Birds, work, and Mt. Moriah July 12, 2009
Posted by Jenny in White Mountains, hiking, nature.Tags: Carter-Moriah trail, hermit thrush, Mt. Moriah, Mt. Surprise, trail maintenance, veery, White Mountains, white-throated sparrow
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From Mt. Surprise toward Mt. Washington. This is where my trail section starts
It was time for another work trip up Mt. Moriah. Stopped at Camp Dodge to pick up a pair of loppers—a nice sharp pair—then on to Gorham and the Carter-Moriah trail. I feared man-eating vegetation after all the June rains. That fear proved to be well justified.
It took me six hours to lop my way to the top, an all-time record. (My usual work-trip time is between four and five.) Since the first 2.0 miles of the 4.5-mile, 3300-vertical total are someone else’s trail section, and I covered that in 50 minutes, that means it took me five hours to go 2.5 miles.
The stop at Mt. Surprise makes for a nice rest and a snack before getting down to work. This time of year, the sheep laurel is blooming on the open ledges. I love the combination of reindeer moss, lowbush blueberry, laurel, and red and black spruce.
Even after all that lopping, the trail needs more attention. It needs a lot of drainage work, the kind that has to be done by a crew. I apologize to everyone for the state of the bog bridge at 3300 feet. There is a very interesting section at the end of it that has turned into one of those lumberjack-style balancing contests where you try to stay upright on a 
floating log. I tell the AMC about this on every work report, but I think they are shorthanded. Overall, the trail is the muckiest I’ve seen it in about ten years. This is the kind of mud that makes an ominous sucking noise when your boot goes into it. It is getting almost as bad as Adirondack mud, which I believe, after extensive research, to be the worst mud in the world.
Hermit thrush
On this particular trip, the forests of Mt. Moriah lived and breathed with songbirds. The melodies of hermit thrushes wove a pattern among the hemlocks and maples of the lower altitudes, their songs looping from branch to branch. The Peterson’s bird guide describes their song as “clear, ethereal, flutelike,” resorting to more poetic wording than usual. The cousin of the hermit thrush, the veery, contributed a variation, playing notes on a similar mysterious woodland flute but in a
Veery
different pattern. Peterson: “Liquid, breezy, ethereal; wheeling downward.”
On the summit of Moriah, it was all white-throated sparrows singing and singing among the spruces and firs. Some people think they are saying, “Sam Peabody–Peabody–Peabody!” Peterson thinks they have “several clear pensive whistles, easily imitated.” The tune part of it might be imitated, but not the “clear pensive” part. They pass through my yard in the spring on their way up to northern New England. Peterson: “Patronizes feeders.” (”Why, you’re just a fine little feeder, aren’t you?”)
White-throated sparrow
The sparrows were flitting among the spruces and balsams that upholster the upper parts of the Carter-Moriah ridge. It is a lovely world up there among the evergreens and the ledges, with views of three mountain systems fairly close (east of the Wild River valley, between Wild River and Peabody River, and west of the Peabody) and more unending mountains marching off to the horizons further away.
Black spruce on left and red spruce on right
The Pencil Museum July 3, 2009
Posted by Jenny in hiking, history, memoir, travel.Tags: Cumbrian Mountains, graphite, Henry David Thoreau, Keswick, Lake District, Pencil Museum, pencils
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The first pencils were made with graphite from the slopes of Grey Knotts
I described in my last post how I walked from Grasmere to Rosthwaite, climbed Scafell Pike (England’s high point), and then walked over the Cat Bells to Derwent Water, where I took the boat to Keswick. The next day I visited the Pencil Museum.
I credit my appreciation of pencils to my mother, who always—and I mean always—kept a batch of freshly sharpened pencils on her desk. She wrote all of her school notes, her grocery and “to do” lists, and her poems, in pencil. The metal pencil sharpener bolted to her desk was faithfully emptied of its crisp aromatic shavings, and her supply of plump, clean erasers never failed.
