>go east

Digging here reveals nothing
>go east
You are beside the trail in a province-owned forest.

There are trees on both sides of you.

A few feet in front of you is a crystal clear pond.

The ground here seems very soft.
>dig
I think you found something!
>

… I went back to the place I shouldn’t be going. The ground is much warmer now, so yay. And yeah the mud I found there is interesting. It’s got this red/orange color to it. I’m not exactly sure what it’s made of, but I’m guessing it has to do with iron content… That might also explain how this mud tends to settle when left alone, so if I leave it for a day or two, it will return to being hard ground with water on top, and I have to dig it out all over again. I think what I’m in here is some sort of iron-rich fine sandy stuff. It’s makes OK mud, albeit a bit gritty. It’ll do in a pinch.

I yanked up the nice satellite imagery we have for this area (very recent, and much higher resolution than Google [Earth|Maps]), and I see there’s a publicly accessible tract of forest nearby with some OK looking spots that aren’t too close to public road… It doesn’t give me much indication of what the soil is like, but it’s east of here, and I’ve noticed as I go more east I get finer soils…

So I’m going back to where I know all the glaciomarine clays are. DeepMushTrail is this type of clay mixed with some silt and/or very fine sand, and a few small rocks… One of it’s most endearing qualities is that if I leave the spot for a week or two and return to it, my first step ends at the same depth that my last step did the month before.  The more east I go, the finer the soil particles get, so now I have some sort of focus to my summer travels. 🙂

Aside from all this… The other day I received a message suggesting I enable comments for individual posts. First off, thanks for your kind feedback! Second, re-enabling comments is definitely on my to-do list, however, I am very hesitant to allow public comments because of the never-ending spam problem, and I’m not interested at all in allowing account signups.  I have, in the past, allowed comments, which were heavily moderated. I may allow this again at some point, but there is not likely to be much ‘development’ work on the site until the summer is over… Stay tuned!

The first order of business when I do return to heavy development is to update my (years old) theme to current standards. This will be quite a bit of work, but I will end up with a really nice responsive theme. I’ve noticed I get a lot of traffic from iOS and Android devices, which seems really odd to me since I find web browsing on phones/tablets to be very cumbersome.