Can I Reach 5 Million?

Last summer, a few days after my birthday, I thought it would be cool to see how many steps I take by the time I hit my next birthday - or, to be fair, until a few days after my upcoming birthday, which will be #62.  Since I started counting on July 19, 2012, I will end my count at the end of the day on July 18, 2013.  That gives me 30 more days, including today (which was a good day with over 21,000 steps as of 8:30) to see how many steps I can take.

So it is cool to report that I am within striking range of 5 million steps in my 62nd year.  In fact, as of the end of yesterday, I am only 375,000 steps short of the 5 million mark.  If I average 12,507 steps a day for today and the next 29 days, I will reach that mark.

I am sure I will do it, barring illness or injury.  In fact, I am going to see if I can reach it by my actual 62nd birthday, which would mean averaging about 13,900 steps a day, including today.

I am excited about my next birthday because I will be able to get a lifetime National Parks pass for just $10!  That is the best bargain going.  So I'd like to qualify for that by hitting the 5 million step count.  As I told a friend today, I am OK with being an old person, as it far beats the alternative.  But I don't want to move like an old person!

5 Million, here I come!

Shackleford Sunrise

Sunday June 9.
After seeing the wild horses the evening before, we had dinner at our campsites - mine was a commercial backpacking meal in a bag, no clean-up, just pack the trash out - we went back down to the beach.  There was a really nice sunset, but my camera was back in camp.  If I get photos from Chris or Carl, I will post them.  The air felt great with the sun down.  I took off my still-damp shirt for a while and enjoyed the breeze.  There were a lot of clouds but we could see some stars later.

On Sunday morning, I was awake by 5:30 and left my tent to walk on the beach.  This time I took my camera and got some shots of the sun coming up over the island's east end.  It was wonderful being on the beach at this time of day.  After the sun was up, I did a couple of miles beachcombing and found some shells.

Here are some photos of the sunrise.

 If you look carefully, lower dead center, you will see the Cape Lookout Lighthouse - about seven miles away.  Click on any photo to enlarge it.

"Bankers"

As I arrived  back at camp from my walk on Saturday (June 8), I saw Carl standing on a hummock motioning to me.  As I got closer, I realized that he was telling me that he found wild horses.  We climbed a hummock, and there they were - to the west of us.  I had covered the other three major points on the compass on my hike.  When I first saw them, they were several hundred feet away, and the sun was behind them, so the first pictures I took did not turn out well.  But I very slowly circled around them - getting stuck by small cacti several times - and got closer and closer.

These horses are wild, but they are used to people.  Deer would have run away, but the horses stayed.  Even so, they are wild animals, and are believed to be descendants of Spanish horses that were shipwrecked in the 1600's.  People are injured every year when they do stupid things, like trying to ride them.  The boat captain told us that five people have been kicked this year, so far.  So we kept our distance, and enjoyed being so close to large wild animals.

Here are some photos.  You can see that the National Park Service brands them to keep track of them.  This was a band of five horses - a stallion and four mares.  At the first point, I had gotten north of the herd, and you can see the ocean to the south.  By the last photo, I was to their west, with the declining sun behind me.  These animals were all within a few hundred meters of our camp, but with all the little sandy hills, they could be totally hidden until you came right up on them.

I Stand Corrected!

A few years ago, I wrote a piece about encountering two copperheads, among other animals, while hiking in Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

It turns out that I was wrong about that.  At least two people made comments that the snakes that I saw were cottonmouths, not copperheads.  They looked different than the cottonmouths that I saw elsewhere in the refuge, but one person in particular said that the snake I photographed had the classic defensive pose of a water moccasin.

So, thanks for the comments and the corrections.  I stand corrected.

Day One on Shackleford Banks

It is taking me a bit longer than I hoped to get things posted about last weekends backpacking trip on Shackleford Banks, but I will gradually get it done.

Saturday, June 8.  We got off the boat by about 10:20, looked around a bit, shouldered our heavy packs, and started walking up the beach.  There were lots of people out and about on this uninhabited island who had taken boats over to look for shells.  But we didn't see anyone else backpacking.  Our loads were heavy, but bearable.  I cannot imagine the weights that soldiers carry in places like Afghanistan.

