West Karana

This article would be a lot better if it had the pictures of the mountains from my desk. Wait, I do have one.

I took this picture during the Ontario wildfires. This is a bright, sunny day — Toronto style. I’m not in Ontario; I’m in Connecticut, in the States, but it feels like I’m right up there in the frozen North. Anyway, you’ll have to take it on faith that, on a clearer day, you can see a line of peaks on the local Metacomet Ridge lining the horizon… and more mountains behind them. And it really, really bugged me that I could see all those mountains and I didn’t know their names.

I wanted to take a bunch of post it notes, stick them to the windows, so when I looked out, I’d know what I was looking at.

There’s one mountain I know very well; Talcott Mountain. When I worked in Simsbury, I used to bicycle over it on the way to work. A bit further up the mountain than the pass I biked through was the trail leading to one of the peaks, upon which stands Heublein Tower. And at the top of that tower, there is an observation deck which labels the mountains you can see.

So to answer the question of what I was seeing from my desk, I had to climb the mountain, the tower on top of it, and see what I could see.

The first problem was that my desk isn’t actually in the Heublein Tower, so the view I’d see from the tower would be shifted west about five miles and up a few hundred feet. This meant that a lot of the hills and ridges I could see silhouetted against the horizon from my desk, would be below me and at a different compass direction from the tower.

Actually, that was a really big problem.

Talcott Mountain is roughly west from where I sit at work. But when I got to the tower, I realized that most of the mountains you could see to the west of the tower were probably entirely invisible from where I sat, hidden behind the traprock ridge. Maybe I could see Onion Mountain and Sugerloaf? I really had no idea. Everything looked very different from here.

I could somewhat get my bearings from the mountains I did know. Rattlesnake Mountain has two huge broadcast towers on it, so that was easy. To the left was West Peak, and from my desk, Talcott Mountain is bookended by these two mountains. Sleeping Giant Mountain would be hidden behind Talcott from my position. But this meant that I wasn’t looking west from my desk at all — I was looking southwest. Rattlesnake Mountain is way clockwise from where I thought I was. In the smoggy picture above, Rattlesnake would be seen in the rightmost window.

The Metacomet Ridge is a traprock ridge that stretches from southern Connecticut to northern Massachusetts. It doesn’t form any part of the Berkshires, which are a little further west. I think I read that the ridge was formed when North America split off from Europe. The hills and mountains of New England are very, very old. Traprock mountains are made from alternating layers of soft sedimentary rock and harder igneous rock, and so they weather unevenly, leading to massive cliffs with mounds of rubble at their bases.

One of the things I really like about New England? The forests. Connecticut is one of the most densely populated states in the USA, but everywhere you look is forest. Above is the capital of the entire state, and it looks like it’s losing a fight against the trees.

Anyway, next week, when I’m putting post-it notes on all the windows labeling the mountains, I’ll be able to get about half of them figured out, thanks to the tower. Past that, well, I guess I’ll need to hit up the USGS and get some topographical maps…