Sunday, September 9, 2012

County Hiking Challenge 2012--Hike 5/6

We hiked a new preserve this time.  It was a double points hike because it was 2.4 miles long which is why this makes it hike 5/6. When I say this a a new preserve I don't mean just new to us. It is so new that if you go to Google maps to check out how far you walked, the parking lot and trails aren't there, even in the satellite image!

You can't drive by this preserve because
there is a big bull at the entrance
That is because for many years this land was owned by a man who raised Black Angus cattle

 First things first, I had to check the pee mail

Then we encountered these gems which worried Mommy
Their dog was running wild off leash
and when Mommy called out for them to leash it they ignored her
She was afraid that we were going to run into a bunch of stupid McMansionites like this, but luckily we didn't

Here are their faces bigafied in case you bump into them
Mommy is pretty sure the visor one is looking at the big pile of poop
that their dog left in the middle of the boardwalk that Mommy had to pick up

You can see, that not only was their dog off leash, they weren't even carrying a leash!
What really makes us mad is that about 4 miles farther south there is a 68 acre dog park with trails and woods where they could have gone and legally let their dog run free
But they still would have been required to carry poop bags

Anyway, our worries were unfounded because they were the only ijits that Mommy and I met up with until the end when there was another off leash dog, but that dog's owners saw us in the distance and put his leash on right away. So, even though they were breaking the rules too, they were a tiny bit more responsible about it.

This hike had lots of prairie and some smallish trees

There was a lot of goldenrod, ragweed and Queen Anne's lace

There were a bunch of boardwalks too, which leads us to believe that if we weren't in a drought this year that most of this preserve would be covered in swamp and small ponds.  
 
Mommy says she is going to keep that in mind for the next time we are in a flood year.
We think this hike will be amazingly different then.

 
We came to a mowed path that wasn't on the county's official hike.
I can't resist a mowed path so I asked to go on it.
While Mommy was getting out the map trying to estimate how much extra that would make our hike
I just started up it, so Mommy gave up and let me take it.

By the end of the mowed trail, I was starting to lag behind.

When we hooked back up with the main trail Mommy insisted on backtracking back to where we turned off so that we did the whole marked trail.  Taking the mowed trail and backtracking to the branch wound up adding .6 more miles to our hike.

When we were only about a half mile from the end, 
Mommy noticed that she could see the moon really well so she stopped to take a picture.

 I stopped and took a picture too by lying down on my side in the middle of the trail.

As tired as I was, we made it back to the car for the ride home.

We hiked a total of 3 miles because of adding in the mowed trail.

2 comments:

Backcountry Brodie said...

OMD, OMD, OMD! We got that furry same moon in our picture yesterday. How did it get from your place to my place so fast?

Johann The Dog said...

Hey, I was just over at Shawnee's blog and saw the moon there too, too funny! Looks like a great place to hike, I don't like dogs off leash, not at all!