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boulder-studded woods
Thursday, August 22 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
This morning while I was still drinking my coffee, I decided to tackle the problem with the ESP-8266 Remote system I'd identified last night. Something was keeping the last_known_device_value from updating on one of the device_features (specifically, the water heater relay). Further investigation eventually showed that I had the logic backwards on the mechanism that provides for the temporary suspension of automation. But once I had that fixed, I realized that there was no way to reliably suspend automation from data.php, a page that mostly just runs when an ESP-8266 communicates with it. (Suspension is normally triggered by a direct modification to a device_feature, either via a backend tool, using a page called tool.php, or indirectly by an endpoint on the ESP-8266 hit by the Local Remote.) The solution was fairly easy though. I just had to reliably update the device_feature's modified column whenever a user made a change to a record. And then I modified the automation logic so that automation wouldn't happen within five minutes of a user change to a device_feature record, giving it enough time for automation suspension to kick in if that was called for.
Once that issue was no longer weighing on my mind, I could take the dogs for a nice hike in the woods. To Charlotte's delight, I set off down the Lake Edward Trail, with Neville bringing up the rear as always. But instead of hiking to Lake Edward, I only walked as far as a little brook I'll called Quarterway Brook, which the Lake Edward Trail crosses at 43.1187N, 74.3460W. I then followed it downstream, which led me generally northward into a boulder-strewn forested landscape. Eventually Quarterway Brook turned more westward, passing at the base of a low cliff. I decided at that point to continue on my own through the trackless wilderness, using the compass I'd attached to my Nikon Camera to guide me northward.
I soon found myself in a landscape so thoroughly dotted with boulders that it was no wonder at all that it was now part of Adirondack State Park. The land itself wasn't especially mountainous, but it was difficult to see how equipment could've ever moved among those boulders to carry out the trees that clearly had once been cut down, though probably had happened more than 100 years ago, back when logging was mostly done with horses and gravity-powered systems.
Further to the north, I came upon several exceptionally large boulders, one of which being the size of a small house. It had a flat top covered with a little detached ecosystem that would've required a ladder for me to investigate. When looking at the bottom of one end of it, I could see daylight coming through from the other side. Apparently one of the bottom corners of the boulder was missing, creating a void large enough for a bear. (The only problem was that the void looked like it had a tendency to flood.)
I continued hiking northeastward, expecting to eventually encounter either Virginia Creek or West Bifurcation Creek. I'd just made the effort to climb up around the end of a set of cliffs to an escarpment above them, and that was when I saw, on this same escarpment, the stunning West Bifurcation Cliffs that I know to be a little above where West Bifurcation Creek meets Virginia Creek. Instead of the creek following the more direct path downhill (that is, westward and down the cliffs I'd just gone around), it instead flowed on the top of the escarpment northward. Little hydrologic inefficiencies like this (as well as the Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek bifurcation) is part of what makes the Adirondacks so magical. The mountains are relative new and glaciers retreated from them even more recently, so they haven't had time to reach hydrologic equilibrium. The presence of so many lakes is the most obvious consequence.
Since I'd been up West Bifurcation Creek twice before, today I decided instead to climb up the West Bifurcation Cliffs to see what was at the top. There wasn't much going on up there other than, not far away, an upper section of West Bifurcation Creek just before it made a grand turn northward through a jumble of boulders. I ended up following it all the way back to Woodworth Lake, eventually returning to the cabin via the Mossy Rock Trail.
The Mossy Rock Trail continues to compel me to work on it just by its very nature. It's easy to get to, starting only a few dozen feet from the cabin's front door. And there are endless possible improvements. Today I made several forrays into the woods south of the trail (particularly to the headwaters of the creek that runs down the Backwards Cliffs Gorge, one of the few places where one can find loose stones). I also used the big crowbar to extract rocks both from the trail (where they sometimes stuck up too high or at toe-stubbing angles) or from the nearby woods. After maxing out the improvements to the nearest-to-the-cabin mini-causeway across a terrain dip, I had a big rectangular piece of gneiss for which I couldn't really think of a good use. So I ended up wrestling it off the handtruck and on top of a large round boulder near the cabin end of the Mossy Rock Trail and used it as the base for a tall elegantly-curving cairn.
