This region is aswarm with groundhogs (aka woodchucks). Groundhogs are a type of large rodent in the marmot family of ground squirrels. They happen to be rather large ground squirrels; Chuck here is a relatively small one, about the size of a large cat. Another one living in my back yard, Groundhogzilla, is about four times his size.
Groundhogs like to nibble on garden plants, and what with the large gardens around the house they can be a bit of a problem here. A live trap is used on occasion when one gets too destructive. Chuck had gotten bold and taken to sitting on the front porch eating the petunias. And so it was decided that Chuck needed to be evicted.
The trap was placed where Chuck was wont to roam, and in a few days I found him sitting in it looking most disgruntled.
Chuck in action!
And so Chuck was taken for a ride in a car to a nice area of woods and fields and streams about ten miles outside of town, where he was released upon the unsuspecting world. Now he's hopefully gallivanting about in happy groundhog style out there, eating things other than peoples' gardens.
So far, Groundhogzilla has been behaving himself. He wanders off to the meadow next door to munch on things, so there are no plans to trap him. It would be interesting to try, though. I think we'll need a bigger boat. . .errrr, I mean a bigger cage.
On a different note, Wolf Hills has started its annual Mountain Festival, the yearly event held to commemorate the desire of local merchants to get lots of money from tourists. Opening day kicked off with a parade down Main Street, featuring lots of Shriners and lots of clowns.
Here is the front of the parade, complete with big lumpy weird mascot thing.
There were also these odd miniature trucks charging down the road.
What would any parade with Shriners be, of course, without their miniature precision driving teams?
And what would any parade be without these guys?
So now the streets of the town are full of tourists and will probably remain so for the next few weeks. Various events and activities shall occur around town, and all will be happy and carefree and merry. Or something like that. So far I've seen the parade, an airplane and car show, several concerts, various demonstrations of Colonial-era and Civil War-era this and that, and other stuff. This upcoming weekend is to have an overall "Celtic" theme to it, so perhaps I'll be able to record lots more bagpipe music for all my Scottish friends to enjoy.
This afternoon, though, I went out of town and trekked southwards to seek out new life and new civilisations around a certain geographical feature I'd heard mentioned a few days earlier: Backbone Rock.
No relation to Brokeback Mountain, as far as I am aware.
Backbone rock is a ridge that juts out from Holston Mountain. I have no idea how it formed; information on it seems to be very, very limited. A small river called Beaverdam Creek flows along one side, around the end, and then back up the other side. The ridge is about a hundred feet tall on average, though it varies considerably. A tunnel was blasted through it in 1901 so as to allow a railroad track to pass through; the train has long since stopped running, though, and these days a road passes through the convenient tunnel instead.
I decided to climb up to the top of it and see what was to be seen. The entire ridge is perhaps a mile or so long, but at the top is about ten feet wide. So it forms a sort of narrow rocky pier jutting out into the trees that you can walk along.
This is that same bridge, looking upwards from about halfway up the side.
If you look closely, you can see a team of climbers with their ropes and pulleys and pitons and climbing packs and hammers and picks and whatnot, all set up to climb the slope beneath the bridge. If you could look even closer you'd see that they looked rather annoyed, because I climbed up to the top, wandered around up there, and then meandered back down again before they even got halfway up. They were some of the slowest climbers I've ever seen.
Compared to climbing up, climbing back down is generally either extremely fast and easy and unhealthy or else extremely difficult and tiring. So I decided to just walk down the hiking trail that goes down off the ridge rather than climb back down.
The cliff face had lots and lots of nice hand-holds, but most of them were also full of spiders. Which made climbing a bit more interesting.
There were also lots of other fun Naturey things to admire. Such as this tree, which has been very thoroughly visited by woodpeckers.
There were plenty of flowers still blooming, too.
The place was rather damp and shady, so there were plenty of mushrooms. I restrained any urge I might have felt to nibble on them.
I even spotted some of Gustav's cousins lurking about. They were much smaller than he is, though, only about as long as a finger.
After climbing about, I decided to go splashing about. I visited Beaverdam Creek and (keeping an eye out for any bears) poked along it for an hour or so, hopping about on boulders and poking at river rocks.
I didn't see any bears, but I did find lots of our little salamander friends lurking beneath rocks and leaves.
Salamander!
I haven't figured out what type of salamanders they were, other than small and squirmy. I did catch a glimpse of something else; a very pale tail of something slipped quickly beneath a rock. What I saw of it was about the size of my thumb. It was probably either a large salamander of another species (or perhaps a newt or hellbender), a lizard, or a snake. I couldn't tell if what I'd seen was the entire tail or just the tip. Since it would have taken a good bit of up-close effort to lift that rock, I decided that I'd leave it be in case it turned out to be something less than entirely pleasant and friendly that I wouldn't want to be sticking my hands into the middle of.
And that was my investigation of Backbone Rock. From there I drove the long meandering road back to Wolf Hills, and was once more immersed in the seething swarms of Summer tourists.
1 comment:
It was a fun, exciting adventure all the way around.
Post a Comment