Best Find of the Run! Chestnuts!!

I get provoked, wired, elated, ecstatic and angered-- often-- while out in the woods. There's so much to see, good and bad. Usually, I'm a relatively composed individual. Even in the woods.

Last Sunday though, I was ecstatic. Running atop the Blue Ridge, dodging rocks and clusters of acorns, I suddenly shrieked out to Dave, always about ten yards or so in front of me, to make a full stop and turn around. I'd found something that had eluded me in my almost 60 years of woods watching.

When Dave arrived, I was standing over a number of large, bright green items that resembled day-glo, chartreuse pincushions. I was probably twitching with excitement. Those hedgehog look-alikes were American chestnut burs; within, they held American chestnuts.

Why the excitement? At the beginning of the twentieth century, the American chestnut was the dominant tree of millions of acres of eastern and midwestern North American forest. The nutritious nuts, falling in October and Novmeber each year by the billions, fed local people, hogs, black bears, wild turkey, deer and hundreds of other species. The wood was of superb quality and was naturally rot-resistant.

The trees reached heights of 110 ft or more with trunk diameters of over 17 feet. In 1905, American chestnuts in Brooklyn became in infected with a blight thought to have been introduced from nearby Japanese chestnuts, a related species. Over the next 20 years, almost all American chestnuts had died back to their root systems.

For the past 90 years, those ancient roots put up new sprouts that reach a height of 6 to 25 feet. The blight then overcomes the young trees and kills them back to their roots. Millions of these root sprouts remain but very few ever grow large enough to produce nuts.

I'd found two or three trees, slightly resistant to the blight, growing from root systems hundreds of years old. To produce nuts, two or more resistant trees need to be growing closely enough for cross pollination to occur. Rarely does a tree grow large enough to flower. Rarer even are two close enough and producing enough pollen for fruit to set. Up on the Blue Ridge, somewhere south of the Blackburn Trail Center, conditions were just right. This wasn't the first year; burs from 2005 and 2004 and perhaps even earlier were on the ground nearby.

The American chestnut split off genetically from its blight-resistant relative, the Chinese chestnut, some 10 to 15 million years ago. It is unlikely that a species with that kind of endurance would disappear due to some single human blunder. Realistically however, it might be another half dozen centuries before they regained their place in our woodlands.

Many researchers and organizations have been working for decades to find resistant trees, to breed resistance into the American chestnut from its Asian relatives and now re-introduce this incredible tree back to its former haunts. The American Chestnut Foundation works tirelessly to breed and distribute resistant trees and to continue the search for remaining living trees that are producing chestnuts.

As Dave and I collected the last of the 12 chestnuts we took with us, we noticed a gray squirrel running across the Appalachian Trail ahead of us. In its mouth was a chestnut. How many generations of squirrels in our eastern forests have gone a fall season without eating what was the staple in the diet of millions of generations of their squirrel ancestors?

The chestnuts we found won't be roasted on an open fire. They'll rest for the next four months or so in our refrigerator, a necessary cold treatment to trigger germination come spring. They should sprout next April or May and then will be carefully nurtured in our Backyard Wildlife Habitat for a year or two before being placed out in friends' chestnut-friendly Virginia woodlands. It'll be a tiny step in bringing back this sorely missed friend of wildlife and people alike.

Changes: Seasons, Landscapes, Climate

A storm front hovered over Virginia Saturday, October 7; it bathed most of the state with drenching rains and blew dry the landscape with some blustery winds that followed. This was great "site prep" for a Sunday running adventure that was going to be difficult anyway.

The weather brought the first significant leaf drop of fall and paved many of the already slippery rocks in slick coverings of magenta, carmine and chrome yellow. It activated the silt and clay in those parts of the trail prone to muddiness.

Northeasters are part of what arrives in fall. This early, weak one will be followed by others through winter. They most strongly manifest themselves in the often heavy snows, gale force winds and heavy beach erosion of February and March storms. Last year, nor'easters continued passing up the coast into early May. Were they yet another manifestation of the stronger and perhaps more frequent storms we are to expect from our changing climate?

Fall change at its best however is about changing leaves, birds and monarch butterflies in migration and much more. Together with our year 'round residents, all manner of birds were actively feeding along the Blue Ridge early that morning. Kinglets, both ruby-crowned and golden crowned, were especially active, hover-gleaning insect eggs and spiders still inactive in the early morning fog.

Change too was apparent and less kind in the broader landscape. There was some reason for optimism, but perhaps I just needed to find something good in evidence. Most landscape changes observed were obvious and upsetting but only perhaps to someone who has hiked them for 30 years. Most disturbing to me is that all of these changes I saw and those related to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we can anticipate, were brought about by our actions.

Running the ridges and intervening stream valleys on Sunday took us through ridge top forests that are now chestnut oak, red maple and black tupelo. Twenty years ago, large changes began when the introduced gypsy moth ravaged the more diverse oak forests and left behind an altered landscape and fewer food alternatives for the wildlife of the forest.

Perhaps twenty five years ago, the wooly adelgid, an introduced Asian pest insect, began to kill off our native hemlocks that cloaked most of our mountain stream valleys. This tree offered nesting and feeding habitat for blackburnian and Canada warblers and ruffed grouse. They cooled our trout streams. They perfumed the forest for acres around. The hemlocks and habitats they dominated are now gone or changed much for the worse-- in just a quarter century.

The continuing bad news of landscape change includes the loss of most of our flowering dogwoods, succumbing to the introduced dogwood anthracnose. They no longer provide some of the best food for our migrating thrushes and other birds.


