Shenandoah National Park May 1 – 5 — When it’s spring the wild azaleas bloom. They come first, closely followed by the mountain laurel about three weeks later. After that, it’s all weeds.
We started by joining the Crapper Crew emptying the compost bin on the Calf Mountain Hut privy. Everybody thinks this is task is as attractive as waking up in a French Quarter back alley. In reality it’s more like opening up a bag of potting soil from your local garden store.
On the way to the trail section Caroline and I maintain, I stopped by to check out the fire damage in the north district from last month. The understory is coming back. The canopy is normal. All told, it appears to have been a healthy event for the forest.
“Greetings,” said the bunny. “Do you know the way to Mr. McGregor’s garden?” For a rabbit, this time of year, the world is a giant salad bar. Not need for Peter Rabbit’s coordinates.
Unfortunately, this little bunny was unafraid. Saw it on my way back down the mountain. Sad to say, there are too many hawks and coyotes on the hunt for fearless Lepus sylvaticus to survive for long.
One of the sentinel trees that stand watch over the AT.
Saturday was “Show Your Love” to the park day. Almost 90 people showed up to volunteer on what was a cold and drippy day. Thanks y’all.
Kensington, MD, April 23, 2024 — It’s common for people to list the age of 100 as the aspirational length of their life. Centenarians are widely celebrated has having achieved greatness in just about every human culture. Why not?
Today the calendar marked seventy five years since my birth. That means three quarters of the aspirational century is now in the books.
If sports were a metaphor for life, today I started playing in the 4th and final quarter of the game. The difference is that the human fourth quarter is literally sudden death overtime. You never quite know when the clock will run out. The only thing you do know is that life can dunk on you at anytime it wants. You won’t be taking the final shot.
The logic works sort of like this. My broken wrist will take 9 months to completely heal, restored to pain-free, full function.
When you’re 18 months old, 9 months is half of your life. That’s a long time. When you’re 38, it’s more or less a blip. However, when you’re 75 and don’t know how much time remains on the clock, the functional deprivation can seem like a disproportionately huge fraction of the time you have remaining.
You’re back to square one. At 75, time matters more than ever.
When I turned 65, I was on my AT thru hike. I posted a birthday blog, the premise of which was that at 65, my utility to the American economy was about the equivalent to a snotty Klenex – useless. No longer was advertising or other marketing targeting me at that age, in spite of the fact that I had more disposable income than ever and was blowing through the Appalachian Trail like a kid in a hurry to catch the school bus. Consequently, I might as well have been dead.
Things have changed. Seventy-five-year-olds are a valuable demographic. Now, suddenly, folks want to sell me lots of stuff – senior living condos, Depends, prepaid funerals, walk-in Jacuzzi tubs, hearing aids, power chairs, retirement annuities, life insurance and Medicare supplemental policies and, of course, cures for all those supposed aches and pains.
Really?
To be honest, decrepitude is evermore visible – except through a gauzy lens. The aging body is protesting from time to time. But, I can still keep time with the fifty-somethings. (Nobody says ever 70 -something.) I’m slightly slower up the mountain on occasion, but I’m always on the summit, lugging my chainsaw, when it counts.
April 23 is a birthday shared with Shakespeare, Shirley Temple, Prince Louis of Wales, William Penn, former U.S. president James Buchanan, and others.
Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC), January – April 2024 — There was a lot going on over the winter, broken wrist aside.
The PATC dedicated a new website at http://www.patc.net. It replaced a 1995 design. That was a welcome change.
A few PATC stats are in order. We are a volunteer managed and led organization. For the past 97 years the club has been connecting people to the outdoors through rental cabins, guided hikes and volunteer opportunities, mostly maintaining hiking trails, our 49 cabins and 45 shelters.
We have 8,400 members, 1,000 of whom are active volunteers, plus 9 full-time employees and several seasonals. The remainder of the membership rents cabins and participates in hikes.
