Monday, July 25, 2011

Phoebes Nable Mt. & Burrows Farm 7/24/11

"Crispy With a Chance of Being Stung!" (pictures)

With another humid day Saturday and the promise of a slightly more comfortable, sunny day for Sunday we opted to work Saturday and hike Sunday. We planned for Garfield but decided to see if we got up early and how we felt. Scott got up at 6am and watched the weather report. The forecast called for morning showers and it didn't look promising outside! I also woke up at 6am, turned the alarm off and rolled back over and was back out in no time! I crawled out of bed at 7:30, woke Scott who was now back in bed also and we dragged ourselves downstairs. We then spent the morning doing yard word and running errands ... so much for hiking, LOL!

3pm rolled around and simultaneously we both thought about doing a small hike on Moose Mountains Reservation! I've said it once and I'll say it again, as much time as I've spent up there it still hasn't gotten old! There's always something different! So we arrived at the empty parking lot at 3:30pm. We checked the map box to find 3 maps had been taken since Friday! That's about 16 maps total in the 3 weeks I've been printing them off :^) We parked further up the road and began our hike. I wanted to hike to the junction below Phoebes Nable and down to Mountain Road hoping to finally find Moose Mountain!

We passed through the field and checked on the Burrows Cemetery. The Lily's we planted were still blooming despite the obvious burning they had received from the excessive heat we had! The field was lined with flowering Meadowsweet and Steeplebush, there seems to be something different flowering up here every week! We took a left across the field to continue on Burrows Farm Trail and up to the height-of-land at the Phoebes Nable junction. Here the blueberry bushes and trees were notably dried-up, yellow and very crispy!

We headed on down the other side to the corner. Here I looked my map over and realized just how long Mountain road was as it looped around near the Moose Mountain Summits and back to the field. So I thought we should head back and start out at the field and try and find our way to the mountains from there. As we passed the Phoebes Nable Trail we looked around for a sign of a skid road. By the looks of the satellite maps there is a skid road that possibly connect from the kiosk parking to just above this junction. We walked the woods up to the summit of Phoebes Nable with no luck. Brush was dried-up here too and we headed back down deeper in the woods looking for a road of some kind.

With no luck again we continued through the woods past several ledge outcrops and we came out on Burrows Farm trail below the Phoebes Nable junction. From here we walked back down to the field and up another woods road that connects to the road behind the Burrows Farm site and up past the mountains to Mountain road. After passing the road junction we soon lost the woods road. It was just too overgrown to make out it's route. So we turned back and headed down the other road back out to the Burrows Farm site. Confused yet!? Here there were Bouncing Bet (soapwort) flowers in bloom. Always something new!

Just past the large rock I walked in the thicket of plants to take a picture of the apple tree. I looked down next to my left foot to see a hornet nest. Yikes! Glad I didn't step on it!! They turned out to be Bald-faced hornets! The paper nest was the size of one of those mini-basketballs. Careful should you walk off trail in a thicket! That was it. We headed back down and finished our explorations at 4:30pm.

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