The pencil was invented in the Cumbrian Mountains. At the headwaters of New House Gill, on the eastern slope of Grey Knotts (2287′), just down the Borrowdale valley from Scafell Pike, wandering shepherds in the early 1500s discovered a deposit of graphite. Legend has it (legend is so possessive) that a violent thunderstorm toppled some trees and exposed a mysterious black material that the shepherds found useful for marking their sheep. The shepherds thought at first it might be coal, but it didn’t burn. They did not realize that they had found an exceptionally pure and valuable form of carbon.
It actually was coal, what is sometimes called meta-anthracite, which is harder and higher in percentage of pure carbon than anthracite. It is lacking in the volatile (gas) content that makes coal burn. The coal food-chain goes: meta-anthracite, anthracite, bituminous, subbituminous, lignite, peat. Anthracite can be hard to burn too, as well as low-volatile bituminous coals that sometimes cause “flame-out” in boilers. (There—my experience writing about international coal markets is coming in handy. Just ask me about thin-seam mid-vol metallurgical coal.)
The Cumberland graphite, also called “wad,” was found useful for lining casting molds for cannon and musket balls. And around 1560, someone wrapped a thin cylinder of graphite in string and used it for writing. And so
Assembling pencils in Keswick (photo source: Cumberland Pencil Museum)
the pencil was born. Borrowdale graphite mines continued to operate until 1890, when they closed due to high production costs and overseas competition, even though the overseas product was sadly inferior. People had also discovered that clay could be mixed with the graphite for making pencils, or that other materials altogether could be used.
The graphite mines were dangerous and difficult for working. Heavy lumps of it would be sent racing to the bottom of the hill on rickety tracks, with someone riding along the top of the graphite. But it was valuable. Cumberland graphite was said to be used in the late 1500s by the school of art that Michelangelo founded, and graphite’s use in the manufacture of ammunition caused its value to soar during the Napoleonic wars. Thieves burrowed stealthily into the mines and extracted the material by night. One smuggler pretended to be digging a copper mine while tunneling down into his neighbor’s wad mine. For more information about these nefarious activities, visit the Lakestay website.
Henry David Thoreau, 1856
In the early 1800s, deposits of graphite were discovered in New England. Henry David Thoreau worked for a time in his uncle’s pencil factory. The New Hampshire graphite at Thoreau’s factory had to be mixed with large amounts of clay.
Pencil production in Keswick is now limited to high-quality artist’s color pencils under the “Derwent” name (no graphite involved). The Pencil Museum gives a good historical introduction to this humble but important implement. It is well worth visiting. You can see what the museum boasts is the world’s longest pencil (26 feet). I see from a little googling, though, that this claim is disputed by various pencil enthusiasts.
The pride of Keswick (photo source: Cumberland Pencil Museum)
I particularly like how the museum describes Keswick as the “home” of the first pencil, suggesting the pencil’s possible need for domestic comfort. The museum is located at Southey Works, Keswick, Cumbria CA12 5NG, tel. 44 17687 73626.
I spent several hours at the museum before it was time to catch the bus to Penrith, a larger town to the east located on the main rail line. The next day, I took the train back to the south of England.
I looked forward to telling my mother about it. She would enjoy hearing about the graphite mines, the historical development of the pencil, and how NASA spent enormous sums trying to develop a ballpoint pen that would write in zero-gravity conditions, while the Soviets sent their astronauts into orbit carrying pencils.
Borrowdale valley
The Pike of Carrs, Bleak How, Scafell Pike, and the Cat Bells June 28, 2009
Posted by Jenny in hiking, memoir, travel.Tags: Cat Bells, Derwent Water, Grasmere, Keswick, Lake District, Rosthwaite, Scafell Pike
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Between High Spy and the Cat Bells
It started with my old boss, Gerard McCloskey, loaning me his Wainwright books about walking in the Lake District while I was over in England for work in October 1989. From there it was a spur-of-the-moment decision to do some exploring in the wilds of the Cumbrian Mountains as a side trip. I had no real hiking gear, but I borrowed a backpack—more what you would call a knapsack— from Gerard and, since my raingear was inadequate, I also borrowed an umbrella from his wife Sheila. For footgear I wore shoes that are hard to describe: not hiking boots, not running shoes, but comfortable shoes that were a bit dressy, like something you would wear with slacks to a social gathering.