I marvelled at how beautiful and remote the beach was.  Not too far from here, there would be beaches with thousands of people, but once we had walked a half mile from where the shell seekers were, we hardly saw anyone.  A couple did come down the beach with a large bucket full of shells.  They must have come over at 9:00 and headed straight up the beach for a few miles, determined to get the shells washed up by the storm, and they had cleaned up!  Here is a view of the beach, with the tide going out.

We decided at some point to only hike 3 miles (instead of 4) before setting up camp.  So on our second or third pack-off break, we had come nearly that far, and Carl and I started doing a little scouting.  Most of the time, the dunes were too high to climb over easily, but in a quarter mile, we came to a spot with low dunes.  We started exploring.  The land on the other side of the dunes was more dunes and sand hills, all covered with low grasses.  There were paths made by the wild horses, and small cacti that hurt like hell when you got one jabbed into a leg.  In between the grassy dunes were low, flat areas covered with short and thick grass:

We followed some pathways through the dunes and found what looked like a good camping spot.  It was close enough to the ocean to get a breeze, but partially protected by dunes, plus our tents would not the highest things around in the event of a thunder storm.  We returned and got Chris, and came back, had lunch on the beach, and set up our tents.  We took care to not pitch our tents in the middle of a horse trail or on the lowest ground.  We also put them 20 to 30 feet apart so that if we got lightening, one bolt wouldn't be likely to get all of us at once.  Here is my little tent, all set up.  It was already hot enough that I was anticipating lying in there in relatively cool darkness:

 Carl set his tent up close to a dune, with another small one to its right that partially hid it.

 Here is a longer range view of our home for the next two nights.  Chris's and my tents are to the left, Carl's in partially out of view on the right.

It felt so good to have the heavy packs off.  We lazed on the beach, and took turns fishing.  The other two guys caught one small fish each, but my traditional fishing luck held.  Without firewood, we released any fish caught.  I explored for shells and found a few good ones.  After a few hours of this, it was getting on in the afternoon, and I decided to explore a bit before dinner, so I took a short hike over the interior of the island.  Here is the route, shown in blue (our campsite is indicated with the little campfire icon, even though we didn't have a fire), of my 1.5 mile hike.  I went roughly clockwise, and the ocean is to the south, and the sound to the north.

It gave me a chance, unsuccessful, to look for horses, and to see what other parts of the island away from the beach were like.  A dominant feature all around us were these interior dunes.  They were not more than 15 - 25 feet tall, but were steep and gave interesting relief to the land so close to the flat beach.

There were also a few trees scattered about, and sometimes, little clumps of trees.

As I approached the north side of the island, the trees suddenly turned into a thick maritime forest.  The shade looked inviting, but it was so thick that I would have had to force myself through it, and I didn't like the thought of all the ticks I would likely pick up.  So I admired it from a little distance.

Even this close to the forest, I was not far from the ocean, and by hiking up a little hill, I could see it behind me.

I kept exploring, and found a clear path through the forest,

and followed it to the sound:

I could see boats out and about, and civilization across the sound on the mainland.  I retraced my steps, left the forest in a short time, and followed the path to the ocean.  Along the way, I found evidence of when people actually lived here.  It must have been a difficult life, just surviving, but tranquil all the same.

I had meandered slowly and quietly, and had not seen a sign of a horse (well, OK, I saw plenty of signs that horses were there, but I didn't see the animal, just what they were leaving behind).  At this point, I returned to camp, wondering what Chris and Carl were up to.  As I approached camp, I saw Carl standing on a high spot.  He motioned for me to come join him, but to be quiet.  He had found the "bankers" - the wild horses of Shackleford Banks!

Getting Out to Shackleford Banks

Saturday morning, June 8.
In my last post, I gave a summary of my backpacking trip on Shackleford Banks.  But to hike on an island, first you have to get out there.  In our case we took a boat out, using Island Ferry Adventures in Beaufort, North Carolina.

