A good start

Jean-Philippe is a sweetie, but he does not like to hike.
Fortunately, we had some friends of his over for dinner last week, and one of them was in the same situation - short of people to hike with, but not liking to join one of those hiking clubs. So we made a date for Sunday, and had our first outing of the year. It was meant to be a little 10k, just a stroll to break in the feet and also to see if our speeds and interests are compatible.
Definitely compatible, and the 4k added for a mistake in direction was just fine.
Here are some pics from the outing. Next time I swear I will clean the lens before going out. Really!

 Somebody had arranged a mandala in the middle of the trail.

 We both like to stop to admire trees

Spring is in mid-stride at my house, but up here at an extra 250 meters a lot of trees are still in blossom, or just budding. The violets were mostly gone from the pastures, but there were some left. Sheep were already in the pastures, and you could tell where they'd been because there was not a dandelion to be found - non-sheep fields were carpeted yellow.

If my schedule allows, we'll go out again next weekend.

Last of Oct

The weather was beautiful Monday, and the lab was closed so I took a few hours and went for a walk in the hills above town. You can't have a Tuesday holiday here without everyone wanting Monday off too. With the schools closed for the week, it's hard to keep the moms at work. So when the boss is okay with being closed, we're just closed.

One of my favorite stands of trees. I'd love to get a wider shot from this side, but stepping back would mean falling down about 15 feet.

I wasn't the only one out for a stroll in the sun. This popular trail is a regular highway of hikers. Even the pasture with the stand of trees, which is a steep scramble up the last bit of hill off to one side of the trail was full of people - a mom looking at a picture book with her young daughter, a man and some kids wandering around, a random dog probably attached to somebody down the path. No cows, at least. I've never seen the cows up there, although each time I have to be careful of fresh cowpats so I know they're regular visitors.

Still some blackberries in the brambles. A bit past their prime, though the one on the right was okay. 

There's one kind of tree (what kind is this one?) that puts on a great show of Yellow, but it's plagued with Black Spots. Which are kind of interesting, aesthetically, but I don't imagine the tree appreciates them much.

And naturally, the path is sideways. Blogger used to load photos in portrait format if it decided that's the way it went. So it was hit&miss with a lot of abstract things. But now it's made up its mind to be entirely consistent and never, ever load anything but landscape formats.

Sunday walk

I went for a new walk on Sunday. I won't say hike; it was just a stroll around the hill that's between my house and the really big hill where local hero Vercingetorix got the best of Ceasar and the Romans.
It's crisscrossed with trails and the odd bit of fencing that shows somebody's rights to this or that bit. Sheep droppings everywhere.

Happy to know I wouldn't be shot by hunters. Probably. I did spy plenty of spent casings scattered around.The view from the far side.
Spring seems to be coming to the far side of the hill, too. Surprising, since it's just a bit colder up a hundred meters.

There was plenty to see in the way of abandoned stuff. This shed seems to be useful still.

These tires and assorted groups of their bretheren were very slowly merging with the ground. I am fascinated by old junk and can fill my memory card with photos of it. An old mattress, boots, a car seat, junk you wonder what it was... but it got to be kind of depressing. Like this hill is more a diffuse junkyard than anything else. There were a dozen small vineyards gone to ruin (I'll go back for those in a month or two, to see what's still growing), patches of refuse, and ruts from the roaming motorbikes all over. Not much else.

At the beginning of the walk I reflected on what a neighbor said about digging in his yard. He's found several artifacts from the age of Vercingetorix (that would be 2000 years or so), and even the burial site of a chieftan - now housed in the Museum downtown. Wherever you turn it's history under the ground. That junk I'm seeing scattered around, in a thousand years will be archeological treasures!

Oh, here's another tree thinks it's spring.

I wish it were true!

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weekend walk

I had a cold over Christmas, and on the 25th didn't budge from the house. Never quit my bathrobe - just went from nap to book to dvd. With a few trips to the kitchen.

Sunday was better. We had half an inch of snow in the yard on Saturday, and I hoped there was rather more up on the nearby hills. It was a bright day and very cold, but I bundled up with extra socks, and tights under my jeans, and many layers under my parka. Hat, mittens, extra handkerchiefs, the whole nine yards. Last year I picked up some of those glove-mitten things, where the mitten over the fingertips is a big flap you can pin back, revealing gloves that don't cover the last finger joint. Perfect for maneuvering a camera without taking off the handwarmers. They made a new trailhead that leads up the Gergovia plateau, and it passes through this huge yard full of odd metal sculpture.

Plenty of mistletoe overhead.

Icicles on the windmill.

Critters had been all over this road. Half a mile down, I discovered why none of the many human traces went that way - it was a dead end at one of the groundwater monitoring sites.

