A Virtual Hike to the
By Brad Sylvester
Just because it’s too early to start working in the garden doesn’t mean it’s too early to enjoy the great outdoors. A springtime hike through the woods, gives us a different perspective of familiar landscapes. I recently visited
The entrance to
If you look directly under the center of the sign, the large rocks on the other side of the parking lot mark the trail entrance. I've always been fascinated by how much history is imparted by the landscape. Here, the lower portion of the trail is dominated by young trees, mainly white birch, but with a few others mixed in as well. This is an early successional forest. The lack of older trees says very clearly that this area was clear land, either pasture for cattle (or sheep) or farmland at some point not too long ago. Much of New England was deforested for these purposes around 1900, but around 50-100 years ago a program of reforestation was begun, in part to help control the water run-off from the mountains that resulted in annual spring floods. This area looks to me, to be much less established than 50 years. The tree trunks here are not more than 2-3 inches in diameter for the most part. I'm not sure how many annual growth rings per inch one might expect in white birch. The next few times I cut one, I'll measure so that I can do an accurate age calculation based on trunk diameter. In the meantime, I will guess the trees right at the base of the trail are probably around 20 years old. Young birch trees grow relatively fast, and these stand about 7-10 meters tall (about 24-32 feet). They are spaced very close together since it is easy to get sunlight when every tree is the same height. As the forest ages, some trees will outcompete others growing taller or having broader thicker canopies that block sunlight from the others and give the larger trees a competitive advantage. Then the trees will thin out as the stragglers die off and the mix shifts from early successional trees like birch to mature forest trees like oak and pine. I haven't even taken a step on our hike and already, I'm lost in history trying to guess what this area would have looked like 30 or 40 years ago when it was all cleared... and when was it first cleared... and by whom.
When hiking on public lands, it's always a good idea to know and follow the usage rules for the area. In most cases, right at the trail head there will be a sign with all the rules.
You can see the map in the bottom left corner of the sign. The trail starts at the lower left of the map and today we'll be following the left-most trail which will leave this map and go off to the summit of Little Job. Another time, perhaps we'll hike to the main summit and climb the fire tower indicated by the blue circle on the map. The fire tower trail is a big loop so that you can return by a different path that the one you took to get there. Today, though, we'll go up and back the same trail to Little Job. Although the views from both summits are spectacular, I prefer the view from Little Job. Let's get started or we'll be here all day staring at this sign.
Well, as we take our first steps, we see the orange paint marking the trail. These markings are known as blazes - you've heard the phrase "blazing a trail," haven't you? If you follow the blazes, it's pretty easy to stay on the trail. You can see what I meant about the trees being spaced very tightly, as well as the consistently small trunk diameters. You'll also notice that there is snow on the ground. It's May 6th, 2008 in New Hampshire, which means the snow is actually fairly deep, especially where it doesn't get much sunlight. Fortunately, these paths are used by about a dozen people a day at this time of year. That means they are well packed down. If it were still earlier in the year or a particularly cold day, that would mean the trail would be icy and quite slippery. We'd need spikes on our shoes for traction. But today, it's apporaching 50 degrees fahrenheit so the top half inch or so is soft enough to provide a good grip and any comfortbale hiking shoe will do. I'm wearing plain old sneakers. If we leave the trail, though, the snow hasn't been packed down by scores of hikers and we'll fall through - in some spots up to our knees. The bare spots you see are usually wetter areas. The meltwater runs off the mountain and either joins a stream on it's way to the ocean or collects in a vernal pool until it dries off in the full heat of summer, which was about late June last year, but we didn't get nearly this much snow. Unfortunately, in some places, the path of least resistance for the water is also our path. It's still early enough that this isn't much of a problem. The ground is still mostly frozen and solid beneath our feet. Stepping on the high spots or rocks keeps our feet dry, and the footing is still good. Later on in the spring, as the mud thaws deeper, it'll get a bit sloppy and it'll be harder to keep our feet dry without skirting the edges of the path for dryer terrain.
Notice the rocks, though. If this land was cleared for farming, they would have been too large and too many for this area to have been plowed, but they wouldn't have bothered cattle or sheep at all. These may have been deeper without the erosion caused by hikers and the water run-off, but still it's pretty rocky for farming. It's also quite steep in places. The hillside could still have been planted with corn or hay or some other large field crop, but at this point, I'd guess it was pasture. Since it is New England, we expect pasture lands and even farmlands to be divided off by stone walls. The stone walls served several purposes. They might keep livestock in (if we found the stone wall topped with old rusted barbed wire, that would be a telling clue), or they might separate one neighbor's land from another's. Equally important, however, was the fact that they were the place that the farmer would put all the rocks he dug out of his fields. A cast iron plow blade was fairly brittle and would break on large stones, a plow horse might injure its foot on field stones, and so they were removed from the fields as a matter of course. Since they had to go somewhere, and somewhere nearby since they were quite heavy and very numerous, it was expedient to lay them out in long lines as you went, forming a stone wall. Sometimes though, you'll see simple piles of pumpkin size rocks where a farmer didn't need or want a fence and just dumped all the stones in a big heap. And sure enough, as we continue up the trail we see stone walls rising like breakwaters through the ebbing snow tide.
This stone wall is particularly interesting. Remember my earlier discussion of the age and type of trees indicating the period when the land was last clear? Well, on this side of the wall, we continue to see young, small-trunked trees - mainly birch, beech, some maple in the less densely packed areas. On the other side of the wall however, the forest has an entirely different character. It is dominated by much larger trees with trunk diameters averaging somewhere in the 18 inch range. And you can see that there is a predominance of evergreens, with a smattering of larger beech and oak. So when the land on this side of the fence was clear, the land on the other side was already grown up into forest. The wall likely marked a property boundary, the edge of someone's pasture while the other land was unused. Notice another striking difference, particularly in the winter and spring. The ground on this side is brightly sunlit while the older forest floor lies in shade. The big evergreens snatch up every bit of available sunlight before it hits the ground. This provides them more energy, but also prevents smaller fast-growing trees (like birch) from springing up and competing for nutrients. As the tall pines take hold of the area, they drown out the fast growing trees that first dominated the early successional forest. While we might find a few very large older birch trees in the mix. They'll most likely be old and distressed and sliding down the back end of their lifespan. We've walked barely five minutes and we've already found the border from one age to another.
So before this page gets too big with all the graphics, let's click on over to part two of our walk with the link below. I promise the scenery gets better. The open, rock-covered summit offers a complete 360 degree view of the surrounding countryside.
Click here to continue on with the spring hike!
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