I got from London to Windermere by train and from there to Grasmere by bus, as I recall. (I am going by memory on all of this.) It was a windy, overcast afternoon as I dutifully looked in on Dove Cottage, the home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. I am quite willing to journey iambically with Wordsworth, but I wasn’t really in the area to look at points of historic interest. I was there to see mountains. I found a small hotel and had a dinner that involved Cumberland sausage and a brew called Old Peculiar.
In the morning, after my breakfast of eggs and sausage, fried tomatoes, and toast, I called over to an even smaller hotel in the village of Rosthwaite and made a reservation for the next two evenings. I then started walking toward Rosthwaite.
It rained most of the day. To reach Rosthwaite, I had to climb over the wide divide that separates the watershed of the River Derwent from the chain of lakes that includes Thirlmere, Rydal Water, and Windermere. It was a rough, stony track that took me past guardian sheep.
This one wore a black and white sweater
My route took me up the valley of Far Easedale Gill, past the Deer Bields and the Pike of Carrs, and across the height of land at Greenup Edge. At that point my umbrella nearly blew inside out from the wind. Passing through an unmarked junction of rough paths, I continued northwest along the headwaters of Greenup Gill, between Long Band and Bleak How, and down into Stonethwaite Fell.
Near Bleak How
I passed some small farms. All of the streams were running high (or as they would say in that region, the becks were in spate), and in the picture below you can make out a cascade glimmering in the distance. It was starting to get a bit dim.
Approaching Stonethwaite Fell
Right around 4:00 I found my Rosthwaite hotel, folded my umbrella, and walked in. The proprietor said, “Good to see you, Miss Bennett. We will be serving tea in ten minutes.” Hot tea and cookies, which I had in the dining room with three or four other guests, have never tasted so good.
The next day I walked down the Borrowdale valley and climbed Scafell Pike, the high elevation point of England (3209). From where I started, it was a climb of about 2900 vertical feet. The Pike is a rugged mountain studded with sharp stones and riven by steep gullies. I took a well-traveled route, going up along Grain’s Gill.
Grain's Gill
Then I passed Sprinkling Tarn.
Sprinkling Tarn
The clouds were just brushing the mountain. I believe the next picture was taken looking past All Crags over Angle Tarn, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
The path was easy to follow, but at no point were there any signs—not at trailheads, junctions, or destinations. I hope that is still the case, and I applaud the English for that tradition. It was not hard to find my way to to the summit, but when it was time to descend, many somewhat confusing paths led toward widely separated valleys. Picking my way carefully over the scree, I sorted things out and followed the path that led past the Round How and back toward the Borrowdale valley, a route that roughly paralleled my ascent. I saw some interesting formations of grass and hill on the way down.
I remember that at this point, my ankles were getting a little tired in my thin, low-topped shoes as I stepped from rock to rock, but I am strangely proud of the fact that I managed to pull off this … feat. Eventually I wended my way back to the Rosthwaite hotel in time for dinner.
The next day I headed north toward Derwent Water, a large, clear lake. I followed the River Derwent a short distance, then scrambled up to the top of the ridge that lies to the west of the river. The ridge, or at least part of it, is labelled as Narrow Moor on my map. I passed High Scawdel, Lobstone Band, and Nitting Haws. Clouds were scuttling across the sky, creating a patchwork of light and shadow (see top picture). The ridge terminates in some hills called the Cat Bells, which I descended down to the lake.
Derwent Water
I knew that a boat circled the lake in a clockwise direction, touching at various points at scheduled times. I recall that I had a timetable for the boat, and at any rate, I walked to Hawes End and waited for the boat. I had a bit of trouble at first believing that the boat really existed, but eventually I saw it approach, and I boarded it for the journey to Keswick.
Heading toward Keswick
I strolled around Keswick (pop. 4800) in the late afternoon. The next morning I visited the Pencil Museum. That deserves its own post, because I need to explain why pencils are so interesting and fill people in on what they have to do with my mother. That will be my next entry in this blog.