Our volunteers maintain 1,200 miles of hiking trails in the National Capitol Region, including 240 miles of the AT and 500 miles in Shenandoah National Park. We work with a total 16 national parks, two national forests and various state parks, forests and wildlife management areas.
The PATC’s geographical footprint covers 45,000 sq. miles in four states (Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania) and the District of Columbia.
Those stats represent a lot of effort, tradition and history.
Richard Lee and Venus Foshay dig a rolling grade dip (drain) on an AT section in Shenandoah National Park.
Trail maintenance goes on year-round, but becomes a force to be reckoned with starting in mid-March with the ground in our region begins to thaw. That’s when prep begins for thru hiking season on the AT and the influx of hikers everywhere.
Meanwhile there are winter meetings with our agency partners across the region, including regional planning meetings that include sister trail clubs.
PATC also hosted a book signing for Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. His new book, “Walk, Ride Paddle: A life outside” is about hiking the AT, biking the Blue Ridge Parkway and paddling the James River in Virginia. https://www.amazon.com/Walk-Ride-Paddle-Life-Outside/dp/1400339456 PATC is prominently mentioned, not to mention he used vintage PATC guidebooks so he could see what’s changed in the past several decades.
If you think winter was busy, stand by. Spring and summer will be busy like this past winter on steroids.
Kensington, Md., April 8, 2024 — The ancients thought eclipses were omens. Don’t we wish, except what side would receive the benefit of its support? I prefer to think of it as a Bat Signal as described in a “Screen Rant” story entitled: The Secret Meaning of the Batman’s Bat-Signal Revealed.
According to the story, “These are the nights when Batman and the GCPD are pushed to the brink, and the people hunker in their homes, kept awake by the sounds of chaos. On those dark nights, Commissioner Gordon deliberately leaves the Bat-Signal on all night. “That’s the funny thing about the signal,” Gordon reflects in a text-box. “People think it’s an alarm, a warning that danger is coming, a call for help. ‘It’s to make them know we’ll make it to morning, even if we make our own d*** light.“
“… At first the citizens saw the Bat-Signal only as a call for help, but little by little they would have found comfort in it, realizing it meant Batman was active and on the way.”
So, let’s just call the eclipse a symbol that the best is yet to come.
So much for hope as a personal priority. I was too lazy to charge the battery for my Sony A6000 SLR. Instead my iPhone 12 pro had to do. “Do” it did with a sunlight filter held in front of the lens.
We were in a 95 percent-plus obscuration zone that was unfortunately compounded by a broken overcast. It took luck, but I got one good shot shown above.
Note the eclipse image captured in green in a camera flair to the lower left.
The clouds added to the dramatic effect. At its maximum, the light from the sun dramatically decreased, it wasn’t enough to trick animals into assuming nocturnal habits. The birds continued chirping while the squirrels danced in the shrubbery. All seemed to be normal.
When you break your wrist, you’re stuck mostly with calisthenics.
Kensington, MD, Spring 2024 — Being president of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club is a full-time job. It doesn’t leave time for extra curricular activities including this blog.
As winter tightened its grip, so did my volunteer gig. From a raft of regulatory compliance issues to a key staffer with an unfortunate cancer diagnosis, slogging through the so called dormant season has had all the joy of chomping into a tepid corn dog at the Iowa state fair.
The stale air inside was smothering me. Much like a pup with a full bladder, I wanted out.
Then I broke my wrist. How’d that happen?
It was a leaden day in mid-January with light snow on tap.
A group of my friends organized a trip to crosscut several blowdowns on hiking trails in a federally designated wilderness area near the eastern boundary of Shenandoah National Park. Count me in? Hell yes!
Hell yes! That is until I was literally thigh deep “in” the Thornton River slipping on snot rocks. As I unsuccessfully Attempted to stiff arm a chilling dunk, I smashed my right radius at the distal head. Then I slipped on another snot rock cracking my knee and jamming my wrist again. Ouch!!!
It felt like a polar bear swim in Chicago’s Lake Michigan. There I was … soaking wet, scrambling up the river bank while assessing the growing, throbbing ache in my right wrist. It was about a nano second before it was absolutely certain that I needed to get the hell out of there before I morphed into a lime popcicle and became a carry-out casaulty.
