Friday concluded our trip north, so this post will be the last in the Nature Notes from the North Woods series. It had been far too long since I’d been up in the White Mountains, and I already can’t wait to go back. I hope you enjoy the final installment of photos and notes from Maine.
This was one of multiple bunches of oyster mushrooms growing on this old oak tree. The view of Old Speck from Table Rock in Grafton Notch State Park – if you look closely, you can see frost/snow at the top. The mountain we were hiking, Baldpate Mountain, was about 400 feet lower than Old Speck and didn’t haven’t this same accumulation of frost/snow at its peak. A very uniform forest near the top of Baldpate Mountain: almost exclusively spruce and fir trees with an understory of only moss. Where the foot traffic has worn the trail down to the bedrock, you can see how thin the layer of top soil is on the top of these mountains – a few inches at most. We have birch trees on Cape Cod, but they are predominately gray and yellow birch. It is rare to find even a small patch of white birch anywhere in southeastern Massachusetts, but forests dominated by white birch were relatively common in the Bethel area. A few of the lower elevation trails we explored had a decent population of red oaks, the acorns of which sprinkled the path. Although most of the acorns were the typical brown color, a couple scattered ones were almost jet black. I don’t know the cause of this (stress? fungus? etc.) but I’d love to hear your thoughts if you have any insight on what causes this phenomenon.
