Waterside Wonderfulness

As rain and cold and even some frost arrived the past few days, I'm recalling some sunny, warm, sweetly mellow days last week, visiting two of my favorite wetlands, Moreau Lake and the Hudson River.

I love weekday visits to Moreau Lake State Park this time of year, when all is quiet and just a few people are enjoying what this beautiful lake has to offer.  Here, a lone fisherman casts his line into the water, while only two canoes carry their silent paddlers around the lake.

I enjoy walking along this sun-warmed, pine-scented trail that passes between the main lake and the lake's back bay, offering glimpses of blue water to either side. Both White Pines and Pitch Pines line the trail.

The vividly colored leaves of a Shadblow tree (Amelanchier sp.) cast a warming glow as I passed beneath its branches.

The sunlight beaming on these shoreline shrubs made their leaves glow like embers.

 

What shoreline shrub could rival the intensely scarlet color of Highbush Blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum)?

Here's a closer look at super-saturated red of those Highbush Blueberry leaves:

Due to the past summer's lack of rainfall, the shore along the north end of the lake presents a wide stretch of sandy beach, which felt quite summer-warm this day, thanks to abundant sunshine.

I was happy to find on this sandy shore a few plants of the quite-tiny Small-flowered Dwarf Bulrush (Cyperus subsquarrosus) still looking quite healthy, with its chubby spikelets still intact. A hard frost will cause the plants to wither and disappear until spring. Because these particular plants (an Endangered species in New York State) grow quite high up on this beach, they avoid being covered by higher water in wetter years, so I can count on finding them every year.   This year, due to drought, on another stretch of Moreau Lake's shoreline, many thousands of plants have re-emerged from several years of inundation, looking hardly the worse for their several years of biding their time under the water.

Further up on this sandy shore, a thick hedge of Black Huckleberry shrubs (Gaylussacia baccata) was displaying its gorgeous autumn color.

As I turned to leave, I lingered for some time enjoying the glittering wavelets that sparkled and danced on the lake.

On my way home, I took Spier Falls Road, which closely follows the Hudson River.  Along this stretch of the river, forested mountains fall to the water's edge, and virtually all of the land you can see here on both sides of the river is part of Moreau Lake State Park. The Spier Falls hydroelectric dam can be seen spanning the river far off in the distance.

Because of a raging fire that damaged part of the Spier Falls Dam last year, the water upstream of the dam has been lowered significantly, so that work may proceed on repairing those damages. Consequently, much of the river bottom here has been exposed for over a year, and a fascinating variety of plants has sprung up, now that sunlight and air is available to them.

I confess that I sidled around some "No Trespassing" signs to make my way out to the water's edge to see what I might find springing up from what was once river bottom. The most obvious plants were abundant clusters of deep-pink leaves and scarlet seed pods, belonging to Dwarf St. John's Wort (Hypericum mutilum). A tiny sprout of Red Maple leaves added a rosy accent to this patch of rock- and snail shell-strewn mud.

The sprawling stems of Water Purslane (Ludwigia palustris) formed carpets of rosy red, punctuated by slender green spiky growths. I bet those spiky, curving green growths are some new plants of Slender Milfoil (Myriophyllum tenellum).

When I first visited this drawdown of the river, almost exactly one year ago, the only plants I could see covering this muddy stretch were vast masses of Slender Milfoil, as this year-old photo reveals:

Here's a closer look at those newly uncovered plants of Slender Milfoil:

It amazed me how different this same patch of exposed riverbottom had changed in just one year. No flowering plants poked up from amid those milfoil stems a year ago, while many had by now.  Most were quite small, like the Dwarf St. John's Wort and the Water Plantain. But this solitary stem of Sneezeweed (Helenium autumnale) was quite the showy exception!

A wonderful day on the waterways!  And the roadsides on the way home were pretty spectacular, too.