January Thaw

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Charles Dickens' worst novel is A Tale of Two Cities because it's written about a time and a place that wasn't his own." Well, you're right, his least memorable characters are in that book, and I think I see your point. Your point is that the dithering old parson, too, should stick to topics he knows and resist the urge to report on lakeside parks in the lowlands of New York State. Point well taken.

It's good to be back in the woods again... After a whole day of working on a really dry and esoteric final paper for one of my classes, I discovered that I still had some daylight hours left. So, I went to a part of the forest I know too little about, an area known as Cornplanter's Bridge. About a half mile from the entrance to Red Bridge, and on the opposite side of the road, there's a beautiful little brook that flows down off a very steep mountainside. Following streams up mountainsides is bushwacker paradise. Photos can't capture the allure of this stream valley under the snow, and it was the perfect destination after too many weeks away.


The steep hillsides are spectacular. Summitting, on the other hand, can be a little anticlimactic in the ANF. In this case, the summit, which promised glorious vistas from afar, was a clear cut with two major forest roads and three active oil derricks. Even when the summits are wild, they're usually little more than broad, level areas with trees and rocks. Views are relatively rare.

This January Thaw surely ruined some of the fun up at the annual Winterfest at Chapman State Park, but it provided a great day for hiking...if you don't think too much about just how extraordinarily warm and long the "Thaw" has been... (Global warming, while horrible, is at least better than the New Ice Age theory that's propounded by some pseudo-scientists in the pocket of Big Oil.)