Spirit of the Woods Hike- November

Although the morning started out chilly, it turned into a perfect crisp day for the NCTA Chapter hike. We had 22 people, but there were 7 dogs who came along this time. (1 person and 2 dogs didn't make the picture.)

We started at Upper Branch Bridge which is where the trail crosses the Pere Marquette River.

Gary leads us off into the autumn woods with rich brown oaks and yellow beech.

Two of the hikers completed their 100 Mile Challenge today. I didn't get a picture of Peg, but here is Sue.

There are still plenty of little gems to see. Northern Maidenhair fern grows along the banks of the unnamed creek there.

We were discussing whether these are quaking aspen leaves or big-tooth aspen. I've decided they are big-tooth, even though the teeth aren't huge, because the trees are tall and straight with ridged bark. Quaking will get ridged bark if it gets old enough, but I just have a feeling these are big-tooth. Anyway, I took the picture because I like how the water beads up on wet leaves. This is because the leaves have natural plant oils. (I'm a dummy- didn't check to see if the stems were flat.)

The oaks are starting to get involved in the fall color. Even though they don't get the really bright colors, I always like how rich they look. These are white oak.

We did hike a little farther than we usually go from this trailhead. To go to the next road and back is only 3 miles. We did the half-mile roadwalk (a pleasant dirt road), and partway into Bowman Semi-Primitive Area, so that the total miles would be more. I did five.

This is the only section of the NCT that is along the Pere Marquette River. There is one place where you get an unobstructed view, and I almost always take a picture of it there. But today I decided to try to find another place for a glimpse of the water. This one through the trees isn't bad.

I managed to do some computer work before the hike. In the afternoon, I mostly worked on trying to get some computer coding to work. I've determined several things that DON'T work. I guess that is progress of a sort.

Miles hiked in 2025: 423

Miles hiked on the NCT in 2025: 241.3

North Country Trail, Lake Co, MI. Upper Branch Bridge into Bowman Semii-Primitive area and back. Total 5 miles.

See SPW Hike- October

Those Same Three Miles

 Since the big hike, I haven't been able to talk myself into doing many road miles. But I wanted exercise this afternoon, have no car, and so I did the three-mile loop yet again. Could I find anything new?

Not much. The pond is always appealing, but there were no ducks. Looking back at earlier posts, it seems as if the birds usually show up about 2 weeks later. But I've already seen robins and red-winged blackbirds. Just not today.

The best part of the pond is a little arm of water reaching back to ??? It makes me want to explore. But I did once, and the owner had a cam somewhere out there and came roaring out in his truck and threw me off the property. He wasn't interested that I was practically a neighbor and was just walking home a different way. Sheesh.

The quaking aspen have their catkins all hanging out.

But it was a lovely, warm afternoon. My foot is still a little sore, but it did the three miles, and now I have ice on it.

I edited, I wrote.

Total miles hiked in 2024: 156.8 of which 45.4 is North Country Trail

See Three Mile Loop Again

More Spring

  This seems to be an amazingly colorful spring. Maybe it's just lasting longer because the weather has stayed cool, holding the leaves in bud longer.

Cathy and I took a walk today at Scottville Riverside Park. We weren't trying for any big distance- actually we were trying to follow the cross-country race course that winds through the park. This picture is just along one of the old berms from the treatment ponds. I like the line of white-barked aspens on the left.

This ornamental crabapple sure is pretty.

There is a backlog of spring pictures from earlier in the week. Along the trail, I ran into a few small goldthread, Coptis trifolia. Although it grows in almost every county in Michigan, it's a little surprising to see it along the trail in the Manistee NF, because it likes damper conditions than most of the dry sandy ground along the trail. This isn't a great specimen; it usually grows in thick patches, often mixed with moss. The leaves to the right of the flower, and dead center, bottom are the ones for this plant. Interestingly enough, the white is not the petals, but the sepals. The actual petals are the yellow. It gets its name because it has fine, thread-like roots that are bright yellow.

Finally, I love sassafras in the spring. OK, I love it in any season. If you are driving along and see bright yellow-green buds reaching for the sunlight on up-curving twigs, it's probably sassafras.

The flower buds are just beginning to open.

In other news: I edited in the morning. Walked in the afternoon and remembered to go to bell choir practice. Plan to work on the Newaygo County Data Book some more this evening.

Scottville Riverside Park, Scottville, MI. Cross Country course and more. 3.7 miles

See Sassafras!

