Pre-Picnic Hike

A week ago Sunday, the Old Dominion Appalachian Trail Club (ODATC) had our annual picnic at Powhatan State Park on the James River.  Before the picnic, about 20 of us got together for a 5.7 mile hike on a warm October day.  This park is a great resource.  In addition to the river and lots of hiking trails, there are campgrounds and a special canoe campground.  It is also a good place to see wildlife, although with 20 of us tromping along, spotting elusive wild creatures was a long shot.

Here is the route of our hike, starting and ending at the star on the left.  You can see that the park is a mixture of fields and mostly deciduous forest, with a lot of edge.

I snapped a few photos as we hiked along, beginning with the James River at the start of the hike.  Our post-hike picnic was right along the river.

We moved out through heavy forest along the river.

I imagine that this was once someone's home.  I wonder what their life was like?

You can see that there were enough of us that we got strung out over quite a distance.

Walking isn't the only way to move along in this park.

Here is a view across one of the fields.

For a hiking group, what could be better before a delicious picnic than a hike?  This one was a lot of fun.