damselfly

damsel
Originally uploaded by fishertrack.

This is one of a few irridescent damselflys around Limestone Spring

monolith

rock
Originally uploaded by fishertrack.

Was it used in ancient times for religious or scientific purposes? Did aliens put it there? It's big and made of stone...
(for scale note the internal frame pack in the bottom left corner)

toad2

toad2
Originally uploaded by fishertrack.

This was one of many toads that seem to enjoy hiking the AT. So far it's the only one that's been subjected to my camera

flwr

flwr
Originally uploaded by fishertrack.

this is just a flower near Rand's View on the Conn. AT

life till now

It's been a while since I've made a post, so here goes:

I spent a week in the Bahamas helping a proffessor do research on the Allen's Keys Rock Iguanas, and endagered species that occurs nowhere else in the world. That was quite an experience, and I got very torn up in the process. We also got to see the tourist district in Nassau, and we checked out Atlantis, which had a very cool underground aquarium that's free at night (10 foot Manta Ray was my favorite) as well as a casino where many people wasted much money. The bulk of the trip was spend scrambling over rocks, getting bitten and scratched, and giving small talks to tourists.

After that, I went and started work as a ridgerunner for the AMC Berkshire trails office, and am currently about to back onto the AT for another four day stint. Some of the job is a pain, what with breaking up fire rings and cleaning up litter, but overall it's a good one, and it's getting me in shape a lot quicker than was happenning at college. It's fun hanging out with thru-hikers, and I've seen some wildlife and a lot of sign of wildlife. There's a large Helgramite population that emerges from the river and moves up to Stewart Hollow shelter every night, creeping out many hikers, and I found a rock that is serving as a restroom for a bobcat near the Pine Swamp/Pine Knob area. There's also a multitude of sizeable millipedes and many birds of varying descriptions. Several Thru-hikers have also seen bears and rattlesnakes in this area. I'm carrying my camera, so hopefully I'll have some good pictures to post soon.

A general note to all day hikers out there. KNOW HOW FAR YOUR GOING, and MAKE SURE YOU HAVE ENOUGH WATER. We've already had a case of heat exhaustion this week.

Anyway, I hope to have some pictures to put up here soon, of the AT as well as the Bahamas.

back to the woods now

The beginning of Scientific Thought

Louis Liebenber holds up the art of tracking as possibly the beginning of science as we know it. It certainly has many of the elements. Many questions are asked and answered, data are collected, ecvidence gathered, and patterns are recognized and predicted. The amount of information gathered through looking at the signs left by the movement of life could fill more books than we have trees for. Everything that moves leaves a track of some sort, and even the action of moving is, in itself a track of sorts, or a sign. An animal steps, and the earth changes. A bird flies by and startles a deer. Everything that happens adds to one massive, interwoven story, made up entirely of tangents, never going off subject, but only because there is no subject. If you picked up one thread, and tried to follow it, keeping track of everything affected by the thread, you would spend eternity learning all there is to know in the world, and you would be one of hundreds trying to do so.

This curiosity leads humans to all ranges of thought, trying to discover the inner workings of a cell, or the dynamics that drive the weather around the globe. People dive into themselves to try to find the meaning of the universe, and others delve deep into lore, trying to find ancient spirits spoken of in legends. We are a multitude of monkeys, poking and prodding into everything. If something blows up in our faces, we do not simply leave it alone, we go back to find out why it blew up, and try to get it to do so again.

Some speak of tracking as a branch of science, but in a way, all science is a manner of tracking. Every little detail means something, the position of every letter, every print, ever leaf, every nucleotide, every person - everything has a meaning, and every person in the world spends their life learning those meanings, and using the meanings they learn to decifer new meanings. From voices, to language. Frome language to literature. From literature to experimentation. From light to seeing, from seeing to looking. It goes on forever, circling, weaving in and out, dividing, coming together - so extensive and all encompassing that we can never really comprehend it all. Instead we give it a name or two and try to comprehend it anyway.

turtles

hp_scanDS_53301081610
Originally uploaded by fishertrack.

canoe trip

A couple weeks ago I went on a canoe trip on the Buffaloe National River in the Ozarks. It was a fun trip, if slightly damp, and there was a fair amount of wildlife. I found a LOT of beaver sign, as well as raccoon and one bobcat. There were always turkey vultures and great blue herons around, and another guy on the trip saw some sort of falcon. On the last day of canoeing, We saw a lot of turtles(as we had on other days) and one group in particular was all cammed onto one small log - I got a picture(low quality) that I'll put up.

Squirrel

I woke up the other morning, pulled up the blinds, and say this fox squirrel looking at me from the tree outside my window. the screen and bad lighting makes the pictures a little fuzzy, but they're ok.

followup

here's a tree the day after the snow/sleet, and a robinon thee day of the snow/sleet

tree

robin

Robins in Snow

The other night we got a snowstorm that bled into the next day, melting into a heavy sleet. As I was returning from class, I noticed a couple robins sitting in the trees, trying to keep warm. The robins hung around Richmond pretty much all winter, coming out from their little hidingplaces during the occasional warm spells, searching for illusionary worms in the recently frozen soil. The only place that would offer hope to the stubborn birds is the network of steam tunnels that runs all over campus, keeping the ground above them thawed year round as they try to heat the campus (buildings included). It was fun to look out my window and see the little brown and red shapes huddles on the green/brown swathes in the snow, hopping around, and flurrying away at the approach of students, who ignored them on their quest for a dry place inside. I took few pictures, which I will post later.

The next day, there was some drier snow, and I had a chance to see the effect of high winds on tracks in snow. I walked through a four inch deep drift on the way to class, and an hour later when I walked back, they had been completely filled in, and there was no trace.