the Way of the Turtle

7.3 Mile Run in the Albany Pine Bush
Monday, May 25, 2009

Today's run was difficult for a couple of reasons. First, my legs are still a bit beat up from Saturday's 20 miler (go figure...) so I ended up walking up most of the hills and took a lot of breaks toward the end. And second, I went on a tour through some of the areas in the Pine Bush where the white pines are being "thinned out" to restore a more natural pine bush habitat... at least, that's what the folks running the show at the Albany Pine Bush commission say. What I saw was a lot of trees cut down, a lot of trail torn up (in a couple of cases it wasn't clear at all to me why the logging company had even gone into certain areas) and woods that I've been running in for almost 10 years disappearing. And it definitely left me bummed out.

After passing through the area currently being logged I ran along the base of the hills that were cleared last fall... basically a huge sand dune, though the greenery that's returned to the other cleared areas offers some hope that it won't be as barren next year. What can I say, it's a bit depressing to run through an area that used to be wooded and it now stripped down to bare ground... I get what they're trying to do, the Pine Bush habitat is unique and the goal is to restore it to what it once was before invasive species and lack of fire allowed it to grow into what I was used to... but I miss the woods I spent many, many hours running through.

On the plus side... I saw an oriole and caught a brief glimpse of a group of turkeys. And I managed to run farther than I'd planned on, even if there was a lot of walking mixed in with the running...

JMH