The Forest Fence

I have a 7mo old Beagle/Border Collie mix, a female, named Spanky. I've take her running, snowshoeing & x-c skiing ever since I got her when she was a month old. We've built up her strength and stamina gradually, to the point where, for example, we were out in fresh snow for almost two hours today. For those that have never done a two-hour bushwack in the end of February in the Northeast Kingdom, you have no idea how hard it is.

We alternate between snow shoes and x-c skis depending on our moods or just to change things up a bit.

Here's what we did today: We've been exploring the area bounded by the Rte 2, the Danville-Peacham Road & Oneida Road (Google Map). The pic at the right shows the area. Basically, we explore the region between the Lamoille Valley Rail Trail (marked with green dots) and Oneida Road (marked with blue dots). You might have to click the map to zoom in. We start at the Danville recreation field in town and head through the woods, making a huge loop. Now this may not look that large a territory on the map, but while the goal is merely to find our way to Oneida Rd and back, we have a few things working against us.

1. The woods are a deep, nearly impenetrable forest of red pine, balsam and juniper, interspersed with groves of birch, alder & maple.
2. The terrain is essentially impenetrable woods punctuated by marshes, beaver ponds, swamp & streams. It rolls, with no prominent ridges or hills. There are a few hills that are not more than two stories above the surrounding terrain, but things roll so much it's impossible to tell if you are above or below any reference point.
3. The woods are so dense you cannot follow a straight line and you cannot see the sun much of the time.
4. The snow is about 4ft deep in the woods and any bushwack includes encounters with frequent traps (air pockets made by small trees, brush, grasses, rootballs, branches of fallen trees, etc. that cause you to drop knee-deep or hip-deep without warning and grab hold of your snowshoes). A little dog has severe challenges and must learn quickly to read the snow.
5. The trees grow so close in places that they form walls, making the route maze-like, and on very overcast days makes it difficult to maintain a sense of direction.
   
6. We don't bring a compass.

Spanky has learned to detect traps and streams (she lets me pack a trail over snow-bridges - places where the snow drifts across the stream making a relatively firm crossing). She also is getting very good at choosing routes that don't required pushing through immovable branches. This seems obvious, but for a human it is very challenging. Dogs are more flexible, but it's still a huge inconvenience.

Today we made four major marsh crossings and found a beaver dam that appeared to be about 200ft long and about 6ft wide. There is so much snow out there that it's hard to tell where the dam started and ended, and we encountered it while tramping across the pond - hitting it somewhere in the middle. We also found a huge birch grove that I'd never seen before.

We were not able to find a little hill that I found two days ago before the big snow - it was about 30ft above a marsh and very steep - an odd little pimple thing. It was also heavily tree-covered.

We'll try again.