Seriously though, the blazing was excellent, the trail was well laid out, and maintained, and all but the final mile of the day was in the woods.
It was hard to choose only a few pictures to show you. This was one of the nice views as we crossed a road. I'm not sure this hill has a name, but it might be Borden Hill.
We had lunch at our own waterfall site on Erwin Hollow Creek. A totally perfect lunch spot!
The patterns in the water-washed shale were intriguing.
There were too many interesting plants to show you. I'll settle for a few. This is Beechdrops, Epifagus virginiana. It's parasitic and grows on beech roots.
We found more Dead Man's Fingers, these ones are really weird- all black. The last ones I found were gray.
Best find of the day for me is Old Man of the Woods. I've never seen one of these before. It's actually a bolete. It has pores on the underside, not gills.
And this is the first marker we've seen for the Great Eastern Trail, which this is also a part of. The GET runs from Alabama to New York. We are on the most northern portion of it.
Today was logistically challenging. We had to break camp at the state park where we were. Then we had to spot the cars with the trailer in tow. Since one end of today's hike was in the middle of a state forest, that road wasn't too good. We scouted it in Marie's car and decided I could drive it if I went really slow, so I did and we made it with no problems. Well, except that I had no signal in the middle of the move to our next place to stay. I did a little seat-of-the-pants driving and got us where we were going.
The joke of the day was that the map warned us of two stream crossings where we would need to ford, one of them probably deep enough to get wet. So we carried sandals all day for this. We did not get our feet wet at 7 of the 2 crossings. Our sandals were still safely in our packs when we were done. There are no typos in this paragraph.
Crystal Hills Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail, Steuben County, NY. Kinsella Park to West Hill State Forest. 9.7 miles
 | See One Big Hill |
3 comments:
What a great day! I've prayed you'd find new plants! Cool on the "no typo"! True to form! Love the new trail marker, too, and patterns in the shale. - Elaine
Sounds like a perfect day. Those Dead Man's Fingers are fascinating. I've never seen anything like it.
Elaine- Thanks.
Ann- they are distinctive!
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