Outdoors
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Camping at Village Creek State Park
So, I went back through my blog trying to find a post about Village Creek State Park. I only found this one but that post isn’t even specifically about the park itself. The first time Chris and I visited the park was sometime in the fall/winter of 2010. We drove down from San Augustine, Texas on a few days off from field work in Sabine National Forest. I think we visited in conjunction with a visit to the Big Thicket units down near VCSP, but either I didn’t take photos or I didn’t bother to blog about it. Kind of weird for me not to have written about that trip,…
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Valentine’s Day Camping | A Movie
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Car Camping with a Toddler
I started this post as a draft in May of last year and it has been sitting in my drafts folder since then. At that time I thought I’d impart what little wisdom I had with car camping with a baby, two whole camping trips, but never got around to writing my thoughts down. Since life is different now and I have a toddler I’ve opted to tailor this towards our current experiences with car camping, that with a toddler. Needless to say they are vastly different and yet still share similar qualities. My first tidbit of advice is going to be find yourself a lot of Patience. You’re going…
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Bottomland Explorations at SFA State Park
Wetlands. They are highly undervalued but very awesome ecosystems. It was in college that I pinpointed the fact that I really loved wetlands and decided to focus on them as part of my marine biology degree. Looking more deeply, it was salt marshes that I had an affinity for, something I grew up loving as part of family vacations to the Texas and Florida coasts. Of course from there I learned about freshwater wetlands, and with our living in Florida for 8 years we became wetland maniacs. Wetlands are happening places! With our camping trip a few weekends ago, we took to the trails the morning we were to pack…
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(Mostly) Raptors at Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge
Two weekends ago when we went to Stephen F. Austin State Park just west of Houston, I got on Google Maps to see what other parks would be around the area. Close by was the Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge, a place I had always wanted to visit but we’d never made it down that direction. Many of the trails were closed at the state park due to mud so when we packed up Sunday morning we headed over to the refuge to have lunch and see what we would see. There were several trails and a five mile scenic drive we could take. The refuge office was closed…
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Evening Trail Explorations | SFA State Park
After we returned to the campsite and Forest played around for awhile, I decided to take him for a walk while Chris tried to get a campfire going. The wood was wet from the rain and it was proving to be a slow going feat. Chasing a toddler around was fun for awhile but was definitely on the exhausting end, so a walk was definitely in order. I hadn’t meant to dive off onto a trail, intending to just walk the large loop in the campground, but we eventually found ourselves at the Brazos River. The trail was a little muddy and puddled here and there, but that didn’t stop…
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Campsite Shenanigans! | SFA State Park
We haven’t been camping since early October at Martin Dies Jr State Park. The three other reservations we’ve had since then were all thrwarted due to weather. In all reality this one should have probably been cancelled, too. We spent about three hours in nearby Katy dodging thunderstorms that appeared earlier than predicted once we arrived, and temperatures overnight were pretty cold—the three of us tried our best to snuggle in the tent overnight but we all slept rather poorly. I’ll have more write-ups and photos soon, but for today I’m just sharing some of the fun photos of Forest around the campsite when we arrived back from our excursion…
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2nd Day Hike at Eagle Mountain Park
First Day Hikes have become more popular in the last several years, which is very good thing, however we weren’t able to get out and enjoy a hike on the first day of 2016. Chris and I had opted to go up to visit our families in DFW during the latter part of our winter break and that encompassed the New Years holiday. After being cooped up for several days due to various visits with family and cold weather, Chris was itching to go for a hike somewhere on the second day of the year. It was a rather lazy start to that Saturday, enjoying bacon cooked by my mom…
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Eightmile Lake | Wenatchee National Forest
On our third night of backpacking in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, we took a relatively flat hike over to Eightmile Lake. There were a few rolling areas but it was an easy hike after our climb up and down Aasgard Pass. It was also a very quiet hike. There were a few people camping on the far side of the lake but we never interacted with them, and we saw no one on our hike into the lake. It might not have been alpine as the Enchantment Lakes were, but it wasn’t without a lot of grand scenery! There was a very cool old dam near the end of the…
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Another Sunday Hike On The Chinquapin Trail At Huntsville State Park
We first hiked this loop back in late March when Forest was almost 7 months old! This time we opted for a clockwise route instead of the counterclockwise route. The trail is the orange line on this map. It was a little chillier than I expected when we set out that morning and I was thankful that I had a hoodie on my fleece jacket. The sky was overcast and while there were some storms west of us in Austin, we didn’t expect to be impacted during our hike. There were lots of prints in the first creek crossing we visited, some we could identify and others we couldn’t. Chris…