Hiking with Kate

 Today, I got to take a hike with the brand new Executive Director of the North Country Trail Association. She is spending time visiting with a few of us "old f*rts" who have been around long enough to see a lot of things happen with the trail. Her name is Kate Hagner.

We could have met over coffee, but how much better to take a hike together!

We went to Sterling Marsh so I could show her the massive boardwalk project our chapter did a few years ago. There's a bit of open water.

Just proof that we made it all the way to the beginning of the 13 boardwalks. Yes, each one is numbered.

She signed our fairly new trail register! I'm thrilled to see that about 4 pages of entries have already been made.

We talked the whole way about hopes and dreams for the trail. I'm afraid I did more of the talking. I guess that was kind of the purpose, but still... I could have shut up and done more listening. Nevertheless, I got to tell her my personal hot buttons on trail issues, so I feel valued. Her head must be spinning as she does this with a whole bunch of trail people.

Best nature find- A tooth fungus.

At first, I didn't think that's what it was because I didn't see the teeth. The edges are smooth. But they are hiding back in there!

We did about 3.5 miles. She got to see the Ed Chappel boardwalk and a very pretty section of trail. And listen to me- what a treat! Ha (I really did talk too much but hopefully she'll forgive me.)

Miles walked in 2026: 290.7
Miles on the NCT in 2026: 112.2
Onekama Challenge: 102.5- complete!

North Country Trail, Lake Co, Michigan, Jenks TH south 1.75 miles and back.

See NCTA Introduces New Executive Director

10 Miles = Hike 100 Challenge

 It took a little longer than last year, but I finished the 2026 Hike 100 Challenge today. It wasn't planned, but it seems fitting that I accomplished it at the place the trail is closest to my house.

I pulled this off with a ten-mile hike on the North Country Trail today. In fact, it's the first ten-mile hike I've done this year. I needed to accomplish one for sure before I commit to my hopeful hike this fall.

Well, I did it. And I did it in 88% humidity. The temperature was decent, but I was soaking wet when I got home and not because it rained. It WAS supposed to rain, but it didn't. My knees and hips are tired, but not impossibly painful, and the joints didn't seize up like concrete after I got home.

Two nice finds on the trail. This is a group of Inky Cap mushrooms.

Best find of all was a really large blue racer. They aren't endangered, but they are becoming more rare.

Here's a closer look at his head. He was right beside the trail, but he let me pass.

I didn't do much else today. I figured the long hike would be enough. It took me just over 3.5 hours. I did take one snack break, so that was pretty close to a 3 mile/hour pace. I chose the route on purpose because it has decent elevation change. Not sure about all the ups and downs in between, but overall, I climbed 260 feet from beginning to turnaroud. If I'd been willing to make it an 11-mile hike I could have climbed another 130 feet. Maybe another day. That's a fair amount of elevation change for around here, so even though it's such a familiar hike to me, it's a good workout.

Miles walked in 2026: 287.2
Hike 100 Challenge 2026: 108.7= Complete
Onekama Challenge: 99.0 miles! I'll complete that tomorrow.

North Country Trail, Lake County, MI. Wingleton Rd to 8th St and back. 10 miles

See 2025 Hike 100

Spirit of the Woods Hike- July 2026

Today's hike was on a section of trail that, somehow, the group has not hiked recently. It's hilly but very pretty.

Here's the group- 19 in the picture, one more showed up. Several people we hadn't seen for a while, and one person who took her very first North Country Trail hike today!

This section is mostly on the bluff high above the Manistee River. There aren't many view spots in the summer with all the leaves. And it's too hazy for the far bluff to show in the picture, but it's over there in the bright spot.

Not much blooming as far as flowers. Some tick trefoil, but my picture isn't in focus.

Several nice puddles of northern maidenhair fern- always one of my favorites. Adiantum pedatum

Parasitic plants were represented. Here is indian pipe, Monotropa uniflora. A small patch, but always interesting to find.

We also saw bear corn, Conipholis americana, and I thought I took a picture, but it's not on the SD card, so who knows what happened. Sort of looks like cream-colored pinecones growing out of the ground.

We did see a beautiful patch of one of the Clavaria fungi. Basically a coral fungus. The names have changed like crazy. I used to call this one Crowned clavaria because the ends of the stalks are divided into little "crowns," and its name then was Clavaria coronata. It seems to have changed more than once, and is now Artomyces pyxidatus.

