Sat/Sun August 29/30 2009

SATURDAY AUGUST 29, 2009

A busy upper lot just before the start of my Saturday circuit of Old Rag.
Turned out to be a pretty day.

Nice clouds.

The upper Ridge Trail had some pretty flowers. This is a great shot of the species but truth be told I took this picture on a back-road near Woodville on my way to Old Rag. I believe this is Giant Sunflower.

Earlier I had said that I believed that flowers contained in these two pictures were the same species. I believe I was wrong. I think that the flower above is a Giant Sunflower and the one below is a Woodland Sunflower. The flowers look very similar but the one above was growing over ten foot tall in a road side pasture the the one below was under a sparse tree cover and was only about 2-3 foot tall. The following shot was taken just below the Skyline Wall on the upper Ridge Trail. While not as prolific as the riot of flowers on the Giant Sunflower plants there were several hundred of these flowers along one fifty foot section of the trail.

These little tiny ants were having a feast on a dropped Goldfish cracker.

Sunset from the summit of Old Rag.

LNT IS NOT BLACK AND WHITE
OOPS in the picture below it would seem a Girl Scout must have missed the Leave No Trace lessons. Her mirror case and lots of little broken pieces of mirror were litter items I picked up off the trail. Actually the individual who dropped this item was probably not aware that it had been dropped. Subsequent individuals who saw it and or stepped on it probably should have picked it up.

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Even rabid practitioners of LNT make mistakes. Often they are individually unaware of their mistake. At other times there is a collective unconsciousness that their current behavior is unethical. For example, were the first climbers up Everest doing anything unethical when they left empty oxygen bottles or even dead companions high on Everest? Today, climbers of Everest are judged with a different standard. Twenty years from now the standard will be different than today's. Do you consider the early human artifacts left on the Moon or Mars unethical behaviour? Yet there will most likely come a time when it will be considered inappropriate to just willy nilly leave junked space vehicles on the Moon or Mars.

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It is not unusual for individuals new to the outdoors to either not understand or not be good at practicing proper outdoor ethics. Yet with time, these novices will often turn out to be the best practitioners and strongest advocates of outdoor ethics.

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We all continuously impact the resources we cherish. The most we can hope for is to lessen the amount of that continuous impact and to make sure that the benefits received warrant the cost. Starting a forty acre wildfire deep in the Alaskan wilds may be appropriate if it is the only way to save a human life. With hind sight would it not have been better to clear cut Mt St.Helens before it disappeared? Despite my good intentions this blog will have unintended negative consequences for Old Rag. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? There are an infinite number of grey scale variables to be weighed. I have come to the conclusion that it is usually best not to get too judgemental of your own or others decisions/actions related to these complicated questions.

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Before finally getting to the picture below, it should be said that I believe that despite the many mistakes made by inexperienced scouts and their volunteer leaders, that in the end the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts organizations and their members provide overwhelming good toward the advancement of outdoor ethics.

ADVICE ABOUT HEADLAMPS

ONE REASON YOU WANT TO USE LIGHTS WHEN WALKING IN THE PARK AT NIGHT!

On my way out in the dark under headlamp I encountered a very pretty young Copperhead crossing the Saddle Trail. When I first came upon him he was sitting on top of this rock right in the middle of the trail. By the time I got my camera out he had slipped behind the rock. Double click picture to zoom in and see his little head peaking up.

A better head shot after he moved on up the bank on the side of the trail.

You are a good looking little guy. Glad I did not step on you. Bye, bye so long farewell.

Sunday August 30, 2009

I only did an up and back to the first false summit. Looking up the rock scramble just before sunset.

Some pretty orange mushrooms spotted on the way out. This orange reminds me the Old Rag Mountain Stewards will be on the mountain next weekend wearing their orange tee shirts with the Old Rag Trillium blaze. You can obtain one of these tee shirts by joining the Old Rag Mountain Stewards.

ORANGE FAIRY CAPS

Sunset from near the no camping sign on the Ridge Trail.

Sunday May 31, 2009 New Shirts and Fireflies

Sunday May 31, 2009

Just as GLOWUORMS (the Global Worldwide Union of Old Rag Mountain Stewards) was pondering a strike, our shirts arrived and the need for the strike disappeared along with the morning mist. Now the hikers will be able to recognize us even from a distance.

Just look for the big giant Red Spotted Newt(Eft) colored folks with the Old Rag Trillium blaze on their shirts.

http://www.uga.edu/srelherp/salamanders/notvir.htm

Newts and other little creatures are often on the trail please be careful not to step on them. The newts often come out onto the trail during and after rain storms. Despite their beautiful color they are not as easy to spot as a Mountain Steward. On the other hand if your not seeing one of these guys good luck with the Copperheads and Rattlesnakes which sometimes (fairly rare but it does happen) cross our trails.

LITTER
Of course the better you get at seeing these things the better you will get at seeing any visually obnoxious gag reflex inducing litter left by those who have not heard about Leave No Trace. We have a lot of newbies on this mountain please get up to speed on outdoor ethics.
http://www.lnt.org/programs/principles.php

Except on our shirts I did not see any Trilliums they have truly passed until 2010. The Pinxter/Mt Azela bloom was in its last waning. The Mt Laurel were in the earliest stages of their 2009 bloom. Speaking of waxing and waning we had around a half moon showing in the late afternoon and evening.

