Strangers on the Mountain

Fiber optic installers on Barton Mountain

The back of our house has great views of the ridgeline of Barton Mountain. Nobody is ever there. We have no curtains and we have no modesty. We are always alone, with only thousands of acres of forest behind us, which is just the way we like it. Until last August. Suddenly there were strangers all over the place and we felt invaded.

There is a ROW on our land to the top of the mountain for cable and cell antennas. This summer, Fairpoint Communications, Vermont’s telephone service provider,  thought they needed to install fiber optic cables up the ROW. I chased off the guys who never asked permission to park on our land, and from that point on everybody was very polite and requested permission for parking. I also tried to scare them off by telling them to be careful of the bears and bobcats up on the cliffs (which really exist). But they are Vermonters and such critters don’t scare them. They hiked up unarmed, something we, who frequently hike up there, won’t do.

The installation took several days. There were men on top of the mountain who fed down the cable to the guys down here. But the guys down here also took cable off of a truck up the mountain as far as they could go. They used four-wheelers and wrecked up the land something wicked. They caused run-off, which is illegal (we have never reported them). They took the vehicle up over boulders instead of using an ancient road that paralleled their invasion. They chopped trees down and tossed them off the ROW and onto private property. Those trees will provide habitat for lots of animals, but it looks ugly and doesn't demonstrate any respect for the forest. I will post those photos in the near future.

Towards the end of the cable installation, some new strangers showed up above the house on the ROW and scared the hell out of me. Thanks to my long lens, I got a decent photo of them. But they can't be identified. Shucks. The photo was taken from the back door.

To view the photo essay of our hike to view the damage::
Introduction: Strangers on the mountain
Hiking the ROW: Part 1
Hiking the ROW: Part 2Hiking the ROW: Part 3

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