tamarack

Been thru the one at Bear Mt, NY when I was in Scouting. Mahoosuc Notch in Maine has loads of "lemon squeezers" - fun scramble among car-size rocks when pack-free but a major pain when carrying one. Often would need to slide the pack thru and crawl after it. I've read where it was called the AT's toughest mile.

Back when I lived in Gardiner I made the mistake of putting one of those bite-size Hershey bars on the dash of the carbureted 1983 Escort before driving home from my deer hunting area, and the candy slipped down the heater hole. Smelled nice on the trip, but we then parked the car over winter. In the spring there was a foul odor in the car and when I ran the heater fan pieces of insulation flew out. Obviously a mouse/vole had smelled the riches and then probably nested in the shelter but succumbed during the cold. We were giving the car to our daughter for college in SC so I had to drive it around for quite a while with the heater on high (windows open because it was warmer that day than today) to get the stench down to a bearable level. Unrestrictive sun today and cool. That CAA map of PF's is impressive. If things were to relax and go calm just after nightfall, I might be scraping the windshield Monday morning.

No, though I've read snippets about that year. Used to have (lost in a move?) a "disasters" book that included the fires at Hinckley (MN) and Peshtigo, and still have "The Week Maine Burned" about the fires of 1947. (Which burned through a couple entire downtowns in SW Maine along with the "cottages" at Bar Harbor. Caused 15 fatalities, but thankfully nothing like the above pair, 500+ at Hinckley and more than 1500 at Peshtigo where the flames rode the same winds that spread the Chicago fire.)

Perhaps get a firm ID on the bugs, then look for the appropriate variety of BT, the biological insecticide which has been adapted for numerous insect families, each working only on that family (BT for Diptera [flies and mosquitos], as an example, won't harm bees.)

Cannot argue with that. Though I like "interesting" wx, I'm also happy to live in the land of little hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes and big snowstorms.

Probably fall webworm, aka uglynest caterpillar. Looks messy, has little/no effect on the trees as the leaves being eaten have done nearly all their work already. This is the season when the yellowjackets in particular get both dumb and aggressive. Maybe they sense that the end is near and want to enjoy their last meals, so they become less wary (easier to swat) but more pestiferous than ever. No 80s last month, waiting for 1st 70s this month. (Will undoubtedly come - 15 of 21 Septembers here have reached the 80s and the lowest monthly max is 76.)

Somewhat related, I've always found ice storms exciting and beautiful (the NNJ event in 1953 probably triggered my interest in both wx and trees), but that excitement is tempered by foreboding since I entered the forestry profession.

Our first house in Fort Kent had town sewer and well water (which had objectionable iron levels among other problems.) Of course, Taunton is a bit closer to centers of civilization. (And the sewer had its problems too - would back up during the summer. We would close the cleanout "Y" where the soil line went thru the floor, but one time our neighbors neglected to do that, came back from a weekend away and found 9" sewage in their basement. They'd just put 6 cords of firewood down there, and had to toss it all out thru the little window - no Bilko Door or other outside entry. )

Despite driving thru Kinsman Notch dozens of times when my parents lived 15 miles to the west in Woodsville, we never stopped at Lost River. Have had some excitement in the corkscrew turns heading west from the notch.

At my place it has both the highest proportion of available sunlight and the lowest median precipitation. (Average is 4th lowest, behind JFM.) September only very rarely has good severe. While that's accurate - in 46 Maine Septembers I've yet to experience a TS remotely close to severe - the largest TS-related blowdown I've seen in those years occurred in September, on the 30th no less. 600 acres got flattened east of the town of Eagle Lake, in a 4-mile-long swath that started a bit north of the Eagle-Square thoroughfare and finished by tossing spruce trees into the west end of Square Lake. In a delicious bit of irony, that area got 3-5" snow on the same date 5 years later.

Where's this My guess is somewhere in the Sierras, judging by the trees. 18 hours of autumnal rain produced 0.54" with temps in the 50s - high was 58. First time running the woodstove this season.

Nice October-y feel to yesterday, RA- all day (0.54" total) and a max of 58.

The leaves in your pic (right side) look a bit wider than cherry leaves around here, but the bark is cherry - no other tree in the area has that blocky black skin. If you can reach a twig, a scrape of the bark offers that "bitter almond" aroma diagnostic for the genus, which includes chokecherry (more a bush than tree) and pincherry, also called fire cherry as it's often on of the first trees after fire or clearcut. It grows about as large as striped maple though it cannot tolerate shade.

