Walnut Creek Park

Yesterday, I went on a delightful hike with a delightful group of four others - well, one of them was focused on geocaching and so ended up doing that on his own rather than hiking - at Walnut Creek Park south of Charlottesville. It felt like being in the mountains but with less elevation gain - same type of forests and birds, for example.  Here is a map of the track, which was a 5.5 mile circuit hike.  Arrows show the direction, and the red star marks the starting and ending point.

There was a nice lake and thus, the hike had water views for a decent part of it.  We walked past beaver activity and even went through a forest fire zone.  Some of the birds I heard as we hiked were oven bird, Eastern wood pewee, tufted titmouse, Acadian flycatcher, phoebe, and pileated woodpecker.

Here are a few photos from this pleasant hike.  It was a little sad to see this abandoned house in the woods.  It makes me think of how this was once someone's home, and I wonder what their life was like.

 Deeper into the forest was the remains of a fireplace and chimney for what must have been a cabin.  It had to have been a difficult life.  Maybe they had a little farm in the foothills.  No grocery stores back then out this way!

No, we are not in Tibet, but we did find these faded prayer flags.

There was plenty of mountain laurel in bloom.

Timber!!!!  I wonder if beavers yell that when they drop a tree?

This was the inlet into the lake.

An apparently quick moving forest fire burned part of the area a couple of months ago.

The lake had a number of nice viewpoints.

Here is the hiking group, minus Steve (who went geocaching.)

After hiking, we met up with Steve, ate lunch by the lake, and headed for home.  With a fairly short hike and a pretty short drive (about 75 minutes each way), I actually got home in time to relax a bit before dinner after getting a shower.  It was a fun day in the woods.