Cheryl and I set out on St. Patty's Day for a hike at Hayes Arboretum in Richmond, Indiana. It was an unbelievable 66 degrees, the sun was shining, and we didn't see anyone on the trail! I couldn't believe that more people were not at this beautiful location enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. It was truly criminal. We hiked three trails for a total of 3 miles in one hour and 30 minutes. We had little difficulty finding the park. Pat on the back to us! I only had to remind Cheryl once of the 3 Mile Rule: No talking within three miles of finding the trail. I gave Cheryl a high-five when she suggested we get a map from the Nature Center before we set out on the hike. However, we had little reason to use it because these were by far the best marked trails so far, hence the name for this week's post - "Hiking for Dummies."
These trails are truly beautiful! We hiked the Blue Trail First. Between the many signs of spring and all of the interesting trees, there was so much to see. We were greeted at the trail head by a carved wooden statue. All three of the trails begin at this landmark, so it was a helpful spot to get reoriented between trails. I stopped to take a picture of the base of one tree that looked like it had a creepy face in it. A little further down the trail there were several different varieties of fungus on the trees. One was striped and shaped like sea shells. The other wasn't at all colorful, but it was huge and looked like a big shelf! Since this was Cheryl's first spring hike, she was really enjoying all of the signs of spring. I had to keep moving her along or we would have doubled our hiking time. This is not an exaggeration!
Next we headed to the red trail. There were so many interesting trees. We saw one tree that looked like someone took a gigantic vegetable peeler to it and carefully peeled off the bark. All of the bark was sitting in neat little piles underneath the tree. How does that happen? We figured it had something to do with the variety of tree, but I have never seen anything like this before. We also saw a tree that had a series of large holes up and down it. We figured Woody the Woodpecker had done the damage. About halfway through this trail there was a clearing. We hiked up a good sized hill and at the top there was a cool historic sundial that was made in France. As we headed back into the woods we noticed so many new little buds on trees starting to add color to the forest. Sometimes they looked that they were just floating in the air unattached to the trees.
The last trail we hiked was the yellow trail. Cheryl noticed that the trail terrain changed frequently. Sometimes it was thick with leaves, other times it was covered with bark or gravel. Every once in a while we would hit muddy patches. We noticed a sign for a wedding chapel, so we hiked up a hill and came upon neat little rows of benches and an altar - a very cool setting for an outdoor wedding! As we continued along the trail we came to different informational signs. One was about watching for wild turkeys. We were a little disappointed that we didn't see any. Another sign indicated that we might see coyotes in the area. Cheryl said that if we saw one, they wouldn't hang around after they heard her high-pitched squeal. There was some additional reference to her wetting her pants...I will leave this part of the story to your imagination. Thankfully we didn't see any coyotes.
14 hikes down and 46 to go!!!! Hopefully this beautiful spring weather will hold out. I have some longer hikes scheduled coming up before the weather gets too hot. I hope I have some joiners!
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