Button Bay State Park

How to get there: Take Route 7 north to Vergennes, turning left at junction with Rte. 22A and following 22A south through the downtown center (along Main Street). Shortly after crossing the Otter Creek, turn right (west) onto Panton Road…there will be signs for the park from this point on, as well as for "Basin Harbor Club" and "Lake Champlain Maritime Museum" which are close to the park. Leave your car at the gate (which is shut in the off-season) and walk in past the camping areas, the pavillion and pool…the road then follows the line of the bay out to a spit of land stretching into Lake Champlain, with a "nature trail" winding through the woods and along the shore.

 
Tracking Time in Button Bay

Last week, over 200 geese were startled out of the cold, January waters of Button Bay. My friend Molly acted as the catalyst for their flight, as she ran down to the water's edge in awe of their floating tribe. Mob mentality took over as one goose first sensed her presence, then turned to see her clumsy, flailing body barreling down to their camp, then pumped his wings hard to shake off the icy water and pull himself into flight. The others got the idea--one by one, five by five, 30 by 30--and all shook out their drooping wings and flapped themselves away from shore. Realizing that we posed no serious threat, they dropped themselves back into the water only 200 yards away--virtually a move to the other end of the couch, in bird- distances--and then hunkered back down to conserve valuable cold-fighting energy. Their short flight was mesmerizing, as I watched the dark brown birds slapping splashes of white into the midnight-blue lake. A closer look reveals expanding circles, interlocking like a Venn diagram until rippling away into infinity.

Such was my introduction to the Button Point Natural Area, a primary natural attraction of Button Bay State Park on Lake Champlain a few miles west of Vergennes. The park offers many recently developed attractions--such as campsites, fire pits, a picnic pavilion, and even a swimming pool--in addition to the 253-acre natural area embracing Button Point and wrapped by a nicely looping footpath. Walking through the hibernating campground, I am struck by a feeling that perhaps I am trespassing--an act that once, years ago, landed me in handcuffs. But in this case it isn't the fear of the law that pulls at me; it is a fear of disturbing the land's time to itself, an off-season of rest and recovery from the busier, warmer months. From mid-May through October--I had earlier learned--this park sees thousands of visitors: thousands of tents, thousands of cars, thousands of burning logs, thousands of picnic lunches, and millions of tramping feet just like my two, which now turn right from the pavilion onto a thin dirt road that acts as the only path into and out of the Natural Area.

Thirty-four years ago, a man--or maybe a team of men--pounded the posts into the ground that now hold the informational bin that introduces my crew to the Champlain Loop Trail, one that circumscribes the long, thin twig of land whose tip has come to be known as Button Point. The trail too, was blazed at about this time, winding back from the trailhead at the southern bank of the peninsula towards the north shore. Our feet follow the tracks of the path's thirty-four years' worth of tread as it weaves north, across the coarse finger of land. The ground is mostly covered by a rough, mossy horizon that frequently yields to boulders that protrude through its solid, well-worn blanket; my feet find an affinity for these islands of rock popping forth from the turf, and I hop from one to the other, for a while pretending that the undergrowth of this ancient forest's floor is so fragile that one false step on any of these low-lying shrubs and thickets may throw the entire ecosystem off-kilter. These fears are very quickly knocked from my head, however, as my eyes move from the ground beneath me to the trunks surrounding me, which look anything but fragile.

Two hundred years ago, an acorn cracked open its shell and grabbed onto the turf beneath where I now stand. Thousands of other seeds acted likewise, and the forest covering this thin track of land was born. My gaze travels upward, following the thick trunks higher and higher into the sky. Never before in Vermont--or even in the East, for that matter--have my eyes seen trees of such formidable size. As we continue up the path I am continually awed by the fairy-tale like atmosphere--still, dark, and magical--created by these ancient giants. Still, the strong gales of wind barreling through this forest prove formidable enough to rattle even these old monoliths, and with each sharp gust, a sorrowful song of bending and torquing hardwood resonates from their otherwise stoical trunks. I feel for a moment like I am in the Swartzwald, or Germany's "Black Forest," and I expect to see a gnome or fairy stride out from behind the trunk of one of these old oaks or pines. Molly fears that the sounds are those of people stuck inside of the thick trunks, whining about the cold.

