Hiking the Cascades in one day-- a good hike

                                                   Cascades Falls, Pembroke, Virginia

    I took oldest son Zeb and his girlfriend Stephanie on a hike to "The Cascades," a well known spot in Virginia but one we hadn't been to yet. The falls are well known, and I'd heard something about the trail being a little rugged in parts and they were right. The so-called lower trail took you close to a cool stream with various little falls. You were stepping on rocks that were pretty flat, or stone steps, or stepping around the above ground, thin roots of trees that were also on the trail, so it wasn't flat by any means.

      Being as it was July, there were very few wildflowers making an appearance along the trail. But there "were" some pretty white and pink bordered rhododendron flowers, as well as some bergamot, white and yellow avens, leafcup, and a bit of wild ginger leaves too. I also picked up some "heal all". I thought it might help Stephanie, who fell and broke her foot!

    Actually, "comfrey" might have been more helpful as some kind of poultice, though she didn't have an open wound. When we first got to the falls my spouse and I took off our shoes and socks and put our feet in the cold water. But Zeb and Stephanie took off their shoes and walked together up to the falls themselves. She said the stone was slippery, and she turned and her left foot fell into a crevice, fracturing a little of her foot above her toes. She went down the "upper" steeper trail without all the steps but mostly dirt, using our walking sticks like crutches. The next day she "did" get crutches and we found a few places that would have wheelchairs we could borrow for her so we could visit a few places.

     When we got back to the parking lot she soaked her foot in the cold stream water and I got her a towel, as the men did most of the cooking of our steak shish kabobs. Before her mishap she actually got a lot of good pictures. I didn't take too many as my camera was acting up, without its full compliment of power,  I guess. It was 4 hours to the falls and back. A lot of exercise!

Nature, Travel gets you out of whack, People,Writing

    Emerson said travel was a "fool's paradise" and that people are basically the same as you go from place to place. My travel in June has me tired. I slept fitfully during half of it. And your system gets 'out of whack' by not eating your regular diet at a regular time --- I admit their had great desserts (choc. cake, cheese cake, choc. cream pie, etc.) at the writers' conference. And I wrenched an arm and wrist a bit falling down (being attacked by) an escalator getting off Amtrak's train in New York City. I was helped up, ironically, by a black woman behind me with a cane, and a uniformed Amtrak employee.
    Hamilton (N.Y.) was a neat looking little old town with a very scenic campus with a good variety of tree types, some of them labeled. You actually drive onto Colgate University's campus, not far from town, surrounded by these big, shading oaks (on Oak Drive). The college must be three times the area of the college where I work (Radford U.), which is part of the "main drag" in town. There is little room to expand and they keep swallowing up the green spaces and parking lots for bigger and better (?) buildings. I can see that whoever had the fortitude to have a writers' conference at Colgate saw there was room for visitors and students alike,with a nice pond (they call it Taylor Lake) to sit by and contemplate. Or see a sunfish shaped fish whose mouth area was an iridescent light blue! And the swans left their (crappy) calling card on the grass near my wooden bench, encouraging me to write a little poem about it.

Mother Nature's Wrathful Snow-- GBBC coming

     Mother nature certainly showed who was boss recently. Schools and businesses closed, and we received 13(!) inches of snow; and it didn't look like it was going to quit for a while there. The Interstate 81 exit near our town seemed to be constantly clogged with traffic and I'm glad the college was closed and I didn't have to go out in it. But my husband, who works at the college dining hall, couldn't depend on our two small  "unheavy" Chevys-- people with trucks gave him rides to and from work.
     Today the sun is out and I should go outside, but don't have a decent pair of waterproof boots. AND my digital camera stopped working :(  so I don't have any photos of the pretty snow to upload. It is covering the shrubs in front of the front door,  the post holding our mailbox is  covered halfway to the top, and a neighbor broke one of our cheap shovels--- well, her daughter's friend did. Husband told her to keep the other shovel for a while (well, we have two of the shovels you use to dig up dirt and I suppose they won't break--- but the snow is on the wet side now in the sun and I should go out for some vitamin D).
   And today starts the Great Backyard Bird Count! No birds in the backyard now, but yesterday as the snow was coming down I spied a flicker (type of woodpecker) and what looked like a black capped chickadee at our front yard feeder. In the last few weeks I've noticed seagulls  hanging around our one shopping center where the old (now vacant) KMart used to be. You know, I like that store-- it has a better variety of clothing styles than its competitor, Wal-Mart. 

Another Encounter with Nature -- Part 2

       It was actually several months ago, but I would like to remember the fact that I had an encounter with deer in a suburban setting, on the outskirts of a town part, similar to the above photograph.
     I was actually driving along, in a part of town that skirts around "Wildwood" Park, when I noticed something starting to move, off to the side of the road. It was actually an adult deer and three smaller deer, at least two of them with the visible white spots of a fawn. Mother and children were getting ready to cross the road, and it was still daylight out, though later in the afternoon. I've spoken to a local person about this, Becky at "Curves,"and she pointed out her daughter recently moved to a more remote town, Snowville, and she's actually had a black bear right in her yard!
     Are we encroaching more and more on wild animal habitat (or could it be the other way around)? Running between natural wilderness corridors, I suppose that makes it more possible to see deer in town. I hear in some places they vote to get rid of deer by extending the hunting season, because they think they are becoming pests in their gardens. I don't have a woods around me (so no big animals in the garden), but my neighbor has complained of rabbits in hers. I did see deer one night as I was driving home from work, and they looked like they were headed to the cemetery. What, to visit a friend? There are big trees at the nearest cemetery, too high I think for them to reach the branches, but maybe they were going to eat some grass and shrubs instead. Deer seem to be amazingly fearless, until you start moving toward them. They are the gentle creatures of the woods and we should appreciate their presence, because they are a reminder we still have nature quite close to our door, if we would but let it in.