Finished with our 2nd August never reaching 80 (hit 79 twice) in 22 years, the first being 2008. Not quite as cool as that month, 62.1 vs 61.5. Average is 63.8. Had 5.13" RA, about an inch AN, thanks to the 2.3" in 2.5 hours on 8/21.

Agree. The sinuses are too deep for black oak, and though the full tree pic doesn't show pin oak's frequent horizontal (or lower) branch character, that facet is usually seen in open-grown street trees. In the forest the tree grows much like other oaks, though it's prone to epicormic branches (none seen in the pic) unless it's in dense woods.

Gorgeous place! However, having heated mostly with wood for decades, I can't imagine not having a woodstove in the north country, preferably on an inside wall (unlike our current place with stove on outside wall) so the chimney gives heat to the house all the way to the roofline. Some folks, my wife included, would rather not see firewood hauled into a brand new home.

Not PC In the plant nursery business, trees like striped maple are called "snakebark maple." And slippery elm is relatively uncommon in the Northeast, such that I've never bothered to learn how it's different from American elm.

In Fort Kent, where vine-ripened tomatoes were dream stuff if one didn't own a greenhouse, we'd put the greenies between 2 sheets of newspaper and add 2-3 ripe apples. Ripe tomatoes (from somewhere else, obviously) would do the same - the ethylene gas that hastens ripening is the same for both "fruits." I'll have to double check the numbers but glens falls will def be higher than Troy/ALB It's almost 50 years since our youth group twice visited Word of Life's snow camp at Schroon Lake, and back then snow and pack increased gradually from little/none at ALB to a nice pack (Feb. 1969, living on the 2 feet from the post-Christmas storm) to being buried the next year. The biggest changes were from Saratoga north. In Feb. '71 we arrived on a Friday a few hours after the end of one major dump and left Sunday morning in another (the 2 totaled 34" at the Schroon River co-op.) The snowbanks next to the Interstate on-ramp were 7-8 feet high, and between that and the SN+ we had to stick the front of the car pretty near into the travel lane to see if anyone was coming. I likened the view as being inside a ping-pong ball, but by the time we'd reached Saratoga, the snow was nearly stopped.

Depends on when you look. My useful snow records for BGR start in 1953 and for a couple decades they had frequent bumper winters. Their cumulative average thru 1972-73 was 99". Then we moved there on 1/23/73 and the snowtrain derailed. Our 2 full winters, 73-74 and 74-75, averaged 55" and only the April snow brought that average above 40 (and we lived at about 25' elev - the airport observation site's extra 150' often made a significant difference. The 3-days of 32-33° paste in Feb 1973 brought 9.0" at our place - never more than 4-5" OG - and 14.1" at the airport.) For 1973-74 and forward, the cumulative average ran in the mid-upper 60s (probably not dissimilar to Troy/ALB) until the most recent 9 winters averaged 88" and dragged that 73-74/forward average up to 72". For the full 1953-on period the average is 80".

That map accurately reflects co-op reports, but folks living northwest from CAR know that Fort Kent and Allagash generally get more. There are exceptions like the April 1982 blizzard when CAR measured 26.3" while FK co-op recorded 13" and I had 17", but most storms and nearly all years had the St. John Valley with more actual snow than CAR. Loggers and sledders also are well aware that once one reaches the St. John uplands west of Allagash, where most of the land is at 1,000-1,500' elev (or about 500-1000 higher than the valley), snowfall and depth climb significantly more yet. The numbers below show snowfall during my time in Fort Kent, for that co-op, CAR and my own records. #1976 includes only Jan-May as we moved there 1/1/76, and 1982-83 omits March because the Fort Kent records are missing. I had 20.3" that month and CAR 13.9". Thru the winter of 80-81 we lived at about the same elevation as the co-op, while the last 4 winters we were in the back settlement 3 miles SW and about 450' higher. Winter FK co-op CAR Personal 1976* 86.0 85.6 93.5 76-77 152.0 145.9 186.7 77-78 108.0 118.8 125.6 78-79 113.0 126.8 128.2 79-80 65.0 74.2 81.8 80-81 73.5 122.9 108.5 81-82 127.5 159.8 185.8 82-83* 62.0 74.2 85.2 83-84 117.0 136.2 171.0 84-85 65.0 90.8 113.8 I probably took less frequent measurements - more one-a-days - then compared to what I do now, and one can easily do a sniff test of my reports on KevMA's snow tables. Look how sneaky NW and even nrn NJ can be near 287 with those events. Might not jack, but they do better than BOS when longitude is involved. 12/29/00 was a hard lesson in that. We were in N.Central NJ and bagged some major events - 2-footers in '56, '58 and '61 and storms 15-20" in '58, '60 (March and Dec), '61, '64,' 67, '69 and probably 1972 though we had only 8-9" with mix at our garden apartment about 400' lower and a few miles south of my parents' place.

