Walk - Featherstonhaugh State Forest

Today was lawn-mowing day, yet again. All this rain has made the grass go crazy, and I'm still mowing it weekly in October! With cool dewy (frosty?) mornings, I have to wait until afternoon when it warms up and dries out to do this. So after some errands and lunch, I dispensed with the lawn pretty quickly and got out for an afternoon walk on another gorgeous fall day.

With logging now completed in Featherstonhaugh, with Irene now long gone, with an ECOS trail maintenance trip there coming up in a couple of weeks, and with my monthly moonlight snowshoe trips coming up a little later, I wanted to see what kind of shape the trails were in. I expected a wet mess in the worst way, so wore appropriate footwear and set off for the forest.

The marked access trail from Tidball Road was my main concern. The logging had left a mess here, and it appears nothing has changed to correct it. Lots of downed branches on the "trail", a paucity of remaining trail markers, and the wettest conditions I had ever seen, mostly due to the vehicle ruts. This will take days or weeks to clean up, and I don't plan on using this access trail anytime soon.

Once I managed to find the main ski trail loop, it wasn't in bad shape, although still very wet. That won't be a problem in winter, so OK, it's probably skiable, at least the part I saw. I didn't continue as far as I'd hoped, because it just stopped being fun with all the wetness. It was worse than I could have imagined, and this wasn't even the traditionally wettest section.

As I was about to head back toward Tidball Road via a different and better access trail, my cell phone rang. It was a former consulting client with a software question he thought I could answer. It was weird sitting on a stump in the middle of the woods and having this conversation, but it was brief, and then I continued out to Tidball Road and back to the car.

At some point, I had wandered through a patch of some kind of weeds that left my pants and sweatshirt covered with hundreds of clinging seed pods. That will be a fine mess to clean up, picking them all off one by one. Sounds like a good rainy day project.