It’s so nice to see green plants again, though the ones in the photo above are last year’s growth—ferns and moss survived under the deep snow.

 
The sun casts a warm glow in early morning, illuminating the bark of this yellow birch and showing why the tree has been thusly named:

 
Further down the trail we come to The River, and despite the rapids’ roar, I could hear a dull thud. Pushing through the bankside thicket of hemlocks I saw discovered the cause—this downed pine trunk:

 
Relentless pounding by waves and scouring by ice in floods has debarked this trunk which is trapped in a bedrock fissure on the bank. With each new roller, the trunk lifts and smacks down again onto the rocks in the shallows, and that’s the thudding I’d heard. I like how the bare orange trunk is reflected in the water. Upstream, below a falls and in the shadow of a cliff, russet-colored riverside moss is highlighted by sun filtering through feathery branches of hemlocks:

 
Further upstream, right beneath the falls, I found icicles clinging to snags poking out into the flow:

 
And here are the falls:

 
This drop is about 12 feet, discharge was very high, and the roar was so loud it excluded all other sounds. Climbing up the steep bank in bedrock fissures, the roar is finally muffled. Up on the high riverbank, these hemlock trees sway in the breeze, their feathery limbs whispering:

 
At the base of a nearby pine, a red squirrel enjoyed a picnic of pine seeds. He’s even left another cone for later. See the discarded cone scales in the lower left of the photo below?

 
The orange leaves in the background are from the American beech trees down the trail, and in the background you can see the rapids. Walking further up the trail away from the roaring water, I heard the hollow hammering of woodpeckers marking out breeding territories. Waiting quietly and still, I was rewarded with a visit from a male hairy woodpecker who worked his way around a stump:

 
Up the hill and through the woods, to a fox’s den we come:

 
The fox isn’t living there anymore, but this fellow is interested in the vacant den:

 
The warmer temperatures have encouraged garter snakes to come out of hibernation and see what’s happening. This one has a head about the size of the first joint of your index finger, and he flicked his red tongue at me as I shot his portrait. I tried to capture his tongue, but all I got here was a hint of the forked tip—you can just see it as a pair of parallel dark lines in front of his mouth. The snake slithered under the leaves after kindly posing for a few shots, and not far from his hide, these grouse droppings indicate the bird’s drumming spot on a mossy rise overlooking the wooded valley:

 
My boot at the top of the photo gives scale. When the grouse hen lays her eggs, she’ll have to keep watch for the garter snake—he won’t turn down an egg breakfast. And speaking of breakfast, see the maple sumara (seed) husk commingled with the grouse droppings? Looks like either the grouse ate it, or a squirrel left it behind. Something else caught my eye: this grayish-white object: