Outdoors Maryland; 2104

Taurus Maryland does me like P.T. to serve all of our diverse communities and is made possible by the generous support of our members. Thank you. Coming up. Riding the wave. Of Allegheny County. Hitting the slopes with something else. Than. Managing the balance between the Earth and Man. Next. Outdoors Maryland is produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Dno are inspired by nature guided by science. Get in now nces itself is a plume of smoke above the tree line. But

that only builds the anticipation for the amazing sight that is to come. As a steam snorting behemoth from another age rounds the bend. And rumbles to a stop. Glowing in heaving at the Cumberland Maryland railroad station. The Western Maryland Scenic Railroad has a ride. And each year thousands of visitors climb aboard to ride the rails. Back in time. Writer. Frank Fowler is the train's general superintendent of. The US Mail say railroad operates between Conlin Maryland and frost for a distance of 16 miles going up through the Allegheny Mountains. Our excursion will take approximately one hour. So sit back relax and enjoy the ride on the natural beauty of Allegheny County. Coming out a column we go through the Narrows which was a first real a way to rust in our country. And it's about a mile long trough.

From there we go up to town status fir which is a half mile or so far and it just does gorgeous scenery. On weekends the train is pulled by Mountain Thunder a thirty five hundred horsepower steam locomotive. The story in our film Stein. Now here's a big huffing and puffing 1964 one steam locomotive whistle whistle blowing the smoke blowing out of the air. It's all rushing here that chugging and the clanking. I think that's the track it is not something you see anymore. Passenger Bruce course. This was my first time running a steam engine like this and I found it just wonderful. The highlights were the train line in the hillside and the rumble in the shake of it. You could feel the wheels trying to move and keep traction and. Then. Going through the tunnels it gets dark because there's no lights in it. The kids enjoyed that it

was like a spooky Halloween time going through the tunnel. Passengers can ride in refurbished 1940s coach cars or travel first class in a vintage dining car. Janet Blanc. It's been fun to see why. Why is that a way of travel back many years ago when people used to travel on trains and see the countryside see the collar. Right now they trade fell off. We're enjoying it very very much. The Scenic Railroad follows a portion of the route of the original Western Maryland railway. Original line that connected the Port of Baltimore with coal fields and small towns to the west. Charlie Amos was an executive with a railway which merged into the chassis system in the 1970s. We were not as long as some railroads but we were just as wide. And we kept everything in first class condition. Our locomotive are great cars our bridges our roads bad and frog. And Western Maryland

railway was really the envy of many railroad people. Veteran conductor Richard Markel 65 year career actually began aboard passenger trains in the steam era. He spent the last two decades with the scene. A record that earned him a car named in his honor. I kind of like trains and they're out so like you do. I will be good for anything else. Assistant Conductor John Jeppe is another colorful character. Sometimes a train stops for someone then reason and you'll be walked through the cars and I'll ask you what happened when that happened. My favorite expression is oh well we had to stop the change of heart and you'll be surprised how many people would think that we had a tire that we had to change. The passengers in the No. You can take advantage of a rare opportunity. Frank found.

Where one of the other direction the country. Or allow us to ride in the locomotive cab. Thing they can. Hear up there actually watching the farm and. Me. Paying the fire. And watching the engineers who are offering locomotive. Long time engineer Howard hold that it is modest about what it takes to control this 250 tons steam will change. The role the engineer is to receive them this season. When they tell you to go forward you go forward and monitor the back up to go back up. Hey stop stop. Stop. In fact there's a little more to it than that. Especially when it comes to coaxing the engine up the steep 2.8 percent mountain grade during the last two miles into Frost burn.

That presents a real challenge especially in a steam locomotive in October when it's raining the leaves are hauling. And leaves stick to the rails and they act like a Liberty and give you a bit. So when the people riders train they really see how railroading used to be. Everything was like. Smoke so nobody thought anything about it. During the layover in Frostburg the trains crew uses an ingenious method to reverse the locomotive. As we have a small minded but turntable that will take the engine put on the turntable and rotate it. In the opposite direction. And then put it on the other end of the frame for the return moment back to the ground. Monica will find. Her mother and niece are among the cyclists who are only taking the train one way. They'll pedal back to Cumberland on a new bike trail that parallels the steam trains route.

I'm just a train buff. I love riding the train and then I love riding bikes and I couldn't be happier doing both the same threat. With. Mountain Thunder makes more than 100 trips a year. Threading through the Allegheny Mountains. Working at a rail yard in Ridgely West Virginia. A crew of welders and machinists take pride in keeping this century old locomotive running in top form. Dan Pluto is chief mechanical officer. The parts are really available we make most them ourselves so if you have a good machinist or mechanic background you know you can do quite a bit of the work on. There's only about a 50 or 60 roads in this country still running now. I think it's a pretty important piece of Americana. But the biggest single handed thing that built the country was a steam locomotive so I just though. I was very proud. Keep it around for people to see. It's a rush and. It comes naturally to me it's just like another part of my body

when I put on my. TV. Oh everything about skiing spirit I'm in skiing fast down the hills making cuts. Dylan had collar flying down the. Street trails. Everything about skiing is just great. I hope for the future it is the world to the Olympics in time when my role models. Someday. The remaining years with big dreams and big air dozens of skiers and snowboarders launched the first year of the Deep Creek winter sports teams home bases with Deep Creek Mountain Resort in McHenry Maryland's family ski resort. Tanya Brennan's family moved to Deep Creek three years ago from the balmy south. That's when Tanya her son Jake aged 5 and Cally aged nine donned skis for the first time. It took a certain amount of moxie for Tanya to start a ski team here. She's president.

