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Extension News: November 2010 Archives
When you have friends to climb with, time passes quickly, and the panting, sweating and wondering if you can keep going is easier to push out of your mind.
Not long ago I set out with three friends to climb Mt. Hale, one of the White Mountains' easiest 4,000-footers. Teresa has studied plants for years and can walk up a trail, knowing so many names of tiny woodland plants. Roxanne loves to tell stories and can turn the smallest situation into a 30-minute narrative. Sandra is a soccer-mom friend. At one game, we discovered a common passion--the mountains.
One of the lesser-known Whites, Mt. Hale has an elevation of 4,054 feet. Checking my book, I discovered I'd climbed Hale July 28 three years earlier. I vaguely remembered a long slog with the final half-mile going on and on and on.
Every time I climb a mountain a second or third time, I try not to have a preconceived idea of what the hike will be like. A mountain never bores. Each has its own ruggedness, majesty and magic. Its terrain and elevation combine with weather, state of mind, and hiking companions to offer a unique experience every day, every season, every year, for every climber.
As my friends and I geared up at the bottom, we noticed it had gotten colder and the sky had turned gray. We had diligently watched weather forecasts, and though we thought the day would be cool and clear, we'd packed cold and wet-weather gear, ready for anything. The White Mountains during a "shoulder season" are unpredictable.
Half an hour into the climb, snowflakes started falling. But none of us voiced any concerns.
Teresa kept pointing out wild plants and Roxanne kept telling stories. The snow started coming down harder.
There's a formula suggested for timing climbs. You have to learn how your own kind of hiking fits the formula and add or subtract time. We were planning on two miles per hour and a half hour per 1,000 feet of elevation gain. So, since the trail we chose, the Hale Brook Trail, was 2.2 miles long with a 2,300 elevation gain, we estimated we would reach the top in about two and a half hours.
It was getting colder. We stopped to pull gloves and hats from our packs. We put on waterproof jackets, and Sandra zipped on the bottom of her pants. Roxanne and I were wearing shorts. We hated getting overheated. We pulled our hoods up. The snow began swirling around us. We estimated about a half hour to go. I knew the worst part lay ahead: the final slog to the summit.
We stopped several times to readjust our layers. Hot, cold, back and forth. Luckily we had packed smart: extra gloves, extra socks, food, water, emergency blankets and more. We laughed at our fashion statements. Bright ponchos blowing in the wind, crazy hats of all kinds, zip on, zip off pants, gaiters.
No one wanted to give up.
Near the top, trudging along a bank that was now covered by four inches of snow, someone suggested, "Let's make snow angels."
With our packs still on, we fell back towards the bank, and spreading our arms and legs, we flew like angels, laughing and joking, catching snowflakes in our mouths with the glee of little girls. We got up gingerly, trying not to mar our angels. Admiring our artwork, we lingered there, talking about how fun it was to stop and play, enjoying what nature had thrown at us so ferociously.
We knew we could make it to the top. Within minutes we rounded the corner and reached the summit. Exhilarated, we cheered and breathed sighs of relief.
We got out our lunches and ate quickly, hooded, huddled and shivering in the blowing snow. We knew we needed to get back to the shelter of the woods and get on with the two-and-a-half-hour return to the warmth of the car. But we took time to climb atop the huge cairn and take photos of the gray, snow-filled sky around us. No view from this summit.
Our camaraderie, again, made us pause. This time our pause was more reflective. We thought of the turning weather, thankful that we had prepared well. We thanked our snow angels for boosting our spirits and reminding us that we could trust each other. So, we each put one foot forward to make four boot prints in the snow at the top of Mt. Halesole-sister prints, evidence of our bond and trust in each other.
In some ways we wished we'd had good weather and could linger. But we'd found fun and magic in the midst of a dangerous turn by Mother Nature.
Our four angels were covered with snow by the time we trudged by hurriedly on the way down. But we knew their magic, laughter and inspiration would be with us all the way to the end of our hike.
By Meg Downey Hardy, Master Gardener
Photo credit: Roxanne Angevine. Some rights reserved.
