Bunnell Notch Trail Question

[LarryD]

My wife and I were hiking Cabot via the Bunnell Notch Trail yesterday (#43 for her). Upon descending, along the upper stetches of the trail (nearer to the Kilkenny Ridge Trail than the trailhead), we saw running along the trail steel wire or cable of some sort. Most of it was buried, but it ran above the ground in a number of locations, sometimes for several yards at a time. It seemed to run for some distance, as we saw it above-ground in numerous places. It did not appear to be of recent origin.

Any idea what this is? Something related to logging activities? Some sort of cable running up to the old firetower?

 

[una_dogger]

I think its a good guess it was part of the Fire Tower. I have seen cable and telephone type wire strewn along the Firewarden's Path to Hale.

Congrats to your wife, she's close!

 

[LarryD]

Congrats to your wife, she's close! [/QUOTE]



Thanks Sabrina. And because she has hiked all of those with me, she has suffered more than most!

 

[MichaelJ]

For anyone curious, it was quite the fire tower.

 

[peakbagger]

No doubt you were looking at the phone line for the tower. What confuses some folks are that there is only one wire and most circuits use two wires. In order to save money and hassle, the old phone lines only used one conductor and used the ground for the other one. Over the years I have heard many comments that using that type of phone line was a major challenge as the static and interference on the line was incredibly high. They were also very prone to lightning strikes and tree branches falling so the wires were generally right along the side of the trail. The firewarden's would inevitably have to spend a lot of time keeping their wire up off the ground and in one piece.
On occasion on lesser used trails you will find a two piece "donut" style insulator. Large logging operations used the same wires and there most likely is hundreds of miles of this stuff rotting away in the North woods.

Unfortunately the majority of fire towers used "B" batteries to run their phones and radios and generally once they were worn out, they would be dumped at a convenient location on top of the mountain leaving a small hazardous waste site. Most of the accessible mountains are probably somewhat cleaned up by now but I expect the folks like Buckyball who go to remote fire tower sites, probably encounter battery dumps on occasion

 

[JustJoe]

I saw some of that and a couple poles heading to Bemis and it's old fire tower. Definitely phone line.