Mianus River Gorge

 Along the Rim Trail at the Mianus River Gorge Preserve 

On the last day of our Hudson  River valley vacation last month, Kali and I hiked the 2.5-mile Rim Trail at the Mianus River Gorge Preserve in Bedford, Westchester County, New York.  Protecting the Mianus River Gorge was the fledgling Nature Conservancy's very first project.  Today, the gorge preserve is managed by an independent non-profit organization.

 The Minus River in the narrowest part of its gorge.

The Minus River is a modest stream that rises in northeast Westchester County and flows southward into Connecticut.  Continental ice sheet meltwaters carved the dramatic gorge, whose sides are lined with old-growth Canada hemlock stands.

These millipedes, much larger and more colorful than those around my preserve,

were abundant in the preserve

Because it precipitated at least part of every day of our vacation, I expected the preserve to be very wet, and that Kali would upbraid me for bringing her into a rain forest.  But the trails for the most part were in excellent condition, and Kali told me that she enjoyed the 5-mile round-trip walk very much--except for the abundant mosquitoes which bred in the vernal pools near the southern end of the trail that hurried us on our way.

Despite the fact that the preserve protects old-growth forest, it's had its share of human use, too.  In fact, it's amazing that the hemlock groves were left untouched, given the preserve's proximity (about 35 miles) to New York City.

Stone walls divide large sections of the preserve away from the gorge edge

Small quantities of mica, quartz, and feldspar were removed from this quarry face

I don't know how many folks are familiar with the Time-Life book series on American Wilderness that was published in the 1970s.  My complete collection is one of my prized possessions.  One volume of the series is called Urban Wilds and explores natural areas in the metropolitan New York City area.  In that volume, the Mianus River gorge is profiled through a collection of images and an essay entitled "Nature Walk."

 Havemeyer Falls, about 8 feet high, on a Mianus tributary near the southern end of the preserve

 

 A natural rock garden with Canada mayflowers (Maianthemum canadense) on a boulder above Havemeyer Falls.  

Don't you just love to pronounce that genus?

The Mianus River ends ignominiously just below the gorge in a reservoir, backed up to provide drinking water for Greenwich, Connecticut.  At this point, hikers must retrace their steps back to the parking lot.

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This is my 200th post; is that a milestone?

Mink River, and Your River

I'm reading Mink River, a strange, enchanted, and enchanting first novel by poet and essayist Brian Doyle from Oregon. I was captivated by this (longish) passage about the fictional Mink River in the Pacific Northwest, but it's applicable to your river, too; just change the players.

The river thinks too, you know.  Did you think rivers did not think?  The Mink is thinking.  Salmon and steelhead and cutthroat trout, it thinks.  Fir needles.  Salmonberries dropping suddenly and being snapped up by a trout who thinks them orange insects.  Alder and spruce roots drinking me always their eager thin little rude roots poking at me.  Rocks and pebbles and grains of stone and splinters of stone and huge stones and slabs and beaver and mink and crawdads and feces from the effluent treatment plant upriver.  Rain and mist and fog and gale and drizzle and howl and owl.  Asters and arrow-grass.  Finger creeks feeder creeks streams ditches seeps and springs.  Rowboats and rafts.  Canoes and chicory.  Men and women and children.  Dead and alive.  Willows and beer bottles and blackberry and ducklings and wood sorrel and rubber boots and foxglove and buttercup and rushes and slugs and snails and velvetgrass and wild cucumber and orbweaver spiders and that woman singing with her feet in me singing.  Baneberry and beargrass.  Thrush and hemlocks and coffee grounds.  Thimbleberry and heron.  Smelt and moss and water ouzels and bears and bear scat.  Bramble and bracken.  Elk drinking me cougar drinking me.  Ground-cedar and ground-ivy and eelgrass.  Vultures and voles.  Water striders mosquitoes mosquito-hawks.  Dock and dewberry.  Moths and mergansers.  Huckleberry and snowberry.  Hawks and osprey.  Water wheels and beaver dams.  Deer and lupine.  Red currant.  Trees and logs and trunks and branches and bark and duff.  I eat everything.  Elderberry and evening primrose.  Bulrush and burdock.  I know them all.  They yearn for me.  Caddis fly and coralroot.  I do not begin nor do I cease.  Foamflower fleeceflower fireweed.  I always am always will be.  Lily and lotus.  Swell and surge and ripple and roar and roil and boil.  I go to the Mother.  Madrone and mistmaiden.  The Mother takes me in.  Nettle and ninebark.  Pelt and peppergrass.  She waits for me.  Pine-sap and poppy.  I bring her all small waters.  Raspberry and rockcress.  I draw them I lure them I accept them.  Salal and satin-flower.  She is all waters.  Tansy and trillium.  She drinks me.  Velvetgrass and vernalgrass.  I begin as a sheen on leaves high in the hills, a wet idea, a motion, a dream, a rune, and then I am a ripple, and I gather the small waters to me, the little wet children, the rills of the hills, and we are me and run to Her muscling through wood and stone cutting through everything singing and shouting roiling and rippling and there She is waiting and whispering her salty arms always opening always open always o.

