The Path of a Century

BLOGGER’S NOTE: The Long Trail, Vermont’s 272-mile hiking path from Massachusetts to Canada, turns 100 this year. The birthday comes with a great book, A Century in the Mountains: Celebrating Vermont’s Long Trail, published by the trail’s caretaker, the Green Mountain Club. Having hiked the Long Trail end-to-end twice, with countless shorter hikes in between, I wrote the chapter on the trail’s natural history. But the Long Trail is Vermont. So my chapter is in many respects a concise introduction to the nature of Vermont. I’m taking a break from the blog in order to make progress on my book. I’ll post here about once a week or so for a while. Until then, here’s my chapter from A Century in the Mountains with a few of my photos (including a bobcat and my hobblebush slideshow). Read on, buy the book … then get outside.

By Bryan Pfeiffer

From the summit of Mount Grant the nature of the Long Trail unfolds at a hiker’s feet. This lofty spot (3,623 feet above sea level) is about halfway between Massachusetts and Canada. Yet it boasts no particular celebrated status on the trail, unless, of course, you believe each step along this route is itself a celebration. In any case, Mount Grant is a fine spot to stop and ponder the diversity of life on the spine of Vermont – whatever flies, flutters, darts, jumps, scampers, walks, crawls, slithers, swims, grows, decays, or even only sits there beside this illustrious path.

Visible far to the south of Mount Grant is some of the Long Trail’s more gentle terrain, a high plateau where a hiker can swim in remote ponds and circumnavigate mysterious bogs. Southern trees and unusual plants, at least by Long Trail standards, like bitternut hickory and Goldie’s fern sprout here and there in few locations. And early hikers, in June, might find early hairstreak, a prize butterfly about the size of your thumbnail, colored in shocking cobalt blue and mint green marked with little orange lightning bolts.

Somewhere off in the distance to the north are the trail’s classic and most recognizable peaks. As hikers here walk atop Vermont, they pass tiny flowering plants more typical of the arctic than New England. And if that isn’t wild enough, one of the Northeast’s rarest breeding birds, the Bicknell’s thrush, with a swirling, fluty song, enjoys a rather exotic and promiscuous sex life nearby. Soon after departing this the elevated excitement, the route to Canada features descents into various dramatic notches and eventually crosses two major rivers, from which, as the Long Trail always seems to do, it rises skyward yet again into the mountains.

But for now, having attained that high perch on Mount Grant, or most any elevated point on this trail, do not forget to admire what is close. Here at your feet, or more likely beneath your boot, look for one of the trail’s certifiable marvels of natural history. It is called Marasmius androsaceus. It is a mushroom standing no taller than an inch or two, with a black hair-like stalk and a tiny peach-colored parasol cap.

Of course, few hikers ever notice Marasmius androsaceus. In the vast assemblage of rock, mineral, plant, animal and otherwise that constitute this path, a mushroom would seem ill-qualified as a poster child for an essay on the nature of the Long Trail. It certainly lacks the lofty status of pink lady’s slipper orchids or peregrine falcons or bald summits with big views. Yet once you discover the role of Marasmius androsaceus, and countless other natural riches large, small and in-between along this route, it should become obvious that most every step on the Long Trail is indeed a step to be celebrated. Spend a lifetime walking this long, green path and you will discover but a fraction of its natural secrets.

Rock and Ice

No understanding of the nature of the Long Trail – its maples and moose and Marasmius – is complete without some ground rules. And in nature those rules begin, fittingly, with the ground itself. Failing to understand the role of rock and soil in the nature of the trail is like overlooking the outfield and diamond in the nature of baseball. Sure, you can enjoy the game, but you won’t really know what’s going on. Mountains are, after all, no trivial matter. They lend the trail identity, legend, temperament, even its own weather. And the Long Trail is nothing if not steeped in steepness. The rise of this trail’s rock has been more than one billion years in the making; yet allow me (with a most sincere apology to geologists) to condense it to a few minutes of reading.[1]

The Earth’s surface amounts to an assortment of oceanic and continental plates floating on layers of more viscous rock. Those plates drift somewhat independently, a few centimeters per year. When plates collide, things get hot and heavy. The earth trembles. Volcanoes erupt. Mountains rise. Think of piles of flattened modeling clay pushed around on your kitchen table; when they collide they crunch, fold, bunch, and overlap one another: Play-Doh mountains. Each mountain-building collision is called an orogeny. But plates not only smash ever-so-slowly into one another; they drift apart as well. And when that happens, the valleys (or rifts) that result can become oceans loaded with sediments and marine life. Oddly enough, these ancient oceans played a role in the nature of today’s Long Trail. Ocean materials can become sedimentary rock that goes on to be forced up into mountains when plates once again collide.