We saw the value in the skiing with something we could do as a family. There are a lot of people in the community that talked about that there used to be a race team here and they really wanted to see racing coming back to the mountain. And then a colleague and I decided to get together and start a ski team. We thought we would be lucky to have 20 or 30 members and we have 65 for the first year. We probably have 20 percent snowboarders 80 percent skiers. Our youngest skier is a five year old and our oldest member is forty five. Provides major support for the team. Greg rounds event coordinator at Whistler was tapped for head coach. Greg hails from the west home of America's world class ski slopes but he settled with Deep Creek. Garrett County Maryland reminds me of being back out west for one reason or another everybody skis out west they do either their stand out in Utah Colorado or California. But this is a pretty tight community and everybody knows everyone else. Everybody coming back here counts.

Early March brings the whiskey Cup the final race of the season and the new Deep Creek Winter Sports Steve Snow is already melting. Except for wisps manmade powder. Passing drizzles are turning that to slush on ice. Some team members also participate in other weekend ski and snowboard competitions like the regional big ear and the super pipe final. Kids here get exposed to a lot of different elements at the West. That's one of the goals in the phaeton was to not just have them take a close call at all the academy in the park with some of our coaches. Our park specialists and. Rationalise that they get a lot of different exposure other than a series of races come around to our mountain so they can join in. Those

series as well that this mountain is a lot of. The. Kids. Get it. In a totally different prices and a bath for the kids being part of the team has a lot of perks. Tom aged 16 has been skiing since he was two. Expanding his repertoire of snow sports has been Keep came the first day like we're going to be doing everything you know racing park to light sweet. This is going to be nice. For younger kids it's all about technique. Carson is 10 since I joined the team. I've learned how to carve in good race techniques I didn't know before. I think it's made a huge difference in my skin. Elizabeth aged eight is another natural. I learned to keep my skiis Farrel. Matched up together. What I like about skating is going down hills for Emily age 16. There are social and even career dimensions.

I look forward to my practices all week and I love coming out and being with my teammates. I hope to go to college and be on the race team and ski competitively. Hopefully continue my career in skiing. Is just my loved one here they knew there were coaches and parents the team provides focus motivation. What community the team is is very much a developmental team at this stage and we've promoted highlight the fact that we want to be good skiers good sportsmen. Responsible skiers and the racing will come. The speed will come. The winning will come. And that's a lot of fun to see the fun competition that comes out of it. We haven't. Travelled with him as a travel this year. Down the line. We were looking at travelling to a local area. You get there Jean saying that. My goal as head coach would be ultimately to someone to. Get the Olympics. That's. Got to be every coach to go.

My wish Cup race time rapidly deteriorating weather dictates adjustments. OK we got a modified slump today so we might set some single pole Gates or some panel Gates. What about this is where the year long training shows both technically and mentally. The weather does present a factor for. Me only the coaches the parents and the. Instructors that are setting up the gates but the kids don't seem to care. Your first factor is safety for the for the competitors. Everybody wants to race but. You have to have a safe race we have loose Brando's snow in the morning and as the sun went down and we had some moisture. It's starting to get really firm and it's starting to get routed out to. Sell. We had the. Type Of course often that makes the term more so they slow down. That was. That was the goal that for. The modified slalom what we called it to actually try and slow the competitors down.

I was hoping that this race would be easier than the past home but it turned out to be the hardest race I've ever been. The snow. Was really snow when the side flipped it took off all the powdery much ice. And you couldn't cut. Cutting and. You were basically. Trying to switch your whole body around the curb instead of trying to take it with your stick. It was hard work. To burn your legs. And. The gates were unusually tight which meant you had to have a really small radius to turn. And that's really difficult. To keep you. Maintain your speed and go through such takings. I usually don't really worry about winning my category but beating my previous time. And even if I beat if I win in my age division I still want to beat everybody else. I didn't do as well as I hoped. But. Winning side everything all the time. So I didn't see a lot of this ball pacing the floor or DNF.

Did not finish. I was. Very satisfied with the. Way the kids. Performed. Just making up for it. On this race day. The fastest time was a fat 63 seconds. But for the Deep Creek winter sports team. To measure success these efforts and enthusiasm. These racers. With feedback. Highlight is key. There's a silent menace stalking our roadways. Anywhere especially at night. For d here. In Montgomery County alone deer vehicle collisions almost 2000 in 2006 a direct result of a population explosion both human and deer. Do almost extinct in Maryland in the early 1900s. A century later numbers peaked stabilizing now at about a quarter of a million.

