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dogs doing crazy shit
Friday, June 28 2024
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
Originally Gretchen had planned, this Sunday, to go visit our friend Anna at a rehab facility she'd checked herself into in Connecticut. But the bureaucracy of rehabs is too Byzantine to permit casual visits. Visitors must first go through orientation, and orientation is only offered on Tuesdays. And Tuesday had already come and gone. Since her plan had been to do that, Gretchen had decided not to go to the cabin, and even after finding out she couldn't visit Anna, she decided to spend the weekend back in Hurley. She needed some alone time to prepare for future social-heavy days. And she was also having trouble processing Joe Biden's debate disaster last night. (She's been reading a lot of articles about how the Democratic party might replace him as their candidate, something I am pretty sure is impossible at this point.)
Of course, my plan was always to spend the weekend at the cabin, so late this morning I packed up the car, loaded up the dogs, and started driving to the Adirondacks via the scenic route. As I often do, I stopped at the Hannaford in Cairo and got provisions (chips, tofu, beer, nuts, cherries, sourdough bread, and maybe other things). As I passed the castle on route 145 east of East Durham (that's my roadbeer landmark when northbound), I cracked open a big twenty two ounce Voodoo Ranger Juice Force IPA. That was a lot of 9.5% ale, and it lasted beyond Schoharie. I had perhaps too good of a buzz going, so it's unlikely I'll be doing that again.
As I drove through the grid of Johnstown, Neville and Charlotte saw a woman in a brown sundress walking a huge german shepherd, and they began frantically barking like they always do through the little gap I'd made by partially rolling down the window. In their frenzy, though, one of them managed to stomp down the window retraction button, which rolled the window all the way down. (I wish modern cars wouldn't accept a quick tap to completely roll down a window, though most of them now do. I'm perfectly happy holding down a button for as far down as I need the window to go.) With the window down, Charlotte jumped out, causing an oncoming car to immediately stop and for the woman to adopt a defensive posture with her dog. But Charlotte was immediately confused once she was out of the car and didn't make any moves towards the dog that had just been the focus of her attention. I was able to get out and get her back in the car without much difficulty, explaining to the woman that my dogs had managed to roll down the window themselves.
Up at the cabin, it was unseasonably cool but good conditions for hiking. I decided to take the dogs down to the dock. On the way down, though, they both split off from the trail about half way and completely disappeared, similar to how they'd done last Saturday when Neville ended up killing a fawn over by the public dock. I continued down to the dock (since I was using CalTopo to map that trail). But when the dogs failed to materialize down there, I walked south along the shoreline through Shane and Ibrahim's parcel until I was nearly at the public dock. At that point I encountered Charlotte. "Where is Neville?" I demanded, and this time she more or less led me right to him. He was snorting around in the bushes just west of the public dock area, probably looking for the dead fawn darkness had forced him to abandon on Saturday. I said that no, we weren't doing that, and that he had to come. He didn't really want to, and I was forced to poke and carry him most of the way through the brambles back to our dock.
At that point, I decided to walk the dogs in the opposite direction. I led them to first the outflow creek's point of bifurcation and then west to where the East Bifurcation leaves our parcel. From there, I continued mostly westward away from the creek, following an arm of swamp that forms a barrier to walking along much of its route. I wondered if it might be part of the same wetlands that my Lake Edward Trail crosses at the bottom of the grade west of our cabin. It turned out that it wasn't; there were a number of such wetlands, all at different elevations, and some of them seemed to drain not from one of their ends but instead from a low spot somewhere along the side. (This is in keeping with generally underdeveloped drainage of the Adirondacks.) Eventually I arrived at the Lake Edward trail a little above where it crosses that wetland I just mentioned, and from there it was a short (if steep) hike back to the cabin.
Neville had been following me most of the way on this hike, but a couple hundred feet from the cabin he disappeared, and didn't return to the cabin in a timely manner. Charlotte didn't either. I figured they'd somehow managed to find their way back to the public dock, so I drove down there in the Bolt, parking it along Woodworth Lake Road at the top so as to avoid driving it on the rough, rutted road down to the the dock. But the dogs weren't there either.
When I didn't find the dogs back at the cabin, I figured perhaps it had taken them awhile to get to the public dock. So I drove out a second time. This time I saw Neville come bounding up though the ferns on the shoulder of the road not far from the public dock. I immediately stopped the car and demanded that he get in. Charlotte immediately appeared as well, and she dutifully complied with my orders. The dogs might've discovered that the fawn's corpse had already disappeared, perhaps having been eaten by coyotes, because they showed no further interest this evening in heading off anywhere.
I spent most of the evening doing experiments with various LoRa boards I'd brought with me to the cabin. I'd amassed quite a collection. Unfortunately, there was no documentation for some of them, and I ran into various problems when probing them for continuity. I did, however, get a 433 MHz shield and a 915MHz Adafruit "wing" to work; these both managed to read data from one or more of my TBeams.
At the end of the day, I took a nice hot bath, which (in this weather) was completely appropriate.
Woodworth Lake today. Click to enlarge.
A disembodied crayfish claw near the bifurcation of the Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek. Click to enlarge.
A large burl at the base of a sugar maple west of the East Bifurcation, with a Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing for scale. Click to enlarge.
One of the swamps north of the hill that our cabin is located near the top of. Click to enlarge.
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