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terrifying lake creature
Saturday, September 27 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I got out of bed fairly late and had a relatively brief version of my typical weekend morning at the cabin before taking Charlotte on a walk. (Neville didn't come). I took a little past Quarterway Brook and then down through a sloping boulder field just west of the Great Hemlock Grove. (43.122N, 74.346W), looking for possible animal den sites in the voids between the boulders but not finding much. I continued down to that Winnebago-sized rock at the bottom of the slope which actually does have a void on its east end where a bear could make a den. I then continued northward all the way to Virginia Creek. After Charlotte crossed the creek and continued northward into unbounded wilderness, I began to get worried that she might get lost (as she did last November). So as I continued up Virginia Creek and then up West Bifurcation Creek, I kept calling out to her. But the only sounds I heard were falling leaves and the shrill caws of blue jays. Not too long after I made it back to the cabin, Charlotte arrived, and I was so happy I gave her and Neville special treats (sourdough bread with a little peanut butter). Later the two dogs disappeared for several hours, probably to mine for chipmunks (which there seem to be a lot of all of a sudden).
I spent most of the rest of the day jacked up on pseudoephedrine doing what I could to set up a system for tracking Charlotte using a Heletec LoRa tracker board. To get all this working, I needed a real computer to serve as a bridge between the LoRa devices and the internet, so I'd chosen a classic Raspberry Pi Zero W, something I'd bought maybe back in 2019. Back when I was last using Raspberry Pi Zeros, I did not use large language models, so I'd had to figure everything out myself using Google searches (a huge improvement over the even more primitive way I used to figure things out as a teenager). Today, though, I thought I'd have ChatGPT guide me through the whole process. It seemed to think I could set up a headless Raspberry Pi using an image downloaded from the Raspberry Pi website and then tweaking a few parameters in the volume that is visible to a Windows machine. I quickly found that this was impossible, and I ultimately had to attach a monitor and keyboard just to get the device connecting to the local internet. After that, I wanted to set a fixed IP address, and ChatGPT was hellbent on doing this with something called dhcpcd5. But it kept not working, and ChatGPT started flailing around making me uninstall something called NetworkManager, which killed off the Raspberry Pi's internet completely. At that point I realized I had to take control of the effort and pay less attention to ChatGPT or at least guide it towards the method of implementing a static IP that seemed most likely to work: configuring it in NetworkManager. At that point ChatGPT gave me some helpful info, and, after over an hour of struggle, I had a system onto which I could install the LoRa software, something called Meshtastic. Before I move on to that stage of things, though I grabbed a beer and the paddleboard fin and headed down to the lake.
With the attached fin, an ankle strap, and calmer water. I felt safe enough to go out into the middle of the lake. Sometimes I stood on the board, but I mostly sat or kneeled. At some point I noticed something floating to the southwest that might've been a bird. So paddled over in that direction and saw that it was a bird. Initially I thought it was a duck because it was sitting too high in the water and didn't have much visible white. But later when I got back to the dock and took a photograph, I saw it was that old loon, the one with grey patches on his cheeks.
Back at the cabin, I installed Meshtastic on my Raspberry Pi and then tried to communicate with the Heltec boards, which I assumed had the Meshtastic firmware pre-installed. But after some testing (and pasting the data into the ChatGPT chat), ChatGPT concluded the Heltec boards were not running Meshtastic. So that launched me into a miserable several hours where ChatGPT got stuck in a doom loop of giving me advice on how to compile the Meshtastic code from source and then upload it onto the boards. But I kept running into problems, at least one of which was because I didn't have the programming language Rust installed on my Windows laptop. At some point ChatGPT gave up and said that my microcontroller (and ESP32-s3) was incompatible with Meshtastic. "You mean I wasted all that time trying to install it?" It answered in the affirmative. This might be the first time I'd ever been mad at ChatGPT, though this would only have come across in my tone. Another thing that happened in the course of all this was that the little spring that served as a LoRa antenna got caught on the chair fabric and snapped off. So then I had to make replacement, taking a thin strand of wire and wrapping it neatly around a narrow dowel to form a nice looking spring (one that probably was better tuned to 900 MHz than the original).
By the time I went to bed tonight, I actually had a working Meshtastic node, but to get there I had to ignore some of what ChatGPT was telling me. I'd downloaded a huge collection of pre-compiled firmware .bin files that came with a .bat file, and running that .bat file was the key to flashing the firmware, not using esptool (as ChatGPT had kept telling me to do).
A big hollow tree. Click to enlarge.
A chunk of wood with insect tunnels I found inside that hollow tree. Click to enlarge.
The big Winnebago-sized rock. Click to enlarge.
A bear den possibility under a corner of that big rock. Click to enlarge.
A place where Virginia Creek passes between large boulders. Click to enlarge.
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