DIY Gear ~ Sleeping Quilts

Over the weekend, I finished sleeping quilts for E and Z for this summer's Colorado Trail hike.

The idea behind the sleeping quilt is that it's lighter than a sleeping bag, allows for ventilation, so you don't sweat and then get cold during the night, and you don't lie on top of any of the insulation, smashing it down. I made one for myself last summer and tested it out on our two-week Colorado camping trip. It worked really well, mostly. The two drawbacks were that there's nothing between you and your sleeping mat, so if it's too warm to wear sleeping clothes with long sleeves and legs, you stick to the mat, which is not that pleasant. Also, I was cold when we camped at Sand Dunes, where it got down to the 30s at night.

I'm a little nervous about being cold on our trip, and even more nervous about our kids being cold. Lightweight backpacking philosophy is to have a lighter bag and wear your warm layers while you sleep. I hope that works. Ray Jardine, the godfather of lightweight backpacking and the manufacturer of these sleep quilt kits, claims to have used this same bag on a trip across Antarctica, so...it should be warm enough. Just to be on the safe side, I added a layer of insulation that I had cut off the make the bag the right length to the torso area of E and Z's bags.


The quilts are not difficult to make, just fussy. And I don't do that well with fussy. Making them does give me a great appreciation for the workers in sweatshops who manufacture our clothes and gear. Now I just have two more to make and the countdown is on!

Wild Wednesday ~ Woodland Flowers

We didn't go hiking this weekend--E and Z requested a break from hiking on their birthday weekend--and, truthfully, though Saturday's weather was gorgeous, it was kind of nice to hang at home (until Sunday afternoon, when those same birthday boys convinced their parents to take them to the movies). We did, however, get out in our own woods. Saturday morning I had a great bird walk, with sightings of a yellow warbler, black-and-white warbler, ovenbird, black-throated green warbler, yellow-bellied sapsucker, and an immature bald eagle. The birds Sunday morning were more reserved, but later in the day I got a great, naked-eye view of a rose-breasted grossbeak.

And the woodland flowers are starting to come in bloom. I've been seeing red trillium and trout lily along the trail I walk when E and Z have baseball practice, but we don't have any of either of those flowers growing in our woods (not that I've found so far), so this weekend was really the first of the woodland flowers for us.

Not too far down our trail, I spied this Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphullum), a flower I just love for its exotic shape. It's the first one I've seen this year.



We also have two different violets growing in the woods, which I will someday key out.

Right beside the river, I spied this little white flower growing, which I thought on first glance was a wild strawberry. But on closer inspection, I saw it was something else, which I'm pretty sure is wood anemone (Anemone quinquefolia). It's always a surprise and delight to discover new (to me) flowers growing on our little patch of earth.

Trees are starting to flower now, too. The plum in our yard is snowy with blossoms and buzzing with early bees. And along the edges of the woods, common shadbush, or serviceberry (Amelanchier arborea), one of the earliest flowering trees, are in bloom (though fading fast).

The cherries are getting close to ready to flower (I think these are black cherry, Prunus serotina, but I'll have to double-check that).

And not nearly flowering, but pretty with its deeply parallel-veined leaves is the alternate-leaved dogwood.



Finally, not a flower at all, but a different sort of natural beauty, I found the picked-clean skull and jaw of a rodent carcass I had seen here sometime during the winter (I thought I'd shared a picture of it, but I don't see it when I scroll back through my archives). Good to know that the nutrients are getting cycled back into the woods. One of these days, if I remember to, I'll take my skull identification materials with me on a hike and see if I can figure out what the unfortunate animal was (I suspect maybe chipmunk; it seemed too big for a mouse or vole).

What's wild in your neck of the woods this week?

Elevensies

E and Z turn eleven today, which means it's official: we are careening toward a house full of teenage boys.



In honor of our upcoming epic camping trip, I thought I'd share this a picture from their first camping trip, when they were about 16 months old. Have you ever taken two one-year-olds camping? It was like they were circuit training and their fitness stations went like this:

• try to pull the flaming Coleman stove off of the picnic table onto your head
• eat dirt
• run headlong toward the flaming fire pit, on legs that only learned to walk two months earlier
• try to pull the other Coleman stove onto your head
• barrel into the camp road every time a truck rounds the corner
• eat gravel
• stand on the picnic table bench and slip down between the table and the bench, whacking your chin on the way down
• eat leaves
• climb the six-foot high rock behind the campsite, even though you just learned to walk two months earlier
• repeat

I remember saying after we got home that running after the twins in an effort to keep them out of harm's way had been more exhausting than if we'd hiked 12 miles each day. Looking back on it now, I think that weekend must have been more exhausting than our whole upcoming six-week trip will be. I think I've got a bad case of PTSD (post-toddler stress disorder), but gosh, aren't they cute? Those jeans are killing me.

Back then, I could never have imagined that one day they would be eleven years old, and no longer walking tornadoes (well, most of the time). And now I can hardly believe that they were ever that small. Or chubby. Or blond! Parenting is such a strange trip.

Love Bugs

I have an essay about dead bugs and affection up at Mothers Always Write today. Please check it out!

Mother's Day Hike ~ West Branch Preserve

Little bluets (Housonia caerulea)

Thank you all for the positive response to my last post. It rocketed right up almost to the top most-viewed post. Now I know all I have to do to get people to read my blog is make big, dramatic announcements. And now you know why we've been going on all those hikes lately. They're not quite as long or rigorous as they should be for training purposes, but they're the best we can fit into our schedule.

