Our Own Backyard

This week’s trail was close to home.  We traveled only three-fourths mile to Annie L. Jones Park in our new neighborhood of Scottish Hills in Cary.  This is a really nice community park with a baseball field, basketball and tennis courts, swimming, and trails.

We parked beside the baseball field (we would have walked there if it hadn’t been 90 degrees yesterday!) and started at the Coatsbridge section of the trail.  All of the trails in this particular park are short, totaling just over a mile combined. However, they are not loops, so you get double the distance in your trail hike when you turn around to come back.

The Coatsbridge section is a natural trail of crushed stone and dirt, nicely packed for easy footing. It winds leisurely through a dense canopy of very large trees. The branches provided a welcome relief from the high temperatures. It was cool and quiet along this trail.

We had only walked a short distance when we came upon these unusual structures:

We left the trail for a closer look, speculating as we walked. Playground equipment for really tiny children?  Fairies, perhaps? Thank goodness for the sign. We were smack in the middle of a Frisbee golf course! This is hole number six. The sign pointed the direction to holes 7 through 10 across the Greenway. I’d certainly never seen it before. I thought people played Frisbee golf on....well, golf courses. Guess not.

We continued on, and in a short distance, the trail ended at the Annie Jones Greenway.  I don’t know who Annie Jones is or was. Google doesn’t know either except to remind us about a billion times that she has a park named after her. My guess is she was on the City Council or somesuch in the recent past.

Anyway, the Greenway.  Cary has miles and miles of Greenway meandering around and through its public parks. They are quite nice, a good place to walk the dog or pedal an easy bike trip without traveling too very far away. I prefer the more rugged trails of the national and state parks, but these are good for busy weekends when you want to get your walk in but don’t have a lot of time available to do it.

This is a wide clean asphalt trail that winds through the backyards of homes in Scottish Hills. It’s far enough away and densely enough forested that you aren’t looking into anyone’s bedroom window. You can see the decks through the trees and leaves. Some of the homeowners have blazed their own trails from their backyard to the Greenway. And you see the evidence of children everywhere.

Having just finished listening to the Tom Sawyer audiobook, Steve was convinced Tom and Huck constructed this makeshift treehouse/pirate lookout/stairway to the stars:

We passed a small playground and a couple of picnic tables before the Greenway ended at Tarbert Street (one street over from ours). We turned around and headed back admiring the hydrangeas blooming in our neighbors’ yards. Then back to the natural trail, and on to the baseball field parking lot. A quick trail, but an easy one to accomplish given that our lives are still consumed with unpacking and organizing right now.

May all your Trails be Happy!

CICADAS!

This past weekend, our trail went from the old house to the new and back again multiple times. We didn’t get the chance to explore any woods because we were busy discovering the woods of our own backyard.

We have, however, run into something that I’ve never experienced before. Cicadas!

I’m not mourning the loss of love bugs since I moved away from Florida. I didn’t know I was going to get such a remarkable replacement.  This year, anyway. After the next few weeks, I won’t see them again for 13 years.

These creatures are everywhere right now. You can hear them any time you walk outdoors, whether it be deep in the woods or an upscale subdivision. It’s their mating call. And apparently, it works.

They live an interesting, if uneventful, life. They answer the mating call. The female lays eggs. Tiny larvae about an eighth of an inch long hatch as the adult dies. The larva digs into the ground about ten inches deep and stays there. For THIRTEEN years!

Then they make their way to the surface, and the whole cycle starts over again.

Here’s a video I took at Eno River State Park with the Cicadian Love Song in the background:

We found corpses everywhere in the park. Look under any leaf, and you’ll find evidence the cycle is at work.

So here’s my question:  How do they know when thirteen years have passed?  Is there a Head Cicada with a calendar?  Is someone marking seasons on a tree root with a piece of charred firewood? Did they simply call down to the front desk and leave a wakeup call?

Just another one of Nature’s great mysteries. It works because it works. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

Or listening to them.

Happy Trails!

Watching the River Run...

Remember the Loggins and Messina tune, "Watching the River Run?" I couldn't get it out of my head yesterday. Here's why:

This week’s trail led us along the Eno River near Durham. This lush and lovely river was once the home to Native Americans of the Eno, Shakori, and Occoneechee tribes before European settlers arrived. In the 1700s, these three tribes merged and set up a village near present-day Durham.  When the settlers arrived, they established farms and mills along the river.

In 1972 the Eno River State Park was established.  We entered the eastern end of the park off Cole Mill Road where there are six trails totaling just shy of ten miles.  We chose the Cole Mill Trail, a 1.2 mile loop, and extended our hike with the Bobbitt Hole Trail for an additional 1.65 mile loop.

This is by far my favorite trail to date.  We start off with a well-packed level trail that gradually becomes more rustic as we descend to the river.  Both of these trails are marked “Moderate.”  Easy to see why.  You must carefully pick your way over roots, around stumps and occasionally under downed branches. This is good for many reasons, chief among them the fact that you don’t see as many joggers on a trail this rugged.  I’m all for people getting in their exercise, but when I’m out in the woods, I like to be as alone as possible. Popular paved jogging tracks are not for me, no matter how beautiful the lake it encircles.

Here we encountered no such crowds. It was quite easy to get into my Pocahontas mode and imagine the spirits that inhabited this area.

