Baker Brook - Fitchburg

I do have one more site to report, from last weekend. You may have seen my "The key to NE Fitchburg". Well I went out to the first of the places, behind the Fitchburg baseball field, walked into the woods following the brook upstream. Not seeing anything I headed uphill slightly and hit rock piles on the first terrace level above the brook (middle blue outline, above).

Now there is not much to see. A rainy day in the darkened woods means blurry pictures.

These are old piles but there is a pattern here- of a larger boulder with rocks (fallen off?) to the side. I know I wrote about that somewhere....ah here. I believe this is an early form of "rock pile with hollow". So there were maybe five ten piles in this group.

Saw an interesting arrangement of white feldspar pieces:

A bit like this:

I proceeded upstream but also uphill, diagonally. I was thinking "well sometimes you find rock piles part way up a hill". Sure enough, I hit another pocket of rock piles up against Northfield/Fisher Rd. [Later I verified the piles are easily visible from a passing car.] Slightly larger piles, more lousy pictures. First glimpse (with bug on lense):

Again, a large rock with smaller rocks to the side. Getting closer to looking like a rectangle with a hollow but still an old form. I have several pictures, mostly blurry. Here is a small one with a bit of white feldspar:

This is by no means shapeless. Here is another, very much starting to look like a rock pile with hollow (shadowed by another bug on the lense):

In this group the piles seemed to mostly have a piece or pieces of white feldspar or quartz. In fact, the whole group of piles was concentrated around a quartz outcrop.

Closer:

 The outcrop:

I suspect the quartz in the pile came from right here.

Here there is a stone wall in the background and a road

Not much to see:

For some reason, this was my favorite, can't see why:

There were some nice chunks of feldspar/quartz:

A classic example (and lousy photo of) this form of pile:

You see the larger rock, the sense of hollow, the white rock (right rear).

After this, I explored in the section of woods, north of the road. I stayed up on the hill where I saw nothing, and the underbrush was too thick for me down near the brook, so I turned around and headed downstream back the way I came. Passed back through the first cluster of piles, saw another small cluster (lowest blue outline on map). Headed out well satisfied.