Hiking in Alabama with Leslie

My daughter Leslie who lives in Colorado is visiting. Yesterday, I asked her if she wanted to go with me to check my trail camera that I have set up to photograph wildlife at night. I'm going through a learning curve with it, and haven't got great results yet. The best I've done so far is a picture of a bird and part of an unindentifiable animal.

We took Leslie's golden doodle, Amos, and our two dogs Maggie and Daisy. Almost immediately after we got outside the dogs chased one of our cats up a tree.



The trail cam was set up only about 10 minutes away in the woods. Once we got there and removed the memory card from the camera, we decided to walk farther because it was a beautiful day and the dogs were having so much fun, especially Amos, who never gets to run in the wild without a leash. Most of Leslie's hiking is in Colorado on government land; Leash laws are strictly enforced there, and in many places, most of Rocky Mountain National Park for example, a dog owner can't even walk a dog on a leash because of the possibility of a mountain lion attack (that was the reason a park ranger gave us).

We hiked a route that Kathy and I often use. It crosses a pretty creek that our border collie likes to sit in in when the weather is hot, and our labrador likes to run in even when it the weather is below freezing.



Since we had not planned the hike, we didn't have boots to wade the creek. I grabbed a small fallen tree that I had used on another day and pulled it farther to the bank, first breaking the rotten limb I was tugging on and tumbling almost into a backwards summersault.



Both of us managed to cross the creek on the creek without falling in.



The first thing Leslie found interesting on the other side of the creek was this abandoned car.





With bullet holes and almost totally stripped.



Abandoned cars are not unusual on Alabama trails. We always speculate how and why they got there. Leslie was more fascinated since she doesn't see things like this in Fort Collins, Colorado. She deduced that it must be an "Alabama redneck thing," which might not be far from the truth.

Our next find was this.



We weren't really looking for Indian artifacts, but my eyes are always scanning the ground. This was on the edge of the trail on the power line we were walking.



It looks like this was at one time a larger point that was broken. The owner then sharpened the other end and used all sides as a knife and scraper and maybe even a spokeshave.



We crossed the creek at another place on the trail and began walking in the direction of home. We left the trail and walked down the creek to one of my favorite areas. The creek flows through a ravine here, and the banks are almost straight up on both sides.











Soon after we got back to the trail, Leslie asked "what are those nuts on the ground?" I told her they were hickory nuts. When I was young, I thought they were called "hikkernuts" because that's how everybody pronounced it. I never think about them, even when I'm stepping on piles of them, but when I was a kid we used to pick up sack fulls and bust them open with rocks in the woods and hammers at home. My mother would even put them on cake icing.

I busted one open for Leslie and she thought it tasted great. She cracked a few and took some home. They have very tough shells, but the nut inside tastes very good. A close relative is the pecan. Hickory nuts taste better, but pecans are much easier to open.



On the ridge road I took this photo of Leslie. I shot towards the sun. I like the shadowy look.



And here's one just moving a little to the left.



We took a short break before we started walking home.



Since we didn't have leashes for the dogs, rather than walking down the trail to hit the paved road, we cut down the mountain into the woods. This route would take us across the street from our home. It was very steep with rock outcroppings. Since we didn't have boots, we slid down much of the mountain.



The sun was going down.



And we made it back when the sky was dark. A 3 hour+ walk that we didn't plan.