Later in the afternoon, I managed to get Neville to follow me down to the dock, where I sat for a time watching Throckmorton the Loon, who was acting strangely. Normally in the late afternoon, Throckmorton just paddles around on the surface, preening and occasionally flapping his wings. Today, though, he also made a few lonesome loon calls, specifically, the wail. That is supposedly a call from a loon to other loons in the area wondering if there are any and where they are. I had Throckmorton figured for a loner, one who didn't care about other loons. Perhaps he's an incel or a sigma, but wailing for other loons didn't seem like his modus operandi. Evidently loons are more complicated than I'd thought.
From the dock, I hiked along the lakeshore to Ibrahim's dock to see how it had been put together, as I'd noticed the public dock had been assembled with nails (not what I would consider a best practice for dock construction). Ibrahim's dock, I'm pleased to report, was assembled with screws. From there, I hiked back up to the Mossy Rock Trail via the little brook that comes down the Backwards Cliffs Gorge.
Later in the early evening, I again went down the Mossy Rock Trail, this time with the crowbar with the idea of extracting any rocks that I didn't like from the trail in the part nearest the Backwards Cliffs. There was one particularly large triangle-shaped rock that was embedded in the soil at an angle, exposing a six-inch-high ridge one had to step over when hiking down the trail. Not thinking I would be able to move the rock, I nevertheless shoved the crow bar in beside it and gave a pry. Amazingly, the big rock moved. So I pried some more, getting the big rock high enough to shove a stick under it, locking it in place for another attack with the crowbar. I went and fetched some small rocks to use as wedges, blocks, and fulcra, and before long I'd pried one end of the big rock about a degrees up from where it had been. At that point, on a whim, I just grabbed the exposed lip of the rock with my hands and heaved upwards. Initially it seemed like this was foolish, but then it started going up, and as it did so, it got easier and easier to lift, since more and more of the weight was being directed towards the part of the rock in contact with the ground. I soon had the rock standing straight up like a gravestone, leaving the hole where it had been in the trail. I filled the hole with rocks and left the rock standing as a landmark. I then added a few additional rocks to the top so it would be a cairn.
Back at the cabin, I baked a frozen pizza to which I'd added an enormous number of mushroom slices. I'd eaten some cannabis before making that last cairn, and as it started to kick in, I was chatting with ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT when its training data had ended, and it said August 2023. So then I asked if it would be interested in knowing news items from today. I then proceeded to tell ChatGPT that the Ukrainians had managed to invade and hold a small part of Russian and watched what its reaction was. It occurred to me that having a large language model react to news from beyond its training data could be an interesting way to get a sense of how wild the news actually is.
Meanwhile Gretchen was sending me messages about how much she was enjoying the Democratic National Convention. I managed to see a little of Kamala Harris' speech tonight streaming on the CNN.com site, and it was powerful stuff.
At some point I took a nice hot bath.
Quarterway Brook as it heads westward along the bottom of a low cliff.
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A large shark-tooth-shaped boulder with voids at the bottom for creatures to den in.
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Neville trespassing on the parcel of one of our neighbors. Interestingly, this parcel is only posted on its boundary with Adirondack State Park.
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A house-sized boulder with a detached ecosystem on its top.
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An enchanted moss-covered cliff with Charlotte.
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A void in a cliff below West Bifurcation Creek.
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Charlotte at the edge of West Bifurcation Creek with the West Bifurcation Cliffs in the background.
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A wildly-cantilevered ledge reaching out from the West Bifurcation Cliffs.
Click to enlarge.
The new tree dock in the Woodworth Lake Outflow Bay. Note the anti-slip hatching.
Click to enlarge.
A stone staircase in the Mossy Rock Trail as it passes near the Backwards Cliffs.
Click to enlarge.
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