Trail maintenance, Frankenstorm, and disc golf

This past weekend, with storm clouds looming in the days ahead, Holly and I led a Schenectady ADK trip to our adopted section of the Northville-Lake Placid Trail, near Lake Durant.  We've been the ADK Trail Stewards on this section for 19 years now, and make two trips each year to remove blowdown, cut back brush, and clear leaves and debris from drainages, allowing the trail to dry out (theoretically).  On this trip, we had seven of us, many of whom had helped us out before, and we got a lot of work done.  Then it was home to get cleaned up to first drop in briefly on a birthday party before finishing off the day with a concert.  Busy day.

Sunday was spent battening down the hatches in preparation for the remnants of Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Nor'easter Sandy.  Fortunately, when Sandy arrived on Monday, the Capital District suffered only a glancing blow and endured only some high winds and scattered power outages, nothing like the damage in other parts of the East Coast and New England.

Today, with Sandy's winds still gusting to near 50 mph at times, but under partly sunny skies, I got out for a couple of rounds of disc golf.  Discs tend to wander when thrown under these windy conditions, but I finished with rounds of 66 and 68, not horrible all things considered.  I did need to be acutely aware of the sounds coming from the trees overhead, in case a sudden change of location became necessary, but never actually had that problem materialize.

One side benefit (?) of the winds is that a whole lot of leaves now litter my yard, so cleaning that up looks like the next thing on the agenda.