Following the Yellow Beech Trail

It's called the Western Ridge Trail, the trail that Sue and Laurie and I hiked on Friday in Moreau Lake State Park.  If you study the full-color map provided by the park, it's the yellow trail that follows a mountain ridge that runs for six miles or so, up and down through woods high above the Hudson River.  And yellow was certainly the predominant color now, with mostly the beeches still holding on to their sunshine-colored leaves, filling the forest with golden light, even in the deepest shade.  A few Red Maples still held some leaves, but even these were mostly yellow, although we found evidence all over the forest floor that some of the maples had once held the brilliant scarlet foliage this tree is famous for.

This fallen log provided another bright splash of color from the Turkey Tail fungus and Green Shield lichens colonizing its moss-covered length.

We found long stretches of bedrock covered with green-velvet mosses of many different kinds.  We were grateful to have Laurie, who is a geologist,  point out to us the different kinds of rocks that underlie this mountainous forest, and we noted how different species of moss were growing on the different kinds of rocks, whether composed of granitic gneiss or quartzite or marble.  I confess that I could identify only a few of the mosses.  (Note that we are wearing blaze orange, now that hunting season has begun.)

 Here's one moss I think I know the name of, the starburst-shaped ones called Atrichum undulatum surrounding the tiny red mushroom that could be a Scarlet Waxcap.

Talk about tiny!  None of us had ever seen a Red Eft so itty bitty as this fingernail-sized cutie wriggling along on the same clump of moss as the normal-sized eft next to it.

The bears should be fat and happy going to winter rest this year, to judge from the massive numbers of nuts we found throughout the woods.  We found Pignut Hickory nuts now shedding their thin green husks, as well as thousands of bristly-husked beechnuts popped open and releasing the tasty morsels within.  We filled our pockets with the little wedge-shaped nuts, peeling and eating them as we strode along.

We didn't hike the full length of the trail, choosing a destination only a couple of miles from the trailhead. We started at the high end of the trail to minimize the amount of climbing we would have to do to reach a spectacular overlook, although the hike did require a certain amount of huffing and puffing up steep slopes and carefully picking our way down rocky ones.  Here we are, about to take our final steps to a rocky outcropping that will grant us glorious views of the Hudson valley.
 

Yes.  Glorious views, indeed!

That's the Spier Falls Dam on the far left, with the Luzerne Mountain range beyond the forest across the river.

Here's the view directly below where we sat to enjoy a picnic lunch.  Except for the dam site and the powerline clearcuts, plus a state road that runs close to the river, Moreau Lake State Park owns the land on both banks of the river here, so all that forest and river shoreline will remain in its naturally beautiful state for generations to come.

The Hudson flows in a northeasterly direction along this stretch, heading toward Glens Falls and Hudson Falls, where it will take a sharp turn to flow directly south to New York City and the sea.