The impacts are far reaching. During the 80s and 90s there was a period of exponential growth. Deer were nearly doubling every two to three years. Ryan Isler is deer project leader. Maryland Department of Natural Resources. You know we had increased deer vehicle collisions are significant impacts to regenerations and forests. There are a host for little nymph stage of the deer tick which carries the sparky for Lyme's disease. Here cause significant amount of crop damage every year in Maryland. Today. Deer hunting is the principal method of controlling deer populations across the state. Beginning in the late 1990s early 2000s Maryland though a lot of other states began to really implement liberal harvest regulations for Atlas near the female is the one you need to control to control population growth. Since we enacted those liberal Amaryllis harvest regulations our

population has stabilized in most of the state. Every year I learn his team survey the health the number of white tail deer the deer processors and butchers they sample more than 4000 out of over 90000 deer annually harvested. We collected ages SAC's species. We also look for signs of disease. Age is determined by examining the deer's teeth. This data is used to formulate population estimates and trends which DNR publishes every year. The researchers measure antler diameter to help track deer health. And they take tissue samples from about 1000 deer to test for chronic wasting disease which is similar to mad cow disease. It's doesn't look like it's a human concern but there are still some on the Owens so far chronic wasting disease has not been found in Maryland. But has been discovered in West Virginia 10 miles from the Maryland border.

In rural areas where there are more hunters regulating bag limits suffices to keep deer in check. In densely human populated areas state and county officials rely on managed funds by sharpshooters and other trained unders. Bill Hamilton is head wildlife ecologist for the Department of Parks in Montgomery County. We typically see densities that exceed roughly 100 mile but there are areas throughout the county and throughout the state where you're an excess of 300 to 400 deer for square mile. This map represents the manatee deer hunt today that we are conducting in North Germantown Greenway park. As you can see there is ideal there habitat and in Forth preservation areas and parkland greenspace area all of which is surrounded by high density housing. Because of safety issues. Menage hunters undergo testing and background checks. They also have to demonstrate knowledge of hunting safety and honey attics.

Russian lips go live retired computer system analyst for the U.S. Army is one of today's licensed hunters. I've been hunting for about 53 years. There are so many deer. Here in the Maryland area and so many action if. Not with cars hitting deer during all people landscaping and such. That I think it was a good idea to do some of the hunting here to get rid of some Lipscomb gives his extra charity the rest of their I have left over here to a dog station call. FHA if a switcher formers or Hunter's feeding the home I give it to them. Some among the public will never favor any but there's a growing sentiment that something needs to be done to control the sable general manager of miles auto body shop in Gaithersburg Maryland approves of managed funds even though they put a dent in her business. We get approximately 10 vehicles per day for repair and

I would say about 10 percent this time a year up until Thanksgiving. All right dear relate. The opening day of the hunting season the collisions that seem to come in here go down for a while and then after the New Year comes then they seem to increase again. Merely Gable in Don's town Maryland moved to the country to escape urban living. Now she's wildlife Committee chairman for the dawn's town Civic Association. Well we moved out here in our first experience of where the beautiful deer you know in the backyard and everyone would run and get a camera and come out to see the deer and it was a big deal. Well then we spent a few years here and now if we have 20 or 30 that will sleep in our backyard when we first moved here the woods had sticker bushes and things everywhere you couldn't even walk through them you had to stay basically on a little trail. Now from five feet down there's nothing. There's very little vegetation the deer of it all maybe all the trees are that high.

Our family's very conflicted about the Manage tons. They are definitely not a wonderful thing but we have to look at the whole picture. Some non-lethal deer control methods are effective for specific local problems. Managers at the 50 acre Brookside gardens and Wheaton have invested in a variety of deer repellent techniques some can be used by regular homeowners. Stephanie oberlé is assistant director. And so we decided to install a 10 foot fence around the 50 acre perimeter of our gardens. The cost was high but we felt that in the five years prior to installing the fence we had spent the same amount of money on repellents and replacing plantings and staffing time. If you're a homeowner with problems with deer you might install a 10 foot fence or you might just buy to plant plants that are deer resistant. For example this is spice bush and as you can see it has been browsed by deer at all. If you want a wider selection of plants you may need to turn to some commercial products that will help you repel deer but deer are

very adaptable. However non-lethal deer management does nothing to decrease numbers while deer for tele to control techniques need more research. Meanwhile numbers of hunters are in decline and it's a big concern because our hunters are our primary not that controlling deer populations and without hunters. We're going to be in a world of hurt maybe as soon as 20 years down the road. It could happen that way. Drop into our website. At w w w dog MP t dog o r g

to send us your comments and suggestions. Learn more about Maryland's diverse natural beauty on our website. And in our magazine. Dno are inspired by nature guided by science. Our tour is Maryland is made by NPT to serve all of our diverse communities and is made possible by the generous support of our members. Thank you.