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bifurcation bypass
Friday, May 1 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I awoke with a fairly bad hangover and resolved that I would not be doing any drinking today, which is an uncommon resolution for m to make at the cabin. I was also feeling a little paranoid and regretful, which is often something I feel when hungover. I tend to wonder in such situations what exactly I might've done on social media. The thing I'd done in this case was respond in fury to another outrage of the Trump administraiton. Its "Justice" Department had just indicted the former FBI director James Comey over a social media post containing the number "8647" (as in "get rid of the 47th president"), claiming (absurdly) that it was a threat on the life of Donald Trump. So'd posted a meme I'd found of the characters from Seasame Street holding up a sign reading "8647," complete with the added verbiage "Brought to you by the letters F and U." I'm no fan of James Comey, as he's one of several people directly responsible for giving us the last decade of Donald Trump and his horrors. Remember, he was the one who gave a press conference just before the 2016 election said that he might have some additional dirt of Hillary Clinton, dirt that later proved not to exist. But, fast-forward to today, the use of the Justice Department to carry our Donald Trump's personal retribution campaign is a horrifying sign of the decline of our nation. It's the kind of creeping authoritarianism that makes one feel paranoid when one is hungover. This feeling is one of the reasons I practically never consume cannabis these days.
After doing some of my morning rituals in the cabin (eating toast, playing Spelling Bee, and watching whatever YouTube videos that suited my mood), I took the dogs for another walk that began on the Mossy Rock Trail and then went along the lakeshore to the beaver dams at the Woodworth Lake outflow. Along the way to those dams, I heard a loud splash in the water that I knew to be the sound of an angry beaver slapping her tail as a threat. So I walked down to the lakeshore and saw a brand new beaver lodge had been built some time since I last kayaked on the lake back in the fall. Charlotte and Neville were standing on it sniffing around and the I saw a large beaver swimming back and forth in the water nearby. It's common for the dogs to absolutely destroy anything that might contain an edible creature, and you would think a beaver lodge would be easy to destroy. All it is is a mound of sticks. So I was worried that they would begin dismantling it. But no, they sniffed around a little and left. This makes sense; beavers have evolved alongside canids of various kinds for millions of years, and if a hungry wolf or coyote stood a chance of getting something for tearing apart a pile of sticks, they'd be sure to do it. But something prevent the dogs from doing any damage whatsoever. I don't know if there was some scent that had been laid down or if it wasn't obvious what sticks to remove and in what order. Perhaps they were helpless in the face of prayer or a magic spell.
From there, I took the dogs north all the way to Virginia Creek near where East Bifurcation Creek empties into it. By then Charlotte was off somewhere, but Neville was slowly plugging along like he does. Suddenly, though, he became very interested in something north of Virginia Creek. I couldn't hear anything, so it might've just been a scent. He started rushing at a speed her rarely uses, eventually crossing the swollen creek and heading off into the unbounded wilderness beyond. If that had been Charlotte, who has a history of having gotten herself lost, I would've been worried. But Neville, who isn't particularly bright, has amazing dead reckoning skills. So I contented myself with checking out the Six Acre Bog to the west. It's a rectangular clearing in forest belonging to Adirondack State Park that looks, from satellite views, to be man-made, but appears entirely natural when you are there. Trees just don't seem to grow there and instead there is a thick turf of grass and sedge with Virginia Creek meandering gently through it. The land is so flat in the bog that creek loses all the boulders and rapids it has elsewhere and flows on a bed of course sand. Beavers looked to have created a few structures here and there, but there are no actual ponds. And the ground away from the creek isn't as soggy as I'd remembered it. I was able to sit down on the grass and take off one of my boots (which has a seemingly-unfixable leak in it) to wring out a sock that got soaked when I crossed one of the creeks as I was hurrying behind Neville early in his pursuit.
On the long walk back to the cabin uphill, I called for the dogs periodically just so they'd know where I was. But Charlotte was already in the cabin when I got there, and Neville came walking back on the old lake trail shortly thereafter.
I then pissed away some hours in the cabin without much to show for it (there was some further work on my ESP8266 firmware, which I was testing with a non-production microcontroller attached to a BME680). Neville was whining periodically, probably because his joints were sore from exertion. So I gave him an additional glucosamine tablet since Gretchen thinks it helps.
Eventually Charlotte convinced me to take her on a second walk. This time we went around to the north shore of the outflow bay, and there I got some good views of both the new beaver lodge (which is on the south shore of that bay, across from where we were a couple hundred feet away) and a large beaver, the one whose been cutting down trees and leaving three-foot-tall stumps. There are a fair number of mature red spruce trees in that area, and today I made a point of noticing how spruce bark differs from hemlock bark so that I can easily distinguish them without having to look at their foliage. Spruce has darker bark that somewhat resembled black cherry bark. It's not as rough, but it has that same dark bluish tinge.
We continued over to the bifurcation in the outflow creek, and today I noticed for the first time that the beaver dam in West Bifurcation Creek had raised the water so high that it had found its way to shallow trench connecting to East Bifurcation Creek, forcing some of the water from West Bifurcation Creek to flow down East Bifurcation Creek. Enough water had been escaping this way for the beavers to build a little dam to stop it.
Back at the cabin, I found that my ThinkPadE595, the computer I use for all my ESP8266 development when I'm traveling (and all of my Atmega AVR slave development even when I'm not traveling) was dead. I'd left it unplugged, and it lid-close switch no longer seems to work, so perhaps it had burned through its battery. But no matter what I did, it refused to come back to life. I tried holding the power button for absurd amounts of time and then I even tested the outlet I was plugging into. Eventually I opened it up, and somehow I must've jiggled a connector that was loose and the little orange charging light came on. This was important, as the lastest version of my firmware was on that computer and nowhere else, and I didn't want to have to go through the hell of trying to recover it on another machine.
[REDACTED]
Neville on the somewhat-submerged dock this morning. Click to enlarge.
Me on the dock this morning. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte and Neville on the new beaver lodge. Click to enlarge.
Neville on the beaver lodge while a large beaver swims past in the background. Click to enlarge.
The two beaver dams and stone hiker's causeway across at the outflow of Woodworth Lake. Click to enlarge.
A dead tree growing out of a crack in a cliff face, viewed from below. Click to enlarge.
An ephemeral spring beauty flower. Click to enlarge.
A flooded branch of Virginia Creek enters that creek in Six Acre Bog. Click to enlarge.
A goldfinch among tree buds near the cabin. Click to enlarge.
A six-spotted tiger beetle near the cabin. Click to enlarge.
A dark-eyed junco on the southeast deck at the cabin. Click to enlarge.
An equisetum near the cabin. Click to enlarge.
A piece of highly-weathered driftwood I removed from the lake as it drifted under the dock. It had the shape of an enormous fish. Click to enlarge.
The new beaver lodge viewed from the other side of the outflow bay. Click to enlarge.
A good view of the big beaver. Possibly this is "Madysyn." Click to enlarge.
Charlotte showcasing a spruce trunk (near her) and the more numerous trunks of hemlocks. Click to enlarge.
A diagram explaining the dammed bypass from the West Bifurcation beaver dam to East Bifurcation Creek. Click to enlarge.
A view of the beaver dam on West Bifurcation Creek. Click to enlarge.
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