25,000+ miles! Recap of a Hiking Life (so far)

Onward and upward!  Don't look back and never give up.

This is no melodramatic 'I'm getting old, and this might be the last you'll hear from me' post.  It's just a quick summary of an ordinary person with a love of walking, keeping on and keeping on, until the result seems pretty extraordinary.

It was and it wasn't.  It's been one-step-at-a-time ordinary while being punctuated with the joy and wonder of so very many extraordinary places.

Map of my Personal Continuous Footpath across America (with two disconnected bits in Viginia Beach and the Eastern Shore of MD and Delaware.)

The motivation for this post is the passing of a big milestone. As of April of 2025, I've completed my (almost) fully-GPS-recorded virtual hike around the world (the equivalent of walking around the world at the equator—25,000 miles).

Lately, I've been hiking around my current home in the Blue Ridge of Virginia, near and on the Appalachian Trail.  I've walked one section of the AT 250 times now!  I have a new goal of trying to do this 0.067-mile piece of trail (with exactly one white blaze in each direction, both on the same tree) once for every reported completion of the AT (as reported to the AT Conservancy office in Harper's Ferry).  As of this July 15, 2025, the ATC reports that there have been 25,429 officially reported completions.  Hiking that small piece of trail that many times would add up to nearly the length of the entire trail—a very do-able goal.  Maybe a little monotonous, though!  When I hike something over and over, I use the time to turn my mind inward, to some of my philosophy and cosmology/science projects, which the reader will find liberally sprinkled among the hiking posts here on this blog.

The map above shows the track of my completed 'Hiking Home' project.  In about 2010, I established the goal of connecting a continuous string of footsteps between the front doors of every one of the roughly two dozen places where I've hung my hat and received mail (places I've called home).  I reached the last front door in the Colorado Foothills in early November of 2019.  Included in this continuous footpath are connections to 27 states.

The Appalachian Trail is the 'backbone' of that track.

I hiked it both ways in 2012, documented it meticulously (with a GPS and here on this blog), and as of this writing, I'm still the nominal (only documented) holder of the Fastest Known Time doing an AT 'yo-yo' or double thru-hike.  My time was a very ordinary 307 days.  Others have done the yo-yo much faster.  Brian 'yo-yo' Doble reports on Trail Journals that he did a yo-yo in 2008 in 181 days, and Ward 'Spooky Boy' Leonard probably did a yo-yo in the early 1990s, perhaps in less time than that.  AT hall-of-famer Warren Doyle vouches for this.  Problem is that neither of these two provided any documentation, so their 'records' can't be proven.  I certainly hope that someday before I do take those last steps up to the great footpath in the sky, that somebody will legitimately beat my FKT.  It certainly is there for the taking.

But back to the bigger picture.  My 25,000-mile trek has included many other small, disconnected walks that I've done in some really exotic places.  Here, I'm going to list some of the highlights and include a few photos.  The list is the core of this post, and I'll be adding to it over the next few weeks (or longer), so stay tuned.

Seventeen special walking destinations on six continents:

• Switzerland, specifically the Bernese Oberland, including the amazing Eiger Trail and the freakishly scary trail to Bäregg Hut.  That's where the headline photo was taken.

  

  The gang enjoying a stunning sunset with the iconic Eiger in the background.

  Stunning vistas were everywhere.  One of my favorites (and also J.R.R. Tolkien's) is the Lauterbrunnen Valley, which Tolkien used as his model for Rivendell in Lord of the Rings.
  
• Easter Island.  Hiking with the moai!  Spent ten days walking halfway around the island.

  

  The 'Travelling Moai' at Tongariki.  Rano Raraku, the quarry where the moai were created, is the mountain in the background.

  
  
• Hawaii.  I lived on the Big Island for two months in 2017, hiked virtually every day.

  

  Ohia blossom with Mauna Kea in the background with its telescope domes gleaming in the sun on the summit.

  
  

  

  Remote pristine beach on the Kona Coast, requires a mile and a half walk to get there

  
  

  

  High on Mauna Kea on the trail to the summit, flanks of Mauna Loa in the background right

  
  
• North of 80ºN latitude in the North Atlantic, walking on the deck of a cruise ship, and many day-hikes on Svalbard, just a tad further south.
  
  

  
  
• Torres del Paine National Park, Chile, South America—four days of hiking much of the "W" trail including the 'Base of the Towers'.

