Strange litter on Mt. Wachusett

[Davehiker]

Today I saw a 30 pound dumbbell next to the trail part way up the Old Indian Trail. I usually pick up litter, but I didn't touch that. Do you suppose someone will be back for it?!!!

OK, what's the craziest thing you've found?

 

[Woody]

Not mine but I have hiked Wachusett often with a 20 lb sand bag in my pack. It is a good little workout. Someone probably got a little over ambitous.

 

[rup]

I ran into a guy at the Madison Hut ~20 years ago who was carrying 30 lbs of dumbell/barbell weight in this pack over the N. Presis. He challenged everyone in the hut to see if they could keep 5 or 10 lbs in each hand with arms extended from the shoulder (in a 'T' fashion) for 2 minutes. Wierd, but I bit. It was raining like hell outside and needed entertainment. He called me 'Clark Kent' after I did it. Everyone else crashed quickly.

 

[una_dogger]

Not found but taken

Well, when I worked for IES
www.ecostudies.org
we did lots of forest ecology research in the Catskills. Our sites were pretty far off the beaten path and well hidden. Every fall, we'd lug 50 or so laundry baskets out to our sites to serve as "litterfall" collectors -- we'd let the leaves fall into them, then bring them back to the lab, and do all sorts of nutrient, carbon and biomass measurements on the leaves, which we would scale up to the landscape level and arrive at hectare based nutrient budgets for the entire forest. OK...on to the good part..someone in the Catskills stole our litterbaskets...we are talking like years of research nearly down the tubes (ok an exaggeration but lost a year of the leaf litter part of the nutrient cycle). Who steals laundry baskets? Fifty of 'em!!? Guess somebody REALLY had alot of dirty laundry piled up.

 

[woodsxc]

Marty the Moose in the Porcupine Mountains:

A cement moose with this inscribed on the bottom-

Guess what! You go me
I'm Marty the Moose!
Just slip me in the top
of another one's pack
and watch them go marching,
STRAIGHT TO THE BACK!


Actually, it was my younger brother Kevin who found Marty. When we were in Colorado though, I did find Monster Rock, 5-6 pound rock with part of a monster face drawn on it. With my dad's blessings, I hid Monster Rock deep in my youngest brother's pack and let him carry it for about four miles. When we got home, I cleaned off what soot I could, added horns, and wrote some instructions (do not throw, hide in others' packs, etc). Monster Rock is my baby

 

[elvios lincoln]

Wachusetts

Did you notice if all the trails have re-opened. They had signs up after last December's ice storm.

 

[Davehiker]

As far as I know, all the trails are open. I've hiked almost all of them recently. Some have been cut out with a saw, but have some brush on them, and I noticed that a section of Old Indian (between Semuhanna and West Side) had a few big windfalls that still need to be cut up, but the woods are open enough that all can be by-passed without trouble. Another trail that I didn't check that was very bad earlier was Bicentennial between the Loop Trail and the High Meadow Trail. No snow except a few patches on the ski slopes now.