted the slope down towards a tiny stream. This was a different kind of path, maybe one that started as a deer trail long ago. It weaved slightly here and there but mainly stayed true to the deer's way of descending steep slopes on the diagonal.
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| Bonnets |
Hemlocks and American Sycamore gave way to White Pines, Hickory, and Oak. Beech trees clustered at the elbow of the trail where it crossed the tiny stream. American Holly punctuated the yellow understory with dramatic dark green foliage and it will stay just so throughout the winter. Spicebush flaunted its understory skirts of golden yellow and Virginia Creeper showed off cranberry-red leaves weaving through Christmas ferns. Hay-scented and Woodfern have already turned brown and brittle, but the hardy Christmas fern, like the Holly, will keep its deep green year-round.
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| Macro photography |
As we bent and kneeled to take pictures of mushrooms at ground level, I noted that besides a few toothy scrapes on the caps, not many animals in these parts seem to eat exclusively mushrooms. And there were lots to choose from! The Northern Flying Squirrel, Glaucomys sabrinus, however, prefers mushroom caps over almost everything else and I've observed these forest gliders tucking mushroom into knotholes and the forks of limbs for later dining. During my time in South Carolina, I remember watching wild boar root for emergent mushrooms - oh the damage they did to the forest floor! I'll stick with Northern Flying Squirrels, thank you.
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| Sunken charcoal road |
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| Underside of a bracket fungi |
Fallen trees and dead standing snags were heavy with clusters of Artist's Conk, Ganoderma appalanatum, bright white shelves of bracket fungi. The undersides of these tough woody fungi looked different from the gilled undersides of the capped mushrooms on the forest floor. I tested the limits of my Pixel phone's camera by trying some close-up macro photography to capture the distinctive basidiospore tubes underneath. While I was at close quarters with the fallen tree, I noticed that almost every square inch of its surface was covered with thick netted webs of mycelium. No doubt the tree's rotting interior was riddled through with several species and I ventured a guess that biomass weight of the fungal decomposers in this one tree might exceed the weight of the remaining wood.
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| Blue blaze of the Highland Trail |
I noted that from the river's edge to our height on the valley rim, there were thick forests of Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) with some of the biggest diameter trunks I'd ever seen in this valley. I almost mistook them for Rhododendron being used to seeing its thigh-round trunks on the banks of Muddy Creek at home, I did a double take when I saw that these giants were actually Mountain Laurel. How old they must be, I wondered.
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| Gravel work road |
After a sit-down water break and a sweet visit with Penny, a petite hound puppy, we topped the hill under some powerlines and started on the last stretch of trail. Laid with big chunky dark gravel, the gated work road connects the powerline corridor to the paved road ahead. We stopped to admire a Spotted Orbweaver at the locked gate (who kindly obliged our attempts at macro). These spiders are some of my favorite fall critters and I always make the time to say hello. Penny and her human friends crossed the paved road ahead of us and continued on wooded paths to Prettyboy Dam another mile or so on, while we turned down the paved road to end our loop.
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| Spotted Orbweaver (Neoscona sp.) |
Blessed are you, autumn,
season of unavoidable endings.
You show us how letting go
can be a glorious, joyful practice
with your spectacular colours.
You model how to hold
paradoxes with grace -
the balance of living and dying,
relinquishing and receiving,
gathering and sharing.
You know that death is not
and ending, but a passage,
a transformation into new life.
May we learn these lessons well:
to celebrate with abandon
to practice reverence
to surrender completely
to embrace tenderly
to love without regret
- Wendy Janzen
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| Hike-n-dawdlers. |
Notes:
Gunpowder Falls State Park is a long, linear state park and is divided into several management areas. We hiked the Highland Trail Loop on Falls Road in the Hereford Area
Autumn poem by Wendy Janzen, Burning Bush Wild Church
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