Outdoors
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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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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…
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Aasgard Pass Descent
If you’ve been reading here long enough you know that Chris and I went to Seattle and the Cascades for our 10th anniversary in 2012. I never actually finished sharing the photos from that time and since I don’t always have a lot of excursions and adventures to share these days, I thought would try to finish sharing those photos over the next few weeks. If you missed any of those posts you can flip through them here. The big chunk of time we spent in Washington State, the primary reason for going, was to hike in the Enchantment Lakes. We had a permit for the Core Enchantment Zone which…
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The Woodlands Trail | Big Thicket National Preserve
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The Wildlife and Island Trails | Martin Dies State Park
On the Sunday of our camping trip several weekends ago we went over to the Walnut Ridge unit of the park to hike for the morning. We merged these two trails together to create a longer loop. There was no one on the Wildlife Trail while we were on it but a few people were starting to explore the Island Trail just as we were leaving. It was definitely a quiet loop to do. The one annoying thing about the trails in this park is that they include the mileage along the roads to get back to the trailhead of origin for their loops, which we thought was weird. There’s…
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The Slough and Forest Trails | Martin Dies State Park
Acer floridanum, southern sugar maple. Ilex opaca, American holly Poor luna moth! Lobelia cardinalis The afternoon we arrived at the state park we combined the Slough and Forest Trails for a giant loop through the Hen House Ridge Unit of the park. Being as it was Saturday the park was very busy and the trails did have people on them, particularly closer to the ‘front country’ interface near the roads. One thing we were definitely surprised with in this park was the size of some of the trees out there, particularly the magnolias, beeches, and even some of the American hollies. Ocassionally there would be a large pine that has…
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Spiranthes odorata | Wordless Wednesday
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Campsite Scenes | Martin Dies State Park
There’s one thing I find annoying about camping reservations with Texas Parks and Wildlife and that’s that you can’t reserve a specific campsite when you reserve your dates online. You are at the mercy of whatever is left when you arrive at that park. The Florida state park system was better in that regard. However, we did end up lucking out with our site a few weekends ago at Martin Dies State Park. We ended up at site 92 in the Gum Slough camping section. It was tucked off in a tiny loop off of the main camping area, next to Gum Slough. We were secluded a bit on one…
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Monarch Migration at the Lady Bird Wildflower Center
It’s hard to see just how many monarch butterflies were hanging out on this group of mist flower a few weekends ago, but there was quite a grouping of them. I’m sure you’ve heard the plight of the monarchs right now with habitat loss and climate issues affecting their migration. It seems that this year the migration stayed to the west of its usual path here in Texas. We typically don’t see a whole lot of monarchs in our area either. I have plans to start some milkweed this winter to some patches established in the yard and garden. Maybe we’ll attract some in coming year?!