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Searching for Denali
After leaving the Denali Highway way back in September of 2019, we managed to get a glimpse of Denali itself from the Parks Highway one of the pull-offs at Denali State Park. I took quite a few photos from the Denali Highway facing west, thinking that perhaps there in the haze that I could see Denali. But of course once we got to the state park and looked from there it was quite clear I was imagining things before then! And even in these photos you can’t see the entire mountain because it is still socked in the clouds. But—it was a glimpse! And now that our friends Patrice and…
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Morning Rainshower
*Alright, email readers of this blog! I have finally managed to switch you off of Feedburner and onto Mailchimp! Whenever a new blog post is out it is set to send out at noon central time so keep an eye out in your email and be sure to make sure your email filter doesn’t send it to spam. Let me know if you are having problems reading it and I can adjust font size and such (I think!)* Just a quick post for today so this blog situation can get sorted in the email, but I took this photo over Memorial Day weekend in Galveston when we dodged a mid-morning…
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May 2021 Rewind
My online friend Danielle at Suwannee Rose does these lovely monthly wrap-up posts for the month, such as April In Bloom. So, I’m going to borrow her idea and replicate that here for a few months until I get the inspiration to write again more. I’ve actually had the inkling to post a few times but then the effort involved to sit down and type it all out sounded terrible so I moved on. To kick off the month, my parents came down for Mother’s Day weekend. It was their first visit since March 2020 and Forest was thrilled to have them down again, as was I. Thank you vaccines!…
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Wet and Soggy on the Lone Star Trail (Phelps Segment)
Earlier this year my friend Keely had inquired if I wanted to attempt to go backpacking with her and another friend. This was before vaccines were prevalent and at that point I hadn’t had mine, so I declined. Well, a few weeks ago she emailed again and asked if I had my vaccine yet and if I wanted to go backpacking. Of course I did! We pinned down a date and of course as the time got closer the rain chances went up. In fact, it’s been rainy for the last week! First it was thunderstorms coming from the west and then an unnamed tropical system came up from the…
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Adapting
When things get hectic, blogging is the first thing that goes for me. It always has. I’ve tried to keep up during hard times over the years, the biggest adaptation happening when Forest was born to some themed posts to keep me going. And it works, usually. I certainly don’t want to quit writing here. When you’ve been putting your writing online in some form since 2002 it is hard to give it up because you’ve turned into one of those hardcore old-style bloggers and, well, I don’t want to stop blogging yet. But….writing and reading blogs has been more time consuming this last year. And I need to adapt…
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Back to the Pitcher Plant Trail
Let’s pretend this isn’t a dusty post languishing in my drafts folder since last summer! I wanted to post it a few months ago but lacked the interest in getting it out. And seeing as I took these photos in June 2020 and a new June is rapidly approaching I figured I might as well get this one up. And I am itching to get back to the Big Thicket soon, too. I am leaning towards this being a Carolina satyr Hermeuptychia sosybius however Intricate Satyrs are very similar and this one has that look like it is just slightly different and could be an Intricate. Going through my iNaturalist…
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Life Lately | April 2021
Thinking: The last time I did one of these was in December and I lamented then that I hadn’t done one since August. I don’t have a very good track record lately, do I? Well, a lot has been going on behind the scenes. First off, we have new feline overlords! I first found Rusty and Dusty on the Petfinder app back in January. Forest and I had started looking for cats and I was favoriting ones that were kid friendly and those who were in bonded pairs. These two were brothers and they had/have three sisters. Chris wanted to wait until we took our Arkansas trip before we started…
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Guadalupe River Shoreline Explorations | Guadalupe River State Park
Hi there. It’s been a few weeks. I haven’t felt much like writing here and to be honest, I’ve got a huge back log of things to share from not only Thanksgiving but I still have Alaska items to share, and now I have posts from Arkansas and a camping trip we took over Easter—and it’s a lot. I have enough photos processed to write a few weeks worth of posts but the last thing I feel like doing is sitting down and writing. I feel stuck in my writing here. I basically feel like I just do trip reports and while I enjoy that I need to figure out…
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Spring Wake-up at Roy E. Larsen Sandyland Sanctuary
Reaching back into late February with this post to go with a couple of others I wrote about our hike at the REL Sandyland Sanctuary. I actually had to look it up because I was unsure of who Mr. Larsen was, and it turns out he was an executive with Time, Inc. and as a conservationist later in life he organized the Nantucket Conservation Fund and joined the board of The Nature Conservancy, who later dedicated this tract of land to him when it became a sanctuary. A glimpse down to Village Creek before we headed for the trails. Swamp Azalea, Rhododendron viscosum I imagine it is a much different…
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To the Ozarks
It’s back to the grind for us this week, but last week Chris, Forest, and I checked out of state and drove to Arkansas to spend the week in a cute AirBnB cabin on the SE edge of the Ozark National Forest. Between cooler weather and the state of Arkansas not being on their spring break, it was fairly quiet for us on the trails except in a few areas. We could see that ramping up as we left our cabin on Saturday, the start of a glorious weekend meant an influx of ORVs, and canoes and kayaks being driven into the Ozarks as we passed heading south to I-40.…