  

  The towers of Paine.  Yep, a tough hike to get up here.  When I arrived, low clouds were completely blocking the view, but as I was leaving, a little patch of blue sky rolled in, so I hurried back to get my mug shot.

  
  
• Iceland.  Land of fire and ice, geysers, glaciers and waterfalls ... and trolls!  
  
  
  Hikes on six days all around the island.
  
  
  
• Mozambique and Tanzania, Africa, multiple day hikes—Baobab trees, giant flying fox bats, and Red Colobus Monkeys.
  
  
  

  

  For 1000 years or more, these sturdy vessels called 'Dhows' have plied the African Indian Ocean coastal waters.

  
  

  

  The ancient, once major trading center of the Arab empire, Kilwa Kisiwani.  It's a UNESCO World Heritage site with no roads, no electric power, no motor vehicles (except three motorcycles), 1150 residents remain, getting by on subsistence agriculture (little garden patches) and the occasional cultural tourist group.  My son and I wandered far from the tourist's usual routes, deep into back stretches of the town, where this fellow had his smart phone charged and wanted a selfie with the old bearded white guy.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Mid-winter walk to the Bush Pilot's memorial, an overlook outside of Yellowknife, NWT, Canada.

  

  Great Slave Lake at 10:30AM on a late December morning
  

• Moorea, French Polynesia, in the South Pacific, three or four connected day hikes in the interior highlands, plus, of course, some amazing beach walks.

  

  View north from Belvedere Overlook, which was actually the trailhead for three different day-hikes.

  
  
• Climbing half a dozen mountains in South America—Peru (climbed Huayna Picchu overlooking Machu Picchu)

  

  Looking down on Machu Picchu from the heights of Huayna Picchu

  
  , Bolivia (Pequeño Alpamayo),

  

  Pequeño Alpamayo

  and the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile (6000+ meter Cerro San Francisco) and adjacent NW Argentina (20,000+-foot Medusa).

  

  Medusa is the peak I'm pointing to, my bucket list 20,000-foot summit.

  
  

  

  Back to Machu Picchu - Huayna Picchu is the prominent spire just behind the ruins

  
  
• Greenland, both the remote east coast at Ittoqqortoormiit and several day hikes on the west coast.

  

  Ittoqqortoormiit girl.  Below is a view of the town on a sunny afternoon.

  
  
  

  

  
  

  The epic icebergs of Ilulissat, formerly known as Jakobshavn, western Greenland.

  
  
• Seychelles—hikes on four different islands in this Indian Ocean tropical island nation.  Tortoises by the hundreds on Assumption and the nearly impossible to visit World Heritage site, Aldabra.  Plus world-class beaches on La Digue.
  
  
  
  
  
• Beechy Island in the remotest part of Canada's Northwest Passage, hiking to the graves of sailors who died in the ill-fated 1845 Franklin Expedition in search of this elusive passage through the Arctic from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Also got great video of Beluga whales on this hike.

  

  Beechy Island

  This was part of an ultra-bucket-list NW Passage cruise with other day hikes in Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay, Dundas Harbour, and Resolute in Nunavut, Canada, and Herschel Island in Yukon Territory, and with multiple sightings of Polar Bears.

  

  View of Arctic Ocean from a summit outside Dundas Harbour, Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada

  
  
  

  
  
  
  
• A stroll through Sankei-En Gardens, Yokohama, Japan
• Home villages of my ancestors—Kritzkow and Walkendorf in Mecklenburg, Germany (former East Germany)

  

  Church at Kritzkow, Mecklenburg, Germany, built about 1300, where my great-great-great grandfather was sexton and school master.  Taken on 12 October 1992, exactly 500 years after Columbus began the westernization of the New World.

  
  
• Hiking downtown Sydney, Australia including the Royal Botanic Gardens and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, plus the Blue Mountains, including the Three Sisters from Echo Point Lookout, Katoomba.
• Grand Canyon, South Rim to the Colorado River and back—via the Bright Angel Trail (down) and Kaibab Trails (up).
  
  
  
  
  
  

There you have it.  Hope you've enjoyed!  Happy Trails!

Breaking my New Year's Resolution???

 

As I posted on January 1st, my resolution for 2025 was to do an outdoor hike of at least five miles every single day this year, no exceptions, no excuses.  It's been great motivation, and it had been a very positive experience on balance ... so far.

But what about injuries?  What about a catastrophic illness?  What if I'm kidnapped by Aliens?

