It wasn’t until the next day that I learned that the area we had been camping in is haunted. At the time I was plenty spooked by the thought of ticks so it might have been a welcome distraction to see a 19th Century highwayman with a lantern on the nearby Monocacy Aqueduct and I might have actually followed him in the attempt to find his long lost buried treasure. The place itself is a ghost. We had spent the day riding about twenty miles of towpath to get to our campsite wedged between the Potomac River and what remains of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. For it’s time it was a massive engineering undertaking, stretching for 184 miles from Washington DC to Cumberland MD and dug alongside the Potomac channeling the river water into a calm and controlled commercial waterway. With the newer technology of railroads literally on its heels in the form of the B & O laying tracks, sometimes on the same narrow strip of riverbank, the canal was mostly obsolete by the time investment dried up only halfway to its goal of the Ohio River. A lively culture of boat families did manage to carry a fair tonnage of cargo over the 80-some years before floods crippled the canal in 1924 but this ribbon of land has since gone decidedly feral. Except for this towpath that is.

Maintained by the National Park Service is the wide gravel bank on which mules, attached by ropes, once pulled the canal boats. With campsites every 5 miles it makes a great bike tour and if combined with the Great Allegheny Passage rail-trail becomes, in my opinion, the best way to travel the 335 miles from DC to Pittsburgh. Along the way are plenty of remnants of the old thoroughfare, from former lock keeper homes and stonework to elegant aqueducts such as the seven arch span, which in Escher-like fashion elevates this artificial river over the natural Monocacy River. What it also has is habitat. Nature has re-occupied this corridor running from our densely populated National Capitol. The canal has formed ponds where still intact or when drained has become dense with woodland making a great home for shy wildlife such as wood duck and muskrats.

Earlier in West Virginia Rachael and I spent several days riding and camping on another piece of defunct and converted infrastructure. There we found an old railroad grade along the Greenbrier River that travels through a lightly populated valley of forest and farmland. Like the canal path this corridor was once bustling with human activity including the harvesting of much of the forest and an earlier era of less destructive coal mining. The former railroad facilitated the extraction of these resources. The need for that railroad waned as the resources were depleted and when industry moved on the forest recovered somewhat and the long gentle grade up the valley has brought new commerce in the form of travelers on bicycles, on horseback and even on haywagons.

Leaving these winding paths we’ve found ourselves in a distinctly different landscape. After dropping out of the ancient and folded contours of Appalachia we found our way to the sand and low topography of The Pine Barrens in Southern New Jersey. This is a surprisingly wild place of pitch pine forest and remarkably untainted water nestled at the midpoint of the East Coast Megalopolis. What it shares with those previous stopovers is that, in the 20th century it found itself less developed than the century before, reversing the trend of pretty much any place in America. Never terribly populous because the landscape proved impossible to cultivate, it nevertheless saw early attempts at industry with “bog iron” an important source of Revolutionary cannonballs and early American wrought iron items. The pines were converted to charcoal and the sands into glass. These industries moved elsewhere and those places saw the excesses of the industrial revolution leaving “The Pines” to heal. What remains are a self-reliant “Piney” culture and an economy based on blueberry fields and cranberry bogs and tourists drawn to a rare wild place that with any luck will survive the excesses of the 21st century.

Ol’ Lil’Squatch gets all kinds of attention. Whether it be people in their cars or on the side of the road staring, somewhat slacked jawed, maybe pointing to their buddy and then pointing to Squatch or folks, all men, wanting to chat with Tim about the solar set-up. So this chat with a local on the outskirts of Knoxville was not unusual. When it got towards the end of the conversation though the man explained that he had purchased some flat solar panels from Harbor Freight for when the “Shit hits the fan I’m not bugging out, I’m bugging in, nawmsayin?!” Complete with pointing to the ground while saying bugging iiinnnnnnn. I won’t lie these are the types of people that I have no respect for. While the comment made us chuckle the sentiment does not. It’s like the story where the man is on his roof and the flood waters are rising around him. Many people come by to try and save him from his roof but his response over and over again is that he’s waiting for God to save him. When the waters reach him he says to God why have you forsaken me? God replies I sent you a horse, a boat, a helicopter etc and each time you refused. What more can I do? This is how I feel about people waiting to use something like solar. Does he not understand that the proverbial shit is already hitting the fan? Possibly because as a society we’re unwilling to do anything that might make a difference until it’s way too late.

