 Camp Wildflower Camo |
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| My pal Payaso once again using his famous and amazing Payaso Sense found what must be the most private of the waterside campsites in the Green Mountain National Forest near Arlington, Vermont. |
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| From the road it looks like nothing more than an overgrown parking space. The camp itself was hidden by a tremendous stand of wildflowers. But the fire pit is just visible if you are in the right position on the road. |
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| To get to the camp you have to ford the stream on these wobbly rocks. |
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This shot was actually taken as we were
leaving on Tuesday. Here's Payaso pretending to ponder camping in this,
the first open camping spot we'd found by the stream. I guess this tiny
spot, right on the road hardly large enough to be a parking space, is
adequate for a day fisherman. Payaso left me here to hold the spot while
he scouted on ahead. Fortunately he ran into Ted the bear-hunter, who
tipped him off to where we actually ended up camping.
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| I got to meet Ted the next day. He chewed tobacco, had
about four teeth and a gun club hat, and his belly stretched his "I'm
the Dad" tee-shirt to make an almost horizontal shelf. Bear season
starts in the beginning of September, and Ted was staking out his allotted
two weeks of a National Forest camping space a week prior. He's about
60 and he'd shot his first bear when he was 16. But even though he's come
out every year since then, he's only shot one other bear. And that bear
was lost to him as it drowned in a pond.
He has total scorn for the so called bear-hunters using trucks and dogs. They cruise the roads until the dogs smell a bear. Then they let the dogs loose to tree the bear. The dogs have radio transmitter collars so these mighty bozos can find them and shoot the helpless bear trapped in the tree. Ted does his own stalking and just likes being out in the woods. He gets much of his winter's food from hunting deer. Sitting silently in full camo with his shotgun ready on his lap, he claims you could walk right past him and not know he was there. His "city raised" fourteen year old grandson was there to learn how to hunt. Ted said that as a child he threw-up when he first witnessed the bloody mess of his father sticking his arms up to the shoulders in a deer carcass to cut out its guts, and he expected his grandson to do the same. But that's just the way it is your first time. He freezes the deer meat after letting it hang for a couple of days to get the wild taste out of it. He said shooting is the easy part, dragging the hundred and eighty pound carcass, a couple of miles back to the road is the hard. Also squirrels are real good eating he can get anytime, just a few hundred yards outside town limit. |
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| Our two tents, the stone fire pit is in the background just at the edge of the stream. |
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You need to bring a little spade to bury your scat. You should do this at least two hundred yards away from the stream. Our camp was very neat and clean, but some of the other roadside camps we saw were littered with toilet paper. Yuck! I imagine anyone willing to carry all their stuff back and forth over the stream would tend to have a bit more consciousness about such things, leaving no trace, and all. The aluminum foil over the roll of toilet paper is to keep the rain and dew off. "How to Squat" by Josh Neufeld via Small Stories |
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| I found this tree fungus on one of my morning spade runs. |
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| Our camp was at the intersection of two streams and actually had a sandy beach leading up to a dammed area deep enough to immerse yourself. The water even in late August was very cold. Compared to our experience last month in the Adirondacks the bugs were very mild: no black or deer flies, and the mosquitoes were very light. Ted warned us about ticks but neither of us had any problem with them. |
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| I experimented holding a two diopter lens in front of my camera lens to get close-ups. Here's a bee grazing pollen from these wild daisies. Or at least I think they are daisies. |
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| Some fuzzy purple flower. If anyone knows the species please let me know. email |
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| Blue berries but not blueberries. Ted says the bears like 'em, but don't you eat them. |
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| We'd stopped at this Wal-Mart in Bennington to get the garden spade, as nothing else was open that late on Sunday afternoon. |
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The Bennington Battle Monument. - We'd asked some of the locals camped near us what this stone tower was all about. They said it was a lookout tower during the Civil War. But actually it was built well after the Civil War, starting in 1887, to commemorate a Revolutionary War Battle. Here's a statue of General John Stark who successfully defeated two detachments of General Burgoyne's invading British army. |
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| It had much more romance for me when I thought it was a lookout tower. The windows are like those in a castle, I was imagining they were made that way for armed defense. But still it is an impressive structure, the tallest in the State of Vermont, constructed of very large blocks of dolomite. If you get there before five you can ride an elevator to the top. We got there just after five. |
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