In the geological lineage of the Long Trail, the first notable collision of plates was the Grenville Orogeny more than a billion years ago. These mountains may have been as high as the Rockies (or higher). Yet over the course of several hundred million years after their formation much of the Grenville Mountains eroded away. What remains today of this older rock is found in New York’s Adirondacks and within the core of the southern Green Mountains. As the Grenville Mountains eroded, continental plates began to separate, resulting in a new ocean. The sediments and deceased marine life that accumulated in that ocean would go on to become the raw materials for the next round of mountain-building, which took place about 450 million years ago. Known as the Taconic Orogeny, this event was monumental in the evolution of the Long Trail. As plates moved together again, ocean sediments and crusts were forced skyward and went on to become much of what is now known as the Green Mountains. An additional orogeny about 360 million years ago, the Acadian Orogeny, would further deform and uplift these mountains, but the Taconic Orogeny would truly lay the foundation for a footpath to come millions of years later. So although we lump them together as “the Green Mountains,” the range actually results from a series of orogenies, each with its own blend of rock formations, occurring hundreds of millions of years apart. The bedrock diversity can lend diversity to the nature of the trail itself because a given rock type, as we shall see later, tends to support its own community of plants and animals.

But orogenies did not end the formation of the Long Trail’s character. If the collision of oceanic and continental plates hundreds of millions of years ago gave rise to a rough-and-ready mountainous landscape, the advance and retreat of glaciers added the finishing touches. Long Trail hikers take note: blame those glaciers for making your knees throb and ache.

During Earth’s lifetime, glaciers come and go. For the last two to three million years, ice sheets have repeatedly advanced and retreated across northern parts of North America, redefining our landscape many times. But the most recent march of ice (to as far south as Long Island) made the Green Mountains much of what they are today. It is important to note that glaciers are much more than ice. They are an amalgam of ice, rock, and sediments, anything the advancing glacier had scraped up along its path. This advancing heap eradicates whatever animals, plants, fungi and other organisms cannot get out of the way. The glaciers generally advanced from the north-northwest toward the south-southeast. And today, on may exposed rocky summits, the glacial signature – scratches in the rock – orient in that direction as well.

During the glacier’s maximum advance, about 24,000 years ago, Vermont was beneath more than a mile of ice, more than enough to cover the Green Mountains. As it advanced on its southeasterly course, the ice deepened valleys and smoothed the northwest-facing slopes of Green Mountain peaks. As it continued past the summit of a given peak, however, the glacier could pluck and carry away huge chunks of rock from the south-facing slope. As a result, some of our mountains tend to have gentler slopes on their north side and steeper slopes, even cliff faces, on their south side. Camel’s Hump is perhaps our most obvious example. That sort of profile alone persuades some hikers to walk from south to north on the Long Trail. Sure it may be tougher grunting up those steep south faces but kinder on the knees coming down the gentler north slopes.

As the climate warmed and glaciers retreated northward, they left behind lakes, rivers and, importantly, all the stuff the ice had collected and carried – chunks of mountain, boulders, gravel, sand, silt, and clays strewn and deposited in various patterns across the landscape. These are called surficial deposits. They cover much of Vermont, with a notable exception being the exposed bedrock at various high points in the Green Mountains. And like the bedrock beneath it, or sometimes contrary to the bedrock’s own predilections, the composition of those deposits, which aren’t that far beneath a hiker’s boot, help dictate which plants sprout from the soil once the ice is gone. By about 13,500 years ago the glacier had retreated to roughly the Canadian border. Behind the receding ice, the landscape was prepped like a clean canvass for what was to come – colonization by plants, animals, even a little mushroom, and, eventually, a 272-mile-long trail running through it all.