Most everyone walked 6 miles total, and a few did shorter distances as they were able. Five of us went farther and did 7 NCT miles plus the little bit extra to get to the cars.

Miles walked in 2026: 203.5
Hike 100 challenge 2026: 69.75

North Country Trail, Manistee County, from Coates Highway south 3.5 miles and back plus roadwalk to cars. 7.4 miles.

Not a lot else happened today. We started early and got most of the hike done before the air heated up. My temperature/humidity internal sensors started giving off warning signals about a mile before I finished, but it wasn't too bad.

Here's a news flash! Despite the fact that we live on a major highway, Google can not seem to understand where we live. I had tried 7 times to get them to change it, including sending a picture of my driveway and mailbox on request, but they basically said that I don't know where I live.

I tried again a few days ago. Try #8. I got notice that my correction has been accepted! Amazing! Now we'll find out if that is real.

Some of the proof of my claim that they wouldn't change it. And at the bottom, this week, it was accepted. This has irked me to no end, and has resulted in several lost packages, so I'll be very happy if it's fixed.

See Spirit of the Woods- June 2026

Beauty in the Details

We got another beautiful day! I had decided to use it to do my fall walk-through of the trail section I maintain. It was an easy amount of work. I had time to look for interesting details. This is the best.

I'm pretty sure this is a false chanterelle. Cute.

Still on the topic of mushrooms and fungus, this is some variety- I have no idea what- but see how it's growing in sort of a net pattern? The mycelium is under the bark and it puts up fruiting bodies in the softer cracks between the plates of the bark.

The bottomland hardwood swamp is completely dry. I've seldom seen it without any pools of water. This tree decided to become a terrarium. Probably Intermediate Wood Fern.

This just made me chuckle. It's an apartment building for some critters. I wonder who lives upstairs.

The trail work was easy. My section is in good shape. I only pulled a couple of small, downed trees off the path, clipped a little, and flipped away loose sticks.

Oh, a pic of my piece of trail? Sure.

And I did laundry and some editing.

Miles hiked in 2025: 440.5
NCT miles hiked in 2025: 244.8

North Country Trail, Lake and Mason Counties, Freesoil TH to Koenig Rd and back to Tyndall Rd. 3.5 miles.

See Work Day

8, with Day Pack

  I looked at the weather for the rest of the week and decided today was the day for a hike to stretch my endurance. I have to be up to 10 miles with a real pack by June.

Where should I go? I'm generally tired of the closest section of NCT to me. However, I chose it, and managed to find something new to do.

Went to Timber Creek and hiked north. One thing I knew for sure, there is more elevation change there than it seems like, if you go beyond 8th St, so it's a pretty good workout. A little sun makes even the brown woods look good. Mostly, it was cloudy.

This is a really common type of moss here. Maybe I've now identified it. Red-stemmed feathermoss, or Schreber's big red stem moss, Pleurozium schreberi. Wikipedia makes it sound like it's only found in the far north, but the Forest Service website puts it almost everywhere in the NE US.

This is another I see a lot of, and it's getting all sexy for spring showing off its sporophytes. Juniper Haircap Moss, Polytrichum juniperus. It has another funky stage in the reproductive cycle. I'll have to start watching for that.

This was fun. It's some polypore fungus of the shelf/bracket type, but I can't tell which one. From the top, it looks like horse hooves, or shelves. The log was fallen, so the "top" of the fungus is from the lower right.

So, how do I know it's a polypore? The underside has many (poly) pores!

I walked 4 miles out, and started back just a few yards so I could find somewhere nice to sit and eat my lunch. Not only was this stump the right height, it had artistic character!

My little project of interest was to try to track the elevation change better on this section. Previously, all I'd done is subtract the low point from the high. That is 1122-791 feet = 331 feet. But that doesn't take into account the ups and downs along the way. Today, I tried to mark in Avenza the tops of all the ridges. I had previously counted 8, but today I marked 7. I guess one has to make choices as to what are just undulations, and what are really ridges.

Anyway, where I turned around is 92 feet lower than the high point. Then the trail drops from the high point to 921 which is 201 feet lower than the high point. Then it wanders up and down over small ridges till it's back to the 791 feet at Timber Creek.

I think I can safely say I climbed and descended a total of about 600 feet. Maybe next time, I'll track it in FarOut which will do an elevation profile. Thing is, it's not too accurate because it doesn't sample often enough.

I'll close with one of my most often pictured scenes from this section, but I always think it' cool. The light is always oddly filtered through this red pine plantation so that it almost always looks red and hazy.