The climate changes that we see, in storm strength, drought persistance, higher temperatures and both coastal and inland flooding, are new agents of stress that our habitats and especially the trees that give them their bones, can't tolerate. Maybe what we've seen in the recent past is in part due to climate change already taking its toll on our ecosystems.

We did find that one bright spot. Nuts!

Getting Off the AT: When White Rectangles Turn Blue

Running or hiking the Appalachian Trail means carefully watching for:

* trees ready to knock you off your route
* rocks ready to bash your ankles and shins
* mud and tree roots grasping for your feet
* quick stops and face plants on the part of your companions partners
* algae and other rock coverings sure to provide no traction at all
* the regular appearance of white rectangles painted on surfaces along the trail
* rectangles of other colors

Why bother with those rectangles? If you miss a few, you aren't going to slip, twist your ankle or bust your shoulder on a tree trunk.

When your rectangle color changes from WHITE which means Appalachian Trail, to something like BLUE, you're off the AT. Observant runners like Dave and I not only watch for most of the items listed above, occasionally, we also check out the trees and mushrooms, have brief ongoing conversations with deer, grouse, fox,and passing dogs and conduct some fairly absurd conversations about the state of the world and the meaning of life.

Somewhere on the way to our turn-around point on the AT Sunday, WHITE rectangles changed to BLUE. We were oblivious. A quarter mile and 300 feet down the mountain, I said something like, "Dave, those rectangles are blue." Dave commented after thinking about my observation, "Huh. That means..??" I replied, "Not sure," and we continued caroming downhill. A half mile later, a sign saying "Ridge to River Trail" signaled to us that we were headed to the Shenandoah River in downtown Jefferson County, West Virginia. We'd been on the Ridge. With joy at our mistake, we realized that if we finished the run without further detours, we'd be getting in that extra mileage we wanted to make the run close to a twenty miler.

We finally stopped going downhill at the junction of Christ Church and Mission, right in the middle of an undeveloped development. Pretty place. Leaf colors changing. Far from the top of the Blue Ridge. We'd dropped 1000 ft in elevation from the top of the Blue Ridge before coming to rest at the junction which doesn't seem to exist on maps. After a few minutes rest and relaxation, we headed back up to the AT, relocated those welcome white triangles and, in time, found the Blackburn Trail Center.

Feeding and Watering the Runner.....

19 Miles Along the Appalachian Trail, Continued

Long distance runners make sure they start off a run with a happy stomach, adequate hydration and as many stockpiled carbohydrates as possible. The night before our run, I shared a big bowl of pasta crowned by home-grown, home-made tomato basil sauce with my wife, Jean.

Run day started at 5 AM with a good cup of coffee, a big bowel of oatmeal, some rasins and then, just before starting and waiting for the sun to come up, a Clif Bar and half a bottle of Gator Ade. Dave has his favorites too-- coffee, cereal, a banana.

Once on the trail, a squeeze bottle filled with Gator Ade or some other sports drink keeps us hydrated. Andrew introduced both of us to 20 ounce slip over your hand bottles that are mindless to carry. Both Dave and I drank about 2 quarts of liquid on this run. We were able to refill our water bottles at the Blackburn Trail Center, our turn-around point. The Blackburn Center is operated by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club for the use of Appalachian Trail users and others.

GU packets squeezed into our mouths (perferably not all over our hands) every 45 minutes or so and washed down with sports drink helps to replace carbs and electrolytes lost to exertion.

With a long run and some pretty extreme exertion, you can eat just about anything that keeps you smiling, tastes reasonably good and helps to restore some of what nutritionally you're burning or physiologically breaking down. I shared a good amount of beef jerky with Dave at around mile 14 and engulfed a Clif Builder's Bar too. Both provided lots of protein, tasted really good and help in our recovery.

Lastly, the opportunist trail runner/feeder, like Andrew lunging after the grapes in an earlier blog entry, takes advantage of what is to be found along the running route and scavenges. Dave stopped briefly but passed up a last snack as he ran Rt 7 to the Gap and our parked cars.

Nineteen miles and 5 Empire State Buildings Later...

Well, Directionless Dave and Crazy Craig did it. We ran from the Snicker’s Gap Hawk Watch to the Blackburn Center and back. And then some.

Sunday morning, October 8, with a start wisely delayed until it was light enough to see the Appalachian Trail, Dave Strauss and I cruised, grunted, skipped, slid, stumbled and yes, walked, for 19 miles atop the Blue Ridge on the West Virginia-Virginia state line. Why we did anything wisely, we don't know.

At the end, both of us wore huge smiles. This was a run that took away most of the concerns we had about completing the November 18 JFK 50 Miler.

Factoids:

- Our 4.5 hour run covered 19 miles and an elevational change of over 12,000 ft; that's equal to running up and down the Empire State Building FIVE TIMES

- Yes, even two days after this run, our legs are a little sore.

- Change was in the air -- the skies, the birds, other wildlife along the trail, and everywhere in the landscapes we passed through.

- Until the night before the run, Crazy Craig was sure that he’d be running south along the Appalachian Trail. Only a chance look at a friend’s map saved us from running 7.3 miles in the wrong direction.

- The description of this trail section from www.trails.com was just about perfect in its description of The Roller Coaster.

- Both Dave and Craig are topographically and directionally impaired; be sure to see a future blog entry about our incredibly fortuitous wrong turn that took us to the junction of Mission and Christ Church.

- Nuts! We found ‘em. Check out another blog to come about landscape changes and the ghosts of the Eastern Forest past.

- Trail running involves ingesting a lot of liquids and many, many calories.

Baltimore Marathon here we come!