went for a sunset hike at my favorite local natural area over the weekend, and I'd forgotten how good it is... have some photos! also took the Corolla on the great backroads to it, and it's just so good - tiny and light and yet so practical
okay I'm awful at actually like... blogging on this, the blogging site, so here are some photos from a hike I went on with @all-hail-the-conn-8d and @all-hail-the-kazoo yesterday! we found an absolutely massive dead oak that we'd somehow missed on multiple previous hikes, got an update on beaver activities (they're really good at this whole dam-making thing), and reached the northern edge of the park in a season other than winter! also got a chance to drive Audrey (the 1962 Sprite that somehow hasn't really been mentioned here) on the backroads to the park after finally getting the newly-rebuilt handbrake greased up.
For context, this was another hike in the saga of attempting to map the trails in the local state natural area. The place is really cool, but the western side of the “park” has only one officially-marked trail with many other variously-maintained ones that make for quite the set of trails really. @all-hail-the-conn-8d and @all-hail-the-kazoo have joined me for a lot of the hikes to try to map out the other ones, and we were down to basically half a trail left to confirm. This is where a map would help...
This screenshot of my map of the western portion, to give you a sense of scale it’s about a half mile tall and a bit more wide. The dotted magenta line is the hike we did tonight. The black trail is the only officially-marked trail, with the blue, purple, and pink trails being ones we identified in the topology/by hiking them. The blue and purple trails are definitely things (we’ve hiked all of them multiple times), and we’d hiked the upper part of the pink trail previously.
Today’s goal was to confirm the existence of the lower part of the pink trail. We took the black trail out to the purple, got down the valley on that, and back up the other side on the pink. Things were going nicely until we were most of the way along the pink trail, at which point we found the east-west portion at the bottom... doesn’t really exist, or at least isn’t kept up. Instead, we bushwhacked our way along what seemed to be a trail, until is became clear it was just a creekbed leading us the wrong way. So, we got back into the woods, got up the bluffs, and to the prairie (in light green). This is where we got penance for our foolishness, a solid quarter mile of 6 foot tall prairie grass and flowers.
We made it out just before dark luckily, and somehow it was only a mile and a half...
