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new beaver pond
Thursday, April 16 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I was up a little before 8:00am this morning, which allowed me to stuff this day full of activities. Eventually I took Charlotte for a walk down the Mossy Rock Trail to the dock, and before long Neville showed up and flopped down on the dock. So I decided to continue the walk to the beginning of the outflow creek and then across it to the forest beyond the Boy Scout campground. I crossed East Bifurcation Creek at its waterfall (which was running strong with spring runoff) and then headed south past the various low cliffs and other landforms between there and West Bifurcation Creek. Near a line of cliffs, I found the moss-rimmed tops of some fissures in the bedrock warning me of the serious injury awaiting me should I step in the wrong spot. At the bottom of one such crack was a side chamber with a thick midden of porcupine droppings.
I approached West Bifurcation Creek a little east of where I normally cross it and was surprised to find a fairly large body of water instead. Then I saw the beaver dam, which had totally not been there when I'd come through this way back in October. It included a main section in the creek itself and then a meandering wall of mud and sticks across a low area to the north. I hadn't expected beavers to be active on such a small creek so far afield from the places I'm familiar with them being, but they'd done an impressive job creating a new pond out of the little they'd had to work with. I crossed the creek just below the dam and watched as Neville arrived at the edge of the beaver pond and began to cross. Initially all he had to do was wade, but then the water became so deep that he was forced to swim, looking like a little white hippopotamus. That water wasn't ice too long ago and was cold (I'd tried putting my feet in the lake), but the day was pretty warm (in the 70s Fahrenheit), and Neville had been hot enough to lie down in Quarterway brook yesterday. The new beaver pond wasn't huge, mind you, but it was big enough to paddle around a kayak. And it reached almost all the way up to where the outflow creek bifurcates. (If the dam gets too high, it might redirect all of the flow down the east bifurcation unless a dam appears on that as well.)
I should mention that at this time of year the woods is full of the single speckled leaves of trout lilies. There are also a fair number of red efts already, many more than I've seen back in the Catskills (though that might be because of an ongoing drought).
Back at the cabin, I took a handful of pizza dough and did what I could to form a flattened mass in the frying pan. For some reason, the dough was stickier than expected and I had difficulty keeping it off of everything I touched and getting it off my hands. But it fired up very nicely, like a bland piece of roti with little brown marks from where it was slightly scorched. It made for an excellent burrito when I filled it with an assortment of leftover Ethiopian wats.
I then turned my attention to the ongoing mess of my ESP8266 remote controllers down in the basement, where temperatures were still in the forties (Fahrenheit). This involved not only reflashing all the ESP8266s with the latest version of my firmware, but also changing out the Atmega328s-based Arduino Nanos slaves with Nanos running a much more capable version of my slave firmware (which includes the ability to have the master reflash its firmware over I2C, the most ambitious project that I undertook this past winter). These changes would've been easy had a bunch of Dupont connector wires not suddenly come loose from the pins on the old Nano slave as I was doing the Nano swap, which then forced me to have to trace wires to see what things in the database were controlling what pins. Even when I thought I had this figured out, I had the wire controlling the car charger wrong, and it took me awhile to get everything working. I was also plagued by the problem I'd encountered yesterday where the microcontroller is much less reliable with a WiFi-connected laptop nearby, presumably due to congestion on the limited 2.4 GHz WiFi spectrum. But I eventually got both the East Basement Switcher (which controls most devices) working, and then I was able to get the SolArk Copilot working. Unfortunately, I still don't have the SolArk Copilot gathering solar data locally like it should; that's a headache that will have to wait for another weekend in the Adirondacks. (In the meantime, my automation algorithms can get the data they need from the SolArk Cloud.)
One last task I wanted to do before heading back to Hurley was to do something about the old refrigerator, which was still on the side of the driveway near where it enters our parcel at the top of a hill. I'd placed it there back in the fall thinking I would sell or give it away and have someone pick it up there. But it never happened, and now I didn't really want to get rid of it. It's a good refrigerator and as energy-efficient as the supposedly energy-efficient refrigerator we'd replaced it with. I wanted to store it somewhere, and where better than the cabin's basement, where there is an abundance of room. I also thought it might be possible to hide it down there in a way that Gretchen would never notice it, since she would probably be upset were she to see that I'd never disposed of it. But getting that refrigerator down the bulkhead steps into the basement would not an easy thing for me to do all by myself. But, as I was working I doing that, I realized I liked the challenge and that I might've wanted to do it even if I knew I'd soon have to be extracting that same refrigerator. On some level, you see, such challenges of working with materials is like a game to me.