Working my way across the river on a fallen tulip poplar. The going was good on this end of the trip.
Knowing three water crossings were part of the day, a full change of clothes was ridding on my back, nestled next to my store-bought Italian sub and water jug.
Changing clingy wet clothes one-handed was a contortionist’s circus trick. Once dry, and a little safer from hypothermia, more than a mile separated me from my Subaru Forester which was parked along an access road. Fortunately the crew was full of folks with advanced first aid credentials. We had enough splints and ace wraps to equip an ER.
I immediately thought the wrist might be broken, but chose not to splint it so I could better balance on my hike out. We wrapped it tightly with an ace wrap to retard the rapid swelling and everyone hung around while I waded, avoiding the slippery stepping stones, to recross the river.
Patiently waiting in the Page County Hospital, (Luray, Virginia) ER for the diagnosis post X-rays. Doesn’t look that bad. The ace wraps really kept the swelling in check.
The movie “Barbie” was inspirational in choosing the color of my cast.
I have been a woman’s basketball fan (WBB) for decades.
Squeezing medical putty … over and over and over and over.
The swelling made it too painful to type, even after the cast was off. The rest of the winter has been limited one-armed weight lifting, squeezing putty to rebuild forearm muscles and coaching the neighborhood trail crew to fix some muddy spots on the Silver Creek pathway.
Shenandoah National Park, Summer and Fall 2023 — Time flies when you’re having fun, right? Somehow time got away. All summer and fall we’ve been running at warp speed doing the stuff we love to do.
Trail work is fairly predictable. We saw, chop, weed whack, dig, and move rocks. Every so often we work on a shelter or empty a privy compost bin. We also schlepp tools up mountains. That’s what the past few months have been.
We were painting the rusting roof on the Calf Mountain Hut when Henry Horn grabbed a paper towel to mop the sweat from his brow. Little did he know that towel’s astonishing convenience was a trap. Nothing is ever that easy.
The towel had been used to wipe paint spillage from the handle of a brush. The instant Henry touched paper to face, he knew he was ready for his close up in the remake of “The Wizard of Oz.”
The silver colored, oil-based, rubberized paint we use on the corrugated tin shelter roofs is messy. It sticks around like a well-crafted conspiracy theory.
Fortunately, Henry’s wife was handy and mopped his face with turpentine until it was “almost” devoid of paint.
The hut was but one of many adventures.
We rebuilt a ton of trail. Here is a log hauled by Julie and Nicole. It was used for a step on the park’s Overall Run trail.
We were in designated federal wilderness, so all the logs were cut with handsaws. They weren’t small.
Finished work. About three fourths of those rocks are buried in the ground. Like in your car mirrors, objects in this picture are larger than they appear to be.
Checking one of the falls on Overall Run. Surprised it was still flowing. The region was 10 inches behind on rainfall for the year when this was taken. We’ve since had about three inches of rain.
Cleared a white pine that the wind blew over.
Hauled some firewood for the September workshop.
I love helping to split the wood for the workshop community fire.
Workshop class on invasive species taught by a park biologist. When he was done, we realized we were surrounded by several invasive species.
My brother Jack visited from Colorado and helped empty the Byrd’s Nest 3 compost bin. That’s the kind of job you give your brother to show your love, and signal the virtue of your volunteer efforts. We painted the privy afterwards.
PATC open house at Bears Den.
Our best recruiting tool is the crosscut demo.
Future trainers being qualified to train and certify our new Certified Maintainer course. The course is built around the SET principle. Structures must be Sustainable, meaning they will last a long time; Effective, meaning they do their intended job; and Transversable, meaning they are easy on hikers. This is an example of a rolling grade dip (a drain that shunts off water).
Rolling grade dips are now the preferred way to remove water from the tread, thus preventing erosion. If built properly, ideally a hiker will barely notice them.
