Motus Mentis

It was an unusually mild November day here in the Outer Cape, and I went for a walk in Wellfleet’s Fox Island Marsh & Pilgrim Spring Woodlands Conservation Area, which I’d never explored.

While it’s hardly the Bridger Wilderness, the conservation area offers a lovely trail through pine forests down to the salt marshes at the edge of the bay. I snapped a few photos (of varying quality, I’m afraid).

Just past the trailhead at Pilgrim Spring Road, the path passes a steep bank, and gives us a good look at a common Outer Cape soil profile. It’s called by the Russian name podzol, meaning “ash soil”. In podzol soils the colored materials — dark-brown humus from decaying plants, and oxides from rusting minerals — have been leached away down into the sandy ground, leaving an ashy-looking layer that is light grey or even white. You can see it in this photo, sort of:

The ashy layer is right at the surface in many places along the path:

Although the climate in the Outer Cape is more temperate than the mainland’s, there aren’t very many trees that can flourish in the sandy, nutrient-poor soil. Mostly it’s pitch pines and scrubby little oaks. We see both as the path ascends from the trailhead into the forest:

Once we get deeper into the woods, the scrub oaks thin out, and the understory opens up:

Here’s another shot of these quiet pine woods:

Mosses and lichens seem to do well here. Here’s a pale-green lichen, well-established on a fallen pine:

Here’s the common lichen Usnea, also known as “Old Man’s Beard”:

More Usnea, on a pitch-pine branch:

Here’s a young pitch pine that had managed to produce exactly one pine-cone:

After a mile and a half or so the trail approaches the bay:

And here we are, near a little bend in the shoreline called Whalebone Point. We’re looking southeast, more or less, toward Old Wharf Point, Loagy Bay, and Lieutenant Island:

Here’s another shot from the same place, looking a bit more to the east:

Wellfleet’s a small place — the Cape is only about five miles wide here at its widest, and narrows to only a mile or so just south of town — but thanks to its fabulously convoluted bayside coastline and its rolling glacial-moraine “knob-and-kettle” topography, it has more secluded hollows, woodlands, ponds, marshes, islands, beaches, creeks, coves, and inlets than you’d ever imagine possible. I’ve been poking around out here for more than 25 years, and still haven’t seen them all.