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| The Laughing Man, a natural feature on "Secret Mountain" |
Report from
Secret Mountain (3,???’)
Corridor Monitoring and Preserving
the Wild Experience of the Long Trail
One enchanted summer afternoon, a
teen aged boy who was hiking the Long Trail stopped for lunch on a bare little
mountaintop. He munched and looked north, up range where he was headed, and
wondered how far he might get toward the bigger peaks today. While he had a
strong sense of the magic of the mountains, details like the bunchberry
blooming at his feet barely registered with him. He hadn’t seen, either, the bear claw marks on
a half-dozen beech trees along the L.T. back at the last “gap”. Nor did it cross his mind that the
treelessness of this lower peak was anything unusual. Focused on moving, it
wasn’t long before he finished his peanut butter and honey and hit the trail,
never thinking to explore some of the nearby ledges. While he trekked on toward
Canada, the roughly crafted stone benches that had been obscured behind some
low spruce on those ledges for over a half century looked out to the horizon,
alone and unnoticed.
The inscrutable course of everything
brought me, long after, to live near that same little mountain. It’s a local
favorite day hike, and was already part of a circuit of neighborhood hikes I regularly
did when I discovered that they needed something called a “corridor monitor” up
there. The idea is similar to being a
trail adopter, but not concentrating solely on the trail. The Long Trail ( like the Appalachian Trail)
exists in a “corridor” through a variety of national and state forests, state
parks, and private lands where it is protected in an invisible swath, here
about 1000 feet on either side, through which the trail passes. A corridor
monitor volunteers to walk the boundaries of a section of this strip on a
regular basis. They check that the applicable markings, like red or orange
paint blazes, are intact. Good map and
compass skills, fine-tuned at a monitoring workshop, help to interpret survey
maps and the “BDR” (baseline documentation report) monitors work from. There
are tree tags to hang at intervals that differentiate state, GMC, or private
lands. These are the most tangible and straightforward tasks. But mainly, what you are doing is observing.
The standardized form monitors fill out after
every site visit outlines the day in the woods, with headings like “Boundaries
Walked” and “Observations of Wildlife, Plant, Natural or Cultural Resources”. We’re also noting trail and shelter
conditions, though there are adopters who take care of them. We record any
wildlife encounters or sign. Monitors
are on the lookout for any changes in
the corridor (like, say, the cutting of an impromptu ATV or ski trail, logging
road, etc.) that could affect the protected trail. We’re just eyes and ears, and the only direct
action we take is marking the boundaries and maybe scattering an occasional
fire ring. There is a neat blending of
passive and active roles in monitoring; watching the land, maintaining the
markings.
It turns out that these two roles
are more integrated than they seem at first. When you go out to spend the day
re-marking old blazes, you’re also going out hiking on the trail-less
mountainside. There is no footway, even if you can follow the faded paint marks.
To see land features best, we try to work in the “shoulder seasons” when the
leaves are off, which can mean snow, mud, and ice on the hill. Secret Mountain’s boundaries had last been
painted in 1997 when I took it on in 2007.
Some were still clear, but ten
years of blow downs, peeled bark, and fading meant they had to be renewed
before they were lost. So I got right on a program of identifying the previously
blazed trees and flagging them to return and re-paint. It gave me a chance to
get to know the whole “tract”, surrounding about 2.7 miles of trail, while
making progress on the vital preservation of survey marks.
Immersion in a task creates a unique
freedom of mind. Up on Secret, I am focused completely on what I’m doing
(“Where IS that next blaze on line N 15’31”E ?”). If I were simply hiking up a
trail, it would be easier for my thoughts to drift toward stuff in my daily
life - but not here. Everything is about opening my senses, peering ahead over
my compass for that next old orange axe mark or remnant of flag tape. The
terrain is usually steep side hill in moderately dense spruce-fir, sometimes
dropping into hardwoods, around huge rock outcrops and boulders, in and out of
ravines. The survey line doesn’t allow for topography, so if there’s a cliff in
the middle of it, you take a bearing and find a way around to the top.
Sometimes light ice or snow will be melting off branches as the day warms up,
making for a micro-monsoon in the woods. It can be slow going, but time
evaporates. Because I am sort of inhabiting that part of the mountainside for
the day, as I go about my business, I start to pick up on some of the little
things. That raven, for instance, that wasn’t leaving before me- I was the one
being monitored. The super fresh bear tracks in the snow, headed up the cirque
in November. The time a barred owl flew out past and landed on a high branch
where you never would have seen it. The way robins seem to not mind the cold snowy
mountains anymore and exploit high growing sumac berries like crazy! How moose,
deer, and rabbit pellets can look mostly the same, just different sizes, and bear
scat can look like anything from charcoal briquettes to cow pies, all depending
on when and what they’re eating... Traces of the ancient road through the gap…
Thoreau wrote about something like
this in his journals, in his miniature piece “Woodchopper and Scientist”. He called
it “relaxed attention”, but he got the idea from Wordsworth’s thoughts on “wise
passiveness”. When you’re intent on your work, as the woodsmen were, you’re
somehow in a very receptive state for what is happening around you. A
naturalist might study particular species and habitats to follow theories, and
miss much by preconception and trying too hard. The woodsman just happens to be
there all the time, he sees the plants change color and the animals change
their coats, while he labors methodically nearby.