On April the 11th we pulled the invasive Asian honeysuckle from Raven Run Sanctuary outside of Lexington. Tim mentioned this in his last post but it’s worth a revisit. While we ran short on time to really explore the park we couldn’t help but notice what a beloved park it is considering the creative parking folks did once the lot was full that morning. The event was scheduled by a local couple of Sierra Club members. Naturally us nerds all had some interest in both birds and the flowers that have begun to show themselves for spring. There are some downers to the efforts to remove invasive plants and animals and I can understand the sentiment but, I’m in it for two reasons. First, it’s great exercise that I find way more fun than a gym. Second we need places of refuge. Places where we can do our best to keep invasives out and give local plants and animals a place to thrive.

Ten years ago when I moved to SF one of the first volunteer days I did was pulling french broom from Mt Tam. We worked with a ranger who mentioned that they were just now in the position to start planting some local shrubs and grasses in areas where they had made some real headway against french broom. I asked how long she’d been at it and she said 10 years. Very thoughtlessly I replied that I would have given up and the hurt on her face was palpable. It was a learning moment to say the least. I wonder where they are at now 20 years into the project? This came up again when the woman, Anna, who worked at the park casually threw out that perhaps in 10 years they’ll start to see some real progress. There was no defeat in her voice. Maybe in 10 years I’ll go back to Raven’s Run to see the progress for myself and give the place the time it deserved that day. It may seem like a long time and a lot of work but in just a few hours with a crew of nine volunteers we managed to clear a respectable plot of land.

The media might have us all believing that it’s either black or white, red or blue, coal or solar, logging or recreation. And it’s just not. Granted most of our interactions have been with either outdoorsy folks or fellow volunteers. Since we started our trek through Appalachia we’ve heard time and time again that the big “job creator” is work in outdoor adventures. Whether it be hiking, biking, climbing or river running people are getting outdoors. In Tennessee we spent a long time talking to a ranger at a state park who explained how back in the 70’s the TVA had to shutdown a hydro plant. That meant until it was fixed the river ran free. Business boomed. When TVA went to put it back online the backlash was fierce. Eventually they worked out a deal. That river is the Ocoee and was where the river sports for the 1996 Olympics out of Atlanta took place. Nearby is the Hiawasee river noted for it’s constant flow of water (thanks to the TVA). It’s the river of choice for novice boaters. We also chatted up our ranger in the Smokies when getting our backpacking permit, also a river man. The salesman at REI talked to us for the better part of an hour about his love of photography, Napa and his upcoming river trip in Utah. After our volunteer day at Raven Run the folks who got us all together very sweetly took us out to dinner. We could have chatted for several more hours talking of the places we’ve been and where we should all go next.

It seemed only fair that this should all be burned in a giant heap of coal during our days in West Virginia. Coal country in south WV was a strange place stuck in another time. These towns and homes are depressed, the river is clogged with trash. This is not a business that has much life left in it. While coal “keeps the lights on” it’s not keeping people employed. Coals days are most definitely numbered, at least in Appalachia. However, driving further on to an eastern portion of the state for a bike ride along the Greenbrier River Trail we saw a whole other side to West Virginia. It’s not only beautiful it’s also rich in outdoor activities, giving credit to the state’s slogan of “Wild and Wonderful”. We stopped in a cafe for a beer and bite in Marlinton, WV where we got to chatting with a local couple. It was a lovely and informative conversation with folks who very much think like we do.

