Here are some photos from our Adirondack vacation. These photos are the ones not connected with any activity or event in particular, just shots I took while out and about.
Anne and IrisLake Placid: Anne and MeSailboat on Mirror LakeAusable River Behind Our CabinAusable RiverAusable River RocksRiver Bank By Our Swimming SpotDuck PrintsAdirondack PlantsAdirondack PlantsFlowers Near Our CabinFerns
A lot of the nature shots were from walking around behind the cabin, near the Ausable River which was literally in our backyard. I also got a few good photos of some tree trunks behind the cabin:
A Birch TreeThe Birch TreeCedar TreeCedar Tree
We did a few bike rides and a hike, and I got some photos on those as well but I think I’ll give them their own separate posts. Enjoy!
We’re away in the mountains near Upper Jay, NY — the AuSable river runs behind our place; Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid are only a stone’s throw away. It’s Anne and me, Emmi & Kyle with Iris, Joe & Laura, Lorraine who arrived yesterday, and Ben & Jenny who arrived today. (The bulk of us have been here since Saturday.)
We’re just hanging out, going for hikes and bike rides and brunches and shopping sprees — today I bought a hiking book, then coming home, dipping our toes & butts in the river, and just sitting around reading or playing with Iris. It’s been unseasonably warm for this area, but not too crazy.
I’m feeling kind of lazy, and I’m pretty deep into “vacation mode” so I probably won’t post more until we get home, but we are having a great time.
I’ve had a creaking near my mountain bike’s bottom bracket for a few weeks now. I was pretty sure it was either the crank or the bottom bracket itself (rather than, say, the suspension pivots), since it seemed to happen with every pedal stroke, as in an unbalanced load on the BB, rather than with the bike suspension flexing.
I tightened the cranks — no luck, so i took them off, lubed them and reinstalled them. Still no luck, so I took them off to get to the bottom bracket, cleaned and lubed the threads and reinstalled them, and still had the squeak. Maybe my bike was possessed?
I thought maybe I didn’t do the job well enough, so I took the cranks and BB off again, and this time I also took the rear wheel off to access the suspension grease port and pumped it full of grease. I put everything back together, and this time the creaking was gone. No idea what actually worked, but the pivots really did need the grease…
Of course, the bikes never stay perfect for long: the MTB shifting is now a bit funky, and the touring bike had a flat tire when I checked on it. It’s always something.
Saturday was a ride at Nockamixon with Tim C, someone I know from the Museum, and Sunday was a ride up the D&L to a coffee shop in Weissport. Hot rides, both days!
Anne and I planned to get kayaks as our Christmas presents to each other, and were doing our research when her brother & sister-in-law gave us two of theirs as a gift. We tried to pay them, but they refused — I think we did our part to help them clean their garage out.
We got life jackets and paddles from them too, but we still needed some way to transport the kayaks. We did a little online searching, found some used roof racks for pretty cheap, and installed them just the other day.
Today we put the kayaks on the roof and took them to Mauch Chunk Lake for their “New (To Us) Maiden Voyage.” Driving with them on the roof was a bit unnerving, but they did just fine. We got to the lake, got them in the water, and despite the windiness of the day, we had a great time with our new toys.
So now we have the boats, and (some of) the infrastructure, and we’ve christened them — we are kayak people now!
Anne and I just did a section hike on the Appalachian Trail, walking the New Jersey portion with several friends. More (probably much more) on this later, but one of the things that struck me was how meditative just hiking along can be — songs, other earworms, and various musings would take up a lot of the mental landscape.
I’d built a QGIS project before our trip, with info about our section of trail, and put it on my phone. It had some distances in miles and others in kilometers, and I was mentally converting back and forth when it struck me: a kilometer is about 0.6 miles, while a mile is about 1.6 kilometers. In other words, their reciprocals differ by one. Is that true, and if not, what number would it be true for? I worked out the quadratic equation:
(hmmm, seems familiar)… and I found the answer to be:
otherwise known as φ (phi), the golden ratio. Interesting, and a fine bit of mental bubblegum to chew on as I walked along…
When I got home, I broke my internet fast with some Reddit, and the first thing I see there is a photo of a tee shirt, with the golden ratio written on it — meaning, in this case, the “most irrational” number, as in “I am most irrational.” Anyway, just a coincidence, but a strange and striking one.
The other thing I carried with me in my head? “The Alley Cat,” a perfect earworm for my hiking rhythm, though I noticed that I changed the tempo as the terrain changed.
I sometimes get myself into Native-Path-adjacent GIS enthusiasms (other than my original projects), two of them in particular being the original path of the Walking Purchase, and the Mason-Dixon Line.
There was very little information I could find about the actual path of the Walking Purchase “walk” — certainly no publicly available GIS data, just a few scanned maps here and there, along with many depressing accounts of the whole sordid incident and its aftermath. This shouldn’t be too surprising; it seems that the perpetrators took steps after the fact to obscure what exactly happened. This information is probably not lost to history, but it is probably well buried, and it seems that not many people like to dig for and play with shameful data from the past.