Using the cabin's hand truck, it wasn't difficult to get the refrigerator to the general vicinity of the bulkhead doors. But actually getting it to the top of the steps was complicated by the mound of earth leading to it. I'd tried to make this a reasonably gentle slope paved with bluestone, but the most direct way was orthogonal to the back wall of the cabin, not parallel to it like the bluestone path runs. And going orthogonal meant climbing a lumpy series of terraces defined by logs. I decided to put down two pieces of dimensional lumber as a ramp and then use a piece of three inch PVC as a roller on that ramp. I then lay the refrigerator down on that roller and easily pushed it up the ramp. I then used more dimensional lumber to create a ramp down the bulkhead steps, and, using those, I was able to slowly slide the refrigerator down. By this point it was upside-down, so it was good that I'd first removed all the shelves, some of which were made of glass. It didn't take much work to pull the reclined refrigerator into basement, and then all I had to do was stand it up. I did this from the lower two-thirds of our two-level basement floor, but I did it next to the step to the higher third, where I wanted the refrigerator to be. It turns out that a refigerator can easily be moved up a single step just by rocking its bottom up to it and then lifting the lower part and pushing. After that, I could get the refrigerator to its hiding place using just the little rollers on its bottom. To better conceal the refrigerator, I put a large painting ("Hormone Prisoners," painted September 1994) in front of it.
Before beginning my drive back to Hurley, I made myself another Ethiopian burrito in a tortilla of fried pizza dough and then cleaned the cabin as best I could.
I began the drive with about 166 miles of range (up from the 98 I'd had when I'd arrived at the cabin), and I was down into the upper 40s of range by the time I got to Hurley. This was partly because I'd eventually decided to run the air conditioning, as temperatures outside were as high as 87 degrees Fahrenheit.
Gretchen was still off at pilates when I arrived at about 6:20pm. When she came home, we decided to make angelhair pasta, as it was the only kind that was really suitable for a quick pasta meal. I also fried up a pan of mushrooms and onions, though we also used some nut cheese and leftover broccoli and another kind of vegan cheese as sauce (we didn't use red sauce).
Gretchen had told me that the Subaru Forester's brakes were sounding terrible again, which made no sense. So after dinner I went out to see if I could see what was going on. It didn't take long for me to spot the problem: like an idiot, I'd somehow managed to install one of the brake pads backwards, with the metal plate that should be pressed by caliper being pressed against the rotor and the brake pad being pressed by the caliper. I could see the surface of the brake pad in the calipers facing away from the surface it should've been touching. As Gretchen later pointed out, why had that not been caught in the inspection? Back then, though, the backwards brake pad hadn't made any suspicious sounds, perhaps because it had been wearing away a softer layer of paint or metal. But once it was wearing steel against steel, it must've made a terrible sound. There were little grains of steel sprinkled all over everything back there, and the rotor was a series of shallow, irregular grooves.
It only took me about twenty minutes to get the errant brake pad to face the correct direction. I don't know how it will wear against the unusually-grooved rotor, but we'll probably know soon enough.
After that, despite the hot weather, I took a much needed bath. If nothing else, I needed to shave a away at least a quarter inch of facial hair. (I don't know how people tolerate beards; I have never liked how a beard feels on my face.)
Neville walking on the path from the dock to the outflow beaver dams. Click to enlarge.
Daphne mezereum, a poisonous flower that smells like truck stop perfume. It is native to Europe, not North America. This is near the outflow beaver dams. Click to enlarge.
Action shot of Charlotte near the East Bifurcation Falls. Click to enlarge.
East Bifurcation Falls. Click to enlarge.
A moss-rimmed series of deep cracks in the forest floor near a cliff. Click to enlarge.
A porcupine den in a side-chamber off a crack in a cliff face. Note the thick midden of porcupine dung. Click to enlarge.
The new West Bifurcation beaver dam, viewed from upstream. Click to enlarge.
The new West Bifurcation beaver dam, viewed from downstream. Click to enlarge.
The the main section of the West Bifurcation beaver dam, viewed from downstream. Click to enlarge.
Neville wades across the new beaver pond. Click to enlarge.
But then Neville has to swim. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte with bright red cup fungus I found. Probaby Scarlet Elf Cup (Sarcoscypha austriaca). Click to enlarge.
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