MY SHADOW HAS NOT SHOWN ANYONE HIS TATOOS
He is very quiet, not much for conversation. My shadow very seldom scares any wildlife away. He seems to only like to join me on fair weather daytime hikes and he is not fond of the noonday sun(he never carries enough water). My shadow has been known to join me on rare bright-moonlit hikes. Even though he appears to be deaf, dumb and blind he is an idiot savant at both playing monkey-see monkey-do and also at practicing perfect Leave No Trace ethics.

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HELP YOUR SHADOW AVOID BEING TRACKED

Master trackers and sign cutters are taught that their only clues when tracking a shadow will come from past eye witness accounts, pictures, or by tracking the person whom the shadow has a symbiotic (some argue parasitic) relationship with. Considering this last fact, as a favor to your shadow, please behave such that no master tracker can find your shadow through your careless mistakes. You may even want to consider going one better than taking nothing but pictures and leaving nothing but footprints since these are the primary clues a master shadow tracker will be looking for.

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If your shadow could talk he would tell you that the one allowable exception to this request is when you are lost and need to be found.

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Struggling between his advocacy for Old Rag Mountain and his desire never to found by a master tracker my shadow would only release me to use this photgraph of him if I waited at least 12 hours before posting it.

Shenandoah Sunset from near CCC Stairs. If your hiking party is seeing a scene similar to this one than each member should have a light and a backup light. That is unless you intend to bivouac over night and hopefully survive to see the sunrise.

FIREFLIES ARE OUT

http://iris.biosci.ohio-state.edu/projects/FFiles/frfact.html

Travelling down the fireroad in the dark I saw the flashing of my first fireflies of 2009. I have spent evenings on the fire roads when their displays were absolutely magical. Mid June to late July seem to be the prime times for Firefly displays. Sometime during August their numbers slowly fade. I was surprised to learn from my young west coast nieces and nephews that they had never seen them before. Turns out there are no fireflies on the west coast. Such a shame for such a wonderous act of nature not to be shared by the whole world.

March 21, 2009 Equinox

Sunset 10 minutes from the summit.

Fly Fishing Shop
On my way to the mountain I made a side trip to Murray's Fly Fishing shop in Edinburg Virginia. If you are interested in fly fishing this is a great resource for supplies, advice, and lessons. Their website is at: http://www.murraysflyshop.com/

A couple of patches of ice still on the mountain.

BE CONSIDERATE OF OTHERS RESPECT WILDLIFE
As weather warms, crowds and their associated litter returns to the mountain. Winter not only had far fewer hikers on the trail but most seemed to practice Leave No Trace ethics as well as pitch in with picking up for others.

Many thanks to the many hikers who during all seasons help by bringing out more than just their own stuff. (Note: If you pick up broken glass make sure you protect yourself. I started carrying a "sharp stuff" bottle/vault in my litter bag after I accidentally cut myself when my hand pressed down on a sharp bottle shard in my litter bag while I was in the rock scramble.)

The Park Service has a duty to strike a balance between laws that encourage protection of the wilderness and laws that encourage public use of the same wilderness areas. Appropriate use is desired and encouraged but misuse must be controlled if not eliminated. Litter is a visual assault on those that follow. Throwing something over a rock, into a crevice, far off the trail does not mean it is out of sight. A student studying things off the trail, a park visitor seeking a little off trail solitude, a curious hiker exploring, a botanist or biologist looking for a specific species, a back country camper or a climber are just some of the examples of people who go places you think are out of sight. There are individuals who will notice changes at the same level of the changes you would notice in your own backyard. It is also good to keep in mind that this is home for hundreds of other species whom we owe respect.

GALLOWS HUMOR

Usually I try to keep in the Don't Worry Be Happy mood but there are times that I let my imagination toy around with a plot for a horror short story in which there is a wilderness stalker who practices various forms of harsh vigilante justice on abusers of the back country or maybe a whole town complete with a hanging judge who enforce a bizarre set of extreme local litter ordinances or some bizarre future country where they decide to have an open season on adult litterers (they have to be taller than 5 feet to be legal) or the back woods toilet paper covered Bogey man who gets revenge on the tissue paper litter bugs. I have a very active imagination so the list goes on but you get the idea.

The Mountain Laurel are showing green sprouts.

Ridge Trail about an hour before dark.

Equinox and the days are getting warmer but there was still just a little bit of ice to be found on the Mountain. Next weekend is an ORMS training weekend sponsored by NPS so no patrols on Old Rag next week.

Fast Little Dark Grey Pine Voles http://www.dgif.virginia.gov/wildlife/information/?s=050091

The one unusual thing on this circuit were the number of the little black Pine Voles I scared off the trail after dark. I estimate they were less than a quarter the size of house mouse, have very dark grey fur, and are very quick to disappear in just a blur of motion when they were surprised by the light of my headlamp. One actually stood still for the shortest of a partial second in a freeze frame before vanishing in a blur. I must have seen around 5 more tiny blurs after that as I came down the Saddle Trail. I wonder if this evening was unusual or if I was just more tuned to picking up the blur of their escapes after that one had given me the briefest of glimpses of him standing still. It appears that in their panic they are ad libbing their escape routes because when they choose to escape in your direction of travel you can see them do a lot of direction changing, jumping, and sometimes falling off the rocks but it all happens so fast you can not register the specifics of their actions. Their physical prowess would probably be amazing and at times funny if you could watch them on a slow motion replay.