Two early fall hikes

Concord River looking South

Concord River looking North

Last weekend, we took advantage of the very dry summer to walk the "dry season" river trail from the Greenough Land here in Carlisle along the Concord River as far as the National Wildlife Refuge (which doesn't allow dogs).  As expected it was incredibly easy and very satisfying.  The river along this stretch is completely unspoiled.  Apart from probably a more substantial bridge on the Nashua Road, the vista no doubt looks today much as it did when Henry David Thoreau and his brother John navigated it in 1839 as described in his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.  I now have that book as an "ebook" on my iPhone and am planning on finding out what Thoreau was thinking as they paddled from one Concord to another.

From Mt. Pisgah looking East

From Mt. Pisgah looking towards the reservoir

Yesterday we drove to Southwestern New Hampshire for a more substantial hike: to one of our favorite places – Pisgah State Park.  See previous blogs Darwin and Newts and  Basking in an Indian Summer.  We hiked from the Reservoir Road access point to the top of Mt. Pisgah.  Well, almost to the top.  I didn't have my GPS loaded with topo maps and there were a lot of trees and not fantastically good visibility.  We actually missed the summit by about 1000' horizontally and 60' vertically.  Oops!  We did have a lovely view (see left and below) from where we were sitting eating our lunch though, just East of what we thought was the summit.  We could see Mt. Monadnock quite clearly (although in the photograph, it is obscured by a branch of a nearby tree, on the extreme left).  
The wonderful thing about this view is that, except for a couple of distant antennas and, I suppose, the reservoir (see photo on right), there is nothing in the entire view that is man-made.

Normally when we hike in this park we are entirely alone, apart from our dogs that is.  But on this particular day, there was a cross-country race through the park.  The distances were significant (23k and 45k) but most of the runners seemed to be at least 40 and many were 50+ I'd say.

If you'd like to see our actual track and more detail, go to Early Fall Hike to Mt. Pisgah.

Pixie, wait!

OK, but do try to keep up.

Pixie likes to hike at the head of the column, going forward like a scout.  Sometimes she wanders off on her own and can't be found.  This happened yesterday and delayed us for about half an hour while we blew the whistle and called "Pixie....".  Fortunately, we got her back, though through no effort of hers.  Here she is on the Concord River walk.  In the first picture (left) she hears "Pixie, wait".  In the second, she turns to wait for us to catch up.  Most of the time she's well-behaved like that.  Hopefully, she just needs a bit more training.

Basking in Indian Summer

After a cold snap early in October, we've been enjoying unseasonably warm weather here in the city in the woods. On November 1st we drove up to Pisgah State Park in New Hampshire for a guided nature tour by a local professor, Tom Wessels. The walk was extremely interesting - we learned some things about trees that were completely new to me. For example, trees of different species (nay, families, even orders) can root-graft each other to stay alive. He also pointed out that the ratio of biomass between underground and above-ground can be something like 4:5 for a typical forest and considerably greater than 1 for an "old growth" forest.

However, today is probably the last of our warm days, at least for now.

Meanwhile, TiVo can be very frustrating. Can't live with it, can't live without it. When I first heard about it, around ten years ago, I thought what a great idea! When I first bought one, about 8 years ago I thought what a great idea, but what a terrible user interface. The user interface is still terrible, almost unchanged since then. Don't they have programmers?

Last weekend's SPM concerts were really wonderful: a Gabrieli Sonata
"Pian e forte", the Strauss Vier Letzte Lieder with the most marvellous soprano, Sara Jakubiak, and the Mendelssohn 3rd (Scottish) symphony, his last and probably best. The Strauss songs especially are just incredible. What a treat to be able to play this kind of music! Here's a very favorable review from John Zeugner.

Meanwhile, Marylou is receiving tons of messages in the Facebook group Friends of Marylou Speaker Churchill. She's very much in our thoughts.

Darwin and newts

We had planned to take an easy hike to round out our summer during the foliage season in New Hampshire's largest state park, viz. Pisgah State Park. It's 20 square miles and parts of it are truly a wilderness. They do allow ATVs in certain areas in summer, and snowmobiles throughout in winter, but it really is a magical place. We found two beautiful lakes: Lily Pond and North Round Pond. After we left the main trail, we never saw another soul, human that is.
What we did see were a couple of newts (not together). One was kind of greenish on top and yellowish underneath (or maybe the other way around) and about 3" long. The other was the same length but reddish. According to my sources, and assuming that I'm reading it correctly, the former was an adult Eastern newt, while the latter was an eft, the stage between larva and adult.

Meanwhile, I have finally released version 2 of my Darwin project: a Java framework for evolutionary computation. That feels good!