We’d had a hard rain the day before, so the path along the river was quite muddy. We had to carefully place our feet in some portions or risk “skating” down the hill to the water. That made it even more of an adventure.

A treat I hadn’t expected were the laurels. With most of the Spring blossoms long since faded here, I expected only green. The laurels were vibrant with their white and pink blossoms all along the bluffs beside the river.

The Bobbitt Hole extension (I insisted on calling it Hobbit Hole; much more fun!) took us farther along the river. The deeper into the woods we hiked, the faster the river seemed to run, crashing at times over rocks and boulders along the way.  There are several wooden foot bridges to get you across the little creeks that run toward the river on the trail. And there were a few mud puddles to negotiate as well.

If I have one criticism of these trails, it’s that they weren’t always clearly marked.  I like that they blaze the color on the trees.  That seems kinder than the metal markers we’ve seen nailed into the bark on other trails.  But we could have used a few arrows pointing the way from time to time. We didn’t get lost, but we did wonder about it now and then.

There are many other trails to explore in this State Park. We will definitely be back to sample more of them.

Hope all your Trails are Happy!

No Bluffin'

This week’s trail was at Hemlock Bluffs Nature Preserve in Cary.  Although the Appalachian Mountains are about 200 miles away, the same vegetation exists here. It is believed that the north- facing bluffs support that plant-life that thrived here more than 10,000 years ago during the last glacial period.

There are several short trails in the Preserve.  We walked two of them totaling two miles.

We started with the Chestnut Oak Loop Trail.  This is a 1.2 mile circuit through dense woods.  The path is clearly established with two by fours marking the sides during a lot of it. Mulch is laid on the trail so that you are rarely walking on the actual earth.  This might make it easier for some, but I prefer the dirt beneath my shoes.

Still, it’s a lovely loop with many trees and lush vegetation.  At this time of the year, it’s almost completely green.  We saw a few white flowers on some bushes, but the spring blossoms are just about finished.  We walked fairly leisurely, stopping a few times to observe the bluffs and take some pictures.  We finished in about 30 minutes.  The walk was easy except for a few incline areas that made us puff a bit.

Next we took the Swift Creek Nature Trail, which measures .8 mile.  The star of this trail is the Eastern Hemlock, a tree that usually grows only in the mountains.  Hemlock Bluffs is the only other place in North Carolina that you see this tree grown naturally.

This trail dips steeply to meander beside Swift Creek. Most of it is on a boardwalk.  This makes the walking easy, but the climb back to the starting level can be strenuous. When we got back to the top, we understood why there were benches along the way.

From the literature that accompanies the markers, we learned about a ground cover plant with heart-shaped leaves called – wait for it – Heartleaf!  It’s really pretty, and we were able to spot it easily.

Then we came to the section called “A Gap in the Canopy.”  This is the only place on the trail that we saw blue sky above us.  This break in the canopy was created by Hurricane Fran in 1996.  Enough trees fell to create a slightly different environment.  You can expect to find birds and a few harmless snakes that are not present in the rest of the area. (We didn't see any snakes; you probably would have heard me scream).



The steep climb back to the top is killer on thighs that aren’t regularly acquainted with a Stairmaster, but we survived it.  We didn’t even have to stop and sit!  This loop also took about 30 minutes.  We stopped more often on this part and took more pictures. We might have stayed even longer on this trail, but while we were at the bottom of the bluff along the creek, we were providing free lunch to a platoon of mosquitoes.  We weren't feeling generous enough to hang around down there.  Later in the day we bought Deep Woods Off to add to our bag.  We'll let you know how it works.

Even though we had a warm Spring day, the shade of the canopy made us comfortably cool. I can’t wait to see this one again in the fall with changing leaves.

Where did you walk today?  We hope you had Happy Trails.

Nothin' Could Be Finer...

Now that we are officially homeowners in North Carolina, it seems as though it's time to act like we belong here.  We do.  We absolutley do.  We love every single thing about living in North Carolina. Even more than we thought we would.

Friends who have known me forever might think I'm suffering from culture shock when I say that I've become very attached to the outdoors.  I know what you're thinking. This is the girl who said "roughing it" refers to a hotel where the room service stops at midnight.  That's still true.  I'm not about to pitch any tents.  But I do love walking in the woods.

Since we've been here, we've discovered that these Tarheels like their Walking Trails.  You can find them everywhere.  Now I'm not talking about those 30-mile hikes through the Smokies. I won't be doing any overnighters, carrying all I own on my back. No, I mean sweet little trails through the forests close to home, some less than a mile in length.

We started this venture back in the fall, when I was staring at changing leaves as if I'd never seen them before.  Well, that's because I never had seen them before.  When you grow up in Florida, the leaves are green.  Always green.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Plenty of people love 90 degree weather and 200 per cent humidity.  I just don't happen to be one of them.

So we have made it a goal to do one walk in the woods every weekend.  There are plenty of public parks here, and all of them have at least one Walking Trail, some of them quite a few more.

We've seen these trails in the riot of autumn color, in the purest white of fresh snowfall, in the stark gray of winter, in the rainbow of early spring, and now in the green of impending summer. 

With this blog, we embark on the mission of recording each trail. We'll take pictures, and describe the walk, the length, the weather, the foliage, the wildlife, the sounds that may or may not be crickets (and just what IS it if it's not crickets?). 

We hope you'll follow us.  We hope you'll enjoy it.  And we hope you'll get out and walk and share your world with us in exchange.