Posted By auntie on August 17, 2012

3.48 miles   ★★★★½

arcadia management area is fast becoming my favorite place to hike. this was another pretty loop. i really like the arcadia trail. the spider webs were horrid, though. they were so bad i took to walking with a stick flailing up and down in front of me like some sort of demented dowser.

web across trail

this was just seconds before the web ceased to exist. i felt bad, but not too bad.

orange bracket fungus

couldn’t find these guys anywhere on the internet, so i have no idea what they are, but i liked the shot.

stone wall

this is so typical of hiking in new england. you’ll be walking along through a deep-woods trail and look to your right, and there’s a stone wall. i’ve seen a statistic that over 90% of rhode island was deforested at the turn of the last century, and you can see that if you ever fly over the state in the wintertime. it’s criss-crossed with stone walls.

Cortinarius? Blewit?

while i was stopped taking the shot of the trail, above, i glanced down and saw this. i am unable to identify it, but it’s a pretty purple mushroom that looks as if it took some poor spider by surprise by growing up under its web.

emerging dutchman’s pipe

this, at least, i was able to identify. it’s dutchman’s pipe, or monotropa hypopitys, and it’s related to indian pipes. it’s another non-chlorophyll-producing plant in the blueberry family.

hairy tussock caterpillar

and there were more than spiders making webs. this fellow was dangling in mid-air next to the trail, and as it turns out, you can get a nasty rash from his black spines. i think i’ll continue with my mad dowsing, thank you very much.

you can access these trails from summit road off route 165 in exeter, ri. as there are no trail maps, i’ve annotated a ri dem map with my route.

Categories: Rhode Island, Walks and Hikes
Tags: 2–5 miles, Exeter RI, RI