July 4, 2008 – A two-day trip to Chatham at the elbow of Cape Cod this week found sunny weather and winds a bit too brisk for an O'Day Daysailer to maneuver comfortably under sail.

Indeed the Coast Guard had red pennant flying to warn small craft of dangerous conditions.

That did not dampen enthusiasm nor stop an attempt each day to hoist main and jib, although the outings ended under the power of a 2hp kicker that brought boat and crew safely back to shore.

The O'Day is the latest in a short string of boats that have lived on trailers and have been launched around new England and, once, Quebec. First was Prelude, a Cape Dory 14; next Seabear, an O'Day Mariner; then the current boat, with a working name Anastasia, although that has more than the seven letters nautical custom and superstition prescribe.

Two days on the water were quite enjoyable, calling to mind similar days in years gone by, and promising more to come.

As Ratty said to Mole in "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame, "There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it."

True. True.

April 14, 2008 – Spring's here and winter's coming, in the endless cycle of seasons that roll forward through time, as years become a lifetime, and lifetimes become generations.

In recognition of winter's inevitability, John Mirick and Bob Paulson cut firewood two Saturdays in a row recently in the wet spring woods of Central Massachusetts. Mirick has cut in those woods since childhood, and his family for seven generations.

The first Saturday, a fresh fall of spring snow lay upon the floor of an old pasture where the two worked. They felled trees, bucked them into stove length, split fat logs into smaller chunks, and stacked the result. Lunch followed, chicken soup from the Mirick flock and sandwiches.

The following week, snow cover had become sparse, firm and dense. Mirick and Paulson concentrated on a single large oak that had toppled over the winter, some years after the town Light Department had cut the roots while clearing a culvert. Steady work with chainsaws, axe and maul reduced the 40-foot tree trunk to a cord of stovewood.

Lunch the second day was chicken salad, again from the Mirick flock, prepared by John's wife, Diane.

After lunch, another hour's work finished up the oak. The tree was 60 to 70 years old, and the process of cutting it into logs brought to mind Aldo Leopold's "Sand County Almanac."

That poetic reflection on the interdependence of life and land includes an essay about sawing an old lightning-struck oak into firewood. Leopold described how the saw cut backward in time through hundreds of years of tree rings, and what was happening in the world at various stages of the tree's existence.

Mirick's stories of stone walls, pastures, ponds, beavers, birds, farm life, changing landscape and other memories are also reminders of the connections between present and past. He is an attorney and a steward of land.

Eric Sloane's "A Reverence for Wood" is another book for people who heat with wood, spend time in the forest, or simply enjoy good writing about interesting things.

“The brakes don’t work all that well,” my friend called to me as I coaxed her neighbors’ aging blue pickup out of her driveway and onto her road – (excuse me, that’s “road”) – a half-mile of narrow gravel twisting steeply downhill through a series of hairpin turns toward civilization.

Well, she was right. The brakes didn’t work all that well.

In fact, they didn’t work at all.

I pumped the pedal to no effect, slammed the truck into first gear and focused on steering as we – truck and I – began picking up speed into the first of the sharp turns.

“Ohmigod,” I thought. “WhaddoIdonow?”

Let’s back up a bit. This is really a New England story. It involves a tree, neighbors, Title 5 – the septic system law, a roof, a furnace and the annual onset of cold weather.

My friend had a beautiful birch tree in her yard that, sad to say, overhung her roof and may have dropped leaves down her flue. Possibly this interfered with the smooth operation of her furnace; it certainly gave her oil company cover to deny any responsibility for the heating system’s spotty performance.

In any case winter was coming and the tree had to go. She organized a major operation involving a dashing contractor using the heavy equipment he had next door to put in a septic system for the neighbor who owned the pickup truck; the neighbor himself, a strapping blond fellow who notched the tree as the contractor pushed it away from the house with the bucket of his digger; and me, out-of-town muscle on hand to buck up the fallen tree into furnace logs once the dangerous work was done.

The final part of the operation involved hauling the brush downhill for burning by the neighbor’s wife who, judging by stories and the ash piles scattered around the hill, seems to enjoy that pastime.

All went according to plan until the truck, laden with brush, left the driveway and it became crystal clear the brakes didn’t work.

My friend also had said once, long ago, that when she plowed, she could stop easily simply by dropping the blade. That was a moot point just then, however, because the plow wasn’t on the truck.

