garden!

guess what I ate today?

icicle radishes from my own garden.

I went out after the storm... so the radishes were a bit muddy, but easy to pull out of the ground. About five were worth picking, though I checked all of them. YAY!

I love white radishes. They're potent, spicy, and taste good with salt.

skyline drive, blackrock and calf mtns 16v04

On Sunday, we did two hikes. The first was a short hike to the summit of Blackrock Mountain. The trail follows an old road (maintained now as a fire road) for a short distance before joining the AT. Boy was thrilled to be walking onn the AT. It's a lovely wooded walk, though the Virginia blackflies are showing their numbers this time of year.

The forest opens up at the summit, revealing a talus slope. Basically, thousands of years ago, cliffs here tumbled, forming this field of boulders and looser scree. The view into Madison Run Hollow is gorgeous. It was partly cloudy and hazy Sunday, but we were *just* able to make out the southern end of Massanutten Mountain (center of the pic, if you have a laptop screen, bend it back until you can make out the shape of a faint half U). Massanutten splits the northern Shenandoah Valley for about 40 miles. The river itself forks into the two valleys created by the mountain. The eastern valley is called Page Valley.

Boy wanted to pose with this AT-blazed rock.

We scrambled up the rocks to the summit. lovely piles of rocks were everywhere. Boy went first, with a walking stick, to poke for snakes. We saw no snakes, but LOTS of big spiders.

Blackrock Mountain is named for the rocktripe lichen, which coats many of the Hampton quartzite boulders.

A short distance away, down and up the saddle, is Trayfoot Mountain. We didnt' feel like walking that far down and back up, plus there are no views from Trayfoot.

We climbed back down, then looked back up to where we were. I like rocks.

We saw a nice bit of metal-wound wire cable rusting away in the rocks below the summit. The AT looped around the summit, then went back into the woods. It encountered the fire road a couple tenths of a mile down the trail. The AT headed right (Southbound), while we turned left and returned to the parking lot, admiring wood betony, pinxter flowers, and buttercups on the way... and HUGE FERNS. :)

We relaxed in the car and then headed back South, toward Afton Gap. We stopped in Beagle Gap to hike Calf Mountain. This hike is also along the AT. It starts at a fence crossing, and continues through old pastureland. Boy ate his sandwich as we followed the northbound AT toward the summit.

The trailbook claimed this was an easy trail, but about 2/10 of a mile were moderately steep. I had to take a few breaks because my heart was all poundy. We encountered a group of about eight Indian men and one Indian woman playing charades at a rock outcropping on the way up. That was rather surreal.

We hiked through young woods (reclaimed pastureland) and old apple orchards and eventually started descending. We'd come relatively far, listening to the booming thunderheads a few miles north of us... we came to the conclusion that the black walnut trees grow very quickly and the views the book claimed would be there are now only viewable by squirrels and birds. That's okay, we saw lots of neat things in addition to the apple trees: grouse, an indigo bunting, lots of interesting birds, tons of poison ivy, berry briars, lyre-leaf sage, an old stone wall, and a lovely wide, flat rock that lured us over for a break.

We encountered three section hikers on the way back, along with a thru-hiker. :)

As we left the woods and entered the grassy area, we stopped to admire the view. The trail wound through grass down toward Skyline Drive, with Bear Den Mountain rising ahead. It was quite pretty.