Sessile-leaved bellwort (Uvularia sessilifolia)

On Sunday we headed out for a short hike after a breakfast of eggs benedict and horchata made for me by Z and C. I had in mind a fire tower we'd been to some years ago, but I couldn't remember exactly where it was. I found a fire tower on the map in the town I thought it might be in, so we headed there and hiked up the road only to find the fire tower had been replaced by a cell phone tower. While technology can bring us lots of really amazing virtual experiences (you might be reading this post on a cell phone right now), it's kind of sad when it displaces an actual, visceral experience like climbing up the stairs of a fire tower and looking out over trees and hills to see mountains in another state.


Anyway, after the fire tower letdown, we headed down the road to a nearby preserve. It's an area we hadn't been to before and didn't know what to expect. It turned out to be really beautiful, with a remote feeling to it--very quiet and mossy and wild. Maybe the low, nearly-raining clouds added to that feeling.


We didn't bring any food with us, and hadn't planned for an extended trek, so we just did a quick out-and-back on part of the trail, but from the map it looks like you could get a several-mile hike in if you followed all of the loops. We might go back soon, better prepared, to do just that.

 

Rosy twisted stalk (Streptopus roseus)

Big News

I have made the decision to quit my job at the end of June, spend the summer with my husband and kids hiking the 480-mile Colorado Trail, and write a book.

That's the elevator pitch. Here's a little more about what I'm thinking to make such a crazy, life-altering, possibly poverty-inducing leap:

Why the Colorado Trail? Why now? What's this book going to be about?
Twenty years ago, two young kids who had been dating for about a year, ten months of which was long-distance, embarked on a two-month hiking trip which tested them in ways unimaginable and cemented their love and relationship forever. Those kids were C and me, and we expected our lives to continue on the adventurous path on which they had begun, but instead we worked a series of crappy jobs, moved back-and-forth between Colorado and Maine, got real jobs, got married, had kids, built a house, settled down.

Meanwhile, exactly five years ago, my career, such as it was, completely tanked (or, more accurately, was torpedoed). I won't go into details, because it's an ugly chapter I'm looking forward to putting behind me (though if you google me you will get an inkling of what took place). In the years since then, I got my MFA in creative writing, completed the Maine Master Naturalist training course, and started teaching nature writing and nature journaling workshops, while plugging away at writing and publishing short stories and essays with nature/environment/motherhood themes.

I'd like to say I was taking adversity and turning it into opportunity, but in reality I was staying in perpetual motion just to stay sane. I was depressed and miserable a lot of the time, but I was a highly functional depressed person, maintaining a facade of normalcy, even high-productivity (except the times when I cracked, which C will tell you is not a pretty sight).

Somewhere along the way, I got the idea of going back and revisiting the Colorado Trail 20 years later and writing a book about the changes that had taken place in Colorado over the intervening two decades--wild fires, bark beetle infestations, drought, mine waste spills, population influx, pot legalization--as well as those that had taken place in my life during that time. It took literally years (and one of those crack-up episodes) to convince C that this was something I had to do and that I was doing it whether he was on board or not, so he got on board quick and now we're doing it!!

I've been very distracted with planning and prepping and daydreaming over the last few months. I've been neglecting not only my own blog but also my usual blog haunts, instead binge-reading trail diaries of thru-hikers on various trails. But now that the secret's out, I think I'll be back here more regularly, and my blog fare will become even more eclectic, with gear lists and food prep and training and other trip-planning details, along with some of my usual material. I long ago threw out the advice that a blog should focus on a single topic, so why start now?

As for blogging from the trail, I've maintained from the start that I want to completely unplug for the trip, because I want to engage fully with the natural world and with my children (this is hard to do with screen in hand) and also I don't want to dissipate my creative energy that should go toward journaling with the book in mind. But, I've had a lot of people ask me if I'll post from the trail, so my determination to unplug may wane. In either case, C plans to vlog the trip (i.e. video blog at his youtube channel), so be sure to follow our adventures there.

There's so much more to say but this is already a ridiculously long post and if you've read this far, stay tuned for more news as the day grows nearer.

Wild Wednesday ~ Leaves Unfurling and Fungus

For a long time, I felt like spring snuck up on me. Like I'd wait for it and wait for it all winter, and suddenly one day the grass would be green and the trees all had leaves and the flowers were in bloom and I somehow missed the steps that got us there. While it was lovely to finally exist in a green and vibrant world, it was also a little like walking into a movie at the climax, having missed the rising action. Over the last few years, I've become more aware of the gradual buildup of the season, the subtle signs that show the world awakening in new life, and this year, especially, I've been keeping an eye on the trees as their buds split and release the year's new growth.

Each tree has a unique pattern of buds and those buds each open in their own time and fashion. I love the pink-bordered symmetry of these striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum) buds.

American beech (Fagus grandifolia) buds are long and narrow, pointed on both ends ("cigar-shaped" is the usual description), and right now they seem to be telescoping open. The remind me of those things we used to make as kids by rolling up several sheets of newspaper, cutting a fringe at one end and sliding the sheets apart into a kind of scepter (I tried to find a picture of this online and it does not appear to be a thing. I guess I'll have to try to recreate them with my kids, so you know what I'm talking about).

I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember what kind of tree these leaves came from. American hophornbeam, maybe? Anyway, they look so cheerful and ready for spring I had to include them anyway.

Of course, along with spring things, I continue to see many sights that have been around all winter, like these polypore fungi. I think this is violet toothed polypore (Trichaptum biforme). I've seen it all over the place all winter, though I haven't seen any actual violet specimens (and I keep forgetting to look for the teeth).

Another fungus I learned this winter, which is easy to spot because birch trees are easy to spot, is the birch polypore (Piptoporus botulinus). Learning natural history can be a slow process (although I'm beginning to think I'm just slow at everything), and learning fungus seems to be extra slow, so I'll be happy to get two species per year.