First though, we got up and got packed in our hotel in New Bern, had a decent breakfast, and got on the road by about 7:15.  On the way out of the hotel, I admired one of the New Bern bears.  There are 49 of them, I think, scattered around the city.

When we got to Beaufort, in what should have been plenty of time for the 9AM boat, we found out that it was very difficult in this waterfront town to buy bait and fishing licenses.  That took us more than an hour, and we made the 10:00 boat with minutes to spare.  We were on our way to our remote destination!  No, none of these were our boats, but we saw this view from the flat bottomed boat as we left the scenic harbor:

Chris and Carlton were perhaps watching bottle-nose dolphins here.  We saw at least 6-8 of them, one of them swimming incredibly fast.

We had to hang on at times.  The ride was fast and rough, and the spray from the waves broke heavily over the boat.  By the time we got to Shackleford Banks 20 minutes later, I was soaked.  You can see in this photo how soaked the right side of my shirt and pants - the side facing the bow of the boat - got during the short ride!

The boat, with its flat bottom, simply pulled up on the beach at the bow, and we stepped on to the sand.  There were plenty of people going out for day trips - the 9:00 boat was nearly full - but we were the only ones we saw backpacking out there.  It was exciting to set foot on the sandy west end of the island after so much planning and thinking about it.

It was time to start hiking to find a suitable campsite.  The map below shows the hikes I went on during the time we were out there.

The red track on the left was the hike - about three miles - to our campsite.  The small blue loop in the middle was a 1.5 mile hike later that day, and the purple track to the right was a 4.35 mile out and back (for a total of about 8.7 miles) on Sunday to see what some of the rest of the island was like.  On Monday, we repeated the red track in the opposite direction to catch the boat.  And of course, not shown on the map are the many, many shorter walks to beachcomb, explore, and look for horses.

Of course, I will describe each of those hikes, and more, in later posts.

Shackleford Banks Trip - Overview

I had a marvelous time backpacking three days on Shackleford Banks, part of Cape Lookout National Seashore in North Carolina.  I'll be writing a number of posts about the trip, and have something like 200 photos to comb through, but I'll make this overview my first post.

My two compadres and I drove down Friday evening, going right through Tropical Storm Andrea, and finding a motel in New Bern.  It took us nearly an hour to find a hotel.  We wanted two beds plus a rollaway or a pull-out sofa, and the best we could do was a king and a pull-out.  What would women do?  I bet most of them would sleep two in the big bed and the third would take the pull-out, but men just are not going to do that.  Just about the time we had resigned ourselves to one of us sleeping on the floor, we found a great place at a reasonable price with the two beds and the sleeper sofa.  Hurrah!

We drove to Beaufort, NC in the morning and took the 10:00 boat over.  My pack weighed about 55 pounds: roughly 7.5 pounds for the pack and empty water containers, 14.5 pounds of camping gear like my tent and sleeping pad, 28 pounds of water and Gatorade, and 5 pounds of food.  I needed help just to put the pack on my back!  But the good news was, that after the boat dropped us off on the west end of the nine mile long island, we would only hike 3-4 miles with the full pack weight before making camp.  And when Chris suggested making camp at 3 miles about one mile in, he got no arguments from Carlton or me.

Shackleford Banks is a truly beautiful and interesting island.  No one lives there, and there is no drinking water - unless you can desalinate it.  There seemed to be four major zones moving from south to north: a beautiful and wild nine mile Atlantic Ocean beach with a pronounced dune system,

a broad area of undulating dunes and hummocks covered in coarse grasses, with occasional flat grassy areas,

a dense maritime forest,

and a wetland fringe with some beach at times bordering on the sound.

So, what did we do for the two full days and one partial morning that we were on this amazing island?  We explored, hiked, beach combed, fished, searched for wild horses, relaxed a little, and looked for wildlife.  There is no shade - the forest would be very shady but loaded with ticks - and the sun was oppressive at times.  My clothing was continually damp, either from sweat, the humidity in the air, or both.  It never got below about 75, with very high humidity, and so I am glad I didn't bother with a sleeping bag.  Day time highs - in the shade if there had been shade - would have been about 86, but it was much hotter than that in the sun.  I wore long sleeves, long pants, and my Tilly hat, and although these may have been warm, they gave me good sun protection.  I also applied sunscreen to my exposed skin about 3 times a day, and did not get burned despite continually being out in the sun.