Except for the Sugarloaf area, where 8" RA blew out Route 27 bridges both N and S of the resort entrance, Maine dodged that bullet. The 3-5" elsewhere was easily handled. The Carrabassett River recorded its 2nd greatest peak flow (though way short of 1987) while on the Sandy it wasn't even that year's top CFS and the Irene peak of about 14,500 was a bit below the median for yearly max (15,200.)

By the time it reached northern Maine the wind was gone but not the water. We had 6" RA, 90% falling 6-10PM on the 10th. On the 11th one might have been able to surf the standing waves in the St.John. A 50-yard stretch of Route 161 was blown out, cutting off that town and Allagash as a large number of woods road bridges also failed. Next to our office west of Fort Kent downtown (I was a forester on a large family-owned landbase then) a DOT dump truck was sitting with back axles partly in a washed out culvert and front wheels 4 feet off the ground. The apartment next to ours was getting foundation damage from the normally 2-3'-wide brook that was now flowing 2' deep and 100' wide across the highway. We directed it between that apartment and the one where I lived, using bags of marble chips and bales of peat moss from Pelletier Florist across the street, and by the time things had clmed down, there was a trench between the apts 12' wide and 8' deep, and our back yards looked like river bottom gravel, rocks, and one old car hood washed from somewhere.

Wisdom. They had no interest in going out there to rescue folks. High-end tropical storm, winds gusting 60+ at our inland location and the coast probably had some to 75. A local source reported 3.5" in 2 hours. The wind awakened me about 2 AM, at which time the storm was in full fury and the cheap wedge gauge on our 2nd floor balcony (garden apts) had nearly 4" and would overflow at 5". So I donned my official BSA poncho and stepped out to empty the gauge, getting thoroughly soaked in my 15 seconds outside. North Jersey sites received a combined 6" to nearly 10" (Morris Plains reported 9.72) from the 2 events, but it had been dry in recent weeks. Small/medium watercourses went nuts (stalled our Nova trying to drive through 15" of Rockaway River water on a street in Denville, pushed it out, restarted and continued) but there was little significant flooding. The lesser (4-7" in 8 hours) event of late May 1968 came with water tables and streams fairly high, and caused many millions of dollars damage.

Last evening I headed hole from Farmington just after 8 in moderate RA and halfway there got to dry roads. Precip began at home about 8:30 and 30 minutes later I dumped 0.13" from the gauge in moderate RA - enough that our Lab mix retreated under cover after a minute or two. (She's got the proper form, coat and webbed paws, but "retriever" and love of water wasn't part of the package. ) Final total was 0.91" (I'm probably the isolated dark blue symbol on the map PF posted) over a 6-8 hour period, just about perfect for the garden. Perfect would've been temps upper 60s rather than upper 50s - kinder to the 'maters. These PRE events are another one of the Fraud Five. They never produce as advertised in the 4 years or so I've been a board member. My first PRE experience, long before the term came into (common) use, was my best - 3.80" of thunder-free tropical-like downpours through the daylight hours of 8/27/71. Then TS Doria dumped another 5.10" during the overnight, for a total of 8.90", easily the greatest 24-hour precip event of my experience.

Unfortunately, there's no practical method (of which I'm aware) for broadcast control of ticks, short of converting the woods to parking lots. There are effective ways to prevent ticks getting on oneself, and methods to keep them out of one's yard area. The latter consists of providing ideal nest material (cotton or dryer lint treated with pyrethrum in a tube - TP centers work fine) for small rodents, but the stuff needs to be placed at about 10-foot intervals around the area one wishes to protect. (Would need about 40 such "baits" to protect 1/4 acre.) When the Sugarloaf golf course was opened, the black flies were as bad as it gets, the South Branch of the Carrabasset being ideal spawning habitat for the critters. The resort got permission to apply a biological (BT) product specially developed for flies and mosquitoes and of little/no danger to other organisms. Costs more than chemical insecticides, but would make sense around people's homes. (Not a silver bullet, of course. I'm not sure why a related BT product has not been used for browntail moth.) Lyme is a treatable condition with antibiotics. True, but one must recognize the need for that treatment and many with Lyme do not and progress to the chronic disease, which is far harder to treat and can lead to misery and shortened lifespans for numbers several orders of magnitude greater than those contracting EEE (at present - warming climate, as you've noted, can lead to increased EEE, plus other joys like malaria.) This should not be either/or but both/and...