Out Doors
by Elizabeth Bassett

Today, you can rake the flowerbed in a t-shirt. Tomorrow, dress for snow. It’s April in Vermont. Don’t put away hats and mittens yet, but do get Out-Doors!
I’ve been outdoors a lot recently, revising my book, Nature Walks in Northern Vermont and the Champlain Valley. April weather notwithstanding, deadlines are deadlines. The good news is that I’m falling in love all over again with many special places. On a more sobering note, even in this corner of the globe spared from volcanoes, earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes, nature wields enormous power.
I began by checking out two of my favorite walks in the Green Mountain National Forest. Last August, heavy downpours focused their fury on a stretch of the Green Mountains near Middlebury. Within hours streams and rivers exploded out of their banks washing out roads and bridges including Route 125 in Ripton.
My first destination was the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail. I walked onto the circular gravel path that is handicap-accessible. Snow was rotting and the swamp was porphyry of melting ice. Despite a temperature in the low 20s, birds chirped and the sun was bright. Then an orange plastic fence blocked my path: trail closed. A wooden bridge dangled in mid-air, the earth beneath its base gone. The balance of the trail lies on the far side of the river, inaccessible.
I returned to the car, drove over the Middlebury Gap, and turned toward Texas Falls. I parked near the footbridge that crosses, or used to, the Hancock Branch. The bridge had washed downstream and was completely missing. I donned my snowshoes in hopes of accessing the nature trail from a picnic area up the road. Within minutes a huge gulf yawned in front of me. A trickle of water dribbled over the bottom of a 15-foot chasm. I tried to imagine the volume of water that wiped out this two-lane road.
I spoke to the Rutland district office of the Green Mountain National Forest. After the 2008 deluge, FEMA promised funds for repairs. Now there is hope that some of the economic stimulus money from Washington can be used in 2009. In the short term, the trails are inaccessible.
On a recent day better suited to a cup of tea by the woodstove, I visited the nature trails at Kingsland Bay and Button Bay State Parks. The sky was steely and the mercury flirted with 40 degrees. State park gates are locked off-season so I walked 20 minutes to the trailhead at Button Bay. I followed the shoreline beside the vast expanse of 39-degree lake water, snuggling into my cross-country ski jacket. When I reached the shelter of oaks and red pines I unzipped my layers. Waves crashed against the rocks and the Adirondacks peeked in and out of a low ceiling. I hadn’t visited this trail in several years and I thrilled yet again to see the cluster of fossils in the bedrock, 500 million-year-old vestiges of the oldest exposed coral reef in the world.
Kingsland Bay still sported a thin skin of ice, although an apron of open water ringed the bay. The nature trail meanders through piney woods and wind-wizened white cedars cling to the rocky shore. Chunks of ice tinkled like a wind chime as they crashed into the rocks with each wave. What a wonderful day!
Closer to home, in Charlotte, I parked at the small pullout beside the new trailhead for Williams Woods. A microburst in the summer of 2007 wrecked havoc here, uprooting enormous trees and snapping off the tops of others. One of Charlotte’s largest swamp white oaks, estimated to be more than 200 years old, lost its crown in this storm. Nature Conservancy crews and volunteers cleared and re-routed the trail. Armed with an updated map I set off. I had just signed in and was heading toward the first bridge when three massive trees sprawled across my path. The water table in Williams Woods is high, forcing oxygen out of the soil. Tree roots spider across the surface instead of anchoring deep in the earth. As a result even ordinarily deep-rooted trees are easily upended. The Nature Conservancy and its Charlotte volunteers will be clearing the trail in coming weeks.
At Sunny Hollow Nature Park in Colchester, different natural forces are at work. At the end of the Ice Age, glaciers melted into rivers that deposited sand, lots of it, in places like Colchester. Nutrient-poor and well-drained sand plains host a community of plants rarely found in Vermont, a pine-oak-heath forest. Fire is crucial to the survival of many of these plants, among them slow-growing pitch pine trees. Its thick bark protects it from fire, and its seeds germinate most successfully on bare mineral soil. Blueberries like fire, too. In the dozen years since I researched my book, no fires have burned at the park. Fast-growing trees, like birch, poplar, and white pine, are encroaching and altering the ecosystem. There are still plenty of blueberries though!
In his 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, child advocacy expert Richard Louv connects the rise in obesity, attention-deficit disorder, and depression to a lack of nature and the outdoors in young lives. A cohort of children is coming of age with little experience in nature. If you remember chasing tadpoles, whittling swords, searching for jack-in-the-pulpits, (and, yes, getting poison ivy), make sure to share that joy with a child in the coming months.
Give yourself, your kids, or your grandkids some inexpensive pleasures:
Plant flower and vegetable seeds. When those first green shoots poke through the soil it’s like a baby’s first cry, except no diapers to change or tuition bills to pay. And weeding is still weeks away.
It’s light in the evenings; take a walk to unwind from the day. Listen to the peepers!
Watch a bird feather its nest. If you pay attention you may see the babies fledge!
Walk up Mt. Philo. Soon wildflowers will line the roadways. Gaze over the Champlain Valley, the lake, and the Adirondacks. Forget watching National Geographic re-runs, at least until the darkness of next autumn. Look at where we live!
As the earth dries out look for wildflowers. Everywhere!