The leaves are all off the trees, temperatures are low, blaze orange is pretty much mandatory in the woods, and Chico and I are still walking as much as we can while the ground is bare.

We walked at White Lake the other day.

I admired the view of the tippy-top of Mount Chocorua.

While Chico experienced the trail in his own way:

Sniff

…and sniff

… and leave a message that you were here.

The lakeside trail leads to a trail that goes to the Tamworth Conservation Commission trails, so we made a nice loop. We hadn’t been this way for a while, and we discovered that there’s logging going on just past the boundary of the TCC lands and what was, earlier this summer, an overgrown woods road, is now well used, hard-packed, two track road. The work will finish and over the next few years, the plants will start to take it back.

The next day, we started exploring the Ossipee Pine Barrens. Pine Barrens are a rare and fragile ecosystem and this is one of the last in the state. There is a large tract owned by the Nature Conservancy, and it’s open to the public.

The tall Pitch Pines are surrounded by scrub oak.

This ecosystem is prone to fires, and many of the tree trunks are burned.

Some of it is quite dramatic.

Amazingly, the trees live and some start to sprout new growth in a very interesting way:

Like this, right from the trunk.

There are a lot of snowmobile trails in this preserve, and over 200 acres, it’s close to home, but a very different landscape – sort of a mini-field trip – so we’ll be going back to explore further.