Unsettled Bones

 

With the gray doldrums of winter and a pandemic weighing squarely upon me, this week I started taking my lunch outside. By the time the sub zero weekend rolled around and knowing that we were in for a bit of weather on Martin Luther King Jr's Birthday, I was beginning to feel panicked that I would never see the open trail again! Ok, so that may have been a momentary loss of my senses. Call it cabin fever, call it whatever you want, Wayne was on the receiving end of it. 

A bit of a warning is in order here for those who aren't quite as fascinated by bones as I am. There are pictures of bones in this blog, not Wayne's mind you, but interesting none the less.

Wayne had barely gotten the milk on his cereal when I asked him where we were hiking today. His enthusiasm was palatable in his remark about something of it still being in the single digits. 

"Do you want to drive over to see if we can find the trail from the road?" Wayne asked after agreeing to a scouting expedition. We had both gotten into the Jeep when it dawned on us that we were headed towards another error in judgment. "Do you want to get on our gear in case we decide to start hiking?" I looked down at my day hikers and knowingly agreed. The thing about Wayne, is that I can wait forever for him only to have him in the end ready before I am. 

The plan was to hike the VAST secondary orange trail between green trail marker six and Newton road. We had previously hiked the green trail from the Vernon Rec to the Dam but had skipped this extension on that hike. 

This trail skirts state land shown near the top of the below image. Note "Blodgett" on both maps for refence. The areas shaded in blue are state lands. We decided to access the trail from Mary Drive off of 142 and parked at the now closed School House Grocery. 

Don and his crew, Vernon Trail Breakers Snowmobile Club  maintain these trails. Private land owners generously allow these trails to cross their land. 

State lands posted in yellow, are to the left of the trail as we enter from Mary Drive.

As we neared the tracks, we had state land diamonds on our immediate left, multiple newly posted no trespassing signs to our right, with green trail markers and RR signs directly ahead. This is a major intersection for a town of our size.

And by the looks of things, traffic has been heavy this winter. 

We've only taken one animal tracks class with Bonnyvale and this hike challenged every bit of our novice knowledge. Above are turkey tracks. Below are feline, K-9 and deer. There were more  than these to investigate, but I wanted to try and show all three kinds together.

Across the tracks and straight across the field is the green trail. The orange trail is to the left. Never ones to be satisfied with the obvious, we decided to walk the circumference of the field. 

When attempting to identify tracks, distance between prints and stride patterns are as important as the individual print. Here I use my glove to show relative size. These tracks show four toes with retracted claws. I asked Helen how to tell the difference between these cat prints and the weasel family. Helen said that mustelids have five toes.

I took another unexpected trip to the ground. As I rested in the prone position trying to collect myself, Wayne thinking that I had simply failed to sufficiently lift my feet while walking, asked me if I had fallen over my own feet again. I rolled over and looked in disbelief at a clump of grass that had apparently led to my undoing. 

Cut bone and deer hide. We couldn't find the skull or legs.

Rodents had gnawed at the ribs. Ferns and grasses had grown up through them. This find was worth the headache I suffered for the rest of the day from my fall.

On the bank of the Island Meadow Brook, we found a hole.

The brook was frozen enough for us to walk on. We weren't the first to walk on the ice.

With freezing and thawing, it's difficult to know the initial shape and size of a track.

The bend is a particularly beautiful area

We decided to check out the green trail bridge over the Island Meadow Brook as Don had shown me pictures of it being flooded. Don thinks that the issue is an undersized culvert. I wondered if the issue was beaver; but the only signs of beaver we found were two felled tree stumps that weren't fresh. 

From here we backtracked to the orange trail.

The light being let into this area is due to recent logging adjacent to the trail.

Wayne finally located an orange blaze.

Blodgett's field

We spent some time alternating through fields and woods

Wayne walks next to a posted area that has recently been logged.

At the edge of a Dunklee's field, we found seed filled deer tracks

The last leg of the orange trail crosses this field.

However, twenty feet from where we entered the field, Wayne noticed a sign that ended our hike short of Newton road.

Wayne checked his app to see if we had somehow missed the trail, but with no trespassing signs posted to the right of us and this sign to the left, we turned back.

Our shortened hike wasn't a total loss however, we stopped to check out a flooded area on the way back and found these cool tracks. After bugging Helen and Kirk all morning for identifications, they pointed out that most of my exciting track sightings on this hike were domestic dog and cat. I won't let that minor detail ruin my fun. -Norma Manning