Watching for Spring

  This gnarly tree-gnome is watching to see if spring is happening. Looks skeptical.

The quaking aspen tree is surely trying to act spring-like.

Catkins on it are fully fluffy and about to start spreading pollen. Quaking aspen is dioecious, which means there are separate male and female trees. So this one is male. That said, aspen seeds rarely result in new trees. Aspens most commonly sprout from vast root systems. When you see a clump of aspen, it's likely actually all one plant with a shared root. The largest and oldest is called the Pando Clone in Utah. 100 acres in size, it is all one organism and is estimated to be 80,000 years old.

Here's a tiny bit of good news related to a not-quality event I haven't shared (because it did not make me happy). For some reason, the road commission took out 4 big trees along a road on my common road loop. I don't know why- they weren't dead or obstructing sight lines on a corner. Anyway, they cut them, ripped out the roots, and backfilled the holes. What I'm sure they neither knew nor cared about was that there were daffodils that grew beneath those trees in spring. Ha! Bulbs are tough. There are quite a few of them in bud, and one has already managed to bloom. Hooray for the tenacity of flowers!

The moss is getting sexy too! Spore production on its way.

And I suspect the red-tail hawk has a better view of the arrival of spring since s/he is more mobile than the tree-gnome. Love my hawks!

In other news: I worked on a volunteer project all day. ALL DAY. Then I took a 5-mile walk because I was feeling so antsy. Yesterday, shirtsleeves. Today, 37 degrees and winter clothes. Tonight, a dustng of snow on the ground!

See Anything But Brown

Wet Enough

 
Another 0.6 inch of rain today, and I didn't get a walk in at all. There was a window between storms when I might have, but I missed it. I sure didn't have to add water to the birdbath today.



What I did manage to do was spend a lot more time working on the dining room project. In fact, it's good enough I'll show you. And if you want to slam me because it's still not really usable as a dining room, go right ahead. It's working for me, and at least it's not just thrown in heaps and filthy.



And I got a few more pieces of trail food for the hike put together. It always goes really slowly at first, because you don't have all the ingredients of each meal yet. But you have to start somewhere.



Then, I got hung up because there was so much clutter in the kitchen I couldn't work, so I had to clean that up.

The only other thing I did was write one chapter in Dead Mule Swamp Mistletoe. I couldn't sleep last night- who knows why? So I listened to music for a while, then read until 4 am. Therefore, I slept late. Whatever... at least I managed to accomplish some things. And still very thankful for a good vacuum cleaner. I know I don't use it as much as I should, but at least it really cleans when I do use it!

	See Relief! See Kleaning Inspired by K
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Morning Light

 
I liked the earliest stripes of light before the sun actually came up.



You can see how the stripe persisted behind the apple tree on the right, but as the sun rose that bank of clouds lit up.



In a couple more minutes I realized it was going to be one of those sunrises that lights up everything to the west with interesting colors. First it turned the aspen trees pink.


This was the whole scene out back. Yet another mood of my backyard.



Just before the effect faded, it made the two mulberry trees glow. This is the same effect that turned them all pink a few years ago (link at bottom- that picture is stunning). However, this time, it made them all orange.



Back to work in a couple of hours. I'm really tired tonight, so I hope things keep moving. If I can't think about it, it's not too bad.

	See Pink, Blue (and Red)
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Shapes of Trees II

 
One of the good things about the winter season is that you can really see the shapes of trees when the leaves are gone. If the tree has grown in the open, so that its spread is unrestricted, the shape can be part of the way you identify the tree.

Here are a few from my kingdom.

A very old and unpruned apple tree. It bore a lot of apples this year. I made cider.



A sugar maple on the hill to my east. It's not actually on my property, but my "trail" walks beneath it. I have permission to walk there. Unfortunately, it and several other maples are getting very old and are losing big branches in storms. Its years are numbered.



The big wild black cherry by the railroad tracks. It's never borne a cherry that I've noticed, but it's attractive.



Quaking aspen also near the tracks. You've seen this clump before in Just WOW in Blue and White, for one instance.



And on the swing around to return to the house, Staghorn Sumac.



Do you like to look at the shapes of trees? Maybe you never thought about how different they can be from each other.

When I was maybe in junior high I was trying to draw bare trees. I complained to my mother that I wasn't happy with the picture because the trees looked like stalks of celery. She said, "So what? Some trees look like celery."

	See Shapes of Trees I
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The Evening and the Morning and Two Answers

 
This begins Sunday evening. Yesterday I wanted to share hike pictures so it had to wait a day.

