|
|
|
Ramona Rock Swamp
Friday, August 21 2026
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
I spent last night on the couch in the great room while Neville slept nearby on the beanbag, which I'd dragged down from the loft. To keep Neville from running around after creatures in the night, I'd barricaded the pet door. This meant, of course, that I awoke from a dream to Neville's whimpering in the night (the whimpering was part of the dream and was not that of a dog), so I roused myself and let him out. He was good about just taking care of business and then coming straight back inside.
I took a few breaks from my morning routine (which these days involves a fair amount of YouTube consumption in addition to coffee drinking and Spelling Bee playing) to intensify my jihad against mugwort in the front yard, pulling up even small plants by the roots until it was beginning to be difficult to see any examples of mugwort at all. As always, I piled the removed mugwort vegetative matter against the cabin's south foundation wall, where there must now be a massive concentration of sequestered carbon.
Once the dew had burned off, I stretched out my largest tarp (the one I'd used to conceal the greenhouse from the road back when I was building it in 2008) on the driveway behind where I'd parked the Chevy Bolt. THen I brought the 130 inch steel central pole from the spiral staircase I'd bought a couple weeks ago (it had been on the great room floor all this time) and lay it diagonally on that tarp. It's a beast and probably weighs something like eighty pounds, though its biggest problem is that its ends want to bash into things with high inertia. (This time it left a small permanent scar on the entrance deck to the cabin.) Then after sanding away any rust I could see, I spray painted the entire thing with a comically oversized can of Rustoleum black paint, which seemed like my best option for sealing the steel away from the elements. On the can, the paint said it needed to dry for 24 hours before I could do anything with what I'd painted. So after I was done with my painting, I had to find some other project to work on.
Charlotte was restless, so after making sure that Neville had urinated, I barricaded the pet door, put a piece of plywood in front of the steps to the upstairs (Neville isn't supposed to be climbing many steps in one go) and set out with Charlotte and a beer for the dock on the Mossy Rock Trail. Of course, I had to stop along the way to make improvements to that causeway across that low spot that I'd started yesterday with that huge flat rock. I managed to find another fairly large (but barely carryable) flat rock to add to the causeway, making it look even more like an elfin trail in the woods, which is exactly the look I am trying to achieve.
Down at the lake, I saw Throckmorton the Loon doing his thing, which on this occasion meant spending much of his time underwater swimming around looking for fish nearer to the lake's south shoreline.
When I'd had enough of the lake, Charlotte and I walked across the outflow creek, through the old scout campground and then through the woods just below the newish beaver dam on West Bifurcation Creek. The water in the creek was weak, and there was no visible water in the tiny brook draining a wetland at the base of the cliffs north of the cabin. That brook departs the wetland near a large boulder that I've named Ramona Rock (since Ramona was with me the first time I'd ever seen it, and I have a picture of her next to it). I've decided to name the brook "Ramona Rock Brook" and the wetland "Ramona Rock Swamp." I was barefoot when I was hiking through the swamp today, so I didn't worry as much about stepping in dry places. No matter how dry it gets, that swamp always has places you do not want to step, as does the brook that drains it. I noticed today that the brook has cut down to a flat layer of bedrock, which now delaminates into sheets that would make for good paving stones, although getting rocks out of this region would not be easy even if West Bifurcation Creek could be used to float some sort of small freight vessel.
I often see plants that look like stinging nettles that then turn out to not sting me when I brush against them. The only stinging nettles I routinely encounter are in the forested floodplain near the lower Chamomile (not far above the place on Dug Hill Road where it bends around that 17th Century stone house currently owned by Kiefer Sutherland). But today I brushed against some along Ramona Rock brook that did sting me, so I will know to be careful there in the future.
I was under the influence of a recreational 150mg dose of pseudoephedrine that I hoped would propel me through my tasks today, but mostly all I ended up doing with the resulting energy was waging a wider war on the mugwort in the clearing around the cabin. Today I went around west of the cabin looking for and continued pulling out any mugworts I saw, even fairly small ones. I found a big healthy cluster of them where a massive boulder at grade-level marks the northwest corner of the cabin grounds (and the terrain turns into woods at a lower elevation both to the north and west. Here the ground was more sloped, and I left the roots intact as an anti-erosion measure, snipping them off as low as possible so as not to leave too many sharp stumps to step on with my bare feet. There the mugwort was such a monoculture that the ground left behind was devoid of any plant life, so I will be planting seeds from the flowers I like going to seed nearby (echinacea, tickseed, black-eyed susan, and sweet william) in hopes of getting them established there instead of the much less ecologically-useful mugwort.
Woodworth Lake today. Click to enlarge.
That brand new dock I saw on Woodworth Lake yesterday as see today. Click to enlarge.
An Amanita along the trail west of the lake. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte near the old Boy Scout campground. Click to enlarge.
A mysterious Amanita with a rough texture on its cap near East Bifurcation Creek. Click to enlarge.
The state of the new beaver dam on Wast Bifurcation Creek. Click to enlarge.
An interesting rock tecture in the delaminating bedrock near (or in) Ramona Rock Brook. Click to enlarge.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260821 feedback
previous | next |