Some Glimpses of Nature Part 1

     It-- he or she, traveling so fast I couldn't tell which -- stared straight at me as I cracked open the front door of the house to let the cat in. Sammie -- our cat, named after Samantha Brady of "Days of Our Lives" TV fame -- didn't seem to notice that barely above the hedges partly in front of the walkway in front of the house and slightly above my eye level was (gosh)  a hummingbird (we're talking back in July, not now in January). It was a female, a ruby throated hummingbird (many birds being dimorphic) looking at me. She was in her helicopterlike position, as though she were waiting for me to throw her some bread crumbs. Close to my front door is also a tall, gangly rose bush. Maybe she had tried for some nectar from those red flowers before it decided to just hover by my front door? I couldn't tell. But in 15 seconds she suddenly "zipped" away. Too bad we didn't have a feeder out front.
     Our neighbors had a tree of Sharon and a sugar water hummingbird feeder out front, but I believe they were in the process of cutting it down. After that I didn't see any more hummingbirds. They are very fast wing flappers and one wonders how they keep their energy up, especially in winter, when most of them do travel south to warmer climes. As long as we have "sugar" feeders and deep, nectar filled birds the hummingbirds will survive, though I'm also told, like other birds, they will wolf down tiny insects too. The early bird literally "does" catch the worm, and eat it too!

Wonderful trees and nature on Radford University campus

                               

                               Tulip Tree

    It was extremely sunny and bright, the light blue sky almost cloudless. I told my college class, in order to have a "Zen" in the moment experience, that they needed to turn off their cell phones and just experience things then and there. And I think most of them did.
    We first parked ourselves in the Alumni garden. This is a good place to sit and relax, I tell them. I point out the "purple leaf" plum tree, which has tiny little fruits, the tiny, peeling, paper bark maple, and that there are many sayings on the wall that enclose this garden, such as Keats' "a thing of beauty is a joy forever" quote. We sit among some meadow sage with its smelly, almost minty scent. I pull off a piece and pass it around for them to smell. The red and white begonias (the school colors) surround an old, black bell in front of us.
    But the class (as it turned out for those who wrote about this) was more entranced by the koi and goldfish pond across the way, where the fish casually swim about and there are benches nearby they can sit on and watch them on. A kind of murky little waterfall goes into this pond, and they tell me they'd never been here before.
    At one point I take these heavy guidebooks out of the backpack I've got on (I'm usually carrying my papers in a laptop sized briefcase) and hand them out. I point out a tree with round, heart shaped leaves and ask them, based on the guidebook, what tree it is. "I'll give you a hint -- it has pink flowers?"
    "Redbud?" Michael asks.
    "Right!" Mostly, though, they didn't know ANY of the trees on campus, not the unusual Bald Cypress (a swamp tree in the middle of campus), not the Dawn/Don redwood (with the reddish bark), not the hemlock or tulip tree.
    With different groups you get different reactions to taking this kind of walk. I think "both" groups I took seemed to hang back behind me, like 15, 20 feet (!) like I bite or something. I'm sure they thought me an odd duck with all my "nature" stuff, and some of them STILL had their cell phones, on, the addicts!

Pandapas Pond, Meditate weeding

                                              Pandapas Pond, Virginia (woods around it)

    So a few weeks ago I did a little volunteering at "Pandapas Pond". It is called "Pandapas" as it is named after James Pandapas, local industrialist with some money who used it for his own private hunting grounds. Now it is part of the Jefferson National Forest (which I hope they don't ruin with anything like fracking), and has many Poverty Creek Trail system trails off of it.
     With the other Master naturalists in my group, we did some weeding in a "rain garden" area off of the butterfly garden that fellow member Barb Walker had started, a nice addition to something you can find along the trail, not too far from the pond and surrounding woods themselves. Butterflies are a unique addition to any habitat. For a delicate insect they can last a while (those born in October will fly all the way to Mexico and then overwinter there, come back in the spring and then mate, lay eggs and die). I learned a few things about them recently at the Virginia Tech Paula Hahn Horticulture Center.
    Some say weeding is a meditative process, a way of being one with the soil. You concentrate on this one action and things slip away; you forget about current entanglements and worries. And if your legs, as you get older, are getting weak, instead of bending over everything the whole time, you can get yourself a little stool to sit on (found this short, green plastic job in the garden dept. at Wal-Mart). That's what I did part of the time. Yes, the butterfly garden area is really coming along, and besides butterfly bush there are some unusual shrubs, like senna and a bit of ironwood too, I believe.