Another page on the calendar will soon turn. A few leaves hang tenaciously from otherwise nude branches. The wonderful peeling barks of the physocarpus shrubs show layers of cinnamon and ecru. The peels flutter in the breeze or hang droopily down in the stillness. Down in the swamp, a few mallards and hooded mergansers swim or fly in to land with loud calls. Gray clouds skim across the sky, too high to be depressing, but portending storms to come in the months ahead.
A thin coating of ice surrounds the yellowing growth along the water’s edge and reaches tentatively towards the middle. Each night it creeps out a few more inches. Sedges and grasses, old cattails and blue iris stalks whisper together in the wind.
The ducks float out in the middle, where the deeper water gives protection against the creeping vise of ice. I’ve brought my camera along to try to capture some of the wonder I feel, but after a few shots, I give up the attempt. The swimmers are too far away for good images and I already have dozens of shots of reflections. I switch to the binoculars to watch instead and am amazed again at what I see: Who would think to put that spot of velvet blue on the male’s head?
There’s no sense of effort to the duck’s swimming. It’s as if an underwater conveyer belt is passing him from tree stump to grass clump. His paddling feet betray no exertion. Barely a ripple follows behind him. Is the wind pulling him along?
Suddenly a nearby female mallard turns topsy turvy. One moment, her brown head is pointing a path straight ahead; the next, her tail end is sticking up in the air. Is that a stump the beavers left behind? Had I not seen her make the movement, I could have watched that stump for minutes and not realized it was alive. She remains feeding for a long time, then abruptly but smoothly, the head and tail switch positions and she’s once more a recognizable duck.
One of the things I love about the swamp is the searching it requires of me. When I walk down the path, stepping over the low, decaying stump, easing down the slippery hill, and climbing up the small mound to stand a few feet back from the water’s edge, I never know what wonders will unfold before me. It’s necessary to stand quietly and swing my head slowly from the beaver dam past the old, sunken lodge and a new high, domed one, to the space under the heron nests, and finally, around to the swamp’s far northwest edge, where the large rock stands up against the shore.
I must search slowly, carefully, or I’ll miss the beaver quietly moving among the reflections, the Canada goose floating near last spring’s nesting site, the barred owl on a limb on the far shore. There are hiding places out there in what was once a forest and is now a bowl of water, a few large rocks, and several dead trees. Only patience can reveal what is there.
I can watch for a long spell before noticing any movement. Then I realize a duck has been floating serenely, barely moving near a withered trunk. Gradually I notice he is not alone as a female and another male come into view. The brown females are beautifully camouflaged and blend into the background, so that even their swimming seems to be no more than grasses waving. The bright, iridescent head of the male mallard weaves into the background stalks and disappears. The hooded merganser’s brown and black body likewise slips into the background foliage while the male’s white chest and head patch seem to be mere reflections on the water.
Today no frogs poke their yellow chests up as they croak their calls. No black-capped chickadee slips quietly into the nest hidden in the broken tree trunk. The breeding season is long over. I expect the frogs have burrowed down into the mud. The little black-and-white birds are still around, ‘dee-dee-deeing’ whenever they see danger. I don’t know if they are the same ones that nested here last summer or if they are migrants from further north. It doesn’t matter.
A few more oak leaves flutter down. The ducks move off and reluctantly I turn to leave. As always, I feel a sense of calmness after my visit with nature. Winter is coming, yes, the calendar will turn another page, but seasonal change is simply another aspect of the natural world. Like the ducks, we need to accept the change and keep swimming on.
By Susan M. Poirier, Master Gardener
It is late October. New Hampshire has been exploding with bright colors that envelop the countryside. Fall seems late this year. It is unfolding slowly and the greens of many trees are holding on.
But today I was stopped in my tracks by the peaceful beauty of local apple trees. Never before had I stared in awe and felt such profound peace in an orchard I hike regularly. To me, the fragrance of bursting white buds bringing the orchard to life and the red shine of the apples ripening have always held the glory.
The harvest is almost over. A hush is overtaking the rows as they start to shed their leaf cloaks to take a long-deserved rest after months of pruning, growth, production, spraying, and finally, harvest. There is no humming of bees, tractors, or voices. No ladders lean against trunks; the huge wooden boxes set around the orchard to receive hand-picked apples have been filled and transported to a central location for sorting, shipping, and sale.
