Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Walk Along Nashoba Brook

There are lots of rock piles along Nashoba Brook in Acton. Interrupting what has been and will continue to be near continuous non-stop coverage of Muddy Pond, here are some pictures of a walk I took along the brook with my son Joe. I had spotted a new way in via the railroad tracks on Rt 2A, just south of the corner with Rt 27, and had seen some unexplored woods over there. There were sure to be rock piles, and there were. It is a nice experience to step into the woods expecting to see rock piles, and seeing them:Then we did not see much and got over to the place where there is a bridge across the brook and the potato cave on the other side and through the woods. But I stayed on the near side, and poked around in the breakout zone uphill from the southern end of the bridge.
I had forgotten that there is someone out here (at Nashoba) building rock piles but I think there is. I was reminded of it by the fresh appearance of one pile. The top rock is lacking lichen.This was a little cluster of rock piles in a breakout zone here, that I had not seen before. I cannot say it was typical - for example I did not specifically see a split-wedged rock here (although there is one 50 yards away on the other side of the stone wall) but there were lots of rock-on-rocks, small piles, and slightly unusual standing stones.Plenty of tree fall damage too, so some of this could have been natural. But I think not in the case of this one (background of previous picture):Nice colors too:

1 comment :

pwax said...

Come to think of it, I remember now that we spent several times visiting this area across Nashoba brook looking for a light colored triangular "standing stone" that Mark Strohmeyer [was it??] had reported. This could just possibly have been that standing stone, shown in the third picture from the end.