A few steps further up the trail, we see where one such captive escaped! To my right stands the remains of one of these giants, now shortened to about eight feet in height--roughly equal to its circumference. We first theorized that lightning was the guilty party in this heinous act of truncation; however, a closer investigation revealed that surely something had fought its way out from the inside. Sort of. The entire base of this tree had been hollowed out by voracious insects, munching and rotting the hardwood until the hangman wind kicked out the metaphorical stool; since the tree had fallen right across the trail, the park service had sawed the enormous supine trunk to keep a clear flow of traffic. A sawn trunk to an arborist is much like a road-cut to a geologist--both will slow the flow of traffic as the curiosity factor strikes. I must here confess a particular affinity for trees, and admit that at this point on the trail, I slam on my pedestrian brakes and cause a back-up. While my friends wait in the cold, I start to count rings, trying to date these giants in history. I reach back as far as 1850--or 150 rings--before I realize that my friends' silence is one of polite impatience and not absorption like mine. So I guestimate 50 more rings (maybe even more!) and date this tree's birth back to approximately that of our nation.

Dragging myself away from the fallen giant, the trail continues to weave us through this mystical forest, finally bringing us out to the northern shore of the peninsula. The frosty shoreline, a couple of large steps down a jagged, rocky bank, is made up of thousands of smooth, flat rocks, eroded and tumbled for years upon years by the lapping waters of the lake. A rock-skimmer's dream, these coves run the length of the northern edge of the Button Point peninsula, and can be accessed by many branches off of the Champlain trail, which at this point follows within 20 feet or so of the shoreline, maintaining contact with the mystical woods to the left but now also providing stunning vistas of Lake Champlain.

The trail maintains this balance as it works its way west, out towards the tip of Button Point. Soon, a left bend in the trail reveals the nature museum hiding ahead in the woods--holding its own accounts of history, translating the rings of the fallen oak into knowledge accessible by all. We follow the path right by the museum--it is the off-season, and therefore is locked--and follow the now well-trafficked path out to the very tip of the point. The trees out towards the tip, never as formidable as those in the heart of the landform, come to a complete stop at the point; a natural jetty of long, smooth and flat rocks eventually juts out into the lake from the main finger of land.

Ten thousand years ago, the glaciers of the last ice age receded back to their homes up north, and in doing so they carved this unique and geologically fascinating landform into the Champlain valley. The entire peninsula stands--or lies--as proof of this visit from our icy neighbors from up north, but when standing right on this rocky point, one can really visualize what happened back then. Ridges in the rock beds tell the story of the glaciers' friction as it pulled itself home. These lounging rocks, I imagine, are heavenly in the warmer months, as they lie surrounded by the lake's blue waters and yield breathtaking views of nearby Button Island (only about 100 yards away), the vast expanses of Lake Champlain, and New York's Adirondacks in the distance, their two-dimensionality forcing one to feel like an insignificant subject in a sprawling Thomas Cole landscape. But January, I am reminded, is not one of the warmer months, and the frost-bearing wind off the lake is unforgiving on our cheeks.

Seeking refuge from the wind amidst the trees, we return back to the trail and find that it has turned into the dirt road that runs parallel to the south shore of the peninsula--the same one that brought us out to the trailhead. Following it out, the trees to the left--in the interior of the finger--continue to fascinate me, but my attention is continually drawn to the awkwardly shaped and eroded boulders scattered around the path.

400 million years ago, various types of oceanic organisms called this swath of land their home. Around that time, a brachiopod died and sank to the bottom of the sea, where his shell lay dormant for millions of years--until rock had grown around it, capturing and immortalizing it. I didn't know at the time that the fossil I saw on one of these common and haphazardly strewn boulders was that of a brachiopod, and I may still be wrong; bit in any case, the first of these rocks I looked at carefully--as well as countless others--held a fossil, a strong testament to their widespread existence at Button Bay.

As the dirt road brings us back towards the area of main attractions of the State Park, we notice that the geese have returned to their original locale in the bay. Once again they flee at our appearance, and once again, only a few hundred yards of flight brings them to their perceived safety zone.

Next week, Button Bay will probably be covered by ice, and the geese will have to rely on the energy they've been storing up throughout a mild autumn and thus-far-lame winter Making a much later migration than in most years, they've been able to enjoy this wonderous area for longer than they usually can. Their wings will eventually carry them south, though, to a warmer, gentler climate and surely to a place that has its own history embedded in the landscape. It is nice to know, however, that they'll be back in spring, eager to see any new changes that time will have brought to Button Bay.