Sticky July

Castle Craig as viewed from the Halfway House on a breezy but warm and humid Sunday morning.

Visit #1257, Saturday 11 July 20, 6:25-10:00AM, 6.0 miles, 18.7lbs. of litter.

Temps in the 70's and rising, sunny with brutal humidity.

Visit #1258, Sunday 12 July 20, 7:45-9:15AM, mileage and litter n/a.

Temps in the 70's, breezes from the south, with rising temps and high humidity.

Last week I received a report of a fallen tree across a trail. On Tuesday I took a mountain bike ride on the trails to see what kind of work would be involved to remove it.

After eyeballing the tree, I rode the trail down to Merimere Reservoir and back to the park. Enroute, I stopped by the hornets' nest I discovered last week to evict the tenants. A can of hornets' nest spray and some social distancing from the hornets was all it took.

 I started early Saturday morning but there was no avoiding the humidity and rapidly rising temperatures.

I recently mentioned the closing hour for road access to East and West Peak have been pushed back from 4:45PM to 5:30PM. The sign makes it official.

Walking the road, I quickly gathered enough litter to leave this one at the water treatment plant, expecting to fill another bag soon.

At the north end of Merimere Reservoir I came upon my Find of the Week.

Somebody must have expected this inflatable ball to float its way across Merimere Reservoir. It didn't go very far.

In order for it to fit in my trash bag, I had to deflate it with malice and prejudice.

Traveling up the road, I picked up Painted Rocks #'s 23 and 24. I'm still not understanding this peculiar trend.

When I reached the fork in the road to East/West Peak, my trash bag was full so I left it for the parks department to collect, and started another bag. I intended to notify them of the bag's location but when I returned to the park by bike on Sunday, they had already collected the bag. My thanks to the Meriden Parks Department.

Diverging from the road I discovered another tree which needed removal as it was leaning low into the trail. Good thing I had the chainsaw with me.

This took no time at all to clear from the trail.

I finally reached my main objective for Saturday.

Obviously, this took more work than the other tree, but it was not particularly difficult.

At this point I reversed direction and headed toward Castle Craig, then followed the trails down.

Entering the Halfway House, I found much new graffiti. Fortunately, it was written in chalk, which should be easy to remove. This photo is from Sunday when I returned on my mountain bike to remove it. There was much more but it was sort of pointless to display here.

Heading back to the parking lot, I found this painted nip bottle. I can't imagine a child would paint a nip bottle, so why would an adult bother to paint it and to reference someone? What's the boat reference?

Walking underneath the I-691 bridges over the Soap Box Derby track, I found this hat formerly belonging to a CT DOT worker. At least there was no head underneath it.

I dropped off my last trash bag for the day, intending to return on Sunday to deal with the graffiti.

So I returned to the Halfway House on Sunday via mountain bike, armed with the tools to remove the chalk graffiti. Fortunately, being a graduate of Meriden's parochial school system, I was highly trained in dealing with chalk, having cleaned my share of blackboards back in the day. The nuns at St. Stanislaus School would have been proud that I had retained my know-how after all these decades.

A spray bottle of water and a scrub brush, with hardly any scrubbing.

This was a little bit more difficult because I'm so short and even standing on the wall, reaching it was well, a reach!

I don't know what COVID-05 was but it couldn't be as bad as Covid-19 because I've never heard mention of COVID-05 and you probably haven't either.

So I McGuyer'd a solution, using a bicycle tube, and taping the brush to my bicycle pump. Momma didn't raise no dummy! She did however, raise a short son...

There's some remaining graffiti that will have to be dealt with differently, but I'll leave that for next week.

I'll leave you with this week's collection of Covid-19 masks. There was apparently a Covid party here, behind this bridge abutment. One of the masks was ahem, creatively used as toilet paper... I don't make this stuff up.