October 11, 2010

Especially considering it exists within the built-up Hartford metropolitan area, the Metacomet Trail is a special place, a corridor of calm within the otherwise bustling ‘burbs west of the central city.

Hikers on the Metacomet Trail, which follows the Metacomet Ridge north from the Hanging Hills of Meriden to the Massachusetts line in Suffield, and beyond into New Hampshire. Click to enlarge.

The trail follows the Metacomet Ridge, steep in places, which explains how it has, to some degree at least, escaped heavy development. Even today, many decades after its creation, the trail mostly wends through forests, with frequent expansive views of the valleys below. In the fall, it is a terrific place to take in the foliage color.

On Saturday, October 16, the Enlightened Way Wellness Center in the Tariffville section of Simsbury is sponsoring a morning of yoga and hiking on the Metacomet, which literally passes by the front door of the center.

Leslie Gordon, the center’s director of yoga programs, will begin the morning with a warm-up yoga session for hikers. We’ll then lead the hike right from the Enlightened Way studio, up the hill onto the Metacomet Ridge, continuing through forest and emerging near Route 20 in East Granby, about 4.2 miles of walking total. After, we’ll return to the center, where Leslie will lead us in a cool-down yoga session, followed by tea for anyone who would like to join us. As one of her students, I can tell you this: she is a superb teacher.

Details are available at the center website. Space is limited; please pre-register at 860-217-0340. If it rains the trail will be slippery in places and we will cancel.

The foliage color should be at or near peak brilliance. This section of the trail is a hike of mostly moderate ups and downs, a few of them more steep but not especially long. Expect lots of ridgetop walking and a couple of very nice vantage points. Any reasonably fit adult should have no trouble with this hike.

October 5, 2010

At Lyme, Ct.

Each night in early autumn, and only then, hundreds of thousands of tree swallows – as many as 500,000 some nights – gather over a comparatively small, phragmites-covered island just off the Lyme shore, not far from the mouth of the Connecticut River.

Boaters gather on the Connecticut River at Lyme, Ct., at sunset in early autumn to witness the dramatic nighttime roosting behavior of tree swallows. Click to enlarge.

It is an awe-inspiring natural phenomenon.

Flying in from all directions, certainly from much of Connecticut, Long Island, even Rhode Island, the birds form enormous, undulating masses overhead, eventually merging into one dense cloud of avian life. Then, at some unknown signal, perhaps led by a single bird, or a few birds, the swallows plummet into the reeds and disappear for the night.

I watched a couple of nights ago from the RiverQuest, a 64-foot tour boat operating out of Haddam, as part of a Connecticut Audubon-sponsored outing.

Sunset was 6:27 p.m. that night. By 6:10, the birds were gathering, coming from up the river, from down the river, from the east, from the west, many of them passing within a few feet of our boat. Tree swallows are not big birds, about 6 inches long, with while bellies and metallic blue-green backs. In the fading late-day light, they appear above as billowing masses of constantly moving black specks. About the time the sun set the masses came together into one grand group. Minutes later they rained from the sky and disappeared. The descent took about 45 seconds.

Frank Gallo, a highly skilled birder and associate director of Audubon’s Coastal Center at Milford Point, has witnessed the phenomenon many times. He was on board, explaining this dramatic roosting behavior.  He estimated the number of birds at about 250,000 this night.

This swallow happening, known as a pre-migratory roost, is comparatively brief, just the few weeks before the birds head to their winter habitats in the southern U. S., Mexico and Central America. For any student of the Connecticut flora and fauna, for any lover of the outdoors, it is a must-see.

August 24, 2010

Much has changed in the Sierra Nevada since John Muir spent his first summer exploring the range in 1869, working as a shepherd.

Tina Egan, resting atop 8,740-foot-high Ellis Peak in the Sierra Nevada, is a hike leader with Family Nature Summits, an organization of families and individuals who love the outdoors. Click to enlarge.

But enough wildness remains that when I arrived atop Ellis Peak west of Lake Tahoe one day last month, it was easy to understand Muir’s observation, in his book “My First Summer in the Sierra,” that however fascinating were the individual trees, birds, and wildflowers “most impressive of all is the vast glowing countenance of the wilderness in awful, infinite repose.”

Here it was in July, and a dozen of us hiking this day slogged a good part of the time through wet, still-deep snow, happy to be among the abundant pine and fir species of these mountains.

Children and adults at a Family Nature Summit produce a service project each summer. Here, Renee Johns of Texas, left, and Ariel Levy of New York City, dig a post hole for an interpretive nature trail for children produced at the 2010 summit at Lake Tahoe, Tahoe City, California. Click to enlarge

Facing west from the Ellis Peak summit, which is on the California side of the lake, the Granite Chief and Desolation wilderness areas extended far into the distance, higher snow-capped summits rising behind them. The view was not unlike what Muir might have seen from the same vantage point. It made every step of a long hike with some steep ascents worthwhile.

At a time when the country has so many problems, when people are so divided politically, it was a restorative moment, a reminder that the mountains are, if not eternal, certainly enduring. They are enduring enough to provide perspective, enduring enough remind us that we ought not get too worked up about the temporal. That is one of the reasons we hike, no?

I was participating in a Family Nature Summit, an annual gathering of families, several hundred people in all, who each year choose some very special place in North America to spend a week outdoors, with comfy beds at night and good food and company through the day.

Each day of a summit, parents, grandparents, children, couples, even singles, choose among scores of scheduled activities such as hiking, rafting, kayaking, birding, fly-fishing, horseback riding, outdoor photography and nature study, all of them arranged by age-group. Parents may be kayaking while their children are hiking with trained leaders.

My story on Family Nature Summit vacations appears Sunday, August 29, on the cover of the Living section of The Hartford Courant.