Surprise was followed by alarm then a what-the-hell, it’s-not-my-truck feeling as we sped up and lurched around the first turn, picked up more speed and hit the second, and picked up even more speed heading into the final hairpin just before the road leveled into a long run-out.

Sometime in there it all became fun in a surreal way and I began to laugh, with visions of “Toad’s Wild Ride” flashing through my head.

At the same time, I also was thinking it would be good if the neighbor’s wife weren’t heading up the single-lane road at that particular moment.

As my friend watched me careen down the hill and disappear behind a screen of trees, several thoughts flashed through her mind, more or less in this order: “It’s like having the kids home; you never know what they’re going to do. I should have paid someone to take down the tree. Twice in Iraq and once in Afghanistan, and he’s going to die on a widow’s driveway in Ashby; the town will never stop talking about this.”

The truck made it around the final turn, barely, and stopped on the flat run-out. I turned around on the road and headed back uphill, rolling into her driveway, stopping and popping the transmission into park.

“So,” I asked, “was that like a test or something?”

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story was first published Sept. 18, 2005.

April 7, 2008 – "Why should we worry about a species that's going to hell?" mused Frank Gramlich, sitting in the comfortable living room of his home in Redfield, Maine, many years ago.

"They're more valuable than people."

Gramlich and Jack Swedberg of West Millbury, Mass. - two grizzled warriors of the wildlife wars - had gotten together to reminisce.

Fading daylight outside was replaced by muted lamplight inside the house where Gramlich and his wife had watched their six children grow up.

He served a first career in the U.S. Army - entering as an enlisted man, earning a battlefield commission at the Battle of the Bulge, retiring as a major - and then set out anew in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Why did he choose to spend the second half of his life saving wild creatures? "This is such a marvelous ... place," Gramlich said, meaning the Earth. "The thing is, now we've looked out into space, gone into our solar system, and there's nothing out there. It's a ... barren ... place. We haven't gotten any radio signals back from any of these other places. This might be the only christly life in the whole ... universe. So far as we know, it is, and to destroy any portion of it so it can't be retrieved ... "

He shook his head at the horror of the thought. "We have such a diverse wonderful ... planet. For millions of years, of course, there have been extinctions - they're going all the time, change and evolution - but all of a sudden in this century it's all started going.

"It was really a glorious place," Gramlich continued. "Maybe it's a glorious place now. Maybe people are more important, I don't know. People are great, but not in great numbers."

That evening nine years ago remains clear in memory: the clinking of ice in scotch glasses, the comfortable pauses in conversation, the meaning of the words that Gramlich and Swedberg exchanged.

It shares a place with other memories that resurface regularly - perhaps more regularly around the holidays, sitting through the longest nights of the year in front of a wood stove, contemplating another turn of the wheel of time.

Benton MacKaye, the last syllable pronounced to rhyme with bye, died in the same house in Shirley, Mass., where he played as a child.

Between birth and death he organized the creation of the Appalachian Trail, a hiking path from Maine to Georgia.

His 70-year-old mind never saw the allure of setting a speed record for the route.

"The idea of the trail is to look, and to see, and to really see what you see," he said one evening in the late '70s, sitting in his living room with his friend Lucy.

"If there ever were a race along the trail, I would give the prize to the slowest," he said.

David Brower, archdruid of the conservation movement, visited Worcester, Mass., a few years back. Perhaps best-known for his staunch defense of the Grand Canyon against a mind-boggling proposal to dam it for hydropower, he also made his mark in mountaineering and skiing.

Over the years, Brower has been right on all the important issues - a fact that did not make him easier to work with.

After he won the Grand Canyon dam war, the Sierra Club booted him as executive director. He founded the more radical Friends of the Earth, which also found him too difficult, whereupon he established the Earth Island Institute.

During his Worcester visit, 80-plus years of perspective on the human experience were evident in a series of wry observations.

"In my lifetime, the population of the earth has tripled. California has gone up by a factor of 12 - which is just hopeless. The world as a whole has used four times as many resources in my lifetime as in all previous history.

"These are things that can't continue, but our institutions think they can - universities, corporations, churches, consumers. It can't go on. There isn't enough left to play that hand again. We've played it, and we've played it in a way that's devastated the Earth," Brower said.

To Adlai Stevenson, among the brightest of the 20th century's leaders, goes the task of speaking last.