I hadn’t planned to write. I hadn’t even planned to notice. This was going to be a quick hike with my dogs. The camera I carry on most of my hikes was back on the kitchen counter. Even my phone camera was sitting useless in my car. I didn’t want this awe to escape. So, I pulled some wrinkled index cards and a half-working pen from my pack and started jotting down impressions.
The multitude of subtle colors surrounding me came first. Scribbling orange, gold, yellow or red wasn’t enough. I jotted down orange-maroon, orange-rust, orange-brown, orange-gold. Then pink-orange, rose-yellow, green-spotted edges, light green veins, and dark brown veins. The leaves at the ends of the branches seemed to have aged the fastest. They had changed to a plethora of maroon shades.
But when the sun peeked out from behind the clouds and hit that tree, even the darkest colors sparkled with yellow-white sunshine. How many colors could I see on one tree that was just my height? How could I put into words the brilliant uniqueness of every leaf on that one tree? They reminded me of snowflakes, but this time Mother Nature’s artistry was in “my” familiar orchard, and in just one tree among hundreds. All the other trees beckoned to me to visit them, pause, and soak in their unique beauty. I’d have to come back another day.
My observations and scribbles shifted to weeds, grasses, granite slabs, surrounding woods and hills, the rustle of the wind. I looked down as I stepped over New Hampshire granite warmed by the sun; remembering the many times I’d sat on that special spot to absorb the view. I noticed the juxtaposition of all kinds of weeds among the trees. The color, leaf shape, size and branching structure of each had its own unique beauty. And they added to the kaleidoscope I was immersed in. I squatted down to wonder at a 12-inch-high broadleaf plant struggling to survive in the wild grass. It had a purple color I don’t think Crayola has manufactured or named in a crayon. The wind broke me from my reverie as it bent my purple plant and all the golden grasses and set them swaying.
My impatient dogs took the chance to romp, roll and wrestle against me to regain my attention. They were wondering why my pace was so slow. What seemed like walking meditation to me was puzzling to the dogs.
Deep gray clouds were approaching and the wind was beginning to roar. It seemed as if we’d get stuck in a ferocious rainstorm if I didn’t pick up my pace. So I scribbled a few more phrases and tucked my wrinkled, dirty index cards into my pack so we could beat the rain. We hustled back to the car. Sleet hit just as I got the dogs safely into the car and started up my motor.
I had only index cards to remind me of the surprise I encountered in the “everyday” orchard just a mile from my house. A treasure whose seasonal beauty and mystique I had only half understood called to me today in a way it never had.
I know I’ll head out again in the winter with camera as well as note cards, certain that I’ll find a different beauty, magic, power, and mood, as long as I slow down and pause.
by Meg Downey Hardy, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener
Photo credit : liz west, Some rights reserved
My dad taught me to fly his airplane the summer I turned sixteen. I’d never taken much interest in aviation, at least until I stumbled across a magazine photograph of a Citation jet banking gracefully into the sunset. In one small photo I saw artistry and skill, glamour and pride, fluidity and serenity. That jet represented a clean merging of man and nature: a three-dimensional dance with her.
From that moment I understood that a pilot does not strap into an airplane; instead she straps the airplane onto her.
Once I got tall enough to reach the rudder pedals with my feet, Dad taught me the basics of how to keep an airplane airborne. He sat with his toes tucked away from the pedals and his hands folded in his lap, contentedly watching the view out his side window. It seemed he wasn’t paying attention, but I learned later that the airplane’s wingtip told him everything he needed to know about our course of flight. For me, the independence was magical.
Dad’s two-seat Aeronca didn’t fly very fast, but one hour took us far enough, to places like Jaffrey, Keene, Hampton, Nashua, and Laconia. The trees would grow bigger beneath us as we descended, the horizon gently sliding behind hills. Geese or deer basking on the warm runway would scatter before us as our wheels gently kissed Mother Earth. Once down, we’d gaze dreamily across grassy fields of tail-draggers, and biplanes. Some days a corporate jet would stir up the silence preparing to fly far away.
Today I have a career as a pilot flying transoceanic flights for a major airline to places such as Mumbai, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo. Airliners navigate via instruments and satellites, and cruising seven miles high at 10 miles per minute, means most surface details are lost. The earth appears mostly flat and monochromatic, often covered in clouds. There are some rare and beautiful things to see such as St. Elmo’s Fire and the Northern Lights, but usually the thin aircraft skin acts like a warm cocoon luring my attention inward. Flying for work and flying with Dad are two very different experiences.
