Thank you to our hosts You Did What With Your Weiner, Daschund Nola and My Life in Blog Years. This is the Black and White Sunday Blog Hop.
Park Day
Today we’re joining our friend Gizmo and his buddy Finn Howard for Parks Day. A day designed to celebrate and share the beauty of your favorite park.
Long time readers of this blog know that our preferred walk is in our park. The tiny little park at the top of our street. The park’s formal name is Boulder Ridge Park.
Our park is not like your typical city or state park. There are no areas for picnicking, no benches, no bathroom facilities and no place to swim.
Just a big beautiful field perfect for getting your puppy zoomies on and lots of nice trails for hiking.
The enormous field is used for LaCrosse practice three times per week from mid-March until early June, I usually try to schedule our walks so we don’t interfere with their practice.
There are three main trails. The yellow trail is the easiest, with slight hills and fairly clear trails. The blue and yellow is slightly more difficult, with tree stumps, and small rocks. The orange trail is the longest and also the hardest, with many steep inclines designed for those who like a little bit of a challenge.
Most of the trails are contained within the park and generally intersect with one of the other trails at some point. The orange trail encircles the park and from start to finish would generally take us about 30 to 40 minutes. The blue and yellow trail leads down to and then crosses the local rail trail where you can pick it up and follow it in to Valley Falls, a beautiful town maintained park, with many more miles of hiking trails (and picnic areas, bathroom facilities and swimming.) 😀
Because the trails lead outside of the park, It’s important to understand the markings for the trail system.
This marker indicates I’m on the orange trail which shifts to the left, while intersecting with the blue and yellow which would drift off to the right.
There are also some unmarked trails that have been made either by the deer or two-legged adventurers, no worries they all lead somewhere.
In the last 18 months or so, we’ve had three pretty bad storms, Snowtober of 2011 dumped a lot of wet heavy snow. Unfortunately most of the trees still had their leaves. Many branches and trees that didn’t break from the weight of the snow, were weakened. With each subsequent storm (Sandy last fall and the Blizzard of 2013) more and more limbs and trees fall.
Most of the trees/branches miraculously fell off the trails. In other areas, hikers move what we can.
Whenever possible we use the downed trees to practice agility jumps.
Of course sometimes it’s just not possible.
Even without all the facilities a state park has, our little park is just perfect for us. It’s super convenient (I can walk the dogs there in less than two minutes,) it’s far away from busy roads so a dog with a good recall can be off-leash and it’s really not used by a lot of people (not counting LaCrosse of course.)
Plus we get to do fun things like climb rocks.
This is the Park’s Day blog hop hosted by Gizmo and Finn Howard. Visit Gizmo to add your link.
This ‘N That Thursday – April 25, 2013
Today we once again join our friends at 2 Brown Dawgs for This ‘N That Thursday.
You know, some days you have a little of THIS or a little of THAT, but not always enough for a full blog post. This ‘N That Thursday can be anything you want it to be, so grab the badge and join us.
Land Mines
Tuesday while walking the dogs Hubby said, watch out for that land mine. I looked down and then did a double take as I noticed something shiny. Yes, I notice shiny things.
My first thought was oh my god, the dog ate a fish hook. Upon closer inspection (I did stop to clean it up) it was actually a Snickers wrapper.
I took a picture of it to show you. It looks fine on the camera, but when you look at on the computer, it’s too disgusting for words. So I’m not sharing.
You’re welcome.
I tell you this for two reasons. 1) Somewhere near my house there is a person who is not paying attention to what their dog is eating. 2) Tuesday on The Poodle (and dog) Blog, Jan posted about an artist in Manhattan who draws toilets around dog poop he finds on the sidewalk.
In the same post, Jan mentioned a town in England that is spray painting poop, in an attempt to shame owners into picking up after their dogs.
It made me wonder if that might not work in my neck of the woods. 🙂
Listen, if you’re in my inner circle, you talk poop. If you hang around this blog long enough, sooner or later you’ll be talking poop too. If you really pay attention, you might just be facebooking about poop like I found myself doing with 2 Brown Dawgs the other day.
It’s just another bodily function.
And we all do it.
Relax, you’re among friends here.
Tracking spring.
Technically this should be saved for tomorrow’s post but I did want to update you on my project.
Tuesday it was very cold and rainy. The tree that I’m monitoring had it’s little buds all closed up nice and tight protecting them.
Yesterday the weather turned warm again, and once again the little leaves ventured out.
Tomorrow I’ll have a photo of today’s walk and once the leaves are completely out, I’ll post all the pictures.
I’m beginning to notice many of the trees are budding now, it’s beginning to look a lot like spring in my area. How’s spring advancing in your neck of the woods? Are you seeing progress or does winter still have you in her icy grip?
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