Mud Season

Those bright orange “Heavy Loads Limited” signs have appeared on telephone polls around town. As I slip and slide down my driveway in the car, the kids squealing in the backseat, I was thinking that maybe I needed one for the driveway. Mud season has arrived.

Later, I went out to fed the chickens and collect eggs. The path from the garage to the shed and the chicken coop, that I worked so hard all winter to keep shoveled has become a swamp. I sink several inches in the saturated lawn, leaving deep footprints that will still be visible in July. As the snow began to melt, water ran down away from the house and collected in front of the chicken coop. I've laid boards down to walk on. Boards in front of the coop and boards over to the shed where the chicken feed is kept. On cold mornings, the ground is hard and uneven, by afternoon a small pond develops. I keep expecting ducks to join the hens.

Inside the chicken yard, where the ground is clear, the hens have left deep prints in the mud. Their feet disappear into the mud as they walk around, enjoying the warming weather. The rooster fluffs out his feathers, stretches his neck and crows loudly. It appears that chickens like mud more than snow. All winter they hid in their coop, barely coming out to feed. If it was snowing they stayed inside, talking quietly among themselves. Every once in a while the rooster would crow loudly, regardless of the time of day.

The path through the snow from the front door around to the compost pile is getting soupy, too. The sun is getting stronger by the day, turning the snow into lakes and rivers running down the drive and through the yard, into the woods. The ground is still frozen a few inches down: the snowmelt has nowhere else to go. As I take the dog out so she can go to the bathroom, I was thinking it was a good thing the ground was still frozen or we would have sunk down into the mud and out of sight.

The dog doesn't mind the mud, nor do the kids. They leave muddy footprints from the door, across the carpet and into the house. Muddy boots and shoes collect in drifts near the front door and in the kitchen.

It's not just our yard; mud season has arrived everywhere. Down at the end of our road, where the pavement ends, several residents park their cars and walk the rest of the way home. The road has become a mud roller coaster with large puddles and deep ruts. It'll be weeks before it dries out and is passable by anything without four wheel drive.

Mud keeps loggers out of the woods, too. Recently I saw a logging road where a truck got stuck, making ruts more than a foot deep. You think that would have clued me in, but it didn't. Less than an hour later, I got my car stuck trying to get to a trailhead for a hike. I had to leave my car and walk back up the road until I got cell reception to call a tow truck.

Mud season is a transition from winter to spring that cannot be rushed. We need to be patient and let the ground thaw and then dry out, taking time to enjoy the strengthening sun and the bug-free days. Stand on the back porch and listen to the birds returning for the year. Soon enough the grass will green up, the blackflies will emerge, and peepers will begin singing. Until then, I'll just have to live with muddy shoes cluttering up the house and a yard wetter than Caribou Bog. 

Originally published in The Weekly on April 4, 2013

Dorr Mountain

I sat in the car thinking about clouds. Wisps obscured Huguenot Head, the spruce-covered, orange granite knob that sat hunched across ME 3. The foggy haze—or was it hazy fog?--bleached the colors from the mountain. The orange granite appeared pink or even gray behind the veil of air. The spruce looked ashen. Higher, clouds like heaps of plowed snow melted in the late-winter sun. Nothing moved, but from moment to moment the clouds and colors shifted and changed. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope full of smoke.

I opened the car door and was buffeted by the wind. It howled up the valley, across The Tarn, between Dorr and Champlain Mountains and rocked me back on my heels. Quickly, I grabbed my pack and headed toward the trail. I crossed The Tarn's outlet on cut-granite stepping stones. The lake's surface at the near end was covered with a thick layer of broken, dried sedges. Thick brown straws driven by the wind against the rocky shore where they rose and fell in rhythm with my breathing.

Across the stream, the trail rose through bare woods on evenly spaced stairs littered with dry oak leaves. The first step—a wide granite slab covered with pinkish lichen—had the trail's name chiselled neatly into it: Kurt Diederich's Climb. This trail was built by George Dorr a hundred years ago, before Acadia became a national park. When Acadia was made a national monument in 1916 by President Wilson, it was centered around Sieur de Monts Spring and Dorr Mountain (then called Dry Mountain). Many of the trails on the mountains northeast are among the oldest in the park. Several have extensive stonework.

The stairs I climbed from The Tarn, switchbacking up the steep slope, were smooth and even. Their handiwork impressive. In 1981 Kurt Diederich's Climb, along with Emery, Kane, Homan's and Schiff Paths (all part of my hike), received special protection from the Interior Department because of their historical significance.

None of that mattered to me as I climbed away from The Tarn, protected from the wind by the bulk of the mountain. The trail passed ice-covered cliffs and flat-topped slabs of bedrock with views of Great Meadow, Frenchman's Bay, and the surrounding mountains.

