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Transvirginia
Saturday, August 24 2024
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Late this morning I had in mind to take the dogs for a genuine adventure. I wanted to hike down East Bifurcation Creek to Virginia Creek, cross that, and see what lay in the wilderness beyond it. Since one could walk nearly 11 miles northeast (and end up just northwest of Northville) without crossing any roads, I consider the land beyond Virginia Creek "unbounded," the kind that is easy to get lost in if one doesn't have navigational aids or know how to navigate with the help of the Sun. So I was sure to at least bring a compass, in this case the one attached to the neckstrap on my Nikon camera.
But the dogs ended up going on their own, separate walk soon after I'd crossed the Woodworth Lake Outflow Creek at the causeway-dam near the old boyscout camp (which is close to the bifurcation). So I did the rest of this walk by myself. I went down East Bifurcation Creek to the falls, where I found an amazing stick of native gneiss that was about four inches wide, several inches deep, and over three feet long. I stood it up beneath the falls to draw attention to its weirdness. I then continued hiking down the creek along the escarpment of low cliff along its east bank. Periodically I'd encounter fissures where the weather had acted to wrench nascent boulders loose from the cliff, boulders that hadn't yet calved. When I got down to the confluence with Virginia Creek, it seemed that there was something of a delta, since I had to cross four separate channels to get to the land of "Transvirginia." Three of those channels were apparently a trifurcation of Virginia Creek and one was a separate brook coming from the north (that is, from Transvirginia). Once in Transvirginia, I walked to the top of a hill and then down the other side, but the landscape wasn't as interesting as what I'd seen along the bifurcation creeks, so I soon turned around and headed back south. As I crossed the various channels of Virginia Creek a second time, I noticed a good many flat rocks that would be great for building pathways if only they weren't so far from where I want to build paths.
When I returned to the cabin, the dogs weren't back yet from wherever they'd gone, though they returned before I could get too worried about them. I proceeded to make myself a lunch of onions, tempeh, and mushrooms fried up in a pan added to medium-sized pasta shells from Costco with Rao's marinara sauce (a very common meal for me to make). I added a bit too much ghost pepper, though, so my mouth was feeling so hot that I thought I'd cool it down by brushing my teeth.
Since Gretchen would be arriving in a couple hours, I also put some effort into tidying up the cabin, which was looking exactly how you would expect after my having lived there for about six days.
I'd just gone down the Mossy Rock Trail on yet another hunt for flat rocks when I heard Gretchen driving in on the driveway. So I returned to the cabin, where Charlotte was celebrating Gretchen's arrival with a series of quasi-howls. After putting some stuff she'd brought away in the refrigerator, Gretchen headed down to the dock (via the old trail) to take as much advantage of the beautiful sunny say as possible. Meanwhile, I decided to refocus my trail-making on the elimination of various tiny stumps (some only a half inch in diameter) resulting from the elimination of saplings in the trail's alignment. I'd stubbed my toes and impaled my feet on them so many times that I'd had to go back to wearing Crocs or flipflops when walking in the woods (instead of going around barefoot, which I prefer) so my injuries could have a chance to heal.
After going for at least one swim in the unseasonably cold water and spending hours reading on the dock, Gretchen eventually returned to the cabin via the Mossy Rock Trail while I was about half way down it reworking a step on the upper set of stone steps.
Since making a couple rustic stools earlier in the summer, I've had it in in mind to make another one. So this evening just after Gretchen passed me on the Mossy Rock Trail, I continued off-trail to the north along one of the swampy terraces that punctuate the landscape about half-way between the cabin and the lake. There I found a fairly large recently-fallen (and still green) sugar maple. But as I was cutting a chunk of it out with my big Kobalt chainsaw, the weird way the tree was hanging caused the chainsaw to get so badly pinched that I couldn't extract it, something that had never happened before. Fortunatley, using my small Ryobi chainsaw (which I had to go back to the cabin to get), I was able to cut the wood around the Kobalt blade enough to break through the trunk and free it.
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The East Bifurcation Falls, with the long skinny stick of rock propped up below it as a spire.
Click to enlarge.
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