Heart and Sole: January 2025

Jan 27: Ice covered "Stairstep falls". The trail to get there was almost as treacherous.

2025 is my 77th year on this planet. I feel amazing and energetic and truly blessed to be still alive, let alone to be able to get out in nature and walk. I'm astounded to see that nearly half of the men my age in the US have already kicked the bucket by this age (Social Security Actuarial Life Tables for 2024). I'm beating the odds. What did I do to deserve that???

Maybe part of the answer is the walking itself. Honestly, I'd like to get up on a soapbox and preach the amazing benefits of walking and getting out in the peace and serenity of nature. But all these things are pretty well known, and writers much more talented than me have expounded and pontificated and proselytized on these subjects at length. I don't need to add to their wisdom.

My walks are the most important part and the best part of every day for me. I'll even feel a sense of withdrawal and regret if I have to miss a day of hiking, and so when I got up this morning, it seemed natural to consider a New Year's resolution to help me avoid those few days when I just don't feel like going out because the weather is bad, or because I'm tangled up in some indoor sit-down project. "Sitting is the new Smoking", right. The chair is going to kill us all!

I already have good habits regarding the walking lifestyle. When I wake up in the morning, one of the first things on my mind is "where do I want to hike today." I like to vary my walks, both in the actual route, and also in the reason, theme, or goal of the day's outing. Some days I'll walk to a store, buy what I can carry back home in my daypack, and save the planet a little by leaving my car parked at home. Some days I'm looking for a particular feature of nature, such as trees with 'cancerous' burl growths. That's been a hot one for me lately.

In general, I'm always looking for interesting things to photograph, usually something unusual, whether its natural or some sort of man-made oddity. Sometimes, for example, I'll take photos of a plant that I don't know and then get on Google's 'search by image' feature to try to identify it when I get back home.

I love sharing my photographs, so that becomes part of the motivation for creating this blog post. It will serve to make me accountable for my resolution and to give me the excuse to do a 'show and tell' with one or a few photos from the day's hike.

Bonus January 2 Photo: SPRING IS HERE!?!?! (Really???) This south-facing bank along the Middle Patuxent River in central Maryland was loaded with blooming snowdrops today. They're going to get a rude awakening, as the next couple weeks are going to be frigid!

Bonus pic: January 12: The snowdrops seem content enough after 9 inches of snow and ten days of continuous below freezing weather.

And so, without further ado. Here we go. The resolution is basic and simple. Here are the rules:

Walk Ten Thousand Steps. That's nominally five miles, and since I use a GPS and not a Pedometer, I'm measuring distance, not actually counting steps. My goal is to hike at least five miles each day in 2025, and probably for the rest of my days - as long as I can haul my carcass out of bed in the morning and strap on a belt pack and get out the door.
Always walk outdoors in a natural setting. No tread mills. No gyms.
Rain or Shine. No excuses, no exceptions.
Take at least one photo of an interesting sight and feature it here on this blog post
Do a little trail work along the way - pick up litter or cut back some brush (I always carry a hand pruning shear in my beltpack).

The creation of this post was my main motivation for the inaugural New Year's Day hike. I intend to update this post every day, adding a new photo up top and describing the day's hike and distance covered. The Chronological List of 2025 hikes begins below:

Jan 1: Destination: Sewell's Orchard Pond, Columbia, MD. 5.212 miles.
Jan 2: Sweet Hours Park, Eden Brook Rd., Kings Contrivance Trails, 6.51 miles.
Jan 3: Destination: Walmart! 5.374 miles.
Jan 4: Big Loop around Owen Brown Community. "Track 11" - a specially designed Loop to be 5 miles: 5.073 as measured today.
Jan 5: Wincopin Trails - Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple. 5.139 miles.
Jan 6: Destination: daughter's house in 6 inches of snow, 8.223 miles.
Jan 7: Patuxent Branch Trail and Lake Elkhorn. 5.362 miles.
Jan 8: Destination: a local Bamboo Jungle. 5.613 miles.
Jan 9: Lake Elkhorn loop - sticking to cushy plowed paved trails. 5.428 miles.
Jan 10: Loop around Sewell's Orchard Lower Pond. 5.349 miles.
Jan 11: Rambling walk to daughter's house, one way. 5.517 miles.
Jan 12: An even more rambling walk back. 5.874 miles.
Jan 13: Lake Elkhorn loop with several major side trails. 5.318 miles
Jan 14: Revisit the old Episcopal Church, plus Sewell's Orchard's three ponds. 5.852 miles.
Jan 15: Three+ miles of the Patuxent Branch Trail, out and back. 6.292 miles.
Jan 16: Destination: Hopewell Park Meadow. 5.762 miles.
Jan 17: Destination: The Cloister at Three Creeks. 5.425 miles.
Jan 18: Rural roads and trails. South fork, Rockfish River. 5.420 miles.
Jan 19: All roads, with the mush-footing of the snow a cruel buzzkill. 5.060 miles.
Jan 20: River valley trails and quiet roads: 5.087 miles.
Jan 21: Country roads to nowhere, just the way I like them. 5.161 miles.
Jan 22: More quiet roads with killer Blue Ridge views. 5.190 miles.
Jan 23: All roads because trails are a treacherous mess of gnarly rock-solid ice. 5.099 miles.
Jan 24: Same roads, different sky. There's always something new. 5.117 miles.
Jan 25: Walking on roads, dreaming of trails. 5.126 miles.
Jan 26: Blue Ridge Parkway, closed to traffic since Jan 5th. 5.793 miles.
Jan 27: Destination: Stairstep Falls above the Cloister at Three Creeks. 5.229 miles.
... and on we go. Because of very low view-counts on this post, I'm not updating this daily. I'll report monthly, probably, and surely when I get to the magical 'virtual round-the-world hike' mark, at 25,000 miles.

January 2025 total: 171.224 miles. Total since 12 June 2010: 24,605.221 miles.

I hope 2025 finds you, dear readers, healthy and full of joy, and getting the chance to get outdoors as often as possible and take a walk. Cheers!

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PHOTO ARCHIVE

Plastic Trail! January 1st. The world is being drowned in plastic, but ... Really??? Plastic trail??? Yep. This is the first all-plastic trail I've hiked. Usually this is just a regular asphalt-paved bike and hiker trail, but the slabs of plastic were laid down over it for heavy equipment during a utility construction project.

Pond on a winter morning - January 2. I'm showing this photo upside down because I think it looks better that way. What do you think?

January 4, early on a frigid, windy Saturday morning. Wind chill in the teens. Saying "Hi" to the church I used to attend, fifteen years ago: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia (MD). I used to feel very at home there, but the supposedly wide-open UU "theology" has become more and more dogmatic--not in a spiritual way, but politically. Sadly, they seem to have been sucked into the ever-increasing polarization problem in the US, where their niche in the community of religions has always been openness and inclusiveness. I did a few return visits but no longer feel comfortable there.

January 5th: Frazil ice flowing with the current. Early morning on the Middle Patuxent River beneath I-95.

January 7th: Lake Elkhorn, with two willow trees that really, REALLY like the water.

January 10: Canada Geese hunkering down in an aeration opening in the ice. Sewell's Orchard Park Pond.

January 13: Fun with symmetry: an old churchyard tulip poplar tree.

January 15 (at right). The historic Pratt Truss Bridge built in 1902, now the signature feature of the Patuxent Branch Trail. At left is my photo from November 28, 2011, the first time I hiked here.

January 17: The walk along Stoney Creek, heading up to the Cloister at Three Creeks.

Jan 19: deep in the gloom of an impending storm, beside the ecological wasteland of a mown field, we enjoy the ever-hopeful catkins of a sweet birch awaiting spring while basking in a gorgeous Blue Ridge view.

Jan 21: Bird on a tree-top twig. Can you spot it? The clouds are pointing to it.

Jan 22: View from a hayfield of the peak called 'Three Ridges'. The treetops there reach well above 4000 feet elevation, though the actual ground doesn't quite exceed that magic threshold.