A week in the Smokies June 21, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking.Tags: Brushy Mountain, Bullhead, Caldwell Fork, Cataloochee, elk, LeConte, Long Branch, Rainbow Falls, Roundtop Trail, Smoky Mountains, Winnesoka
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Laurel at 5500 feet along the Blue Ridge Parkway
Back in the land of towering green ridges and plunging stream valleys… six days of being in the Smokies.
The elk in Cataloochee
I visited Cataloochee to meet up with Ray Payne of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club and see the herd of elk that have been introduced there. Ray volunteers with the Park Service as a member of the “Elk Bugle Corps” to give information to park visitors and sometimes keep them from getting up too close to the elk. The best time to view the elk is dusk, but I got there early and did a stroll on the Caldwell Fork Trail, where I saw a lot of laurel along the stream and noticed a good-sized hemlock. The base of it looked fine, but the top is about two-thirds dead, affected by the adelgid like most of the hemlock in the area.
Base of dying hemlock
But although I saw a lot of dead hemlock, it didn’t alter the whole appearance of the area as drastically as I had feared.
I connected with Ray at about 4:00. He drives all the way from Knoxville every couple of weeks, going over the infamous Cove Creek dirt road (which has some good dropoffs without guardrails) to get to Cataloochee. I’m not sure which is worse, Cove Creek or driving through the Pigeon River Gorge on I-40. We had a great time catching up on things. He is the conservation chair for SMHC and continues to do a tremendous amount of work on the North Shore Road problem over on Fontana Lake.
It was raining pretty hard when we first drove up past the ranger station, but we saw three bull elk with impressively large antlers and a separate herd of does. We saw them in different combinations as we chatted over the next few hours.
The herd of does
Rainbow Falls/Bullhead loop
The next day I did a climb up to the top of LeConte up the Rainbow Falls trail and down the Bullhead trail. The dimensions of the hike are relatively hefty (about 14 miles and 4000 vertical feet), but the going is very easy, at least compared with the 9-mile, 4000-foot vertical hike I did on Mt. Washington the previous weekend. I picked this hike because I liked the idea of going through all the plant/climate zones on LeConte. I got into fog at about 3500 feet and stayed in it most of the hike, but that didn’t matter at all. At Rainbow Falls, there was a catawba rhododendron in bloom right at the top of the falls.
Rainbow Falls and rhodo
I had the falls to myself at about 10:00 on a Friday morning, except for some company that seemed interested in sharing my food:
Friendly squirrel at Rainbow Falls
At one spot above the falls, the trail was carpeted with rhodo blossoms.
The myrtle was just starting to bloom along the Rocky Spur side trail.
Myrtle coming out on LeConte
I was pleased to see that the Fraser firs are looking better on the top of LeConte. Most of them died 20 or so years ago, and areas above 6000 feet used to have a skeletal, devastated look, but now there are a lot of new firs in the 10-15 foot range. People are waiting to see if this new crop will survive.
I ran into a number of people between Rainbow Falls and the top, and the Lodge seemed busy. But as soon as I got down on the Bullhead Trail, I saw not a single person until I was all the way back at Cherokee Orchard. Sidehilling below Balsam Point, the slope (as opposed to the trail) was very steep, and I couldn’t believe that 20 years ago I rockhopped up the headwaters of Big Branch from the Newfound Gap road with an SMHC group. But those places always seem impossible looking down from the trail.
Winnesoka from Long Branch Gap
The next day I attended the concert at Cades Cove described in the post below. One of my poems that was set to music and performed by the Knoxville Symphony was about a solo trip I did up Brushy Mountain from Long Branch Gap. For the following day (Sunday the 14th) I had invited some people to join me for another off-trail hike in the area, but it turned out no one could make it. I decided to go up anyway on my own, back up to Long Branch, but I would head to the other side of the gap, Mt. Winnesoka. It’s an easier hike, since it doesn’t involve crawling through the heath on Brushy.
I left the Brushy Mt. Trail where it comes close to Long Branch and walked through easy open woods for a while on the left bank of the stream. I saw this enormous basswood:
There was a lot of squaw root:
After the valley closed in I started rockhopping up the stream. There were plenty of stinging nettles.
