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

Rods, Miles, Maps & Acres, Martin Sets Me Straight!

As the old adage goes, when you find yourself in a hole, put down your shovel and holler for a rope! Well maybe that's not exactly how it goes, but it's what makes sense. So when Bruce, on social media, more than politely commented, "Where did you get your dimensions for Vernon? They are way off...." I took a couple more shovels full and then contacted Martin. 

"Martin, Regarding Phineas Munn's Historical Survey and the dimensions of Vernon. Would you be willing to comment on my blog  Intentionally Wild in Vernon error so that I can addendum it citing you?" The following is Martin reminding me that when claiming facts, even one sentence worth, due diligence is in order. 

Take it away Martin!

Questions having been raised about the use of data from Phineas Munn's Historical Survey of Vernon in this blog post, I've been asked to look into the question of Vernon's north-south and east-west dimensions.

In this post, Norma cites Munn's survey as the source of this statement: "With Vernon being a mere 3 x .5 miles in dimension, or 18 square miles plus 1.08 acres...'"

Clearly on the face of it, that's incorrect. (a) Vernon is not a rectangle, so one can't simply multiply its width times its length to get the area. (b) Anyone who has driven the length of Vernon from north to south along Route 142 knows it is ore than 3 miles, and anyone who has done an east-west stroll anywhere in town knows the width is more than a half mile. (c) Finally, even if it were a rectangle 3 miles by .5 miles, the area would be then be 1.5 square miles, not 18 square miles plus an acre or two. 

So, inquiring minds would like to know, what did Munn actually determine to be the size of Vernon, and was he correct? (And if not, what are the actual dimensions of the town?}

So, first I visited Norma's source, which was not Munn's survey itself, but a statement in the 1891 history of Vernon by A.H. Washburn, Esq. and his wife Lucinda W.B. Washburn, which is a source of much useful information about Vernon.

In their paragraph about one of the several land grants formed Vernon, the Washburns state:

"FALL TOWN, was granted (see Centennial Addresses by Lt. Gov. Henry W. Cushman at Barnardston [sic], Mass.), June, 1736 by the Provincial Legislature of Massachusetts, on petition of Samuel Hunt (son of Samuel Hunt who was in the Falls fight) and others of Billerica, Mass., for services rendered at the battle and sixty years after the battle of Turner's Falls. On surveying the north line of Massachusetts in 1763, it was found, about half a mile in width belonged to New Hampshire, now Vernon, taking about 3 miles from the owners of Fall Town Township."

This appears to be the source of Norma's statement that the town of Vernon is 3 miles by .5 miles, but that's not what the paragraph says at all. It says that of the land originally granted as Fall Town( which later became part of Hinsdale, N.H., then Hinsdale, Vermont, and finally was named Vernon) a portion half a mile in width actually belonged to New Hampshire, not Massachusetts, and this resulted in the owners of Fall Town losing "3 miles." (Perhaps meaning 3 square miles - the meaning is not entirely clear.)

The Washburns then go on to cite Munn's survey as follows:

"The boundary of the town from Phineas Munn's survey, 1777, Fall Town Gore being on parchment: Beginning at the northeast corner of the west bank of Connecticut river at the mouth of a small brook, called Venter's brook near the south end of Dummer meadow, about one-half mile south of Mr. Brooks; house, the site of old Fort Dummer; thence, W. 19deg. N. on Brattleboro' south line, 224 4-10 rods to the northwest corner: thence S. 10 deg. W. on Guilford east line 1972 3-10 rods to the southwest corner: thence E. 10 deg. S. on Massachusetts state line and N. line of Bernardston and Northfield 1692 rods to the southeast corner on the west bank of Connecticut river: thence northerly following the west bank of the river and the west line of Hinsdale, N.H., to the place of beginning. The average with of the town is about 3 miles and it contains 18 square miles and 1.08 acres."

Dissecting all that and translating rods into miles (there are 16.5 feet in a rod and 320 rods in a mile), this means that Munn found that at its narrow (north end, Vernon is .70 miles (244.4 rods) wide and at its south end (the Massachusetts line) 5.29 miles (1692 rods) wide. (Thus averaging almost exactly 3 miles wide.) Lengthwise (north-south) Munn found a distance of 6.16 miles (1972.3rods) along the western boundary with Guilford, which is a straight line (or almost a straight line-see below). If you multiply the length of 6.16 miles by the average width of 3 miles you get 18.48 square miles, but given the irregularity of the eastern line along the river, Munn's assertion of 18 square miles is at least plausible. 

Munn was operating in 1777, using actual rods and chains to measure the land, so there was a considerable margin of error in all this, Phineas was a resident of Deerfield, Mass., and surveyed quite a few town in Massachusetts as well as Vermont. We have on the town website, a map of Vernon https://vernonvt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Vernon-historic-Lotting-Plan.pdf based on his original survey, but I've not been able to locate Munn's original "parchment" survey to see whether the Washburns transcribed his information accurately. So, we can only compare the Washburn description with modern-day data on Vernon's dimensions.

