Burke Lake

I love spring for many reasons... but one is because I love flowers springing up, and one of my favorite plants are ferns - and they are so neat when they're popping out.






Okay so getting to the story... yesterday was the first truly beautiful day here. It was in the mid 70's and just sunny and wonderful. I thought to myself, I need to get out. I should go to Great Falls National Park.

I wasn't the only one with that idea.


While I was waiting I did get this cool snapshot of new leaves above me (from my sunroof).


So after 45 minutes and going about a quarter mile or so... I turned around and left to go to my favorite regular place, Burke Lake Park.

Now I've mentioned the park about 100 times because I go there almost every week. When Harland is home we both love going there one day on the weekend. I usually go in the morning, and I usually run there... so I have never taken my camera... so something good came out of this anyway.

So here are some shots of and around Burke Lake!

Easter Bluebells

Spring is a neat time here in Virginia... Every week things keep changing. I have posted 2 separate posts today, so keep reading...

This morning I decided to take a walk to see the bluebells (again, always super muddy every time I hit the bluebell trail...silly April showers). I thought everyone would be at church or cooking Easter ham or finding Easter eggs, but there were a lot of people at the trail. And a lot of muddy dogs.

Here are some of the pictures I took while I was out and about. It is a pretty sunny day, but it was only in the low 50s today. Unlike last year when we wore short-sleeved shirts to see the bluebells.



This one was growing about waist-high in a tree...

Mom and Dad come to Washington

Hey everyone, haven't posted in a while, I've been pretty busy lately.

Last weekend my parents came for a trip to see the cherry blossoms. They've never been to DC during blossom season, so they were pretty excited. The thing is, while DC is pretty during blossom season - so is every where else because there are tons of cherry trees and pear trees everywhere flowering at once.

So here are some of their cherry blossom pictures (I didn't go with them - I had already committed to volunteering by handing out race packets to runners in the Cherry Blossom 10-miler. If you volunteer then the following year you are guaranteed entry... it usually sells out in a few hours).

Anyhow here are some pictures...

Alex Trebec was the Grand Marshall of the parade.




Then that night we went to the Kennedy Center to see the symphony play the background music for an old Buster Keaton film "The General". It was hilarious. I can't believe they did all those stunts back then... makes our use of CG look lame. :)

The next day we took a walk over at Manassas Battlefield and as usual I saw a cool bug (remember that spider?).
Here are some other pictures... the blue bells weren't quite out yet.

Conagree National Park

Good evening! As I said yesterday last Friday we went to Conagree National Park. It was a really super nice day for a walk. Warm, partially sunny, just perfect really. We did a 6.6 mile loop, which starts out on this huge elevated walkway then in the middle is a regular trail and then you're back onto the elevated trail at the end.
We saw that we were not the only ones walking on the elevated boardwalk... I think this is a raccoon.

The reason they have a super high elevated trail, is because this isn't really a swamp, it's a floodplain. You can see on these trees the line from the last flood. It floods sometimes up to 8 feet! The dark line is about 6 or 7 feet off the ground.


There is a huge variety of plant and animal (and bird!) life in this park.
The had some switchback which is related to sugar cane.



They also had swampy areas. What really amazed me was how black the water looked. It was almost pure black.


The trees there were huge. They say they have some that grow 17 stories high. They certainly were impressive. For example take a look at this pine tree. Looks normal, right?


Until you put my hand on it and realize each piece of bark is as big as my hand!!



Harland looks dwarfed by this tree...

And I'm pretty sure when this tree fell, even if no one was around it made a noise. Quite a loud noise in fact.


And even the poison ivy grows large... see that vine next to me? It's all hairy (as the park ranger said at the station, "If it's hairy, then it's scary").


The bootleggers had a hiding spot for their liquor in the middle of the woods...



Here are some more shots...


This tree caught my eye on the drive to the park. It's a little down the way but I had to stop and take a picture. The Spanish moss on a tree that had leaves was really quite striking.

Shenandoah

Okay so I'm starting to think I hadn't blogged because I was busy, hahaha.
Anyway we went walking in Shenandoah last weekend...
Here are some lovely fall-esque pictures.

First we hiked Compton Peak (skyline drive mile 10.4)




Then after a nice long (and very late) lunch at the skyline lodge, we didn't have much time so we decided to take a walk to Millers Head (mile 42.5). There apparently is a place where hang gliders go, although we didn't see any.

Maryland has some stuff for hikers too...

Okay, I have to give some credit to our neighbors north of here. Yesterday we decided to head North to Maryland. We often pass through this area on the way to my parents house, and since we are either going or coming from there, we don't have a minute to spare to stop and look around, netherless hike. So we decided to see what was around that area (and maybe later this year take a weekend camp there). We both want to go camping, and almost did this weekend - but just were not able to. I hope that first weekend in April we'll have a chance to go somewhere!

Anyway, this will likely be a long post (and I finally posted the pictures from last week below this post, so check out the post below this one too!). I hope to have a knitting post later this week.

First stop on our trip was the Cunningham State Falls Park. I had seen a sign for falls (I am a total sucker for falls and caverns), and so I wanted to go. When we woke up and I checked out their website, we noticed they were having a special maple syrup demonstration/breakfast. So of course, that just made us want to go even more.

As a side note, when I think of Northern Maple Syrup... I admit I think of Vermont and Canada, not Maryland. But they sure know how to make a good pancake!

Here is a picture of a tree tapped the way the Native Americans used to do it... with a hollowed piece of Sumac...

Here is the new fangled way of doing things - with a maze of plastic tubing connected to a bunch of trees.

Here is the sap boiling away (apparently it needs to be boiled for at least 3 hours!)

Here is inside the pancake brunch. It was really super yummy and their sausage was out of this world. Their pancakes were rather fluffy - how do they do that? Mine never come out so pillow-y!
They had some local musicians playing away, and a nice roaring fire! It was chilly in the morning, but warmed up later.


After pancakes for lunch we hiked out to the falls (see those people on the rockface? that is how you can see how big the falls really were!)


After we hiked back tot he visitor center, we decided to go next door to the Catoctin Mountain National Park. A lot of the park was closed off this weekend, due to a certain visitor. As most people know Camp David is inside this park somewhere. They won't tell you where anymore, I guess there used to be signs.

We decided to hike in the parts close to the visitor center that were open, and we ended up hiking to Wolf Rock. It was labeled a "strenuous" trail, and after hiking awhile I could see why - it was steeply uphill 95% of the time.

But we made it, and climbed on the rock. Here are our "explorer" poses for you to enjoy.



Then after the hike downhill (much faster!) we decided just to stop off the road and take a look at the Catoctin Iron Furnace. We didn't see all of the furnace site since we had very limited time. We hope to explore it a bit more next time we're up there.

One of the furnaces:


Ruins of the IronMaster's Home:



Anyway - I hope you enjoyed a play by play of our Saturday! I know I enjoyed spending an entire day outdoors with my dear husband... and in the afternoon it even got up to 58 degrees in the sun!! I'm maintaining that spring is almost here...