[Journal entry for October 5, 2014; Cave Shelter on Stockbridge Mountain, Harriman State Park]. It’s a beautiful fall day. Dallas and I park at the Silvermine Lake lot off of Seven Lakes Drive. The fall foliage is beautiful, yet we judge that it has not yet reached its peak. We walk over to Lake Nawahunta and gaze across its waters, to the trees on the far side. The hardwoods are starting to turn, but much of the shore is a stand of White Pine that is, and will remain, green. The Blueberry bushes along the shore are a dull red color and an occasional maple is yellow-orange. We cross the outlet stream, just below the spillway and then walk across the dam. It has been maintained since the last time I was here, and is not free of sampling whose roots potentially could interrupt its structure. We pass an old foundation and then join the Menomine Trail (blazed in yellow), taking it westward up the flank of Stockbridge mountain.

The trail crosses the inlet stream; we pass by stepping from stone to stone. It then winds through the White Pines and begins to climb up the hillside. I take a short detour to visit a little wetland to the south of the trail. I have been keeping track of it, for it is unusually free of Phragmites for reasons that are not at all apparent. The fall colors deepen as we wind up the hill. The Blueberries are redder, the beeches yellower and the maples more orange. Large patches of the ground are covered with calf-high pale yellow fern. The trail is sprinkled with leaves, some of them bright red. An occasional millipede crawls across. We approach a vertical rock face, fifty feet or more high, It is one of the many south-facing glacially plucked cliffs in the park – relicts of the Ice Age.

We connect with the Long Path (blazed in blue) and take it north. It climbs a broken section of the rock face, one with several terraces. We poke around huge boulders lying beneath the rock fare at the top of the first terrace. A small overhand in the cliff has been turned into a large fireplace. We huff up the last steep grade and arrive a wide rock ledge that host Stockbridge Shelter, a three-sided stone lean-to. It has been refurbished since my last visit and now sports a green aluminum roof. Its setting is very pretty, as the rock ledge on which it sits is surrounded by trees in their fall colors.

We rested in the shelter for a few minutes, and then continued north along the Long Path. The ridge crest is wonderful in its fall colors, with red bed of blueberries, wide grey rock ledges and widely-spaced yellow and orange trees. We visited a ledge that looked out onto the hills to the west, though the view was partially obscured by tall bushes. We then resumed out northward journey, soon reaching the gulley that hosts Cave Shelter.

The shelter is a boulder cave on the north-facing wall of the gulley which has been modified by the addition of a fireplace and stone chimney. Unlike many similar caves in the park, its floor is comfortable and level earth that hosts a few pieces of impromptu log furniture. Another couple – the man’s name was Chuck Strube - arrived at about the same time we did, and we chatted with them about our favorite hikes in the park. We then hike down the gulley, taking an informal trail down past the gulley and south along the base of a substantial cliff full of torn and jagged blocks. We pass a fire place and a small windbreak; someone’s hideaway campsite, I guess. We joined a rough woods road that passes through some beautiful golden leaf-littered terrain before connecting with the Menomine Trail. We followed this trail back, stopping for a few minutes on the west shore of Lake Narahunta, under the White Pines, to view the lake.

The trail passes by the now-defunct parking lot of the old Sivermine Ski Area. The cracked asphalt pavement has been colonized by plants, including small hummocks of grass, tall bushes and even small trees, all arranged on a crude grid of cracks. We walked down to the shore of Silvermine Lake, which is quite a bit larger than Nawahunta. The southwest corner of the lake is marsh and the green grasses and cattails provided a nice contrast to the fall colors along its shore.

The hike took about three hours.

We then drove over to Lake Sebago so that Dallas could go for a quick swim at the American Canoe Association Camp. She dropped me off by the main gate and I walked along the lakeshore to the camp. The fall foliage here seemed a bit more advanced than at Silvermine Lake, with many more bright orange maples. When I reached the camp, I chatted with some of the regulars, who were packing up their kayaks for the season. We stayed for perhaps an hour and then headed home.