Not much snow on the surrounding hills at all.

Cows have been moved into their barns.

Have a good week!

Walking weather

Sunday I went on one of my favorite hikes.

It's an 8 km trail, mostly dirt access roads, that winds around farmland on the south side of town. There were still blackberries out, though most had been picked.

There were a fair number of people out on the trail (though I didn't take their photos). Going for a long walk is a big Sunday tradition here, and the trails can be real highways sometimes. At one spot there was a gathering of trucks, and people tearing up and down a hillside on motorbikes. Amazing the damage those things can do. At least the noise is transient.

Some farms have sheep. On this side of the road the sheep are particularly white.

This is the other side of the road.

Where the sheep are still white (well except for one), though not quite as brilliantly white as their neighbors.
The mysterious movements of sheep: one of them started to go, so they all went. Then the one stopped and they all grouped up again, like traffic at a light.

More road. This is cow territory.

One one side, the black & white cows.

On the other, mesdames are brown and white.

No mixing of the cows.

Then it was getting late, so I didn't do the second loop for another 7km. I haven't done that one all year, now that I think about it. It follows a stream up a gorge, then winds through some farms and sub-suburban housing tracts. Maybe I'll do that one next week.

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Blueberry season

The weekend was a full one. Saturday I went out with my friend Stéphanie to pick blueberries on the Puy de Dôme. When I was there the Sunday before it looked like a good year for them, but Steph and I were at pains to fill a single one of the smaller receptacles. Even after two hours of stooping and searching and changing hillsides. The ones we found were perfect - big (well, for wild blueberries! Think a quarter inch across) and juicy and bursting with flavor. (Yes, I know it’s disappointing to use such a cliché, but they really were. Pick them too hard and they would just explode like little fruitbombs all over your fingers.)
Sunday I was determined to get in a good long hike, though everybody warned me there were storms in the weather forecast. I never did catch the news to find out what time the storms were scheduled to arrive, but it would surely be late afternoon. For heat-driven summer storms, that’s usually the deal. So if I got going early I’d be home by then.
Early is a relative thing on a summer Sunday morning. Being Sunday, of course, it’s not very early at all. But then, being summer, it’s light out, mitigating the lateness of earliness on a Sunday. Plus the natural aptitude for early rising that depends on who you are.

Let me give you some actual numbers and you can decide what early is to you. Out of bed by 8:30. Respectable. Out the door for the 9:04 bus, but then the connecting bus had just left and I decided to wait instead of beating up my feet on asphalt. Started on the walking part at 10:10.
My route was up to the foot of the mountain by the most direct route, about 9 miles. Around it on the trail through the woods and up over the blueberry-ground shoulder, about 4 miles. Home again for a total of 22 miles of hiking unless I went the longer alternate route to avoid backtracking, though that would depend on the weather. I had a sandwich, a bottle of water, and some m&ms, plus the camera and a small ziplock just in case I saw berries and it wasn’t raining. And yes, a collapsable anti-rain device.
The way up was glorious. When I stopped for lunch it was one of those perfect summer days, not too hot, just a few clouds for decoration.

Emerging from the woods into the potential berrying grounds, there was still sunshine in front of me (east), but behind me things were starting to look different. But hey, I’m from San Diego. I don’t believe in rain. Doesn’t matter what the forecast says; doesn’t matter what the sky looks like; if it isn’t raining, it isn’t raining.

So I hung around for quite a while, rummaging around in likely spots for blueberries that other hikers had missed. Found a few. Not many. And then it started to rain.
Not a lot. The sky was kind to me. We didn’t have a really drenching downpour until evening. But I was glad to have my umbrella with me, and I made my best time ever on the way down. The combined berries from the three trips even made enough for jam.

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Wm B Bankhead National Forest

On the way to our day at the Bankhead forest area of Alabama, we passed the only remaining covered bridge in Cullman County. It's a nice one.

Doesn't go anywhere any more, though.

Here we are off for a walk to the Caney Falls. This nice dog was going to look after our car.
It's a beautiful little falls, though it did eat my lens cap.

At the ranger station they said there would probably be a bunch of people swimming there, but we had it all to ourselves.

A few miles farther on, we hiked toward another falls, but never found it.
We were going upstream, and it kept splitting into smaller and smaller tributaries, so it was only going to be a sad dribble anyway.So on to the falls at the far edge of the park. There were plenty of people at this one, including a couple of guys who were jumping off this rock where I'm standing, into the swimming hole.

The mama tank and all its little tanklets were fun.

And so back to Cullman at the end of a great day.

I've been to Alabama now! Just three states to go for the whole set.

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