Autumn's Garden: More Light on October

The pond in the picture above is found along the first trail -- there are many -- within the Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, a woodland preserve of hundreds of acres that we visited many times when our children will still, well, children. As you can tell from the photo of Sonya looking at the map to plot her next adventure, that was some time ago. For a while, as the kids grew and discovered their own mountains (and cities, and rivers, and preserves, and countries), and we explored new sites in Berkshire County, an ongoing ambition despite all the year we've visited this region -- especially in autumn, occasions that are treated in my household as pilgrimages.... well, the point is we sort of lost track of how much we loved the place. 
        How varying its landscapes. Woodland walks, ponds, hillsides, little wooden bridges over brooks shiny as they ambled through shaded needle-strewn forest floors. Also paths that run up mountain sides, zig-zagging through mixed deciduous and conifer woodland floors to sites such as the intimidatingly denominated 'Fire Tower,' and whatever you expect to find at the end of the Hermit's Trail. 

           You can pick your elevation. Last week we stayed low, Anne and I restricting ourselves to circuits around two substantial ponds, Pike Pond and the one we call the Beaver Pond.
Pike Pond has narrow, winding trails that pin you close to it low-land banks. The even-leveled footing is good for both young children and unsteady elders. For the second year in a row I was amazed at how much variety in woodland and water and hillside perspective this little trail offers.  The top photo, with foliage reflections on the surface water was taken here.
           The body of water we call the Beaver Pond was the site where we were first introduced to the unmistakable works of beavers behaving wildly in the wild. Chewed logs and tooth-marks on trees. Those unmistakable humped-up beaver lodges, made of thick limbs and mud and branches with the leaves still on them. And the crowded wetland creations of downed trunks amid broken branches, leaf piles and growing stuff in various stages that serve as the 'dams' the creatures throw together (with their teeth) in the never-ending challenge to create deep-water pools surrounding their lodges and sufficiently expansive to deter predators. 
          We glimpsed the occasional beaver head back in the day, as I recall, but mostly we saw their works. And now, the decades having mounted, we see those beaver works overtaken by nature's implacable "succession" strategy and turned into wetlands. When we circled the pond this time, we saw more plant-life incursions than open water: Huge pockets of Phragmites lining the banks at several places. Water lilies, a few with ducks sunning themselves in the autumn sun among them; and other wetlands species working away at the earth-creating job of turning water into mud. 

         It was all quite beautiful.
When we made our way clear of the shade of the trees, the views of hillsides and surrounding woodlands opened for us, as in the photos of the bottom of the page.
         Last weekend, when we visited, lots of other folks had found their way here too.