 Bard Rock on the Hudson River at Hyde Park, New York

Manitoga

During our recent Hudson River valley vacation, we visited Manitoga, a site in Garrison, New York, with which I was vaguely familiar because some of my colleagues had developed a master plan for the property.

Orange Jelly (Dacrymyces palmatus)

Probably Ling Shih, or Varnished Polypore (Ganoderma lucidum)

 Natural woodland garden with Bristly Parchment (Lopharia cinerascens)

Manitoga's mission is to preserve the legacy of pioneer designer Russel Wright — his home, landscape, products, archives and philosophy — and share them with professionals and the public.  The stated mission of the Russel Wright Design Center is to preserve and protect Russel Wright's home, studio and woodland garden at Manitoga "as a learning laboratory about the importance of living in harmony with nature and the value of good design in everything and for everyone."

 

Sensuous mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) embrace)

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Wright was one of the best known designers in the United States.   At the apex of his career, Wright left New York City and moved his base of operations fifty miles north to Garrison, New York. It was here that he created a home, studio and designed landscape. He named it Manitoga, meaning Place of the Great Spirit in Algonquin. Wright shared the Native Americans' respect for the earth.

When Wright first found the property in 1942, it had been damaged by a century of quarrying and lumbering. Over the next three decades, until his death in 1976, he carefully redesigned and re-sculpted Manitoga's 75 acres using native plants, his training as a theater designer and sculptor, and his innovative design ideas. Though the landscape appears "natural," it is apparently a careful composition of woodland trees, rocks, ferns, mosses, and wildflowers.  Wright created over four miles of paths that wind over creeks, into woods, among boulders, and through ferns and mountain laurel to focus visitors' attention on the importance of living in harmony with nature.  In 2006, Manitoga was named a National Historic Landmark.

Wright's house and studio perched on the edge of a quarry.  Wright rerouted the stream on the lower right to fill the quarry.

Tours of Wright's house and studio are offered infrequently and by reservation only, so we weren't able to visit the house and environs, which are completely off limits to casual visitors.  But we did walk much of the grounds.  Despite the organization's hype about a designed landscape, our visit was really just a walk in the woods.  The woodlands at Manitoga are pleasant, but they're not that much different from any other woodland walk you might take in the lower Hudson Valley. 

Constitution Marsh on the Hudson River

Kali and I spent eight days on vacation in the Hudson River valley last week.  Despite precipitation every single day (and sometimes all day), we had a good trip overall.

One of our stops was Constitution Marsh, an Audubon Important Bird Area on the east bank of the Hudson just south of the town of Cold Spring in Putnam County, about 35 miles north of New York City.

Constitution Marsh is a haven for waterfowl and shorebirds.  The marsh developed naturally in a shallow oxbow-like channel of the Hudson between Constitution Island (just off West Point, and actually part of the West Point military academy's landholdings) and the eastern bank of the river.  In the early 1800s, an agricultural entrepreneur developed ill-fated plans to grow wild rice commercially in the marsh, and later in the century the New York Central Railroad routed a rail line along the western side of the marsh, connecting Constitution Island to the mainland and, in so doing, cutting off much of the tidal flow to the marsh.  Nevertheless, the marsh has survived and even thrived, providing much needed habitat.

The Audubon Society maintains a visitor center on the mainland, but the real attraction of the site is a boardwalk extending out into the marsh (and guided canoe trips offered in the summer).  Unfortunately when we visited, we arrived at high tide, a time when most shore birds retreat to the wooded uplands surrounding the marsh and we saw nothing more than a few Red-winged Blackbirds, which I can see in my back yard.  In addition, the boardwalk is so close to high tide level that we couldn't access all parts of the boardwalk complex because parts were inundated.

The naturalist at the visitor center directed us to look for a pair of Bald Eagles nesting a half-mile downriver, and we did see the pair circling above and then entering their nest.  In addition, I photographed a tuliptree snag whose ancient roots had grown up around a boulder on the trail leading out to the boardwalk.