After West Virginia we moved onto Natural Bridge Virginia and yet another volunteer opportunity to pull the invasive honeysuckle. The honeysuckle not only crowds out and thus shades out native plants it’s suspected to produce an allelopathy to keep other plants at bay. This effort was coordinated by the Nature Conservancy for an Earth Day event. There were almost 100 volunteers for the day for both pulling invasive plants and trail building followed by a nice lunch at the historic Natural Bridge Hotel. The event brought in a large group from a nearby college, a local group of AT trail maintainers, staff from both Virginia senator offices and several others just wanting to help make a difference for the day. I hope everyone there that day took a look around at the work that was accomplished and felt good about the day. Even though there is still much work to be done at Raven Run, Natural Bridge and all the other parks, sanctuaries and preserves it will make a difference even if only a handful of people keep chipping away at it each month.

It’s cold again. I don’t have to get out from under the covers to know this. I can see our breath as we yawn and stretch and begin to talk of coffee. I just wasn’t as mentally prepared as I told myself I was when we were leaving the summer like conditions of Florida. It all feels very familiar, the leafless and seemingly lifeless trees, the hands so cold it hurts. We drove from summer back into winter since ten days into it spring has yet to show. But there it is again, the pop of red from out of the woods. We started seeing this tree all the way back in Louisiana, up into middle Mississippi and along the Florida panhandle. Try as we might to get an up close look we couldn’t seem to find a spot where the trees red leaves were close enough to the ground to really see. We just looked in vain at the red fluttering above our heads. A tree that hasn’t let go of it’s red autumn leaves. Are they leaves?
Last December on a trip to Yosemite Tim and I managed to get every passerby curious as to what we were looking at in the grass along the path. We had to sheepishly tell them it was fungus that had grown off a piece of feces. It looked like a giant caterpillar. This is how we “generalists” work. From watching a common gray squirrel to going out on a rainy day hike to see California newts, we find it all pretty interesting and we’re willing to seek it out.

We’ve become visitor center connoisseurs. If you go to a National Park and they have more than one I recommend hitting them all up if possible. Each has their own personality and often unique information about that particular locale of the park. The Sugarlands visitor and park headquarters of the Great Smokey National Park has wonderful displays from A Naturalists Notebook written by Robert G. Johnsson and illustrated by John D. Dawson complimented by taxidermy displays and believable fake versions of some plants and flowers. We liked it so much we went back to try and take in as much as possible. We found out there that Great Smokies National Park is the salamander capital of the world. There are over 30 different species of salamander within the park and several are endemic. Turns out the Smokies are a temperate rain forest. The higher elevations get up to 85 inches of rain a year and the lower around 55. With the astounding amount of rhododendrons, hemlocks and firs parts of the park felt more like the Pacific Northwest. Salamanders are amphibians so moisture is a necessity. Many salamanders are lungless and breathe through their skin. They need good clean water and air which is becoming more compromised with all the nearby coal power plants. For now though the estimated numbers are impressive.

The hunt was on! I figured with our successful California Newt experiences this should be cake. We looked under rocks and logs along streams and found many different caddisfly larvae tubes. We looked in a swamp where we found thousands of tad poles and a few millipedes. Tim began pawing at punky wood much like a bear clawing for grubs. We even saw some grubs. After a few days of this I began to think that we’d not see one after all. Then I thought about how my friend’s daughter Juniper had looked under rocks along the rocky shore back in San Diego and in doing so found a brittle star. I looked back at the stream we had just crossed and found a calmer run where a rock was just so that there was a little cave under it. When I pulled it up some silt spun around in the depression and it took a second to realize what I was looking at. I called Tim over and there it was our first of many found salamander! It was tiny, no bigger than my pinky, dark with white gills. It was all very exciting and each subsequent find no less so.

As for the trees with the stubborn red leaves, we got up close to that too. Turns out it’s the red maple and what we had been seeing was the fruit, or samara, that develop first before leaves or flowers in an effort to be ready to drop into nearby water ways when they are their highest in late spring. The red maple is actually quite common in the eastern states and has become more so with the loss of oaks and pines.

I may not always get to see the neat creatures and plants I seek but I get great joy out of the act of looking. Much like playing a game. As long as the game is fun it doesn’t matter if I win or lose. Sure I’ll gloat like the best of them and high five my teammates just like I high fived Tim, my ultimate teammate, on our successful Great Smokey Mountain salamander hunt.