Shit happens, right?  Just look at that photo of my left ankle.  It was May 6th.  The story is such a typical one.  It was not a hiking-related injury.  I was preparing stuff in the kitchen and dropped something really hard and heavy, and tried to intercept it—to break its fall—with my foot, soccer style.  Big, stupid mistake.  It clobbered that ankle, which is always sensitive because there's a bone chip in there from when I broke my ankle 37 years ago and the orthopedic surgeon told me he wasn't going to operate because the ankle was stable enough.

It hurt like hell.  It began to swell up, and soon the swelling had spread all the way up my lower leg to my knee.  I could barely walk.  The pain was biblical!

I would surely have to stay off the leg until the swelling went down, right? 

Well, I wasn't going to give up without trying.  I took some aspirin (I don't even keep Ibuprofen around) and headed out to at least try to walk a bit.

It was pure torture.  I limped along gamely for just a single mile, and it took an hour and a half.  But then the aspirin seemed to kick in, just enough that I was able to pick up my pace.  It was still as painful as a root canal, but I could see hope of getting in the five miles and living to tell about it - keeping the resolution alive for at least another day.

And I did it.  It was no fun at all, to say the least, but I'd had a day like that with a twisted ankle when I hiked the AT in 2012, and it all worked out for the best.  Back then, I had been almost back to normal the next day.

But that was a twisted ankle.  This was a blunt-force trauma injury.  What would it be like the next day?

May 7th: The swelling was down, back to just a very sensitive local area around the ankle.  I headed out to try to walk and was shocked to find that walking did not aggravate the pain.  This was not systemic, not down in the guts of my foot where bones rub together.  I was able to get my five miles in at almost a normal pace.  And best of all, I was able to actually enjoy the experience!

Normal service resumed!  New Year's Resolution kept alive ... at least until the next big disaster strikes.

That January 1st post has grown long and unwieldy, so I'm retiring that one and picking up the coverage here.

Spring has sprung and it's one of the best times of the year to be out.  The bugs haven't proliferated yet, temperature hasn't gone into a tropical sizzle, the new greenery is all fresh and perky, and the birds are singing up a storm, and I'm loving my life in the woods again, and eager to share my joy, whether in words or in photos.  

The Month of May was a delight.  I had no more problems with that ankle, except for the usual twinges of that bone chip, and hiked a total of 187.653 miles.  Five months of adhering to the resolution—seven to go. 

In June the heat arrived.  Priority for hiking was to get out as soon as daylight arrived, often as early as 5:30AM.  Trying to stay in the deep woods as much as possible, and hiking along my wonderful noisy cool streams at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  The water in those streams never gets truly warm—65 degrees F at the very warmest.  Total miles hiked in June, just 2½ miles shy of 200.  This month puts me past the 15 total years of documented hiking with a GPS and gets me past the half-way point on the Journey to Nowhere other than to daily consistency that is this year's New Year's Resolution.  Total miles for June: 197.572.

July was brutal.  I spent most of the month walking from before sunrise to a few hours after sunrise, not often able to 'stop and smell the roses' because of the oppressive humidity—I just wanted to finish—but also because of the swarming, relentless eye gnats that seem to want nothing more than to commit suicide by dive-bombing into your eye.  This was the month that I realized why this resolution is a real challenge, even if I remain healthy and fit.  It is, on some days, keeping me from spending the time I want focusing on other things—things that I can do indoors, bathed in a fossil-fuel-generated artificial environment of 'conditioned' air, something I grew up without in southeastern Pennsylvania.  Was it cooler in mid-summer back then?  You bet your sweaty head band it was!  Total miles for July: 174.777.

In August, I started toying with the idea of hiking one small (0.065-mile) piece of the Appalachian Trail, past a tree with a nice white blaze on both sides:

as many times as there are completions of the entire AT reported to the AT Conservancy.  That would be more than 25,000 as of their most recent report.  Not yet fully committed to that goal, but I did walk back and forth on various days until the total passes reached 500.  This had already been part of a longer piece of trail to a viewpoint that I had hiked more than 100 times over the years (about 0.8 miles long).  August is also the month when I stop exploring and bushwhacking in the woods because the yellow-jacket wasps, which live big hives in holes in the ground, begin to very aggressively defend the space around those nests because the new Queens are hatching.  Amazingly, bears love to dig up those colonies to eat all the juicy protein-packed grubs, surely getting a bazillion stings to the nose in the process.  Blessed cooler air arrived around the last week of the month and has hung around.  Total miles for August: 175.049.

