Altruistic Tortoise...and Ultrarunning

Seen over at Mike the Mad Biologist.  This 15 second video depicts an altruistic tortoise:

pic.twitter.com/7GAlwVGgae

— Köksal Akın (@Koksalakn) March 16, 2016

Hope this video plays OK, since I have absolutely no knowledge of Twitter, the source.  But I know you'll enjoy it if you watch.

The connection to Ultrarunning?  In various races I have personally participated in helping a runner in distress, and myself have been the recipient of such help.  I suspect that this experience is actually the norm for Ultrarunners--we'll always stop and help somebody who needs it, even if it throws us off our planned race.

It's just what you do.

Picking Up Turtles...and Ultrarunning

I recently posted about the musical Turtles, here, and thought I'd better recognize the real thing:

Eastern Box Turtle along the Reese Hollow Trail

Image credit Gary

Since the first time I ever encountered a turtle along the trail, decades ago, I've picked it up.  That's just what you do.

But on this day back in August, I decided that I would not.  I imagine that getting picked up might be a tad stressful for a wild animal.  So I simply got down to turtle level and just scoped out the critter from several feet away without actually touching it.  Took a couple photos of this artfully constructed and adapted critter, then backed off and watched it slowly relax, stretch out its legs, and speed off (well, it actually ambled or moseyed, but you get the idea).

Now I'm not a strident animal-rights activist (although maybe I should be?), and in the future, say, if I am hiking a trail with Mister Tristan (the 6-year old human being, not the blog), and if we encounter a turtle, chances are I will pick it up to show Mister Tristan the bottom shell and the legs.  You know, a teachable moment.

The link to Ultrarunning, of course is this: we spend more backcountry time, thus we see many more critters than do most of our more sedentary contemporaries  But the default approach for me now is, don't touch.  Kinda like a gesture of respect, live and let live.

The Turtles

This post is inspired by mine of yesterday.

Some months earlier in 2014, the bride and I and several other Baby Boomer couples went to the Luhr Center at nearby Shippensburg State University to see the Turtles.

Yes, the Turtles.  You can scope out Wikipedia for their history and play list.

The name sounds, well, stupid is the only word that comes to mind today in 2014, but in the 1960s, this group was the bomb.  Rivaled the Beatles.  They had a variety of hits, but the one that always arrested me so was the 1967 song "You Showed Me," a tune that was at once haunting, mysterious, and full of longing:




Wonder what the Reese Hollow turtles might think of this?

More Trail Work...and Ultrarunning

On Monday I headed up Alice Trail to its junction with the Tuscarora Trail for some serious weed whacking of briars.  This is in southern PA, just south of where the Tuscarora crosses PA Rt 16 between Mercersburg and McConnellsburg, and heading south from there.

But first, the installation of a signpost I had made to mark that junction.  Up there on the narrow Pennsylvania ridgetop there is a scant covering of dirt, then the underlying rock.  I had hauled up a digging iron to try to make a hole...the best I could get was about  12" deep after several test holes, so I resorted to piling stones around the post as in a cairn.

At the bottom of the buried end of the post I had inserted a 12" piece of re-bar laterally through the post.  When the dirt and small rocks are firmly tamped down around the post, the re-bar serves as a physical deterrent to someone (or some bear, seriously) trying to pull out the signpost.

The signpost is quite stable and should last awhile.  Of course, in the backcountry, if someone wants to destroy a trail sign with bullets or brute force, they'll do it.  I hope that the remote location weeds out the idiot faction, and only serious hunters and hikers will pass by here.

The weed whacking went slowly.  Very slowly.  As in forward progress of about 1/2 mile in 90 minutes slowly.

I was assisting my trail buddy Peter, who's is the overseer for that portion of the Tuscarora.  The briars in some places had rendered the trail  almost impassable in a practical sense.  The technique we resorted to in a few areas of particularly heinous briars was to bring the weedwhacker down from about 6' up, chewing up the briars from top to bottom.

This section, to my knowledge, had not been cut in 2013, so this was 2 years of growth.  My hope is that with the briars now cut back to a 6' trail width, future weed whacking efforts will be more akin to maintenance than (virtually) cutting new trail.

The link to Ultrarunning?  I love trail running.  Somebody has to maintain those trails.  It's pretty simple.

Oh, and another reason:

Box turtle on the Alice Trail.  All photos by Gary.