Travel & Places
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The Village Creek & Tupelo Trails | Village Creek State Park
We’re flashing back to February when we went camping at Village Creek State Park. Our morning walk along the Village Creek and Tupelo Trails was very quiet. Aside from encountering a few people near the primitive campsite near the trailhead, we found no one else on the trails that morning. There were plenty of Nyssa aquatica, tupelo, specimens lining the bayous and bottoms that drained out into Village Creek. Village Creek was calm and serene that morning. Adjacent to the trail we found a couple of jack-in-the-pulpits! The Village Creek trail deadended into the beach at Village Creek. We spent quite a bit of time scouting the edge of the…
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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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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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Rainier From The Road | Wordless Wednesday
As seen from I-90, heading west
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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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Wonder at Moody Gardens Pt. 1
I’ve written about Moody Gardens before. I worked there my senior year of college (2001-2002) in the education department staffing touch tanks and talking at the exhibits. The aquarium hadn’t changed in 2011 when we visited and it hadn’t changed *much* this time around but they were in the process of adding in a new exhibit in the center of the building, a tall, ciruclar aquarium that will go between the two floors of the aquarium where previously you could look down from the center on the second floor. That said, it still was a little ‘meh’ in many regards however Forest was very interested when we went over Thanksgiving…
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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…