[Bill Menke’s Journal Entry for September 23, 2018; Pisgah State Park, Ashuelot New Hampshire] On our way home from climbing Mt Monadnock, Dallas and I stopped for a morning hike in Pisgah State Park. We parked in a large lot off of Route 119 in Ashuelot New Hampshire, which has a kiosk for the Reservoir Trailhead. Several trucks towing trailers with All Terrain Vehicles arrived. Our fear that our hike would be marred by these fast and noisy vehicles was unfounded, for we encountered only few of them on our hike and were not troubled at all by them. I guess the system of woods roads is large enough to spread them out.

We passed a wide area where the White Pines had been harvested and where logging trucks had rutted the road and made deep mud. A sign labeled “What happened here?” justified the mess in terms of creating an uneven-aged forest that had better forage for the wildlife. Dallas, who owns a woodlot up in Maine and harvests it for money was not convinced by this rationale and neither was I¹. We debated the relative value of trees for tourism and timber as we walked through the harvested area. Up in Maine, the value of timber is no more than five hundred dollars per acre, and the trees take decades to re-grow, so the annual yield is fifty dollars per acre or so. I don’t imagine that the yield is much different here. In contrast, Dallas and I pumped more than five hundred dollars into the local economy in just a weekend (mostly for lodging and food), so an annual trip on our part is equal to a ten acre cut. Since we could think of many other, unexploited woodlands to explore, we judged ourselves unlikely to return to this one. We did encounter some very beautiful unharvested areas later in the hike, but who knows whether they would still be there should we return. No one likes to be skunked.

We walked Reservoir Road northward, paralleling a little stream that flows towards the south. I walked eastward down to the stream bed and found that it was flowing steadily, though not especially forcefully, in a straight and narrow valley, with overarching White Pine trees. A little later on, I visited a small wetland, full of grass and the posts of long-dead trees. It was picturesque, but did not have nearly as much fall color as some of the wetlands that we saw yesterday, closer to Mt Monadnock.

In about a half mile, we came to a large beaver pond on the east side of the road, perhaps thee hundred yards long and half that wide, on the east side of the road, but set back from it by an hundred yards of pine woods. We walked down to the dam - an old one, with lots of weeds and wildflowers growing from it. The view of the blue water, the green vegetation along its edges and the marsh at it northern end was very beautiful. We sighted a Great Blue Heron as it flew from the pond into the woods. Dallas found patches of Wintergreen, a ground-hugging plant with fragrant leaves and red berries growing on the forest floor along the lakeshore.

We returned to the road and continued to walk north, but making four additional side trips down to the shore of the beaver pond. One spot offered a good view of a beaver lodge standing in the middle of the pond. It, too, was old and covered with vegetation. Another spot offered a view of a rare (for here) Red Maple, in its fall colors. A final spot, by the marsh at the north end of the pond, was in sight of a second newer-looking beaver lodge, in the extreme northeast corner of the pond. We saw a few animals along the hike, including squirrels and Red Eft salamanders.

I lost my cell-phone during our exploration of the beaver pond when it fell out of my jacket pocket as I was bending over, photographing the Wintergreen. Fortunately, I noticed the loss before we left the area and had both my memory and my camera to guide me to all the places we had stopped. After some tense searching, we found it - at our very last stop.

We walked back the way we had come. We spent a few minutes looking at some of the large boulders along the roadside. Many of these were composed of white granite with inch-long feldspar phenocrysts.

About two hours of hiking.

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^1ButInge Seaboyer of NH Division of Forests & Lands later told me this: “I thought you’d be interested in seeing what the condition of the harvested pines were before the cutting. The attached photo is typical of the crowns in the areas which were included in the group selection cuts. The pine had been repeatedly hit by both needle cast diseases, as well as being affected by caliciopsis (pine canker) – both of which are worse in an overstocked situation. Lots of mortality and highly unthrifty stems in the stand including trail side, so I worked with the Park Mgr to identify and remove potential hazards road/trailside as part of the harvest (in that Stand and elsewhere).”