These odd clouds were bubbling up low in the west just at sunset. I assume they were forming over the big lake (Michigan). They just looked odd because the rest of the sky was clear. So at the beach it must have looked like fog.



The next morning as I left for my hike, not long after sunrise, this doe seemed to be enjoying the fruits of a magic circle under the tree that did not get frosted.



Now for the answers... First, a reader who had never commented before came up with the answer about the striped aspen leaves. And how perfect that I posted it on Halloween, since the author titled the answer Zombie Aspen Leaves. The reader is Jan from Indiana who writes at Jan's Nature Blog.

And the other answer makes me feel a whole lot better. Matt, the mapping and GIS guy with the North Country Trail Association, pondered my question about the miles. We looked at various maps and discussed the trail. As it turns out, the base map on which the interactive web map for the NCT is overlain, has an extra road that doesn't exist.

I hiked 10 miles, not 7.4! That makes a whole lot more sense to me. When I map-measured my miles I stopped at the second cross "street" (haha- sand woods road). But I actually hiked to what shows as the third road. Now Matt has to fix that, but I only have to cheer! So now my total is suddenly at 88.3 miles. That's much better.

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Hike 100 Challenge- 85.7 and Still Walking

 
Today was a lovely hike, but the mileage was disappointing, only 7.4 according to the maps. Something seems wrong about that. If I hiked 12.8 miles in 4 hours and 10 minutes yesterday, and only 7.4 in 3 hours and 40 minutes today, when my pace felt about the same, either something drastically changed with me or one of those mileages is off. I could have walked farther before turning around, but didn't want to be out more than four hours, so I could be home in time to do some things.

Anyway... I won't be finishing the North Country Trail Hike 100 tomorrow because I'm not going to try to do 14+ miles and get home in time to clean up and go to bell practice. We'll see what the weather is. Now they are saying rain in the morning. I was hoping to hang out laundry. Options not looking so good right now. Maybe I can do a short walk close to home which would leave me with one do-able piece for another day.

I drove an hour each way to do this hike. Long, yes, but I "killed two birds." I had a box of stuff that needed to be delivered to someone, and I got that done, and hiked, seeing trail I hadn't been on for quite a while.

I started at Hodenpyl Dam, the northern end of the section our chapter maintains, and hiked south (and then back) more or less along the Manistee River. To put this in context, here's the view east. The shiny spot in the lower middle is the Manistee River below the dam. The big flat plain area across the middle of the picture is the dam. The bright line above that is Hodenpyl Dam Pond. The trail continues east and north from there. Most recently I hiked that with Dan and Ruth Dorrough. See Two Awesome Days.



Just below this is the Little Mac, the second largest suspension bridge in Michigan, which spans the river. It's not actually on the North Country Trail, but is on the connector with the Manistee River Trail. I didn't cross it today.



I'm not sure I'd actually ever done all of the first mile of trail I was on today. This section was completely re-routed since my hike that counted for my NCT E2E, and I think perhaps I hadn't seen this piece. It's on the rail bed of the former Manistee and North Eastern RR.



As soon as you leave the rail bed, the trail drops to Eddington Creek and Eddington Bridge, a lovely spot, and one of the first hikes I ever took on the NCT.





Then begins a long climb along the side of a valley, until you reach the bluffs above the Manistee River.



I pulled this view in with the telephoto to try to capture the colors on the far bank of the Manistee, and the blue hazy hill top beyond. It looks much farther away when you are there. On the far side is the Manistee River Trail which forms a 20 mile loop with the NCT. This is one of the most popular weekend hikes in the state, which is why I went on a Monday, not the weekend. I didn't see a single person. Yay!



This section of trail is characterized by several long gentle climbs and descents. Even with these hills, I can't account for my apparent lack of speed. The trail yesterday was rolling hilly, so I was going up and down all the time, just not for such long stretches.

Here are some fun finds. A really large red oak leaf.



The sun came out toward the end of my walk. That always perks up the fall colors.



I end with a question. Did you ever wonder why so many aspen leaves keep one streak of green in the next to the lowest space between veins? I see this all the time. I made a whole collection of them. I have no guesses as to why this happens.
EDIT: I did find out why this happens. See why at Yellow Memories


Total miles on the Hike 100 Challenge 85.7, with 14.3 to go. Chance of finishing tomorrow- zero. I'm just not going to push that hard. But today was a great hike!

	See Marilla to Suspension Bridge
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