I walked and walked and walked, and then, I walked some more.  On Saturday and Sunday alone, I took over 84,000 steps according to my pedometer.  Assuming 2,300 steps per mile for an average, that would translate to nearly 37 miles in the two days.  A lot of those miles was looking for great seashells, and did I find some good ones!

Twice, we were able to find wild horses, of which there are over 100 on the island.  These animals are descendants of Spanish horses that survived shipwrecks in the 1600's.  They are wild animals but also will tolerate humans as long as you don't approach them directly.

And when you are camping at the beach, is there anything better than sitting out in the (relative) coolness of the evening as the sun sets, listening to the rhythm of the pounding surf?

Well, that is a summary of my little adventure.  If it whetted your appetite for more, more will be coming over the next week, because I have a lot more to share with you.

Heading to Shackleford Banks!

If you carefully worked through all of my clues, you may have figured out my destination for my little adventure: Shackleford Banks, a nine mile long uninhabited barrier island that is the southern-most part of Cape Lookout National Seashore. Uninhabited, that is, except for 100 wild horses, many birds, an occasional loggerhead turtle, and millions of biting insects. There is no water that is drinkable by humans. There are brackish ponds that the horses drink from, but they are too saline for us. So we each will be carrying about 28 pounds of water and Gatorade, which should last us the 50 hours we will be on the island.

The original plan was to go Friday morning and come home Sunday, but the "Andrea"changed that. We have to take a boat over and back, and they were not going to be running Friday. So instead, we will catch a boat over about 9AM Saturday and come back to the mainland about noon Monday. That should give us time to explore all nine miles of the island, and its many ecological zones: maritime forest, “ghost” forest, wetlands, dunes, and beach. Depending on the biting flies and mosquitoes, we may end up being on the beach a lot. There is supposed to be spectacular seashells here, and so I will be looking hard for those. We may also try a little fishing in the surf, and hopefully some star-gazing at night. And if we are incredibly fortunate, maybe we will see a female loggerhead coming up to nest late one night.

Once the boat drops us off, I see us hiking no more than 2-4 miles with our heavy packs. We’ll find a good campsite, set up our tents, and leave the drinking water (most of it) and food behind as we explore. My pack weight will go from about 54 pounds to maybe 15 at this point. Because of the heavy amounts of water we need to each bring, we are carrying minimal gear – no sleeping bags, for example, and no rain gear. The lows are expected to be about 75 and the highs 85. So my sleeping bag liner should be good enough to sleep in, and a little emergency rain jacket should do if a sudden downpour comes up. We are carrying one stove and one first aid kit among the three of us. None of us plans on cooking anything other than an instant meal in a bag, so we won’t have to carry precious water to wash dishes. I am bringing a warm fleece and an emergency “space blanket,” just in case. And there is no need to carry a water filter, as there is no fresh water to filter - although, I would not be surprised to find some fresh water pools after the soaking rain of last Friday.

I will be bringing my camera, GPS, and binoculars, of course. I hope to see some great wildlife, collect some cool shells, and take some nice photos while I am out there those three days, so look for some updates later this week.

"Life List"

As I plan my own little adventure later this month (here are 10 clues to figure out where I am going), I am awestruck with a book that I just finished about Phoebe Snetsinger. The book is “Life List” by Olivia Gentile, and I highly recommend it. It is a fascinating and well-written read about an truly amazing, if obsessed, woman.

Who was Phoebe Snetsinger? Well, only the first person known to have seen 8,000 of the world’s bird species. In fact, she ended up seeing something like 8,700 different species. And this was after first getting interested in birds at age 33 when she was shown a Blackburnian warbler by a friend. Along the way, she traveled all over the world, trekked to the most remote and difficult places one can imagine, saw incredible things and thousands of beautiful birds, endured inconceivable hardships, and experienced a few truly horrific things. She also lived for something like 18 years after being told that she would be dead in less than a year from melanoma, and she virtually walked away from her marriage. For most years after her diagnosis, she ended up traveling to see birds five to seven months of each year.

