Outdoor Adventures with Gary Lee - Vol. 359
April showers bring May flowers, but it doesn’t say rain or snow showers and today we are getting both with it mostly white outside. The daffodils and hyacinths don’t appreciate the weight of the snow, and they are bending to the ground. My Virginia Bell flower just came out yesterday and it is close to the cellar wall, so it is still showing some color. Most of these early flowers are hardy or they wouldn’t still be coming up each year. The spring beauties were out all over the forest floor yesterday, but they are hiding this morning. Trout lily leaves are popping up all over the thyme in the lawn but there are no flowers yet. I think the deer have been using them as a food source as I watch them nibble across the backyard.
The folks in northern Michigan are getting more water than they need as many towns are underwater and dams are being threatened with towns downstream ready for evacuation.
The burn ban doesn’t end until May 14th and it does prevent many fires that used to occur during that time when it wasn’t in place. There have been a few fires caused by illegal burning this year where the person burning illegally was ticketed. The first year 1965 I was a Forest Ranger assigned to West Canada Lake we spent the winter in our trailer in West Milton near Ballston Spa in Saratoga County and I worked out of the Northville DEC Office, making maps and working in the woods with many of the Forest Rangers in that area. When spring came, since I lived in Saratoga County, they asked me since I knew the area, to work there for the spring fire season which started in March and went through April as there was no Forest Ranger there at that time. There were two Ranger trucks equipped with a slip-on unit and tools in that area, one for the ranger and one for a Fire Warden in the area who worked weekends. My area at West Canada Lake was still under snow and the lake covered with ice which didn’t go out until May 20th that year. There were areas in the county that caught fire every year and they did that spring. Plus, people would be doing debris burning that got out of control and escaped into the woods and open fields. I chased all over the county that spring working with local fire companies and Forest Rangers Gilbert White, James Ide, Louis Curth and Craig Knickerbocker from Saratoga, Washington, and southern Warren Counties. I saw places I had never seen before even though I lived there for twenty-two years. I knew most of the Forest Rangers as I had met them when I worked in the Warrensburg Office as a Junior Forest Surveyor the year prior. The fire towers Hadley Hill and Spruce Mountain looked over most of this area to report any fires burning. The local fire companies usually got there first, and some had brush buggies that got off road into the woods and fields but there was always mop up. They would fill my slip-on unit with water, and I would be off the next fire, sometimes I had local fire warden with me, or I would put a fireman in the back to use the slip-on unit hose.
That’s where I got my start in 1959 at sixteen with Forest Ranger George McDonnell at the Ballston Spa Airport. He picked me up there as his hose man and we went all over Saratoga County fighting fires that day. The last fire that day was behind the Wishing Well Restaurant north of Saratoga on Route 9. He fed me supper there; called my mother and told her I was ok and we would be home in about an hour. We picked up my bike at the airport and he took me home. When I walked into the house my mother said, “Well, what do you think about that” and I said I want to do that for my job, and I did it for thirty-five years.
Arbor Day is the 24th, a good day to plant a tree but that’s another story. See ya.
Photo above: Ted Hicks with Captured Red-tailed hawk