In his farewell speech to the United Nation, Stevenson said, "We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and I will say the love we give our fragile craft.

"We cannot maintain half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave of the ancient enemies of mankind, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."

Feb. 4, 2008 – The Blizzard of '78 began slowly in the wee hours of Feb. 6, 1978 with icy precip that coated roads deeply by commute time Monday morning and made driving impossible for many and tough for all.

The snow kept falling for 33 hours, dropping many feet across the region, accumulating to record amounts in some places by the time it ended on Feb. 7.

People remember where they were, and where they were stuck. Some recall trying to get to work Monday morning. Some gave up; a few walked, skied or hitch-hiked on snowplows.

Civilization as we know it did not collapse, but it slumped a little. A few New England cities took on the appearance of the movie "Day After Tomorrow." Interstate highways became parking lots. A nursing home in West Boylston was evacuated when power failed. The roof of the U.S. Post Office on Salem Street in Worcester collapsed, and other roofs across the region sagged under the weight of snow.

The Blizzard of 78 left a landscape deep in snow and set up fantastic cross-country skiing for the rest of the winter. Until then, the skiing had been only so-so.

Sept. 9, 2007 – Wildlife fairly popped out of the landscape this morning on a drive through Central Massachusetts.

A family of loons – two adults and their fully grown chick – swam on Wachusett Lake below Wachusett Mountain State Resevation.

It raised the question in an observer's mind whether these were the Paradise Pond loons that had nested in 2005 and 2006 on that busy pond in Leominster State Forest, but not this summer. They had appeared in June, hung tight for a few weeks to their little nesting island a few hundred yards from Route 31, then disappeared.

Just up the road from Wachusett Lake, a porcupine ambled along the verge, slow and happy and unconcerned over the attention it attracted. Porcupines are fairly harmless except to dogs who confuse their slowness with lack of defense.

And further along, a family of turkeys browsed for insects in the wet grass on the edge of a field. The young birds were of a size that indicated they were from a second clutch, laid and hatched later in summer.

Some weeks ago, a family of deer fed in a field near the center of Princeton. They watched a car stop and a window roll down and a camera poke out, before turning and bounding gracefully across the field.

Fortune favors the prepared mind – or so the saying goes – and keeping the camera close to hand has become routine.

July 30, 2007 – The bike lost headway as its front tire came up against a moss-covered rock protruding 5 inches above soft ground in the middle of a woodsy trail, appeared to think about forging ahead, and stopped. Bike and rider teetered momentarily and then, with a sense of inevitability, toppled over slowly, ever so slowly. Both wound up sprawled on soft ground, covered in mud and leafy debris.

It was a normal day on a quiet single-track trail through the woods of Central Massachusetts.

And it was one of several falls that left the rider banged up, a bit bloody and thoroughly happy.

A companion was equally happy, though more skilful and less battered from the outing, which lasted an hour and a half and covered just over 9 miles.

The ride began with half a mile of downhill along a gravel driveway, then a mile or so on paved roads past one of many reservoirs in Ashby, then onto a private gravel road for another mile, and yet another mile of woods road. From there, the ride moved onto several miles of single-track trail over private land that included woods and hayfields.

The owner, a gentleman farmer, wondered if the fields were to the riders’ liking, and was assured they were.

“I cut them a week ago,” he said. “I wait until the bobolinks are through with nesting.”

These cheerful birds are done with the fields by mid-July.

The farmer doesn’t like ATVs to trespass on his property, but welcomes neighbors who mountain bike. He tried a friend’s Trek 6700 last year, and a few weeks later had a mountain bike of his own.

After a few minutes’ chat, the ride resumed, back out to a paved road and a fast downhill home.

That particular day - yesterday, Sunday - was hot and muggy. In addition to water-filled Camelbaks, the two riders each carried a water bottle filled with Gatorade to replenish electrolytes lost through perspiration.

Each wore a helmet, for safety, and gloves to protect the hands in case of a tumble.

Each wore bike shorts, padded for comfort.

One wore clipless shoes that affixed to the bike pedals, the other wore plain low-cut hiking shoes.

Both wore eye protection – in this case, sunglasses.

In short, both were decked out and ready to ride.

It is said that speed is the biker’s friend, although the proper word may be momentum, as it carries one over and through obstacles. Indeed, that seemed to have been the case with the rock against which one biker's tire came to rest just before his bike toppled over.