I learn about a conifer stand where the moose
have been browsing heavily, not because I’m looking for that, but because the
straight-line easement boundary I’m following happens to run right through
there.
I know that the lean-to on this
piece of the Long Trail has a watertight roof. The clouds keep darkening one
afternoon while I re-flag the western boundary with my dog. Finally, it turns a
weird twilight and I can smell the rain.
We bushwhack east and get into camp just as the storm lets loose with
thunder, lightning, and a torrent. It was time for a break anyway. The dog naps
while I read the shelter log, snack a little, and doze off a bit myself. An
hour and a half later we’re walking out in the drizzly aftermath, satisfied with
having accomplished marking about 1500’ of line.
I find the stone benches one day
while scrambling around looking for an opening so that I can see a nearby
beaver pond, to check the seasonal level. A rocky area grown over with low
spruce hid the way. The seats are partly
moss and lichen covered and look really old. I start coming out here on my rounds, leaning
against the cleverly positioned seat back, wondering who enjoyed this spot
enough to build these, and when. Sometime after this, I accidentally discover a
very similarly constructed “view seat” near a summit a few miles away, also
mossed over and long forgotten. As the “eyes and ears on the ground” of the
GMC, I list these finds as cultural resources on my report, along with the
surmise that they may have been built by early 20th century L.T.
pioneer Prof. Will Monroe and his crew. The Professor was famous for routing
the trail past every interesting or scenic spot, so they seem to fit in with
his taste - and his vintage. Although it’s usually the natural features of the
landscape that grab me, I’m fascinated by the personal stamp on these antique
neatly arranged rocks. It shows how attitudes about the land have shifted; it’s
not something we would do on a mountaintop today. We’ll probably never know the
whole tale, but the air of history surrounding these artifacts adds to the
magic on this ridge.
Like many other trail volunteers, I
live reasonably near my assigned area, making it easy to visit it more often
than the one or two times per year that we agree to. I thought I was getting
out a lot until I heard someone say they had filed 24 reports one year on their
section. It can be very satisfying, locating a stretch of boundary and feeling
like you’re really getting to know this part of the mountains. Every corner
post or axe-blaze discovered is a little mystery solved. There’s also an
awareness of taking part in something enduring. You, or someone like you, will
be perennially circling, inspecting, and maintaining these borders as long as
there’s a trail. Plus, it’s another
excuse to hike.
Sometimes I approach the easement by
bushwhacking up old logging roads, to shorten the distance when I’m working the
section far down the L.T. from the day hiker’s trail up the peak. When I reach
the corridor boundary, I’m always struck by how far it is from there to the
actual trail. These “trail sanctuary” areas can be several hundred to a couple
of thousand acres, and sort of constitute little wildland shires, each with
their own unique summits, notches, wildlife, ledges, beaver ponds, and waterfalls.
I cross this mini-wilderness and, finally, tumble out into the Long Trail
itself.
Maybe the most important reason for
maintaining a protective buffer around the trail is that it preserves a hiker’s
sensation that they are walking through a “footpath in the wilderness”. It should give you the feeling that the
natural space around you is all that exists. Access to this kind of immersion
in nature is a big part of what is being conserved.
The teenager on his first thru-hike
up the L.T. was living in a somewhat different era than the guy in his 50’s who
volunteers on the mountain these days, but they both hiked a Long Trail that is
in many ways the same. Sure, some things are a little different up here. The
spruce-fir around the summit of Secret Mountain has started to close in the
view, as the land slowly recovers from a now centuries old wildfire. There are
also more folks out on the trail these days, though it’s still pretty low key
north of where the Appalachian Trail turns off. There remains a sense of being
on a remote, crag-studded green ridge with peaks pointing off forever to the
north and south. Yet this is the same world whose population has almost doubled
since that first end-to-end hike. That
you can still climb up here and get this primeval feeling is an amazing and
precious thing. On a long trail, it can
be like you’re witnessing the earth as it once was, and feel yourself belonging
in it. This is the hidden resource that will always be so essential for people
to have access to, this feeling of being completely in the wild. Electricity,
cars, laptops, and shopping malls are relatively new to human experience. To really thrive we need a way to connect to
our origins, and a place like a pristine trail can take us there.
On the Long Trail, any tokens of the faraway
industrialized planet usually come up with the hikers themselves. One blue sky
day last fall I was trekking back from the gap when I overtook a distance hiker
who didn’t seem to hear my hello - then I realized she was using “ear buds”. I
managed to not startle her when I passed, and we both smiled. Later it occurred
to me that she was hiking with 4 out of 5 senses, with an iPod substituting for
one. Like the boy on his long-ago L.T. hike, she might not have quite yet
opened up all the way to the entirety of what was around her. But then, probably after a bit the earphones
got put away, and the song of the trail came on. I expect that before long the sounds of birds,
insects, the wind, and her heart pounding as she scrambled up the dome of
Secret Mountain were more than enough.
-John Drew
Petersen, April 2012
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