While I'm sure that Jeff Nugent, the eminent cartographer of the Windham Regional Commission, could cite accurate modern dimensions equivalent to Munn's down to the inch, I don't want to bother him for that but will go with the following information derived from Wikipedia, the U.S. Census Bureau, and Google Maps. Here goes:

The northern boundary of Vernon (with Brattleboro, which Munn figured at .70 miles, 244.4 rods, or 3702 feet) runs from a point along the Connecticut River east of the main Cersosimo plant, to a point just north of Fort Dummer State Park. On Google maps (using their distance measurement tool) its length measures out to 4217 feet or 0.80 miles) meaning Munn was shy 515 feet. But as described above, Munn began near the moth of Venter's brook (which you can see on your left when you head up Cottonmill Hill.) the actual line is a bit farther south, bisecting the Cersosimo sawmill building, which may account for the 515 foot difference. (There is actually a slight northward bend in this line as you approach its eastern end, probably derived from some ancient surveying error or correction, but we'll ignore that for the purposes of this treatise.)

Heading south from the Brattleboro-Vernon-Guilford tri-town point, Munn measured 6.16 miles. But per Google Maps, that line is actually 6.53 miles long. (It also has a corrective jog in it, from where Franklin Road crosses the line, south to where the power line crosses.) so on this stretch, Munn was short by 9.37 miles, perhaps because of uncertainties at the time as to where the Massachusetts state line actually was.)

Finally, we have the southern boundary with Bernardston and Northfield , which Munn determined to be 5.29 miles long. In actuality, I find that Google Maps has it at 5.46 miles. Dh here, it appears that Munn came closest, being shy just 0.18 miles.

Now as to the area: using the Munn/Washburn estimating method, the average width of the town is (5.46 +0.80)/2=3.13 miles. Multiply that by the length of 6.53 miles and you get 20.44 square miles. But that's only an approximation, since the boundary that follows the river is not at all a straight line.

The actual area of Vernon according to the Census Bureau is 20.0 square miles — so Munn/Washburn (at 18 square miles) was a little short, but their method, per previous paragraph, was actually pretty close. Of the 20 square miles, 19.4 square miles is land, and 0.6 square miles is water (mainly Lily Pond and a few smaller ponds; I'm sure the water area of our small broods is disregarded)

-Martin Langeveld \ marketing\social media\strategic planning\fundraising

Intentionally Wild in Vernon

Wayne has a new toy and it's nothing like Jim's. Jim claims that once locked in, his toy (or as he calls it his second midlife), will climb straight up walls. Kayden and Ethan took turns riding shotgun in the dark on Christmas night after hearing that it made their uncle's rebuilt Jeep feel more like a Prius. Not to worry, both of my adult children returned in one piece, which has been my long standing agreement with Jim. 

Similar to my agreement with their Uncle, Wayne's new toy puts our children at ease with their wandering parents out in the wilds of Vernon. It was Seth who showed me the Onx App on his phone after I asked him a question about the south western most corner of the Vernon town forest. Now Wayne's phone is suddenly Invention # 127 - Gyro-Homing Device (Fantastic Four vol. 1 #109). It seems however, that reducing the chances of us getting turned around in the woods, has increased my personal anxiety by knowing exactly where we are. Sometimes, like with my choosing to not inspect what Jim's second midlife actually looks like, willful ignorance can be bliss; and sometimes ...

Many a passing conversations had led us to believe that Cersosimo Lumber Company,. Inc owns large swaths of land in north Vernon. With Vernon being a mere 20 square miles, it begs to question exactly what constitutes a swath of land. Vermont bill H233 which passed the House in 2017, aims to reduce "forest fragmentation" of undeveloped land. As near as I am able to discern, Vermont's natural resource entities have determined that blocks of undeveloped land of 50 acres or more are in pressing need of conservation and for this reason I am considering 50 acres to be a swath. I am in no way pointing fingers at the lumber industry as being a fragmentary agent as such industries are one of the sited purposes for conserving blocks of undeveloped forest land. 

With our new Gyro-Homing Device in hand, gone are the days of spontaneously traversing over unposted lands without concern of being unwanted trespassers. 

Before consulting with Onx, Wayne and I had planned on parking in the Water Trough Hill pull off on 142 for our meandering hike into north Vernon.  Onx however, revealed a swath of rectangular shaped land owned by Renaud Gravel Inc. and west of the Gravel Inc. land, lay three to five land divisions to be crossed on our way to the Roaring Brook Wildlife Management state owned land as shown in blue in the above image. 

