Paint, Pete, Plants, and Turtles

Today, I met with a volunteer from the Spirit of the Woods Chapter of the NCTA named Pete. We headed to part of the section I just hiked on Monday to do some refreshing and improving of blazing in that section. I've blogged before about how to paint blazes correctly.

Pete and I have similar notions about how well this job should be done, so it was a joy to work with him. The condition of the blazes in this particular section has been bugging me for a while, and it turned out he felt the same way. So we fixed it. This is a turn blaze, indicating a right hand turn. In this particular location, there was a right turn blaze, but it was positioned so you could also see it while hiking from the other direction, which was confusing. Arrows had been added, which were unnecessary, and there was no turn blaze at all from the other direction. We fixed all that, and improved the spacing on other blazes which had not taken sight lines into account.

It was pretty easy to change all these because the only trees available to blaze are red pines. That bark flakes pretty quickly, and particularly if it hasn't been scraped adequately, which these had not. So we didn't have to struggle much to remove the old, poor blazes.

Pete is also our chapter Vice President, but he especially likes going out to do trail work. He's done a tremendous amount of it in the past several years!

Since this included the area of the wildflowers, I'm including some updates on those. Here are the actual flowers of the common toothwort, instead of the spring beauty blossoms pretending to belong to this plant. As you can see, they do have only four petals.

I also hunted around and found some fertile fronds of the meadow horsetail. It's that skinny pale stalk in front of the fern leaf.

The violets were just starting on Monday. Today they were open and cheerful. These are common blue violet, Viola sororia. They're everywhere, but I still like them. This one is keeping company with a wild strawberry flower. You can see both leaves- the violet's are pointed and slightly rolled. The strawberry is rounded and toothed in threes (another "leaves of three" that is NOT poison ivy).

Again, this is not unusual, but it's always fun to find a violet that isn't the common blue one. These are downy yellow violet, Viola pubescens.

And, I could have gotten the alliteration complete if I'd gone with Painted turtes, which these are. It was a beautiful morning, and the turtles agreed, spending a relaxing morning in the sunshine.

It always amazes me how much time it takes to do even a small amount of blazing correctly. But it was fun to do trail work with someone. And I like to think we've made an improvement to this section.

We also bumped into Ramona, and I learned that the reason the trail re-route I talked about on Monday did not follow a way that I thought would have been good was because there is a piece of private land, and the owner would not allow passage. So, at least I got an answer to that question which had been bugging me.

I am very happy that I feel good enough (not so sore and stiff) that I can do some trail work like this without a lot of pain. I am hopeful that I haven't aged myself too rapidly by doing this big hike, and how I feel after today is encouraging.

See Flowers from Yesterday