A Trail of Communities

Enough history. Let us get out on today’s trail, into the green, to find the bird with the odd sex life. To discover the Bicknell’s thrush, to learn your daily lesson in humility, and to understand and fully appreciate the nature of the Long Trail, you must climb a mountain. Take Mount Grant, for example, or actually most any high mountain on the Long Trail. Any given climb is, at its most basic, a walk in the woods. Surrounding you might be a dozen different tree species, scores of herbaceous plants, a kingdom of animals, from black bear to black fly to bacteria, a medley of lichens, liverworts, mosses, and (of course) mushrooms. The variety can make a hiker’s natural compass spin. But fear not this diversity. Just point yourself uphill. There is a pattern to these woods, a harmony to your walk, the harmony of “natural communities.”

We used to call it habitat, the place where things live outside (and where Long Trail hikers walk). But the natural community model is broader and better than the term habitat, and it is a fine way for hikers to gain a sense of where they are on the trail and what is around them. Here is one of many definitions of natural community: a distinct assemblage of living things that interact with one another and their environment. So rather than just a bog, the bog natural community encompasses the particular birds, butterflies, bacteria and everything else that conspire specifically to be life in a bog. Rather than a stand of evergreen woods, the natural community includes the mammals, mosses, mushrooms and other organisms that collaborate to be the soul of those evergreen woods. Climate is also a player in the identity of natural communities. Vermont lies in the path of some particularly wild weather, even wilder in the mountains. So where the soil and bedrock and climate are just right for it, a given natural community can reoccur across the landscape. Vermont has about 80 defined natural communities, each a more or less distinct association of organisms. The Long Trail passes through at least a dozen of  them; yet much of the time it traverses only a few that are fairly easy to recognize.[2]

A Long Trail climb often begins in a northern hardwood natural community. Broad-leafed trees dominate: sugar maple, yellow birch and American beech, with occasional red maple, white ash, and black cherry. Eastern hemlock and red spruce are among occasional evergreens here. But the hardwoods are the signature forests of Vermont, offering us maple syrup, firewood, furniture, blazing fall foliage, and home for everything from warblers to white-tailed deer.

Shrubs and herbaceous plants in these woods are among Vermont’s most familiar greenery. One is hobblebush, a spreading shrub that can indeed impede a bushwhacker’s progress. With oval leaves about the size of your palm, a hiker might not give this plant much attention. But take a closer look at hobblebush, for it plays a brilliant game of deception each spring. Its white flowers, displayed in clusters along a branch, are

rather puny and inelegant. So hobblebush surrounds each cluster with a ring of larger, showier paper-white blooms. These flowers are infertile imposters. They cannot produce fruits but look good enough to attract insect pollinators toward the real flowers, which go

on to generate clusters of apple-red fruits, which, unfortunately, aren’t edible unless you’re a bird or some critter other than Homo sapiens. Yet stick with hobblebush through fall. Its leaves progress like fireworks through stages of purple, rust, and brown, often keeping a few veins of green for good measure. Hobblebush is a Long Trail hiker’s personal fall foliage, invisible to leaf peepers who never get far from the car.

Closer yet to the ground in northern hardwoods is a carpet of fern, moss and other herbaceous plants, some of which are among our most artful and elegant spring wildflowers: the nodding yellow blooms of trout lily, the luscious red trillium, the odd Jack-in-the-pulpit, and fall-flowering whorled wood aster. Intermediate wood fern and shining clubmoss, among many other ankle-high plants, are constant companions in northern hardwoods. The shrub and herbaceous layer beneath all those broad-leafed trees can lend these woods a lush, jungle-like atmosphere. No hiker on the Long Trail is ever far from northern hardwoods. And anyone in these woods will generally be below 2,700 feet in elevation. Not high enough to reach Bicknell’s thrush, however. So climb higher through the hardwoods toward another natural community. Along the way, the maple and beech and other hardwood species will gradually yield to evergreen trees more tolerant of the poor soils and harsher climate of higher elevations. This is the second dominant woods of the Long Trail, the natural community known as the montane spruce-fir forest.