If you have any interest in birds and the natural world, and in the human spirit, I’d encourage you to read this excellent book.

Scratching a 17 Year Itch

In June of 1996, I accepted a job with a new company.  Although the job was in Richmond, the company was headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, which is near Washington, DC.  They needed me to come up for the day before I started to fill out paperwork and get taken out to lunch, so I took a day off from my then current job to do so.  It was a nice day, so I threw some hiking basics in the car, and on the way back, I stopped at Prince William Forest Park (near Quantico, Virginia) for a hike of a few miles.

The hike itself was very nice, but what struck me was the cicadas!  As it turned out, the 17 year brood had morphed into adults and were everywhere!  The sound was deafening.  They were all over the trees, flying through the air, zipping past my head.  It was fascinating but a little creepy too, to have these large insects buzzing past.  But I made a decision that I would come back in 17 years once again.  I quickly did the math in my head, and came up with 2013.  Guess what?  It is now 2013, so yesterday, on a simply gorgeous day, I went back.

There were lots and lots of cicadas.  I could hear them everywhere as I hiked a 7.5 mile circuit, and I saw some.  The holes where they emerged from the ground were all along the trail.  But what I didn't see was them flying past, wings buzzing with tremendous sound.  So that was a little disappointing.  Maybe that would happen in June.  Here is the map of my route, hiked clockwise as shown by the arrows, and the elevation profile.  It is not a difficult hike, and is very pleasant.  I hiked mainly on the Turkey Run Ridge Trail (west side of the map) and the North Valley Trail (east side), connecting on the Mary Bird Branch and Lake Quantico Cascades Trails.

The hike is through very pleasant forestland and much of it is along two streams.  Other than cicadas and many butterflies, I didn't see much wildlife.  I heard a pileated woodpecker hammering away, and I saw a young northern fence lizard - very difficult to spot these - and a yellow billed cockoo.  I was thinking that the cockoo would make a great "what am I?" and I was maneuvering for a photo when a couple of hikers came by me and scared him away.

I am so glad that I lived these 17 years to come back here, surviving cancer along the way.  Think of it - the animals I saw yesterday were new life in 1996!  I saw their parents.  For 17 years, they lived under the ground by the billions.  Many of them died in that time.  Human babies born the same year are now going to be seniors in high school!  16 springs and summers passed by, and they stayed under ground.  And then somehow, on the 17th spring, it was time to mature, tunnel out of the earth, climb a tree, and shed their exoskeleton.  They will live a few weeks as adults, feeding hungry creatures all over the forest.  The luckiest will breed, lay their eggs, and then die.  I know that a lot of people think they are disgusting, and even had a couple of folks tell me they wouldn't mind if they all just disappeared, but I see it as a simply amazing biological phenomina, one with few equals.  My guess is that cicadas, and other insects, will still be on this earth when we humans have come to the end of our time.

I reflected yesterday that I have a decent shot, better than a coin flip, of seeing the children of these insects.  But my chances of me seeing their grandchildren is pretty remote.  I hope I can come back in 2030 and say to them, "Hey!  I knew your mom and dad!"  But life is uncertain, and I am just happy I got back their yesterday.  Here are a few photos from my hike.

Green was the dominant color yesterday.  It is my favorite color, so I was fine with that.

About as big around as a pencil eraser, these holes were everywhere I looked as I hiked along.  They are where the 17 year old cicadas tunneled out of the ground.

I liked the blue in this butterfly.

A lot of the hike was along two pleasant streams, some with small cascades.  The mountain laurel was in bloom during my hike.

There was lots of mature forest along the way.

This little northern fence lizard was just a couple of inches long, and difficult to spot.

Pyrite mining was once conducted here.  This shows a reclaimed mine site.

The stars of the show, and the reason I came here yesterday!  I saw these guys parents.  If I am very lucky, I'll still be walking this earth to see their children in 17 years.  And if I am fortunate beyond any reason, I will see their grandchildren!