{"id":5115,"date":"2016-07-01T21:42:19","date_gmt":"2016-07-02T01:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/?p=5115"},"modified":"2016-08-09T14:14:31","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T18:14:31","slug":"coast-walk-14-east-point-to-seal-harbor-town-dock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/coast-walk-14-east-point-to-seal-harbor-town-dock\/","title":{"rendered":"Coast Walk 14: East Point to Seal Harbor Town Dock"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CW<\/p>\n

December 4, <\/strong>9:30am. 33 degrees, light breeze from the south. The morning started out sunny with puffy clouds but by 9:30 it was overcast and the air smelled like snow. There were occasional patches of sunshine as the clouds moved. Red Squirrel, juvenile Common Loon eating a sea star (or maybe a crab); 2 duck-type birds too far off to identify, juvenile Herring Gull.<\/p>\n

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Today’s walk was backwards – I started at the Seal Harbor Town Dock and headed south along the shore (again, with permission to access private property.)<\/p>\n

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This was a classic Seal Harbor estate, with the most beautiful 19th century stonework and perfectly groomed woodlands, gorgeous even in December.<\/p>\n

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I kept looking over the wall, trying to find a place to reach the shore, but it was just a little too high and a little too slippery to jump. But I did notice this cool calcite crust forming where the calcium carbonate in the mortar has been leaching out. I’m not sure if this qualifies as a baby stalagmite, but it’s the same process at work.<\/p>\n

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Some of you know that one of my personas is “landscape architect.” I’m afraid from the moment I saw these stairs:<\/p>\n

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my artist\/explorer hat came off and the landscape architect hat went on, and I wandered along the most marvelous path that ran through the woods<\/p>\n

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and along the cliffs.<\/p>\n

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I also spent a lot of time trying to identify the plants I saw, which is exponentially harder in winter. Pretty sure this is a viburnum, but I couldn’t tell you which:<\/p>\n

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There were Pitch Pines<\/p>\n

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of extraordinary size<\/p>\n

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wild roses (Rosa carolina, which is native to North America, unlike the more common rugosas)<\/p>\n

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and this awesome little fungus growing on the roots of a pitch pine. This is the Orange Jelly Fungus (Dacrymyces palmatus<\/a>) and it only grows on conifers. Apparently there’s a similar fungus that only grows on hardwood.<\/p>\n

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I didn’t see a lot of wildlife, except for a few red squirrels,<\/p>\n

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but I did find what I think was a chipmunk burrow. I didn’t think chipmunks ate pine nuts (that’s a squirrel thing) but squirrels don’t go underground, so maybe there’s a squirrel in the tree above throwing its food wrappers down on the chipmunk’s front door.<\/p>\n

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I also saw a Common Loon. It think it was a juvenile, but it could also have been an adult in its winter plumage. There’s almost always at least one loon on the water whenever I go out, and a couple of times I could swear they’ve followed me. I’d always thought of them as lake birds, but they spend their first couple of years on the ocean.<\/p>\n

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This area is called Ringing Point, and I’m a little embarrassed that I’d been wandering along listening to the sound of the buoy for a good forty minutes before that light bulb went off:<\/p>\n

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The pink granite cliffs were cleft into all kinds of cool formations:<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

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which continued up into the woods:<\/p>\n

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I spotted a pretty impressive erratic:<\/p>\n

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Looking across the harbor at Crowninshield Point and wondering how long it will be before I explore over there:<\/p>\n

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You may have noticed that I was so bewitched by the woods and the views that I never did climb down to the shore.<\/p>\n

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Oops.<\/p>\n

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December 4, 9:30am. 33 degrees, light breeze from the south. The morning started out sunny with puffy clouds but by 9:30 it was overcast and the air smelled like snow. There were occasional patches of sunshine as the clouds moved.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5115"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5623,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5115\/revisions\/5623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jenniferbooher.com\/wp-walking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}