The other biker repeated that wisdom to her companion as he lay upon the ground, spattered in mud.

Oh well.

April 22, 2007 – New England continues its transition from winter to spring, as days grow longer and warmer, and the world is poised to burst into leaf and bud.

Among the first of the spring wildflowers to appear is purple trillium, its sharp green shoots piercing the layer of leaves that lie upon the forest floor and bursting into flower within days, to be followed over the season by a host of other plants. Photo: Trillium erectum f. lutens, a rare, light-colored variety of purple trillium that grows in certain soils.

Paul Somers, Massachusetts state botanist with the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program, described the succession of wildflowers that grace the region's landscape.

Besides trillium, he said, early arrivals include bloodroot, hepaticas, dwarf ginseng, trout-lily, false hellebore, skunk cabbage, violets, anemones, bellworts, solomon's-seal and sedges.

Somers said lady's-slipper follows in late May or early June; sedges and ferns bloom through the summer; milkweed blooms from mid-summer into September; asters come in late summer or fall; cardinal-flower blooms in streambeds in August; and witch hazel is the last wildflower to bloom, in late fall.

“I like wildflowers because they're beautiful and all around us and I can go anywhere on vacation and see wildflowers. For me it's a wonderful avocation and vocation at the same time,” Somers said.

“Wildflowers are interesting. They're an understudied part of biology, and there's a lot more room for exploration. Plants make up such a large part of any ecosystem. They shape that environment in a major way because of their volume – or biomass – on the landscape. Plant communities are going to influence what animals are present just by the pure structure they create, the layers of the above-ground universe but also the root system and interactions at the soil level,” he said. Photo: Erythronium americanum, trout lily, in full flower.

The wildflowers Somers listed above are a scant handful of the 2,814 vascular plant species in Massachusetts – 1,538 native species and 1,276 non-native species.

Vascular plants have specialized stem tissues that carry food and water, and most people would consider most of these plants to be wildflowers.

“All flowering plants are vascular,” Somers said, “but vascular plants include ferns and conifers, which are fewer in number than flowering species.” Massachusetts has 87 species of ferns and fern allies, and 25 species of conifers.

“Probably most people consider herbaceous plants – soft-tissued, low-growing plants – as wildflowers; others consider azaleas, which are woody shrubs. I'm inclusive; flowering plants are good enough for me to be considered a wildflower,” Somers said.

Somers says that some plant species are endangered, and that efforts to protect them from extinction are important for many reasons. “For me, the strongest one is we don't know what the role of a single organism is in this web of life. We don't know what the loss of a species will mean,” he said. Photo: Dicentra cucullaria, Dutchman's breeches.

William. E. Brumback, conservation director with the New England Wild Flower Society, works with rare and endangered species of wildflowers.

“People don't realize there are endangered plants here. You look around you, plants are the backbone of all those habitats out there, the backbone of our landscape, so we need to figure out what part of our heritage we want to protect, and how to go about doing that,” Brumback said.

“Nobody can say if we lost this one particular species, the world is going to fall apart. It's not that simple. But for me there are a host of reasons to conserve plants. There are aesthetic reasons: plants are beautiful. There are good scientific reasons: What makes them tick? There are philosophical and ethical reasons: These are species just like we are and have as much right to live on Earth as we do,” Brumback said.

Many books offer information on wildflowers, including:

Newcomb's Wildflower Guide: An Ingenious New Key System for Quick, Positive Field Identification of the Wildflowers, Flowering Shrubs and Vines of New England. By Lawrence Newcomb and Gordon Morrison. $19.95.

A Field Guide to Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-Central North America. By Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny. Peterson Field Guides. $19.

Photo: Caltha palustris, cowslip or marsh marigold.

The Vascular Plants of Massachusetts. By Bruce A. Sorrie and Paul Somers. A list of plants by county, published by MassWildlife's Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program. Available from Field Headquarters, Westboro MA, 01581.

A Guide to Invasive Plants in Massachusetts. By Paul Somers, Rachel Kramer, Karen Lombard, and William Brumback. The 66 species that the Department of Agricultural Resources recently added to its list of Noxious Weeds and thus is regulating in terms of importation, propagation and sale. Available from Field Headquarters, Westboro MA, 01581.