More step building, this time on the Compton Peak viewpoint trail.
Taken from Skyline Dr. November 18 at eight o’clock in the morning facing east. It’s hard to beat the zen of a moment like this.
The lowly rock bar does its job. We later used rocks to lift the boulder for better leverage.
Shenandoah National Park, July 2023 — It’s been a typical July in the Mid-Atlantic region featuring scorching heat, dripping humidity, gads of gnats, and clouds of dust where the daily pop-up T-storms failed to drip. The rain may have missed a spot or two, but enthusiastic Hoodlums came to dig, push and pound, come what may. By the way, the gnats are a feature not a bug. 🙂
HOODLUMS MONTHLY TRIP Both the Hoodlums’ third-Saturday-of-the-month work trip and crew week pack the calendar. Caroline and I camped at the Indian Run maintenance hut on Saturday night and weed-whacked our AT section on Sunday, hustling for an early start to avoid the heat.
While some folks breakfast at the hut, Caroline, the ridgerunners and I slipped into Front Royal for a bite at the Knotty Pine.
This is a one-meal-a-day, greasy-spoon, stick-to-your-ribs, and clog-your-arteries breakfast. These hole-in-a-wall, mom-and-pop eat shops are where it’s at in every tiny community across our nation. It’s where locals gather and a part of American culture that I love.
Our project was to work on the AT near the spring on Compton Peak. The tread on about 250 yards of the trail had drifted down hill. Our job was to restore the tread to its original location using a technique called side-hilling.
Reminds me of railroad building.
The raindrops didn’t miss the area around the hut Saturday night. The slow, steady patter on my tent fly served as white noise for sound sleeping. That meant hanging my kit out to dry once home. Cleaning and storing equipment is part of the game. Speaking of games, the ballgame was unremarkable other than the hapless Nats won one for a change, but the spectacular shot of the capitol on the drive home reminds me of why I like living here.
NOW FOR CREW WEEK
Crew week runs Sunday – Friday. We reside at the Pinnacles Research Station. It is equipped with ten bunks, a lab area, kitchen, livingroom, shower and laundry. It is surrounded by apron of flat ground for tenting and trees to hang hammocks.
We tend to work side-by-side with members of the park trail crews and various members come and go as available. I had to be home on Tuesday to chair a PATC Executive Committee meeting but rejoined Wednesday bringing Sabine Pelton, 2019’s Ridgerunner One, who was in town all the way from Maine while her husband attended a conference at the University of Maryland.
We did a lot of rock work this year. This happened while I was away. Crew colleague Cindy Ardecki shared her video of this rock’s journey. There is more than one way to move a BFR as you will see.
The previous day we used a different technique while working on the Overall Run trail just above the falls.
Crush and blunt force injuries are possible, so safety is a big deal. The park doesn’t require hard hats, but the club will consider adopting them as standard PPE this fall.
We ran into a young bear on the hike back to our transportation. He was curious but conditioned to having people nearby. He only moved 10 ft. off the trail as we hiked past.
You might ask if we were nervous. Not really. As a rule, bears are shy and fearful of humans except when food is involved. This bear showed no sighs of aggression or being concerned about our presence. Besides, he was realistically overmatched by eight guys equipped with trail tools.
We also repaired steps on Compton Peak leading to the park’s best columnar basalt formation. We built the original steps 10 years ago. They are in a difficult spot in which to build and were in need of attention.
We’re trying a new technique using logs as retaining walls to create steps filled with rubble.
We worked on the Indian Run access road on the final day. Sabine and I also slipped up to the spring on Compton to improve the flow. We also found new artifacts near the CCC trash midden located on the section. I wrote about it last winter. This trip we found a plate shard and part of a terracotta pipe section.
Here, there and everywhere, June to July Fourth, July 6, 2023 — We’ll start with the good news/bad news. My dear friend Mary Thurman is now the park manager at Flagg Mountain, Alabama.
This is stellar news for Mary. She’s been searching for “big girl” work for a long time. She’s uniquely qualified and so far, she’s loving it.
