A short hike on a bright autumn day

For more pictures, see the PicasaWeb album for this hike.

It was a pleasant, brightly sunny and cool day - perfect for a hike. Dylan was, as usual, very eager to go. We didn't have much time, so we opted for a quick walk along the section just west of the Cottons Road crossing. This allowed us to revisit the log that Dylan and I found during our hike in September. The tiny creatures burrowing into it had kept busy; sawdust was still raining out of the holes, of which I think none were more than a millimeter in diameter.

As usual, Grace and I were gratified to tell Dylan stories about the natural world. I showed him some hops and told him about how lots of people around here used to work picking them for the brewing of beer. The teasel gave me the opportunity to tell him the story of how people once used them to raise the nap on wool. And he showed me a particularly interesting rock.

It seemed that the season had conspired to create a palette that was bittersweet and intimate: curlicued teasel towered stolidly against the vibrant blue sky; the umber and russet of the maples and the rioting reds, yellows and greens of the sumac stood out against the fields, striped with austere yellow bands of crisped sweet corn and still-green bands of grass and clover; brilliant ruby apples hung from their green island in a spuming grey-brown sea of spent goldenrod.

A Blaze of Glory

I assumed that this work hike would involve trail-clearing so I loaded my trunk with axes and machetes. I left Oneida at 8:30, driving west through Clockville and south on Nelson Road. Other than the guy in the Saturn who passed me and the car ahead on a double line, it was a gorgeous, crisp, sunny morning. The valley was filling with more yellows and reds than I've seen around Oneida in years.

Just before 9:00 I pulled into the designated meeting spot: the parking area at the southwest tip of Cazenovia Lake. Then I found out that Kathy Eisele had sent me an e-mail telling me that all we'd be doing was marking trail. It turned out that Yahoo had put her message in my spam folder, so here I was with a trunk full of blades instead of the one thing I needed: a hammer. Thankfully Kathy had at least one extra.

Once everyone was gathered we formed a caravan and drove to the Dugway Road trailhead. Coordinator Kathy Eisele handed out the new blazes to the group: me, Margaret Maloney, George Zacharek, Kiley Barr, Ron and Linda Wallace, Patrick Dermody, Bill Zimmerman, Jonathan Bienes, Kurt Wheeler and his three young daughters, Chanda Vincent, and Al Larmann. The youngsters went ahead to clear some brush near the far end of the trail while the rest of us who weren't supervising them paired off. Each pair got a stack of yellow plastic rectangles with two holes for nails. Our job was to replace the old blue blazes with these new yellow ones.

Kathy instructed us to skip about a dozen markers ahead of the foremost pair and begin blazing from there. This leapfrog pattern would allow us to efficiently cover the whole trail. My partner Margaret and I started working on our section and I soon learned that there's more to trail marking than I'd expected. The basic rules turned out to be as follows.

• Blaze on the right side of the trail.


• Leave the nails sticking out so the tree has room to grow before it swallows the marker.


• To indicate direction change use two blazes, the one on top offset in the direction of the turn.


• Don't overblaze; if the old marker was unnecessary, don't replace it.


• Don't blaze cherry trees; the wood is valuable.

It seemed to me that many of the previously marked trees were so young that a nail might kill them within a few years. I tried finding larger trees, but in many cases the bark was so spongy and thick that I would have had to bury the nail. Sometimes there were no suitable trees on the right side of the trail, so we had to use a cherry or a tree on the left. All the rules seemed made to be broken.

Margaret and I alternated friendly chatting with scratching our heads over which blazes not to replace (the trail was seriously overblazed) and which rules to break when there was no satisfactory tree to the right of the trail. Per our instructions we turned around when we ran into the group of youngsters and started working on the other side. I didn't count how many blazes we replaced but when I got back to the
trailhead at about 1:10 I was amazed at the enormous stack of blue markers filling my cargo pocket. We'd done more work than I'd realized.