I reached the Schiff Path and slabbed north through twisted oak that overhung the trail. The understory was leafless blueberry bushes, that held the fallen oak leaves and scratched at my legs. I descended on Emery Path—more granite stairs, more cliffs, more bare rock. I began this hike thinking about clouds, but after a mile of walking it was rock that dominated my thinking. In the winter, hiking is mostly about water: snow and ice. Other times of the year, wildflowers or the changing leaves hog the spotlight. But in the late winter and early spring—especially in a dry El Nino year like this one—all there is to see is the rock. Granite steps, granite cliff, loose rocks littering the woods, glacier-scoured domes of granite bedrock. Large-grained igneous rock that is rough to the touch, offering fine footing even when wet. In orange and gray and pink and tan and covered with swirls of lichen. Worn smooth by glaciers and a hundred years of hikers.

Sure, I saw beautiful ice-covered cliffs and navigated sections of trail that were frozen streams of cloudy white ice. Here and there, in protected copses hid small, hard banks of snow. And overhead the clouds shifted; one moment blocking the sun, the next sending warm shafts of golden light to brighten the bare trees and my tousled hair. But it was the granite.

I descended between vertical faces of the rock on neat, even stone steps. In one place, Dorr had built a small patio on top of a cliff with a view of Great Meadow. Beyond its winter brown, the Porcupine Islands rode spruce-covered black in the rough bay beneath a bruised fog bank that hung, inexplicably high in the air. It appeared as substantial as a distant mountain range of snow-covered peaks and dark forested valleys.

Down off the mountain, I followed a trail through mature hemlocks over mud and rusty needles. I climbed again on the North Ridge Trail. As I navigated the ice-covered bedrock, Cadillac Mountain's cliffy flank came in and out of view behind the shifting clouds. The trail wound from one granite slab to another, climbing through dry scrub pines. I could hear the wind howling through the stiff pines higher on the mountain.

Near the summit, the trail leveled out and the wind found me. The wind shook the twisted pines. It slammed into me with such force that I struggled to stand. Shreds of cloud raced across the mountain top around and through the trees. Around and through me, battering me with cold. It felt as if the wind had roared over the North Pole and slammed into to me. I half-expected the stone cairns that marked the trail to be carried off and dropped in The Tarn or on some distant island.

I snapped a couple of photos and turned tail and descended out of the maelstrom, back into spring. Down from the realm of wind and into the embrace of granite. I descended the Schiff Path over bedrock wet and icy to the Ladder Trail. From there it was one long staircase down beside a cliff to The Tarn. As I hiked the Ladder Trail, I was struck by how irregular the stonework was. A huge undertaking to create a stunning trail, but it lacked the art and regularity of Dorr's work on Kurt Diederich's Climb and the Schiff, Emery, and Homan's Paths.

Tucker Mountain

Saturday night--out shopping for a Father/Daughter Dance dress for Emma--Ann had a flat tire. Sunday morning I took the car in to get it fixed. The plan was that I would get new tires and head down to the coast for a hike. Four hours and $900 dollars later, I gave up and came home. I felt misplaced the rest of the afternoon. All twitchy like I'd down a whole two liter bottle of Mountain Dew.

So, this morning I dropped the kids off at school and lit out. Down to Sullivan to explore a couple of the Frenchman's Bay Land Trust's preserves I'd yet to visit.

I hiked up Tucker Mountain. It's a small, inconspicuous pile of granite along Long Cove. The trail switchbacks up the slope through leaning cedars, emerald moss, and balsam firs. Here and there a white pine towered over everything else.

At ground level the only colors were the grays and faded browns of tree trunks and dead things. The laurel leaves, curled up for winter like little umbrellas, hinted red. They were a deeper, bloodier color than the cedar trunks. Only the patches of thick, verdant moss looked alive.

Even though I could hear the cars whizzing by on Route 1, I felt the solitude of late winter. This time of the years--with no snow to speak of--the trail can be hard to follow. The entire forest floor is equally beaten down. Every seam through the trees looks as much like a trail as any other. I hiked more by feel and the logic of the climb than by certain knowledge that I was on the trail. Did it really matter if I missed the trail by ten feet? In the end I stood on the summit, marked by a small cairn and a USGS plate. The view was mostly blocked by perfect conical firs like over-sized Christmas trees.

Below the summit, the trail had crossed an open ledge with a fine view of Mount Desert Island across the water and convoluted coast. The mountains in Acadia were nothing more than hazy hints on the horizon. The air was as dense as during the dog days of late summer. Even if the firs had leaned out of the way for me, there wouldn't have been much too see from the summit. Just the boot-sucking mud of Long Cove at low tide with sinuous creeks draining out into the blue bay.