Dad is a fair-weather flyer. He cruises low and slow and enjoys the view. He navigates by visual cues: train tracks, racetracks, the rivers of power lines, and the dots of cell-phone towers. Cloud formations and waves on water provide necessary information about wind direction and speed. Mountain peaks seen on the horizon make useful landmarks; a couple of Dad’s favorites are Mt. Agamenticus and the Pawtuckaway Mountains.
Flying low means being close enough to see the movements and impacts of people on the earth while still feeling the serenity and freedom of the wide, expansive sky. More than once I have cruised Dad’s plane at 2,500 feet, and he always asks me how can I see anything from up so high. So high up? I’m used to cruising at 35,000 feet. Everything is relative.
Long after I learned to fly, Dad traded in his Aeronca for a Lake Amphibian LA-4. By then he owned a summer house on a pond. We’d fly in, land on the lake, and tie it up to his dock where he’d leave it to float. One time, when we were airborne on the way to his lake house, we spotted a thunderstorm looming overhead his pond. It would pass in due time, so Dad casually asked me what was my preference in the meanwhile: tour North Conway and the eastern slopes of the White Mountains, or go land elsewhere to wait out the storm.
I delighted in how easily we modified our plans, and in the freedom of changing course without the usual rigmarole and procedure that I’m used to with an airliner. Three hundred passengers and a monstrous company “toy” require calling the dispatcher, revising the ATC clearance, reprogramming computers, pulling out arrival charts, refiguring performance data, re-briefing the cockpit and cabin crew, and advising the passengers. We get very busy, very fast. A recreational flight such as Dad’s leaves us free to just turn the airplane and go.
Dad gently slid the plane into another nearby pond and, for lack of anything else to do, we taxied to an island. We tied the airplane to a tree much the same way we tie up a canoe, and we clambered out to explore. We found an abandoned cabin with bunk beds and a small kitchen. On its front porch we shared a snack of rations scrounged from the airplane. Then we played tic-tac-toe in the sand on the shore. Loons, waterbugs, and lapping water provided a serene spirit so different from the angry, rumbling clouds in the distance.
Eventually the storm passed and Dad said, “So, what do you think? Are you ready to go?” Nobody but us knew of our decision. We didn’t need a new flight plan, release, or clearance. We didn’t need load planning, refueling, or a ramp crew. It was just Dad and me. We were free as birds.
By Dawn Klinker, Master Gardener
Fall’s second phase hit hard this morning. The moonless sky was clear, sprinkled with bright stars and resonant with infinite silence. My footsteps crunched on the frozen path as I loaded the car with my tote bag of lunch and the work I’d optimistically brought home. I shivered as I scraped the windshield.Foliage Season ended last week, and we’ve entered what we affectionately call Stick Season, the austere steel and rust of the forest’s architecture. The heavy rains over the weekend pulled down the remaining leaves of gold and garnet. The occasional pre-sunrise breeze crinkled the leaves on the forest floor. Chipmunks, birds, and neighbors all still slept.
The weekend’s soaking rain hydrated otherwise drying vegetation. It created puddles in our fields and raised the level of the stream. I could hear the stream’s volume pouring down the valley, a constant hum and gurgle in the distance. It is always reassuring to go into winter with a full aquifer.
We mow our fields in a three-year rotational cycle, allowing grasses, wildflowers, and trees to flourish. We mow hard a section each year, letting the other sections grow chest high. We do this to invite song birds, butterflies, insects, and critters of various sizes to have better habitat. It seems to have helped keep out invasive plants, too, as we have only had one purple loosestrife plant take hold. We dug that out as soon as we noticed it this summer.
While it looks a bit messy year-round, we think it’s a much healthier field, and one that constantly evolves. Nature walks often lead to some adventure, either finding a new wild apple tree or a mucky spot where we sink to our ankles, or the aroma of milkweed in flower, or our surprise at the pterodactyl-like squawk from a startled great blue heron.
