Mt Tir’em is on the Schedule Still for Friday July 10th
The weather forecast is suggesting a chance of rain tomorrow but it’s a coin flip so at this point we’re going to try and go. Check your email in the morning in case the forecast changes and we decide to cancel this hike one more time. We’ll leave the church at 8:30 am. Our hike leader, Dale Nelson, probably won’t bother going to the church as it’s way out of his way, so be sure to download your directions prior to going to Denmark, where there is no phone service for most of us.
It’s a half hour drive from Denmark to Waterford. So figure the Denmark group will arrive at 9:00 am. We’ll meet by the Congregational Church and Town Office and then ferry hikers up to the Grover Rd Trailhead, then hike to the summit and descend via the Daniel Brown trail, which will bring us back to our cars. The current forecast says about a 40% chance of rain, and that’s early, probably before we get there. Bring your rain stuff. Water and bug stuff. Maine in the summertime. The address of the Waterford Town Office is 366 Valley Rd, Waterford, ME 04088.
Check your email in the morning to be sure the weather hasn’t altered for the worse and we’ve cancelled. This may be our third attempt for this summit this year to date. Fingers crossed.
Looking forward to seeing everyone.
 Mount Tir’em – not Mount Tire’m! |
Sebago Cove Update
Ever since the Loon Echo Land Trust opened their trail down to Sebago Cove, it has become one of my favorite walks in my area. I pushed the Denmark Hikers to walk the trail last winter on an impressively chilly morning on snowshoes. Link
Last night, I learned something about the Sebago Cove I didn’t know. Sebago Cove is notable as it has one of the most severe infestations of variable-leaf milfoil in the entire lake region of Maine. The Lake Environmental Association’s “milfoil team” spends a good part of their summer in the cove manually attempting to remove this milfoil. The team consists of 18 divers who manually remove and bag the plants or pull and then vacuum up the plants for disposal at an annual cost of over a quarter million dollars. They also use what are called “benthic” barriers, a word that was unfamiliar to me. “Benthic” means, relating to the bottom of a body of water (such as an ocean, lake, or river) or to the organisms that live there. The word derives from the Ancient Greek ‘benthos;, meaning “the depths of the sea”, Think of these benthic barriers as large tarps weighed down with rebar and rocks that block sunlight in order to kill the milfoil rooted to the benthos..
Knowing this will add some perspective next time I take that walk and see the many boats that shelter in the anchorages of the cove and knowing they must push their way through forests of milfoil in order to exit into Sebago Lake proper. Because they never leave the water, all summer long, it doesn’t seem that there is much of an opportunity to inspect these boats to insure they aren’t carrying milfoil fragments into Sebago lake.
Maine Lakes Environmental Association
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