I did a little bit of work, but the hike took the biggest chunk of the day.

Miles hiked in 2025: 73.9. NCT Hike 100: 22.5

North Country Trail, Lake County, Michigan, US 10 (Timber Creek) north to Forest Road 6419 and back. 8 miles

See Familiar- Endurance Edition

Conservation Trail - Not All Paved

 Today's miles were tough only because it was impossibly humid. We got out early enough to beat the real heat, but it didn't really matter. About the first third was still paved trail.

After that, it was still the rail trail, but it was a grass surface. Nice to walk on! Our only real complaint was that the grassy trail had no benches. We walked and walked til we found a place we could sit for our break.

Some cute little white mushrooms looking like scarecrow hats.

Miles hiked so far in 2024: 307.4. Finger Lakes Trail miles hiked in 2024: 40.1

Conservation Trail, Western NY. Shimerville Rd. to Forest Rd. 7.1 miles

BONUS SECTION: Ann's Garden

We went to host Joyce's sister's garden the other evening. It was beautiful! Come along.

She has waterfalls and ponds. This one has pink lights in the water.

This one is even larger and has blue lights in the water.

Container gardens on the steps are always nice with a number of different coleus and other things.

I really like the gooseneck loosestrife.

But the garden phlox and daisies are spectacular too.

The new one to me was a large bush called sweetshrub with big flowers. It's supposed to be aromatic, but I didn't smell it. Next time.

I'm in the very last stages of getting How to Hike the North Country Trail ready. The final check of the pdfs just happened. If I can stay awake, I'll upload them to the printer tonight. If not... tomorrow.

See Peanut Line and Stella T. Rex

Oyster? Hedgehog? Angel?

  I thought I was going to pull photos from previous blog posts to really illustrate the answer to this question. However... Although I know I have taken pictures of all of these choices, I apparently haven't put them on the blog. Huh.

OK, so the question is: When you see a stacked off-white pile of fungus growing on a tree, what is it?

The first question to answer is: Does it have gills or teeth on the underside? This one clearly has gills.

That narrows the choices to Oyster Mushroom or Angel Wings. Well, I'm no fungus expert. I asked a friend who is. She says this is oyster because the gills are fairly far apart and the caps are thick. But I should have smelled it. The oyster smells (strongly?) seafoodish. It was too high up for me to smell it, but next time, I'll try.

I did find one picture from 2104 of old, decaying Angel Wings. I always think of them as having thinner, upturned caps, but maybe they don't start out upturned since the pictures in the book I'm using don't really show it that way.



Both of these are edible, and pretty highly favored. I haven't sampled them.

The Hedgehog has teeth (lots of them) and Stacka Hydnum Mushrooms have pores instead of gills. Hedgehogs are pretty spectacular, actually. I know I have at least one picture of a Hedgehog. I might even know where it is.

So far today, I've edited campsites for 6 hours. Might try to do a little more. Minnesota was a mess because I hadn't really settled on a format when I went through it the first time.

The biggest news is that Om and I went to see the movie Sight. Highly recommended. True story, inspiring and touching.

See Sterling Marsh Again

More Goodies from the Woods

 No wonder I was so tired yesterday afternoon. I forgot that Gary and I held up this clump of trees so everyone could walk under it.

We saw several kinds of ferns, but I'm always a sucker for the Northern Maidenhair, Adiantum pedatum. These whorls are just perfect.

This is nothing special, but it's one of my favorite sedges, just because it's kind of showy. Carex intumescens.

Probably because the wind brought them down, we saw a lot of oak apple galls.

This one must be very new. The structure inside wasn't filled in like I usually see. For example this one

Here's another little oddity. This bracken fern should have 3 branches. But something has damaged the growth meristem. The frond that should have grown there is all bunched up. It looks kind of like "witches broom," but that usually only is found on woody plants. Like galls, this can be caused by more than one thing. Insect damage, a pathogen, a chemical. When you see something similar on goldenrod, it was probably caused by a midge or a fly making the plant create a chamber where its egg can grow. But I've never seen one on a fern before.

In other news, I edited big time. Minnesota is taking a lot of work. I had the data collected, but put it aside because I hadn't settled on a format that worked in all situations. But once I get Minnesota whipped into shape, everything east of there is pretty clean.

I also worked in my gardens for over an hour, total. I edit until I have to wiggle, then go outside for a while.

See Gary Hits 100