According to my GPS, I hiked 9.75 miles on May 16; about half of it in the dark. I probably took a few short detours along the way, and that includes the walk on the road to the trailhead from where I parked near the culvert.
If you are a firefly lover, this is your time. The evening temperatures are pretty mild, the mosquitoes are not bad at all, and the fireflies are numerous and spectacular, as they flash in sequence to create something of a natural light show.
Eventually, I want to walk (or bike?) the entire trail route with my GPS so I can post a complete GPX track of the entire (unofficial) Weetock trail. In the mean time, I have this one of the first half of the trail, as I hiked it, last night. It includes the road walk from my car (1.25 miles), so the trek on the trail would actually be only 8.5 miles, but the entire trail is allegedly 14.5 miles. I think it is closer to 15 miles, as it is blazed with the blue-and-white blazes. (The header images shows the track on Google Earth. If it’s not obvious, it’s the yellow line.)
It got dark before we finished the first section (the official section) of the Weetock. I hiked the first mile or so alone and met Fred Bear where the trail comes out on Loopy Road. My GPS track will reveal where I was wandering around there, waiting for Fred to meet me.
We stopped and attempted some firefly photos when we got close to Haywood Landing (still on the first section). I was using a super fast, manual focus lens with very shallow depth of field and I had to use a long exposure. As a consequence, the image quality is dubious.
I probably don’t need to tell you that the yellow dots are fireflies, but I should tell you that each firefly probably appears about 5 times over the course of the exposure, so it looks like there are more of them than there were. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, they were quite numerous and they are worth checking out, if you can get out to the trail around dusk.
Recent storms have caused some trees to fall across the trail in several places. All three sections that we hiked had some obstructions that should probably be cleared. I wasn’t even carrying a machete last night, and we had to keep moving in order to finish our hike before midnight. Just be warned that there are some places where you may have to go around a mess of fallen timber to get back on the trail. There were some massive oak trees that tipped over.
I’d love to harvest some of the wood to heat my house, but I’d probably have to commandeer a Huey helicopter to get it out of the forest. I suppose I could find a boy scout troop that needed some exercise. I could make it a challenge. Which ever scout hauls out the most wood by weight gets a certificate of achievement. It’s not like I can pay them; we have child labor laws ya know? Maybe, if I charged a participation fee, I could buy some hotdogs for lunch. That seems like the least I could do, if they were paying for the experience and hauling my firewood. They could roast them on a campfire, assuming someone in the troop knew how to start a fire. What? You think I’m going to make this easy?
The last two photos in this entry show two very different “personalities” of the forest. I think the one of the skylight breaking through (on the left) is kind of cool and creepy. The one on the right (above) offers a different “vibe” with the contrast between the sunlight and the heavily shaded, swampy area in the foreground.
