In late July I wrote about monitoring Stairs Mountain for the US Forest Service.
In August I monitored two more locations in the Sandwich Range: Camp Rich and Square Ledge.
Camp Rich is near the peak of Mt Passaconaway. In addition to monitoring how many people passed through the area, the USFS asked me to monitor solitude by recording (a) how many tent sites were within hearing/seeing distance of each other, and (b) how many people I encountered on the trail. In both cases, the answer was: zero. The picture above was taken while I was hiking out, and on the left, you can see Mt Paugus and Mt Chororua extending to the east.
The next day I re-entered the Sandwich Wilderness and hiked to Square Ledge, which is a known nesting site for peregrine falcons. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the monitoring location and a tree was on fire! There were no flames but somebody had dumped their campfire ring (rocks, ashes, and all) underneath the root system of the tree and the underside of the tree was smoldering. Fortunately, I had a cell phone signal and hopped on the phone with the Fire Service for USFS. I was able to text some photos and leave a note for anybody else who happened to walk by. A rainstorm was moving in, so the USFS decided to come out and inspect the site after the rains came. The picture below highlights the situation.
After an adventurous two days of monitoring, I spent the following weekend doing a hike to Greenleaf Hut at the base of Mt Lafayette. The pictures below show what a beautiful location it is (which was partly covered over by clouds on our hike out!).
I was fortunate to use up all of my Dell volunteer hours hiking and can't wait to do it again in 2018.
Steve
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