Places to see wildflowers include:

The Worcester County Horticultural Society operates Tower Hill Botanic Garden, 132 acres of rolling land in Boylston overlooking Wachusett Reservoir. Tower Hill includes a Wildlife Garden, with native flora, a vernal pool, a viewing station and eight bird feeders.

Tower Hill is open Tuesday through Sunday and on Monday holidays, year round, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults, $5 for seniors and for people 18 and younger, and free to members and children under 6.

The New England Wild Flower Society operates Garden in the Woods, a marvelous wildflower garden in Framingham, where more than 1,600 species of plants grow in a woodland setting. The Garden is open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily April 15 to June 15, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, June 16 to Oct. 31. Admission is $7 for Adults; $5 for seniors; $3 for children, and free for members.

March 5, 2007 – "Let's ski Tuckerman, dad," my son, Alan, said one spring a few years back.

It was the kind of offer that had become infrequent as he aged from child to man, looking ahead to his own life, and leaving mine behind. So we did.

It's a New England thing to do, when the season winds down at the downhill resorts, the days lengthen, the weather warms and the winter's snows settle on the steep walls of Mount Washington's Tuckerman Ravine.

On the day we hiked in, several feet of powder coated the Bowl's snowpack. The Crevasse had disappeared - dangerously concealed under new snow. The Lip was out of bounds, and volunteer ski patrollers were warning of avalanche danger from unstable powder across the right side of the Bowl.

About 780 skiers made the trek into the ravine that day, lugging skis, ski boots, winter gear, water and food up the 2.4-mile trail from the parking lot in Pinkham Notch on Route 16.

Several hundred of them were hard at it around 12:30 p.m. when old legs staggered over the final hump and hobbled to a halt so old eyes could feast on a view that was nothing short of spectacular.

Lunch Rocks at the base of the Bowl were exposed and covered by dozens of people resting, changing from hiking boots to ski boots, eating, putting on warmer clothes, taking pictures or just taking in the whole scene.

Frequent icy blasts reminded the faithful that they were, indeed, high on New England's highest peak - hours and miles from the comforts of civilization.

Blue sky, white clouds and wind-driven snow framed the top of the ravine - up which climbed lines of skiers, skis or snowboards over their shoulders, step-kicking their way toward the upper reaches of the snow.

Lunch Rocks afforded a good vantage to watch the action - up to 20 minutes of climbing for each downhill run lasting less than a minute, even for those few who took their time.

Sitting on the bus-size boulders also afforded time to reflect back over the years of coming to Tuckerman Ravine in the spring - of Toni Matt's incredible - and unintended - schuss straight down the headwall at more than 90 mph, running summit to base in 6 minutes 29 seconds during the 1939 Inferno race, most famous of the series held in the 1930s.

Thoughts rambled back over the early years of climbing into the ravine, when young legs and lungs drove uphill at furious speed, unstopping, passing most others on the trail and being passed by no one.

And, inevitably, the restless mind compared those times with the body's performance this time - when most climbers flashed past at furious speed, and only a few had proved to be slower.

Well, perhaps the slower pace had permitted greater enjoyment of the passing scenery.

The Presidential Range, high peaks of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, from north to south: Mount Madison 5,367 feet, Mount Adams 5,774, Mount Jefferson 5,712, Mount Clay 5,533, Mount Washington 6,288, Mount Monroe 5,384, Mount Franklin 5,004, Mount Eisenhower 4,761.

Climbed Mount Washington for the first time at the age of 25, in 1972, with Lee Spiller, brother of Beverly, uncle to my two sons, Alan and Ben.

It was - and is - a magic world of alpine plants, clear sounds, clean air, sharp images and serious consequences.

The early climbs began at the Appalachian Mountain Club lodge at Pinkham Notch - "Porky Gulch" - and followed the "Climbers' Trail," a rough path alongside the Cutler River, closed in the late '70s because of severe erosion. The Tuckerman Ravine Trail is a wide, flat, stony swath between the river and the John Sherburne Trail, a ski trail cut by the CCC in the 1930s. The Huntington Ravine Trail, which forks off the Tuckerman Ravine Trail, is much less used and retains something of the feel of the old Climbers' Trail.