September: Lots of great weather except for a few days. I avoided the rain on one of them by doing a moonlight walk early in the morning.  Another few days, I just sucked it up and walked with an umbrella.  I had a chance to do a couple hikes on the AT in southern Shenandoah National Park with 90-year-old Dale "Grey Beard" Sanders, who had begun hiking the AT southbound from Harper's Ferry on September 6th and who was (and still is, as of early October) on an attempt to gain back the age record for the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail.  From my experience with him, he has what it takes to do the job.  He's amazingly fit and healthy for his age and hikes at a pace that was faster than I usually hike, and I am not yet 77 years old.  See some photos in the archive below.  I stuck with the program and accomplished 183.898 miles and crossed the 26,000 total mile mark!

October:  A new blog post is coming, discussing the amazing benefits of this New Year's Resolution and my plans for an extension of it.  Establishing this goal (hiking at least five miles every single day regardless of weather or other duties) has benefitted me in ways that I never could have foreseen.  I'm becoming more and more 'evangelical' about the walking lifestyle and the benefits of immersion in wild natural settings—of making each day's walk truly the 'enterprise and adventure of the day' as Thoreau put it (quoted on the sidebar of this blog).  This month the mileage total was 187.946 miles.

November: Kept on keepin' on as the weather turned wintry by the end of the month.  Mileage total for the month: 182.486 miles.

December:  SUCCESS!  191.499 miles hiked this month, sometimes in bitter cold and snow, sometimes hiking by moonlight in order to take advantage of the best weather on bad-weather days!  The New Year's Resolution for 2025 was successfully completed.  I hiked 5 or more miles each day for 365 consecutive days.  Total for the year was 2,146.426 miles, which is an average of 5.88 miles per day.

I found that I really appreciated the uncompromising obligation to be out there every day.  It's much like having to walk your dog—you can't skip a day just because you don't feel like going out.  

So, for 2026, I've established a similar resolution, but with more flexibility: Get out and walk every single day, at least 5000 steps (2.5 miles) but accomplish a monthly average, each month, that amounts to 6.03 miles per day or more.  That will get me to hike the entire distance of the Appalachian Trail (2197.9 miles for 2026) in the calendar year.

Photo Archive follows:

This is Western Maidenhair Fern, one of my favorite deep-woods plants, and very difficult for gardeners to grow.  It's called 'western' because its range is up and down the US west coast--including among the huge Redwoods and up into Alaska among the giant Sitka Spruces, growing all the way out into the Aleutian Islands.  But somehow there's a rogue colony of it in the mid-Atlantic, and it's actually reasonably common around here.  (There's another colony in Vermont).  I love the way ferns unfurl in spring, and the delicate, fractal-like geometry of their leaf pattern.  Walked past two small clusters of these on May 10th, not on any real trail--just a route I took through the woods around my retreat at the Cloister at Three Creeks.

White Spotted Slimy Salamander (yes, that's it's official name, not my description).  Accidentally discovered when I turned over a log on June 1st.  Native to the Blue Ridge and vicinity in the Mid-Atlantic.

May 13th: Flooding rains at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is a view at the convergence of two creeks.  The water was higher in this episode than it was here in the Blue Ridge of central Virginia during Hurricane Helene last fall, and the biggest flood I've ever seen here since moving here about 4 years ago.

Tulip Poplar flower.  This has been my favorite species of tree since I was a kid and planted a seedling and watched it grow to more than 100 feet tall and four feet in diameter.  Yes, it's a fast-growing species. It has a truly unique leaf shape (also shown in the image) and these unique flowers that bloom in May.

May 16th: This is not a fungus.  It is called 'Wolf's Milk' and it is a slime mold--related to the single celled amoeba, these 'creatures' exist independently as single cells most of the time, and yet they signal each other chemically when conditions are right, and aggregate into these pustules in order to reproduce.

Stopping for a break beside a noisy mountain stream, the biggest of the three at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  June 21st.

Pine log with a display of knots, one of a bazillion blowdowns caused by Hurricane Helene and cleared from the Mountains-to-Sea Trail near Asheville, NC, where I did a few hikes.  August 5th.

August 25th.  The Crane Fly orchid has a bizarre lifestyle.  This is the shoot of the single leaf it unfurls in September, which hangs around the forest floor all winter absorbing sunlight, and shrivels up in spring.  Just one leaf, never more.  Then the plant sits dormant until it puts out a leafless flower stalk in July.