The montane spruce-fir forest feels like the north. It gives a hiker a sense of elevation and higher latitude. These are the trademark woods of many of the Long Trail’s three-thousand-footers. It is cloudier and colder up here. The evergreens, mostly balsam fir and red spruce, like it that way. Lichens dangle from their branches and spread across their trunks. A few hardwood species can thrive among these evergreens – a higher-elevation maple, aptly called mountain maple, for example, and mountain ash, which really isn’t an ash but whose dangling red fruits help nourish songbirds on the trail.

A dense evergreen canopy and more acidic soils limit the herbaceous ground cover to bluebead lily, with its elegant yellow flower and grape-blue fruits; bunchberry, a tiny dogwood producing a white bouquet of flowers and a bunch of red fruits; Canada mayflower, a small lily perhaps best recognized by a lone, upright leaf; and an assembly of other hearty plants. Mosses and ground-dwelling lichens form an inviting carpet at a hiker’s feet. The mud and puddles aren’t as inviting. Yet they are more common in this natural community because soils tend to be shallower and closer to bedrock, which means water has fewer places to travel (apart from inside a hiker’s boot). It also means that soil erosion and exposed roots (slippery when wet) are more common on the trail in these woods.

Alert readers may have noticed that animals appear to have been slighted in this discussion of the nature of the Long Trail. It is a valid criticism. The scientists who define natural communities also tend to be botanists. So a bias toward plants is revealed in these definitions and descriptions. It is somewhat understandable, however, because plants, unable to move (except when their seeds do it for them), are more or less a fixture in their respective natural communities. Many animals are not. To be sure, northern hardwoods or montane spruce-fir forests each host a particular assemblage of animals. Bicknell’s thrush, for example, is a classic montane specialist; it will not nest down low in the hardwoods. But plenty of Long Trail animals tend to be generalists that thrive in various community types. So rather than getting particular with animals in each natural community, and before we discover the lofty thrush, here is a condensed hiker’s guide to wildlife, beginning with the Long Trail’s mightiest beast:

The Black Fly – We can stipulate that not everything about the nature of the Long Trail is wonderful. Peak season for this miniature biting machine runs to about July (sometimes later). Females lay their eggs in running water, where the wiggling larvae, anchored to a rock, feed by filtering water rushing by until they transform themselves into flying adults. Once airborne as an adult black fly, only the female will bite. She needs blood from hikers and other animals to nourish eggs that will become yet another generation of black flies to bite yet another round of hikers. When the black fly season ends, however, the mosquitoes take over with slightly less vengeance. Larger biting members of a group of many species known collectively as deer flies will intermittently annoy a hiker who isn’t packing an eight-pound sledge hammer in order to slow them down with a swift and direct wallop.

Butterflies – These gossamer insects are solar-powered, so they are not that common in the shaded woods. Indeed, the shocking blue-green-and-orange Early Hairstreak flies high in the canopy of stands of American Beech (on whose leaves it lays eggs), dropping into a hiker’s world only now and then. Even so, roughly 50 species of butterfly may flap somewhere along or near the Long Trail at various periods from spring through fall. Among the most obvious, in spring, is the Canadian tiger swallowtail, large and yellow with bold black stripes. Flying throughout the hiking season on sunny summits is the Milbert’s tortoiseshell, whose wings have a flaming red-orange border and a row of tiny iridescent blue jewels. This lightshow vanishes, however, when Milbert’s tortoiseshell snaps its wings closed up and over its body to conceal itself from predators in the guise of a dead leaf.

Amphibians and Reptiles – Speaking of dead leaves, if one of them hops at your foot it is most likely an American toad, perhaps the most frequently encountered amphibian on the Long Trail. The alert hiker will know a toad simply by the sound of its hop, noticeably sluggish by comparison to birds and small mammals that jump or scoot trailside with a bit more verve. Far more obvious, in day-glow orange, which is wildlife parlance for “eat me if you dare,” is the red eft, actually the teen-aged form (and terrestrial, for up to eight years) of the greenish salamander called Eastern newt, which moves to ponds for the rest of its adult life. Yet one of the most abundant Long Trail slimy things (apart from slugs on a wet day) is rarely ever seen – the Eastern red-backed salamander. Untold numbers of these sit quietly in the leaf litter of mature hardwoods and mixed forests. Step a few feet off trail and flip fallen logs to find this elegant, slender salamander with, as it turns out, a red back. The garter snake is the trail’s most common reptile species; hikers here need not worry about poisonous snakes. One of the Long Trail’s few shortcomings is that it lacks lizards.