I remember still the anger of the hutmaster at the AMC lodge when asked where to camp safely above treeline. He launched into a self-absorbed rant about "the most dangerous weather in the world" that imparted no useful information about traveling safely in the mountains. Spiller and I ascended the Tuckerman Ravine Trail, up the Headwall, past Lakes of the Clouds Hut, where the price of a night's lodging, dinner and breakfast was a stunning $37.50 apiece - at a time when my weekly pay was $120. We descended the Amonoosuc Ravine Trail, passing a series of inviting trailside campsites each occupied by happy tenters, and finally thrashed our way to a flat outcrop where we collapsed, exhausted, into a fitful sleep.

Cross-country skied in Tuckerman Ravine in the 1970s with Beverly, the only two people in the bowl that winter day, overwhelmed by the windy alpine solitude.

Rock climbed on the Pinnacle in Huntington Ravine in the 1970s with Rick Murnik, who later was head of the ski patrol at Loon Mountain, and now is a director of the Bartlett Rescue Squad.

Climbed the Huntington Ravine Trail alone, one October in the late '70s, reaching the Alpine Garden around 4 p.m., and watching the sun set as I trudged south toward Lion Head, acutely aware of the 20-degree temperature, keen wind and the need to proceed carefully across serious terrain.

Took an American Avalanche Institute course there one winter, learning that history is as important in the mountains as in human affairs - at least weather history - and how to gauge the safety of slopes by digging down and examining the layers of snow. The instructors, who included Jed Williamson and Peter Lev, revealed the mysteries of snow crystal evolution, as snowflakes change constantly from formation to melting, becoming along the way as round and unstable as ball bearings.

Climbed King Ravine on Mount Adams with Spiller in the 1970s, on a day when no others were there.

Telley skied in Gulf of Slides in the 1980s with Spiller, again the only two on the mountainside.

Rambled as a family on Mount Washington in the 1980s, on trails crowded with summer hikers.

Drove up the Auto Road one spring in the early 1980s, to ski the East Snowfield with Murnik and friends.

Drove up the Auto Road one summer in the1980s with Ben, and walked downhill to meet Spiller and his wife, Deborah Strohbeen, for a night at Lakes of the Clouds Hut - price by then, $48 apiece.

In April of 1982, clambered into Tuckerman Ravine to watch the fifth or sixth running of the Inferno, the summit-to-base ski race first held in 1933 and most famous for Toni Matt's miscalculation in its third running, in 1939, that led to a straight schuss down the Headwall. Wind and fog prompted cancellation of the 1982 event. It has been held in various forms over the years.

Rode the Cog Railway to the summit in the 1980s, with the locomotive belching black coal smoke the entire way in the most extraordinary juxtaposition of clean mountain air and gross industrial pollution. Dartmouth students mooned the Cog as it passed, and the train crew responded by pelting the students with coal.

Traversed Jefferson in the mid-1980s, starting at a trailhead in Jefferson Notch, uphill and across to Castellated Ridge, over the summit and down Ridge of the Caps.

Climbed Washington one winter in the early 1990s, when the summit poked through clouds, the temperature was 17 degrees, and no wind stirred.

Enjoyed the heck out of Nick Howe’s terrific book, “Not Without Peril,” which recounts generations of mishaps on the Northeast’s highest peak.

Snow climbed in Huntington Ravine with Alan in the early 2000s.

In July of 2005, climbed the Amonoosuc Ravine Trail on the west side of Mount Washington with Shelley, starting just below the Cog Railway Base and following the Amonoosuc River through lovely mixed hardwoods. The path passed a bronze plaque affixed to a boulder, in memory of Herbert Judson Young, Dartmouth '32, who lost his life nearby on Dec. 1, 1928. We added our offerings of small stones to the pile atop the boulder that held the plaque.

On Oct. 22, 2004, climbed King Ravine with Dr. Alan Harris of West Boylston, Mass., and Bungee, his Australian cattle dog, who bounced up the boulders. Before that impressive feat - which really had to be seen to be appreciated - Bungee ranged through the woods on either side of the trail, bringing a little excitement into the lives of the fat, hiker-fed chipmunks who had grown complacent and lax about the Darwinian realities of life on this planet.

Bungee also brought excitement into our lives by finding two black bears - mama and cub - eating berries and beechnuts alongside the trail. Harris was astonished - and quite pleased - that for once in her life Bungee responded immediately to his call to come. The bears lumbered off through the mast-laden woods in search of a quieter place to lay in stores for the long winter ahead, and we hustled up the trail, Bungee on a leash for a bit.