A typical walk part 2

So here are Scrappy and I, getting ready to take you a tour of the north end of our walks.

We start out crossing over to Plex territory and crossing the feeder bridge. Turning to our north, we'll follow the greenway trail.

Here coming up is a view of how big the Plex fields really are.

Once upon a time, huge honeysuckle bushes shielded the trail from the apartments. Last year, I&M had them removed so they could more easily maintenance their power lines. The aesthetic value is dubious at best. The bees that feasted on the spring flowers weren't real impressed, either. That's I&M, an enviromentally responsible utility (they tell us).

This is the first bridge we discovered when we moved in, which lead us to the trail itself.

Along the majority of the trail, the land drops off into the river forest. It makes for some beautiful overlooks.


























And here, much more hidden than before by recent grading, is the trail to Scrappy's landing. As you can see, this is a very overgrown footpath. I almost missed it today, but Scrappy always finds it.






















Winding our way between piles of rusting junk on one side and another dropoff on the other, we emerge at the landing and its beautiful river view.

Here there is another trail that leads away from the landing. It's even more overgrown, but Mr. Dog loves it. It leads eventually to the ditch that once fed water from the river to the feeder. At this point were are at the bottom of that dropoff we were looking at.

Trying to turn back here is always an adventure. Scrappy is good at following the trail down, but is clueless on the return trip. Combine that with the fact that this is my first trip here wearing my new bifocals (so I can operate the camera), and he soon has me tripping. This scares up a large deer about twenty feet away, who then bounds across the ditch. I rush back to try to get a shot of him, but of course, I had to turn the camera back on since it eats batteries like candy; by the time it does its musival "do-do-do-do" and the screen comes on, I'm watching the deer's butt about 5 feet in the air as it clears some obstacle at the top of a ridge on the other side and dissappears.

By now we've awakened every mosquito in the area. Amazingly, 95 % of them are content just to bump into us as they mill around. Nonetheless, we return to the trail. Soon we come upon the wooden bridge that formerly crossed the feeder. This year's flooding floated it from the north side of one electrical tower to the north side of the next one south.

Here's where it was.

In their recent grading, the construction crew decided finally that this COULD be a dangerous dropoff and fenced it off.



















This is one of those spots where I can shut up and hear God's song of creation.



















The trail ends in a gate to keep cars with stupid drivers out at Washington Center. Along the way, we (actually I) see a chipmunk going up a tree and a smaller groundhog than the one on the last walk heading into the now-plastic-less feeder.










Now it's time to turn back around and head home. We keep an eye out to see if we might have another chance at capturing Mr. Deer on this miserable camera. We trailed along the edge of the river for a while in the attempt, and I thought I might have heard him once. But the combination of the glare from my glasses, the thickness of the undergrowth, and the four-legged bowling ball dragging me around made it a hopeless cause. Actually, though, Scrappy doesn't have near the stamina he had when he was younger, so nowadays we run out of gas pretty much the same time when it's warm like this (low 80s). Next time, we'll try going down to the IPFW bridge and along the Tree Walk they have. It will be a much cooler day than this, though, and probably after you people finally get done ordering all these damned patio replacement cushions.