Fisher – This weasel is a yard of terror, even if half its length is bushy brown tail. Fishers hunt mostly at night, which means hikers do not get to see them. In my own travels on the Long Trail and its side trails, more than 1,000 miles in total, I have encountered but one fisher, which crossed my path on Whiteface Mountain a mere five feet in front of me, its head down all the while as it passed. More or less elusive on the trail are other members of the weasel family – ermine, mink, long-tailed weasel and river otter. Agile (and deadly) on land and in trees, a fisher will eat snowshoe hare, squirrels, rodents, fruit, mast (primarily beechnuts), birds, frogs and most anything else unfortunate enough to cross its zigzag path through the woods. Yet most noteworthy on the fisher’s plate is next on our wildlife checklist.

Porcupine – How does one eat a porcupine? Carefully, goes the well-worn reply. Yet fishers don’t do cliché. With speed and agility they dart repeatedly to bite the face of a porcupine, ultimately dining, in the absence of quills, from the belly inward. So relentless is the fisher as a predator that porcupine numbers over the past few decades have plunged in step with Vermont’s rising fisher population. This population decline has left the trail lacking one of its primary legends. Hikers no longer worry about porcupines gnawing away at trail shelters each night or even stealing boots for a salty meal of shoe leather.

Rodents – A pejorative name for a group of animals, to be sure, particularly if mice have raided your food bag. (The porcupine is also a rodent.) But let us not forget that this group includes some of the Long Trail’s most constant hiking companions – red squirrel, which prefers softwoods and mixed woods, and gray squirrel and Eastern chipmunk, both of which are fond of hardwoods.

Cats and Dogs – Apart from tracks or scat on the trail, hikers rarely encounter the wild ones: bobcat, Eastern coyote, red fox and gray fox. To the best of our knowledge, wolves aren’t walking the Long Trail’s woods (at least not yet).

Black Bear – Unless a hiker carelessly sets a table for them, bears want little to do with anyone on the trail. Bears tend to be more common in hardwood forests, where their wide-ranging diet includes beechnuts. Most any hiker who has logged some miles on the Long Trail has probably walked past a bear either hiding somewhere nearby or perhaps even up above in an American beech gorging on its fruits. Claw marks on large beeches all along the trial offer evidence. In any event, the bear can smell even the cleanest hiker long before he or she has a clue of its presence. It is said on the Long Trail that when a fir needle drops to the forest floor, the hawk sees it, the deer hears it, and the bear smells it. As we shall soon discover, our little mushroom, Marasmius androsaceus, takes note as well.

Moose – Encountering the largest animal in the woods is an aspiration of most any self-respecting hiker. It is now more likely on the Long Trail as moose numbers have climbed in Vermont during the past few decades. The trail’s northern sections host the highest moose densities. During hiking season moose tend to escape the heat and biting insects in ponds and wetlands; so approach those quietly. In fall and winter moose move toward higher ground. Hikers should keep a safe, respectful distance from all wildlife, particularly moose during the fall rutting season.

Birds – Little else in nature offers a hiker the blend of flight, song, color and grace found only in the lives of birds. Binoculars aren’t always necessary; a slow and stealthy hiker can hike with many of the Long Trail’s bird species. The spring hiking season begins during the peak of breeding season, when some of our most colorful species – vireos, kinglets, thrushes, warblers, tanagers – are singing and raising young. The bird that explodes from the understory (and invariably startles a hiker) is the ruffed grouse, also known in Vermont as partridge. The trail in a few locations passes by nesting peregrine falcons. And fall hikers often walk with southbound migrants, many of which prefer to move in the mountains, including hawks that float high on rising thermals of warm air so that they can glide southbound for miles and miles with nary a flap of wing.