By contrast, the Mason-Dixon Line is pretty well established online, but then the line itself has been a part of state (and colonial) legal boundaries for more than 250 years, and a cultural boundary (and touchstone) for almost as long. It was a large and highly scientific project for its time, and well marked at the time with massive milestones and a great deal of documentation, and it has had multiple restorations over the centuries. In other words: not shameful, but a point of historic pride. It has received a great deal of attention in recent years, as surveyors and others have been documenting the GPS locations of the original (and replacement) milestones. More info from the Mason & Dixon Line Preservation Partnership can be found here.
Anyway, just some things I’ve been thinking about.
We had an earthquake today. Anne and I were watching Iris, and hanging out in the living room when there was a sort of whump! against the house, and a low rumble. Anne thought it was a really crazy wind gust, while I thought it might have been a truck rolling by outside. I started suspecting something else when I looked out the window: no wind, no trucks, and the rumble continued for a few seconds longer…
I looked it up on the USGS site (no mean feat when Iris is around, and really into our electronic gadgets — we usually keep them hidden), and sure enough there was an earthquake, 4.8 on the Richter scale, out near Whitehouse Station NJ. Meanwhile, our phones lit up with messages: neighbors, friends, and Anne’s siblings too, from nearby and from as far away as Connecticut. (Her brother lives near the epicenter, and they had pictures fall off the walls.) We were listening to WXPN out of Philadelphia when it happened, and they played “Whole Lotta Shaking Going On” (and other songs like that), so I guess they felt it down there too.
So that makes five earthquakes I’ve experienced, all on the East coast:
In high school, probably junior year, we had one during school hours. No one knew it at the time, I was in class and I remember glancing at the door — it sounded like one of those wheeled carts they used in school, rolling down the hall just outside.
Not long after high school, my brothers and I were hanging out in the front yard, and there came a weird groaning from the cement porch. I looked at the porch, and I must have looked like I thought I was losing my mind, because my brother said “yeah I heard it too.” It turned out to be another earthquake.
Early Eighties, I was living in Boston and I was awakened in the middle of the night by what I thought was a passing subway (Boston has subways, but I didn’t live anywhere near one). The next day it was all over the newspapers — we’d had an earthquake.
We had one while I was at work maybe twenty years ago, the first of the bunch that was recognizable as an earthquake while it was happening. It was small and pretty close to my office, which was close to the epicenter of today’s.
Anyway, we just finished a pizza dinner with Emmi & Kyle (and Iris). Tomorrow is a ride to the farmer’s market in Easton.
UPDATE: WE had an aftershock about 6:00 last night, but I didn’t notice it. Also, there was another earthquake here, maybe 2010, strong enough to require repairs to the Fahy Bridge (which TBH may have already needed repairs).
Jasper is a type of stone, sort of like an agglomeration of quartz-like minerals. It’s very pretty when polished and has been used for millennia for ornamentation, and it’s also very good for high quality stone tools like axe heads, arrowheads, and stone knives. There is a seam of jasper going through Lehigh and Berks Counties, and there are small sites all along the seam where natives once dug it up, but the biggest and most important site was an actual jasper quarry just south of Emmaus, at a place now called Jasper Park in Vera Cruz.
This quarry was worked for thousands of years, making it one of the oldest industrial sites in North America, and it really only shut down with the coming of European traders and their more competitive iron wares in the 1600’s. The site was studied by Henry Mercer in the late 1800’s, and was included as the destination for one of the native paths in Wallace’s Indian Paths of Pennsylvania; Wallace also noted that several other paths came together nearby, which was likely how the jasper made its way into the native trade networks — the jasper from here has been found as far away as New England.
As part of my native paths project, I’d put together a bunch of bike rides that more or less follow the old paths, and I have two — one a short ride, and one a multi-day trip — which visit Jasper Park. I have been meaning to go out on the shorter ride for a while now…
The Canal Museum is currently putting together an exhibit about Pennsylvania’s native paths, and just posted something on Facebook about Jasper Park. That, along with the recent nice weather, was enough inspiration to get me off my duff and out on my ride.
I started with some climbing, crossing the Lehigh and cutting across the college campus over South Mountain, then I picked up a few sections of the now-fragmented Old Philadelphia Pike/Old Bethlehem Pike (which name depends on where you are and where you’re heading), which I suspect followed the “Delaware River Path.” From there I headed southwest, skirting the southern flank of South Mountain out to Vera Cruz, and picked up the “Perkiomen-Lehigh Path” which led to Jasper Park, were I stopped to explore on foot.
Jasper Park is a Little League baseball field, some pavillions, and a small fitness trail; the quarries are off the fitness trail, in the woods behind the ball field, and tucked up against the Turnpike Northeast Extension right-of-way.
There wasn’t really much to see, no spooky vibes or anything, though it was cool that the ground still showed the indentations after almost 400 years. The top stone in the pile might have been what’s called a “turtleback:” these were once considered a very primitive form of stone tool, but are now thought to be stones that were partially dressed for trade, which would be shaped to their final form (arrowheads etc) by their end users.
After my expedition I got back on the bike and came home via Emmaus. I was essentially following the “Perkiomen-Lehigh Path” to the “Oley Path,” and it was pretty obvious that I was following the native paths more closely on the way home: the route was much flatter, and traffic was heavier — native and modern routes both preferred to avoid the hills.
In the end, the hilly parts were not historical, and the historical parts weren’t hilly…
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