Great Falls

Hi, we went for a nice walk at Great Falls NP today. It's a nice walk, pretty flat with a few rocks to climb on. Also if you are an actual rock climber with the ropes and the shoes and such there are places to participate in that as well. It was a fairly nice day, it reached 60 today so it wasn't so bad in the woods, out of the wind.

Great Falls is a really interesting area. George Washington decided the river would make a great transportation route, and so they built a canal around the falls. There are some ruins of a town called Matildaville that you can also see. I (of course) took my camera and took lots of pictures. If you are interested in visiting Great Falls, Here is a link to the official site

Here are some pictures from the falls. They were quite impressive, especially since it rained yesterday and Friday. If you click on the first picture you can see a guy sitting on a rock on the left side of the picture to give you a better idea of scale. It doesn't look as big in these pictures.





This is a picture looking down the river away from the falls. You can still see the water churning form going over the falls. I like the way the river curves.



While walking up to the dam we saw a blue heron. Some walker-bys said they saw it catch a frog.


Here is a picture of the canal lock

tent!!

Yay, we are now proud owners of a tent!!!!
We tried it out today in our tiny living room.
Here's proof:


Anyway, I love our tent. It is rather roomy for a 2 person tent. I need to fix my side bars and make this blog more hiker friendly since it is now a hiking AND knitting blog. When I do, I will include these two websites: Big Agnes which is who makes the parkview tent and Gear for adventure who are the people we bought it from.

Anyway, we have one tiny 5 inch pole leftover and we can't figure out what it is for. Anyone know? All the other poles have these bungee cords in them so practically the tent puts itself up. The rain fly was a little harder to figure out (not pictured above) but we got it....

Harland is retying all the knots on our tent that hold the stake cables on to the tent. I guess the bowlines they had on there are not as good as the half hitch stopper knot Harland tied. I personally remember none of the knots i learned in Girl Scouts. Time to hit the library!

Happy Friday y'all.

ZOO!

Okay this doesn't have anything to do with hiking or knitting, but maybe if you stretch the definition of "hike" you could squeeze it in... We went to the Nat'l Zoo yesterday with Harland's sister, Teresa. We didn't go until 4:30pm so we could only see the outside exhibits, but here are a few of the animals we saw. It was getting dark, so some of my pictures didn't come out well.

last shenandoah pictures, for now...

This picture is from on top of Hawksbill Summit... I think hiking gives me a good excuse to wear ponytails.


Here is just part of that trail.


This is some witch hazel flowers. I don't know that I have ever seen witch hazel trees before.


So we walked on the Limberlost trail where there used to be a big swampy area where Hemlocks grew. Terribly, a beetle from Asia has all but wiped them out. 80% are already gone, and the few left are not looking so hot. They put a positive spin on it, showing you all the red spruces and the beech trees that are growing up where the hemlocks used to be... but I know they must be very sad when they hike here. If you want to know more about the hemlock insect and its impact on the hemlocks in Shenandoah read their page here


I can never get a good dusk picture, but I have to say I love how the sky looks at that time of night.

more pictures!

Hey everyone, feeling under the weather, but here are some more pictures!! I think they are mostly self-explanatory....

shenandoah

Hello Everyone, we went to Shenandoah this weekend to see the fall folliage and it was a lovely crisp weekend. On Saturday the highs were in the high 40s and the lows were in the 20s. Unfortunatly, I had a little bit of the sniffles and now it has blown up into a huge sickness.


This tree is next to the visitor center.



This field just looks picture perfect. I love the goldenrod and the milk pods.

We hiked up the hawkbill summitt and here is the view. It was awesome, although I am a bit sore because it was like straight up!
Along the Limberlost trail we saw some signs of a blackbear. I didn't see anything bigger than deer, though.
This is along the Skyline Drive.

33

So I woke up this morning and it was 33 degrees outside.
And I haven't had a decent bowl of grits since I got here.
I'm just saying is all.