1088. Lil' Butterfly Continues into the 20's
Charlestown, RI

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has given us a chance to check on some of the many old boxes we planted in RI years ago, but haven't bothered to check in more recent times. Let's face it, with over 1000 plants now around the world and far too many other things to do, checking old boxes has not really been a high priority for us!;-) Besides, sometimes it seems that trails, trees and sometimes even rocks have changed so much over time that we can't even find our own old boxes! Once in a while, though, we might get lucky, and find an old box of ours buried beneath a tree that fell over on it long ago or something like that, so we might decide to relocate it to a nearby spot. Or we might decide to "demystify" some of our old clues for "mystery" boxes of ours that have never been found or that haven't been found for a very long time. These, then, are a few of the boxes that we have decided to label with "Continues into the 20's ...", if we happen to find that any of them are still salvageable!;-)

This was one of our early plants, about half a mile in on the way to Burlingame's former North Camp, where we once had other plants that are probably now long gone. This little butterfly, however, somehow survived through all these years, although its box and hiding place didn't, so we just took it home, turned it into a "travelin' light" stone stamp, and transplanted it to a new spot nearby!

To get to the old North Campground road from Route 1, drive north on either Prosser Trail or Kings Factory Road, keep straight onto Shumankanuc Road, and then turn left (southwest) on Buckeye Brook Road. Go 3/4 of a mile and park by a yellow gate on your left. Walk past the gate and follow the sandy gravel entrance road south for a few minutes taking note of the crossing of the yellow blazed Vin Gormley Trail at a sign that says "Hikers Only". Within 10 minutes or so, you should see the third stone wall corner that comes to a point on the right about a dozen steps after a patch of slickrock in the middle of the old lane before a grove of pines on the left. Here on the right behind the lower lip of the pink granite mouth about 8 steps off trail is where the butterfly used to live, but the rocks got so lichen-covered you couldn't even see they were pink anymore! Plus the "big mouth" had gotten so deep it practically swallowed the butterfly, too - box and all! So, since the butterfly is just flying solo now on the back of a little gray stone, we moved it over to about 8 steps off the opposite side of the trail and tucked it under leaves and a small triangular pinkish rock behind the large beech tree on the east side!

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