Higher Still

A fine location from which to watch those hawks is the open air of krummholz, which is a German word for “crooked wood.” It is also the next step skyward in our progression of natural communities. Krummholz is a forest of trees at their highest altitude on the Long Trail, usually above 3,500 feet. All that remains still higher is bedrock and Vermont’s highest plants. Up here wind, ice, snow, rain and depleted soils conspire to stress the trees so that they grow stunted and twisted. The krummholz is a short, impenetrable version of montane spruce-fir forests with some high-elevation alpine plants making their first appearance. It is some of the Long Trail’s most unforgiving turf. It is also where a hiker might discover Bicknell’s thrush.

This famous Vermont songbird breeds near the summits of the Long Trail’s highest peaks. The Bicknell’s thrush winters on islands in the Caribbean and migrates to the mountains of the Northeast and nearby Atlantic Canada to feast on insects and raise young. This little brown bird actually prefers the upper end of the montane spruce-fir forest. But a hiker standing taller than the tree-tops in krummholz can sometimes look down toward the montane spruce-fir to find male Bicknell’s Thrushes launching skyward to sing for a mate like an ethereal flute. It is a serious turn-on for female thrushes (or even Long Trail hikers out for a few cheap thrills).

Incidentally, up here in thrushland, Marasmius androsaceus, our little mushroom, sporting its ebony stalk and tiny cap, is sprouting everywhere. Dig one up and you will find that it can be somewhat discriminating in its choice of sites from which to grow skyward. The mushroom will often sprout directly from a solitary fallen fir needle, sometimes at a perfect right angle to the needle from its tip.

But back to the birds for a moment. A singing bird is most often a male that has established a territory on which to breed; he sings to broadcast his presence and show his turf to females and to defend it all from other intruding males. But Bicknell’s thrushes don’t work that way. To be sure, the males sing. But it is the female who sets up and maintains the territory, leaving the landless males to fly to and fro across the mountain summit in a frenzied attempt to copulate with multiple females. It is a rare and odd breeding behavior.

Bicknell’s thrushes build their nests in the dense protection of spruce and fir, which makes them very hard to find. But should you happen upon one, the nest will most likely be lined with black strands that resemble moose hair or wiry fern roots. Many songbirds nesting on Long Trail mountains use this material in the construction of their nests. Biologists studying Bicknell’s thrush in the 1930s noticed the strands but never figured out exactly what they were. Only recently have they solved the mystery.

Those strands are neither fur nor hair nor roots at all. As it happens, one of our rarest songbirds chooses to line its nest with filaments from a rather obscure organism – a little mushroom known as Marasmius androsaceus, which sometimes goes by the name horsehair fungus. Invisible as it is to most hikers, our mushroom turns out to be critical in the life of one of the Long Trail’s most threatened bird species. Why? Perhaps the strands, threadlike components called rhizomorphs, may have antibacterial properties. Or maybe they’re just comfortable to a bird’s behind. We’re not entirely sure. Whatever the reason, the prosaic Marasmius androsaceus and the poetic Bicknell’s thrush are two players among many performing in the theater of nature on the Long Trail. When a Bicknell’s thrush lands on a fir bough near the summit of Mount Grant, an alert hiker may now envision a chain of events: A fir needle breaks loose and drops to the forest floor. From that single needle the following spring may sprout a tiny mushroom, later to be carried by a little brown bird to a nest that will host – for this trail and for its visitors – yet another generation of Bicknell’s thrushes.

Every event along this trail can be remarkable; every event can matter: the song of a thrush, the spore of a mushroom, the step of a hiker, even the falling to earth of a single fir needle. So from that halfway spot on Mount Grant, walk either north or south on the Long Trail. It doesn’t really matter. Your trip is more than a hike. This trail is your long, green journey into one of the greatest natural dramas on Earth.

– The End

---

[1] Readers who seek more wisdom on the rock beneath Vermont (and the life above it) may consult The Nature of Vermont, a classic by Charles W. Johnson.

[2] The seminal work on Vermont’s natural communities, which informs and inspires this account, is Wetland, Woodland, Wildland: A Guide to the Natural Communities of Vermont by Elizabeth H. Thompson and Eric R. Sorenson.