Mary’s mission: Bring a long dormant park back to life. Who could be better for that? Her degree from Florida State is finally paying off.
Unfortunately, with Mary’s fortune, we lost our ridgerunner in the Michaux State Forest, Pennsylvania.
Before she hit the road, we visited the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center where the large aircraft are on display. Obviously, this is the Space Shuttle Discovery.
We also shared a fire and some beer. Can’t wait to visit Flagg Mountain after the weather cools off.
Got to welcome four new AT Communities into the fold. AT communities welcome hikers, support the trail and are a vital source of volunteers. I kept my speeches mercifully short. Some of the politicians didn’t.
Along the way things happened. This is the readout on a gas pump. Usually I get gas in Front Royal, VA when I go to the park. It’s often 50 cents less expensive than in the D.C. area.
Guess who left home without his wallet? In addition to not having my drivers license, I didn’t have a credit card. How close was it? My tank holds 15 gallons.
Nice blowdown on Pass Mountain. Tina is my go to swamper because she’s usually available during the week. Pole saws don’t require credentials or PPE. Secret: The car is parked on a fire road less than 100 yards away.
Made a quick trip to weed the part of the AT Caroline and I maintain. Used my new Stihl battery string trimmer. Worked like a charm. The park service says a persistent bear reported by several hikers has been hanging around. Methuselah, the apple tree, is bearing fruit.
For the first time ever, the PATC was in charge of chainsaw training for a class composed solely of park service employees.
We had several park instructor/trainers working with us and carrying a substantial teaching and evaluating load for the four-day course.
Wayne Limberg is teaching chain sharpening in this photo.
My chainsaw was due for cleaning and inspection. Needed a new starter rope. Of course the dealer didn’t have one. The chain catcher had done its job too many times. Received the new parts the next day via Amazon.
A young fox caught a small black snake for dinner as viewed from the bedroom window.
Our friend Martha Kumar is a professorial scholar of the American presidency. I first met her when I served on the National Security Council staff at the White House. Of course, she was born on the Fourth of July. Our tradition is to attend the Nationals game followed by Martha’s birthday party where we sing Happy Birthday.
Let’s close with the bullseye rash found on my elbow after the chainsaw classes. We spend a lot of time in the woods. It’s doxycycline for two weeks.
PATC HQ, Vienna, Va. May 27, 2023 — The PATC headquarters building hides in plain sight, buried deep, just off the main drag, in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Vienna.
We decided it would be advantageous to piggyback our open house on the local annual street festival thinking we might attract more people. The objectives: raise our profile, sell some stuff and recruit new members. We also added a members only cookout at the end.
The crosscut salami slice is always a favorite. Fun for all ages. The youngest gets the chunk sawed off.
We had multiple displays from the ski touring group, mountain rescue and our standard science fair display used at outreach events.
The early results: $1,200 in sales, 200 visitors, 15 new members. That’s in line with our projected performance objectives.
Obligatory selfie at the columnar basalt formation.
Shenandoah National Park, May 13, 2023 — About a month ago we planned to take a hike up and over Compton Peak to see the wild azalea and mountain laurel which historically are in full bloom. It was also a chance to check up on weed growth and talk about the work we’d do over the summer.
As the days counted down, the weather prognosis worsened. The precip probability in the 10-day forecast climbed from 39 to 58 percent. Digging deeper the day prior, we learned that the Weather Channel app was predicting less than a half inch accumulation with scattered showers. Those are excellent odds and conditions so we green-lighted the trek to great success. So what if we had to wear a rain jacket for 10 minutes.
Maintenance issues constantly crop up whether a waterbar rots, a spring undermines some stone steps, or some knucklehead scratches graffiti on a rock. The steps will fall to the Hoodlums for repair.
Along the way ya gotta check out the rocks. We also found a couple of thru hikers enjoying out bench.
Ultimately we found a few flowers. The azalea were waning and the mountain laurel are just budding out. The dreaded weeds are ahead of schedule. It’s going to be an interesting year.
