The battlefield is ancient. Strewn with the debris of generations. Trees splintered, rocks shattered. Neither side will yield this talus slope in the pursuit of that which is most coveted. This is Game of Stones. Actually, this is just another installment of New Hampshire’s Wild Neighborhoods, and this time we’re scaling the battle ground known as Talus. And there was some disagreement at Something Wild about whether we should call it “talus” or “talus woodland.” What we did agree on was that when the ice-sheet receded from New Hampshire 12,000 years ago, it scraped up the landscape pretty significantly. In its wake it left south-facing cliffs, with boulder fields at their feet. Imagine Cannon Mountain in Franconia Notch or Cathedral Ledge in North Conway. And these boulder fields are the front lines of where the titans Geology and Botany clash. The argument for calling this “talus woodland” is that over time, the boulder fields develop a mat of leaf litter, moss and soil that will