Wayne decided that we should park instead at the pull off located just after the bridge on Broad Brook road. The plan was to hike to the southeastern corner of  Fort Dummer State Park and follow as best we could, the property line along the Lesure land and Cersosimo's, to RBWMA. Onx made it seem that this would be a quick hike in; but what we found once we put boots on the ground was one of our most wild hikes in Vernon to date. 

Technology aside, Wayne, Kayden and I set out for some good old fashioned leisurely fun.

Under these conditions, we should reach our goal in short order

When hiking in Vernon, hills are to be expected.

Kayden wasn't convinced that we should continue hiking without a well marked trail. Wayne and I on the other hand, often find ourselves without clear trails. An unexpected fence at the top of the hill forced us to the east. We soon discovered that this fence is a part of the VT Welcome Center property on I91 N.

Our first glimpse of a tributary running north into the Broad Brook. 

Evidence that other more sensible hikers reached their destination before we did. 

The fence, the tree on the fence and the bank left us with two options. I'm still not convinced that we chose the right one.

Nothing ventured nothing gained, Kayden takes the lead and plans our decent.

Saturated thick organic matter gave way under our feet. Here, Kayden finds herself in the trees.

Wayne regains his balance with the help of a downed tree while Kayden switches back.

A look back to where I finally sat down and slid the final length on my bottom.

Wayne and Kayden wait for me to pick my way across the slope. I want to point out, that I would have turned around and headed for home at this point if the way back wasn't at the top of that hill!

Our reward for getting to the bottom was discovering that we had to cross the brook.

Grateful to be on relatively level and dry land, we walked until Wayne located survey marker #1. We still aren't sure why this marker is in the middle of no place in particular on Fort Dummer park land. 

Making our way to the Lesure property, we noticed a distinct change in the age and size of the trees. Perhaps we had at last found the peace that the trailhead graffiti eluded to.

Wayne standing among these giant trees reminded me of our trip to see the Coastal Redwoods at Muir Wood National Monument which is north of San Francisco, CA. If you are unfamiliar with John Muir and his work with American land use and conservation, here is a brief synopsis of Muir's legacy.

It's been a while since this area was last logged.

Cersosimo's boundary. We were close to learning why RBWMA set aside land in this area.

We crossed an old logging road which begged us to question if there was an alternate way into this area. As far as we could figure however, this road ends before it reaches the Broad Brook. I was beginning to lose hope of finding an easier path back to the car. Unless Uncle Jim showed up with his second midlife, we were hiking back up that hill.

Upon reaching the RBWMA, we realized that we had come unprepared to scale its icy ridge.

We settled for taking pictures of ice falls.

I'm uncertain of exactly what the state is protecting in these rocky ledges and I am reserving my guess to prevent misinformation.

This area is a good example of how Vernon's working landscape coexists with conservation efforts.

Kayden removed a balloon (pictured), a bag and cans from the woods. 

Time to find our way back to the car.

We located a deer trail while on the hill and followed it up. When I hear residents state that, "people can do what they want to on their land", I wonder why land owners don't always recognize that natural communities also own the land. 

Part 2, Further thoughts:

 As I was sliding down the hill on my bottom I couldn't help but wonder how we found ourselves on this wild and crazy route across Vernon. I realized that I couldn't blame mother nature herself. There were plenty of more reasonable ways into the woods! The real question weighing on my mind: how did all of these man-made obstacles pop up without us noticing? 

"The improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries. So much more the reason for beginning now" George Perkins Marsh

Over the past decade, there has been a renewed back and forth conversation of sorts taking place between Vermont's many arms of government regarding Act 250. I have included in Further Reading, one such conversation. Vernon is a "one acre town" while one of our largest land stakeholders depends on unfragmented tracts of forested land for their industry. What many may have forgotten however, is that Sustainable Development has been a part of the Vermont conversation since 1847 when Marsh delivered his lecture on sustainable farm practices to the Agricultural Society of Rutland County.* 

Starting one hundred and seventy five years ago, three generations of families; Marsh - Billings - Rockefeller from the town of Woodstock, VT, worked to promote and carry out the belief that it is imperative that development and land conservation work as in partnership and not as adversaries. A visit to Vermont's sole national park should be on every Vermonters 2022 bucket list. -Norma & Kayden Manning

Note: the dimensions of Vernon in this article has been edited and is now based on Martin Langeveld's research.

*The 1847 Lecture that predicted human-induced climate change, The Guardian

*Man and Nature, G.P. Marsh, The Public Domain Review

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park

Part 3, Further reading:

In towns with no zoning, reopened Supreme Court decision has big implications for Act 250, VTDigger

How a small quarry could have a big effect on Vermont's land use law, WCAX 3

Forest Fragmentation, Vermont Natural Resources Council 

Act 250 and Forest Fragmentation, VNRC

Act 171 and Planning for Forest Blocks and Habitat Connectors, State of VT Agency of Natural Resources

Forest Fragmentation, TORC