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Welcome to Plum Landing.
"Hiking Wachusett."
We are on a mission for Plum.
We are going to hike a mountain.
It's Wachusett Mountain.
Today we are getting ready for the hike.
My brother, Harrison, my sister, Bianca,
my father, Howard, and my mom, Christina.
And I am Cornell.
I think in the summer, Wachusett Mountain has
a big, bright sun, lots of green trees and bushes.
Today we got some books from the library
because we want to learn all about mountains.
One of the things I think we need to do now is make a list
of all the things we need for the hike:
water, food, camera, good shoes, hat, bug spray, sunscreen,
thermometer, so that we know what the temperature is.
And we also need an altimeter
so we can measure how high we're going.
That will be on our cell phone.
I also think we need a first-aid kit, just in case.
We're at Wachusett Mountain and we're starting our hike.
We're going to record the temperature and the altitude.
Hey, Harry, what's our current temperature?
. Fahrenheit.
Hey, Bianca, what altitude are we at right now?
, feet.
Altitude or elevation is our height above sea level.
If we were at the ocean right now, standing on a beach,
our altitude would be zero.
Here, at the start of the trail,
our altitude is almost , feet above sea level.
We're recording this data for Plum.
Right now I'm drawing that tree over there.
I think these trees are about to feet tall.
Yeah, I agree.
Hey, how are you doing?
We ran into a guy named Scott.
I just started finding these little tiny toads.
See how they have that white belly
with the little brown flecks on it?
That means it's an American toad.
Whoa.
I'm a biologist, but I'm also the president
of the Friends of Wachusett Mountain.
I just saw you sketching in your notebooks.
What are you working on?
We're sketching trees and stuff like that.
And we're interested in the low altitude and the high altitude.
And the differences that you might see at the bottom
compared to the top?
Yes. You want to hike with us?
I am drawing a stream.
So you'll notice this stream is pretty wide
and maybe a foot deep.
And we're going to compare the stream on the top to the bottom.
I see a lake.
This is Echo Lake.
That's pretty.
If you look across the lake,
you might notice a little pile over there.
What do you think that is?
I see a little hut.
Is that a home for something?
I think a beaver.
- That's right. - Let's get going.
We're going to go up the High Meadow Trail.
You're going to be more tired, because we're going up higher
and higher and higher, gaining elevation.
Harry, what have you got for altitude?
I have , feet.
We're seeing a different kind of tree.
This is a hemlock tree.
At the bottom, we didn't see any hemlock.
Hemlocks are really good at living in colder places.
Right in this area, we're going to go down
onto the western side of this ridge,
and it holds snow for a little longer,
so the hemlocks seem to do really well in this one patch.
This stream is a lot smaller than the one on the bottom.
The streams on the bottom
are really big and have lots of water,
and the streams on the top have not that much water.
Lots of smaller streams form together
and make bigger streams.
I think we're at the top.
We're at the top of the mountain,
and my altitude is , feet.
We've climbed about feet.
The temperature in the shade is ..
Awesome-- ..
It was about seven degrees cooler here
than it was down at the start of the hike.
At the bottom of the mountain, there was no wind at all,
but up here there's lots of wind.
I'm looking at the trees
and I notice that they're smaller than they were
at the bottom of the mountain.
So maybe the trees are smaller up here
because it's colder and windier
than at the bottom of the mountain.
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