With 90-year-old Dale "Grey Beard" Sanders at Blackrock, early in the morning of September 19th, joining Dale for a few days as he continued his quest to regain the age record as the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail (hike the whole thing in less than a year).

A bit later in the morning on September 19th.

At the 'tractor seats' beside the communication towers atop Bear Mountain, a mile south of Beagle Gap, southern Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, on September 20th.

October 27th.  It's Leaf Peeper Season!  The height of fall color here in the central Blue Ridge of Virginia came during the last week of October and continued into early November.

November 9th: One of my favorite remote viewpoints of the pristine valley that is the home of my soul

New Year's Resolution 2025 - Walk 10,000 steps every day

What's in a trail name?  On the Appalachian Trail, it is sort of a rite of passage to be bestowed your trail name by fellow hikers.  So far, I've not had that honor.  The only 'nickname' that I've ever been given (by two of my high school best friends a full 60 years ago) was based on this old hat that I used to wear as a counter-culture message in my hippie and pre-hippie rebellion days.  I'll let you guess what that name was (big hint in the image below).  Since then, I've always gone by trail names that I assigned myself:  'Seeks It' during my AT double thru-hike in 2012, 'Hiking Hermit' in more recent years, then briefly 'Mud' as a protest to a counter-intuitive Leave-No-Trace guideline, and most recently ORNG (Out Roaming Nature's Grandeur/Old Ranger Nearly Geriatric).  But I think I'll go back to the original and wear the hat for a while.  That hat is, believe it or not, a Templeform fedora made by Stylepark and bought by my Dad at Strawbridge and Clothier's original downtown Wilmington, DE store in the early to mid 1950's.  Yes, this was his go-to-church dress hat in the era before trucker caps (ball caps with non-baseball logos) became the new vogue.  Photo taken at the Cloister at Three Creeks on March 31st, 2025, with trees just barely beginning to bud out.

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 which flowers are in bloom, how the seasons are changing the woods.

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.

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:

1. Jan 1:  Destination: Sewell's Orchard Pond, Columbia, MD.  5.212 miles.
2. Jan 2:  Sweet Hours Park, Eden Brook Rd., Kings Contrivance Trails, 6.51 miles.
3. Jan 3:  Destination: Walmart! 5.374 miles.
4. Jan 4:  Big Loop around Owen Brown Community.  "Track 11" - a specially designed Loop to be 5 miles: 5.073 as measured today.
5. Jan 5:  Wincopin Trails - Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple.  5.139 miles.
6. Jan 6:  Destination: daughter's house in 6 inches of snow, 8.223 miles.
7. Jan 7:  Patuxent Branch Trail and Lake Elkhorn.  5.362 miles.
8. ... 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.  

February 2025 total: 146.785 miles.  

March 2025 total:  173.620 miles.

April 14th, 2025 was the big day: I surpassed the 25,000-mile mark.  I've 'resolutely' kept to the resolution, having hiked at least 5 miles every day this year so far, and have no intention to stop now.

April 2025 total: 173.826 miles.  And on we go ... but ... 

***Because this post is getting long and unwieldy, and because of some breaking news regarding this ongoing quest, I'm migrating the coverage to a new blog post.  Check it out for the current progress.***

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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" and also, really, "Good-bye" to the church I used to attend fifteen years ago: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia (MD).  Back then, I felt very at home there, but the supposedly wide-open and inclusive-of-all 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.  I made a few return visits recently 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. 

January 24:  Three Ridges framed by a badly invasive Paulownia Tree, native to China.

Jan 26:  Three pics for the price of one.  Rainbow Ice falls along the closed Blue Ridge Parkway.

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

February 3:  The first 'wild' flowers to bloom in spring are Skunk Cabbage.  Buds are opening today during a thaw.  The flowers are enclosed in that protective sheath to keep them warm, and the flowers themselves actually generate their own heat by a chemical process.  An extreme adaptation to beat the competition!

February 6:  the noisy abundance of a mountain stream - Stoney Creek at the Cloister at Three Creeks.  This is my new favorite viewpoint.  We had an inch of rain that had just ended; the roar of a hundred little 'water features' was a wealth of soothing joy!

February 18:  Icicles on a log at Flat Rock Creek in the grounds of the Cloister.  Winter is holding on.  Snow is in the forecast for tomorrow.

Feb. 21:  Ice mushrooms?  Puzzle this one out!

May 3rd:  First Rattler of the season.  An 11-segment rattle on this big guy.