At night we sometimes see the flashing eyes of coyote and fox, the flick of white tails on deer bounding from our headlights, and summer’s lightning flashes of fireflies. The grasses and goldenrod grow high in the summer, stretching toward the sun, swaying in the hard winds that hit the valley where we live. Some mornings in late summer, thousands of spiders’ webs hang heavy with dew and shimmer in the morning light. It seems like the space between each plant in those 20 or so acres is home to a fat and happy spider, waiting for its next meal.
In gentle breezes the grasses swoosh in waves making the field almost oceanic. The messiness provides a lot more value to us than would a tidy, green field. Plus it’s a lot less work. Why kill all this life to create a monoculture of grass? Someday we may change our minds and move the field back into production, but for now we think it’s producing just fine.
But it was still night-time dark at six in the morning, and I could see only that field in my imagination. As I drove down the hill, out of the sheltered woods, the headlights illuminated not just the gravel road, but also the encroaching grasses and wildflowers.
The surprise was profound and surreal. Crystalline, sparkly, sugar-coated. Shivering in the still-cold car, I had to stop and sit for a minute to fully absorb what I was seeing. It looked fake. The hard frost had turned all that dismal and bone-chilling rain into a most magical scene, a field of shimmering crystals. It was blinding and dreamlike and hypnotic.
Crystal upon crystal covered every bit of vegetation, turning soggy brown into crispy white. The textures and sounds of the field went from soft and muffled from decay to sharp and brittle in the cold. Goldenrod, milkweed pods, and lanky grasses seemed encased in glass, quietly clinking in the early dawn breeze.
Much is made of the glory of vibrant fall colors, and our tourist industry relies on those wows of beauty around every corner. This was an especially spectacular year. The cacophony of color is nature’s last hoorah, something to savor and photograph. Stick Season seems a let-down, an overnight metamorphosis into something stark and angular, from color to sepia photography.
But, as I saw this chilly morning, sometimes the more profound beauty is less publicized, fleeting, and startling. That crystallized field went through a shocking change last night, but it’s now ready for winter. That’s what Fall’s Phase Two is all about. Gone is summer; here comes winter.
By Laura Richardson, Master Gardener
The last plant to bloom this season in my yard opened its flowers in early October. It was not a rose, but rather a Rose of Sharon (aka Althaea) that had lain dormant for many years.
I didn’t expect much when I planted this member of the Hibiscus family recommended for Zones 5-8, for I live in Zone 3. I covered it with mulch each fall and looked for signs of life each spring. Hope turned into frustration that it hadn’t taken hold, and I was prepared to yank it from the soil this year.
I’d given up on it when I noticed, stunned, it was finally beginning to leaf out. Ecstatic, I ran to my desk where I file plant tags, since I had forgotten what color it was, it had been so long. So these new stunning white blossoms with red centers and striking stamens marked a personal achievement, indeed.
I planted the Rose of Sharon when I first arrived in the mountains of Northern New Hampshire six years ago. It had been one of my favorite shrubs grown by a childhood neighbor in Connecticut. Like the Althaea, I didn’t expect it to take root in this remote area, let alone blossom.
Fresh from divorce and heartbreak, I thought of the north woods as a lovely rest stop, where I might lick my wounds for a bit before returning to the city. This wasn’t the proper zone for a newly single and savvy woman like me. Like the last two lines of Thomas Moore’s poem, “The Last Rose of Summer”: Oh! who would inhabit, This bleak world alone?
But the beauty of the place overrode my pragmatism and I established myself here, much to the chagrin of friends and family. “How will you survive up there?” they wondered. While I have certainly learned a good many things to sustain myself in the North Country, one of the most fortuitous has been learning to live by nature’s clock, rather than my own.
And at this time of the year that means putting the gardens to rest and preparing for winter. It involves cutting back perennials, pruning shrubs, covering the compost pile, putting away the tractor and changing the oil in the snow blower, stacking seasoned wood, fertilizing the lawn one last time, and putting snow tires on the car.
Rose of Sharon is often referred to as Rosasharn, the name of a character in John Steinbeck’s novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Rosasharn is impractical and fragile, a pregnant young woman as she begins her journey to California. It takes her several hundred pages to mature, not unlike my fragile Zone 5 Rose of Sharon that required so many years to take hold in this precarious Zone 3 climate. Also not unlike myself as well, a woman who took several years to take hold and mature in this precarious place.
By Casey Pike, Master Gardener