Scioto Frost
Another magical morning. Any trees that were bare of their ice were covered with thick white frost.
Scioto Ice
But a lot of the forest trees were still ice covered.
By noon, the ice and twigs were raining down on us. Can you see all the broken pieces of ice and twigs on the snow? We kept our hoods on because some of the pieces were big enough to sting. Soon, however, it warmed enough that the "rain" was mushier.
Scioto Fungus
A bright Cinnabar Polypore was showing off in the white world.
Scioto Challenge
The challenge of the day was that there were a lot of trees that had come down over the trail. Yesterday we only encountered 4 or 5, and they were not much of a problem. Today, most of them were too much of a mess to climb over or through, so we had to go either up or down off the trail to get around them.
We did 8.3 miles off road, and it took us 5 hours. Our slow progress was mostly because of the downed trees. We were able to move along quite easily when there weren't obstructions. The frozen snow actually helped where the trail is shared with a bridle path. It smoothed the surface. The part of the trail that was reserved for hikers (no horses allowed) was graded and benched quite nicely. Unfortunately, that's were most of the trees had fallen. It's way too soon after the storm to expect volunteers to have gotten out to clear these yet, and it's going to take a lot of time. There were at least 6 really big ones, and I quit counting the places where tree tops were across the trail. We had to garbage bag wade one stream.
Scioto Valley
But, at last we could see our goal, the flat plain of the Scioto River Valley. We knew the river and our car were down there somewhere.
After we reached the car, we decided we had enough energy to do another 2.5 miles of a roadwalk, so we did!
Miles today 10.8. Total miles so far: 910.2 Over 900
 | See Scioto Ice
See Cinnabar Polypore |
2 comments:
What a pretty start to the morning with all those frosted trees.
Ann- it sure was!
Post a Comment