I left the stream and headed up to the gap through woods that was moderately thick. That area has lots of dog hobble (leucothoe):
Dog hobble and rhodo
Once I got up to the ridgecrest, I found the ground carpeted with wintergreen (gaultheria) and galax:
I headed up the slope, tangling with some greenbriers that were lurking in the laurel, and reached the high point of Winnesoka, Lookout Rock, at 4445′. As you might guess, you have to clamber up the rock to get much of a view. The post below about the Cades Cove concert has a photo of the view toward Brushy and LeConte. This photo is a zoom of the same picture to give a better idea of the heath on Brushy, but really there’s no way of understanding what it’s like until you crawl through it:
I opted not to bushwhack over to the northwest prominence of Winnesoka (Round Top, 4308′) but instead to navigate over to Turkey Rock (4000′), a much easier trip. I was able to stay on intermittent game paths near the steep north slope of the ridge. At about the right elevation I found an unimpressive rock, but a bit further on was another rock that I believe is Turkey Rock:
Still not terribly impressive. After touching this point, I continued along the ridge and then dropped back into Long Branch for the trip out.
Roundtop Trail
This trail is hardly used, for two reasons: it has a ford of the Little River at its western end and very restricted parking on Wears Cove Gap road at its eastern end. Going up to the trail’s high point at Joint Rock made a nice easy hike the day after I did Winnesoka, 5 miles roundtrip and 800 vertical feet. The first (easternmost) part of the forest had experienced a burn.
By chance I ran into the trail maintainer, a very nice guy from Chattanooga who is also a 2000-miler on the A.T. He said the burn had started out as a “controlled burn,” but had gotten a little bit out of control in some spots. But life was coming back, including this peculiar lichen:
Even in the burned over area, there were quite a few wildflowers, especially pippsissewa. The burn ends past a private house where the trail touches the park boundary. I saw spiderwort and coreopsis, some lady slippers that had gone by, and some flame azalea near Joint Ridge:
This trail was also good for mushrooms.
These made me think of a parent and child, though they probably actually sprouted at the same time.
The next day I met up with an old friend from Knoxville for a stroll on Lumber Ridge, a place that seemed noteworthy that day mainly for bugs and mugginess. But it was good to catch up before I headed home.
What I always remind myself is that these places are waiting, these streams and these waterfalls are still flowing, at this very moment even though I am now far away.
Off-trail hiking in words and music June 18, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Smoky Mountains, bushwhacking, hiking, music, poetry.Tags: Brushy Mountain, Cades Cove, Jim Carlson, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Smokies
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Brushy Mtn. and flank of LeConte from Winnesoka
I took the photo 6/14 from the other side of Long Branch Gap from a place described in the composition. I will post about this outing soon.
On June 13 I had the unusual and wonderful experience of hearing words that I’d written about off-trail explorations performed as part of an orchestral piece. The occasion was a concert in Cades Cove to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The piece was called “Off-Trail in the Smokies.” It was composed by Jim Carlson and performed by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lucas Richman on a sunny afternoon before an audience seated in folding chairs in the meadow beside Cable Mill.
It was an honor to have three of my poems selected to be narrated to an orchestral accompaniment. This spring I’d heard from my friend Stephanie Seay in Knoxville that the piece had been commissioned and that the composer was looking for material. I sent him a batch of poems and was delighted when he chose them. You can see the words and play an audio file here. This version has the composer doing the narration; at the concert the narration was done by Katy Wolfe Zahn.
What an interesting thing it was for me to have what I’d written interpreted musically. Jim’s interpretation gave my experiences a form that was new and yet harmonized with what I’d described.
The second part of the three-part composition was about a solo bushwhack I did up Brushy Mountain from Long Branch Gap. It describes how I’d just managed to work my way through the thick laurel to the summit when a thunderstorm hit. By a convergence of circumstance, thunderstorms also threatened on the day of the concert. But the storms held off until afterwards, when the clouds opened with a drenching rain that once again replenished the infinite greenness of the Smokies.
Click on image below, then zoom in for better view.
