Altoona, IA - Around the Campground

We have an interesting group of campers here in this campground. Everyone is a full-timer, except for those who merely store their RV’s here and there are a few of those. The 5th wheel next to us is owned by a couple who live about 50 miles away and come up here once a month to stay overnight for a bit of a vacation. There’s a Prevost with a large motorcycle hitched to the back around which I have seen absolutely no human beings. There’s another large tandem axle RV across from us that has a large trailer with it. Sometimes the trailer is in front of the RV, sometimes in back and right now it is not here. I’ve never seen anyone there but, I can’t attribute all that movement to ghosts.

There are two groups of campers: those who work at the local race track and others, like us, who are snowbirds but come back to Iowa in the summer where they have friends, relatives or old memories. We saw one guy who is smaller than Gary who weighs 125 lbs with his old Navy work boots on. This guy had a saddle in his storage compartment and we figure he’s a jockey. Here are 3 boys who circled the campground all day. Note the sticks in their hands. Nope, those are not sticks, those are crops and they beat their rear tire with them to make the bike go faster.

Gary and I like to walk every day and the only problem with this is that there aren’t many walking trails - within walking distance. We have to drive to them all, unless we want to walk around the campground or along the roads around here. Dull and unsafe. We’ve found several nearby, all old railroad beds which have been converted to trails part of the Rails to Trails Conservancy.

Several days ago we found a very overgrown rail bed where the rails and ties had been removed but no trail had been built yet. Here we found a mother lode of blackberries. Yesterday, we brought two plastic containers and began to pick. We filled these two before we had gone half way along the trail and noticed as we continued that the berries got bigger. Next time we’ll start at the other end and pick these. 

Today we walked the GayLea Wilson Trail which connects Altoona to Pleasant Hill and up to Ankeny, 12 miles altogether. And, if you think we’re walking 12 miles, you’re eating too many carrot sticks.

1 block into the trail we noticed this little thing on the tree. It is a gypsy moth trap.

Oh, no. We lived in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire for about 17 years before returning to the Midwest in 1985. We’ve dealt with gypsy moths and, though we had heard that they were migrating westward, we didn’t think they had gotten this far yet. Gypsy Moths are disgusting and eat every bit of greenery around, even evergreens if necessary. They have a 7-year cycle and are hardly noticeable in the first year or two. In the third year, you can see some of the larva and some tree damage. In the 4th through 6 year, the damage is progressively worse and there are more and more of those caterpillars. In the 7 year, there are so many that cars skid on streets when they are covered with the caterpillars. How disgusting.

They were brought to America in 1869 to breed with silk worms to develop a silk worm industry. Somehow they got out and not realizing the damage, no one tried to retrieve them for a while. Big Mistake. BIG MISTAKE.

I remember the 7th year of their cycle when we lived in southern New Hampshire on a wooded lot. One evening, I could hear raindrops falling on the trees around us. We needed rain and this was such a delightful light rain that I sat in our living room just listening and enjoying nature at work. Then I realized that it was not rain, it was gypsy moth poop falling from the trees onto leaves below and then down to the ground. How disgusting.

I also remember one spring getting a paper bag and scouring our lot trying to scrape all of the egg sacs off any surface I could find. To keep them off the trees, we would wrap the trees with tape with the sticky side out to catch the caterpillars as they climbed up. But there were so many, that the first ones got caught by the tape and the rest just crawled over them to get to the leaves above. How disgusting.

In the end, they all die off because there are so many. Then the body hangs down held up only by their back two feet. How disgusting.

Have I mentioned that I think that gypsy moths are disgusting?

It is classified as a pest, and its larvae consume the leaves of over 300 species of trees, shrubs and plants. The gypsy moth is one of the most destructive pests of hardwood trees in the eastern United States. And, it’s coming to Iowa. Oof-da mega.