Journal Excerpt: Bottom Creek Gorge

A couple of weekends ago, Leith and I took a trip to The Nature Conservancy’s Bottom Creek Gorge Preserve near Bent Mountain.  Bottom Creek Gorge is a great outing.  It provides an overlook to Bent Mountain Falls which are the second largest falls in Virginia.  A number of historic structures remain on the trails as well.  It was a dogless trek, however, as the preserve doesn’t permit pets.  Some excerpts from my January 20, 2007 journal entry:

There was a lot to see too — an old cemetery, remains of old log cabins, woodpeckers, deer and of course, Bent Mountain Falls.

I remember in 2003 taking a picture of a bunch of downed trees in the preserve and citing it as Dad’s wet dream.  My father used to love finding downed trees and then chopping them up for firewood.  He started chopping wood when he was five years old (he actually asked Santa for an ax) and had been doing it ever since.

Now that he lives in a townhouse, his lifelong habit is no longer needed.  At first I felt bad, but Dad  just shrugged and said, “I’ve been chopping wood for 60 years.  I don’t need to do it anymore.”

Anyway, the Bottom Creek Gorge Preserve still has a lot of downed trees and even though my father no longer chops wood, I still thought of him.

Leith and I passed a very rough looking tree on Duvall Trail.  It had obviously weathered some tough times.  It sported multiple knots and big gaping holes.  That tree still stood despite its sketchy past.  And that tree was surrounded fallen and decaying brothers who weren’t quite as lucky.

That tree was surrounded by the carnage of its own kind.

It was a neat statement.  Here was the survivor out of many trees– but it didn’t make it through unscathed.  Its bark and trunk documented its struggle.  Its wounds, deformities and scars remain.

Speaking of scars, Leith and I passed an old wire fence which left its mark on surrounding trees.  Last week on my blog I talked about the stem cell researchers and Alfred Hitchcock working around their obstacles.  Leith and I saw trees that took an entirely different approach.  When impeded by the wire fence, the trees did not grow around it– they absorbed the wire into their trunks and grew through it.

Some trees, we would see the wire go right smack through the middle of the tree as if someone specifically threaded the wire through.  Not all the trees were that far along in their progress.  On some, the wire was just starting to get assimilated by the bark.

All the trees, no matter how deep the wire, had tell-tale parallel lines on its trunk.  You could see where the wire once rested before it just became another part of the tree.

Leith and I saw about eight deer and a few woodpeckers as well.  We also ran across one tree a woodpecker had a field day with.  A great portion of the tree was littered with little tiny holes.

I was amazed at how straight the lines of holes were that circled the trunk.  Every now and then the woodpecker would have lines of holes that were slightly skewed.  But most of them were as straight as an arror and perfectly parallel to the ground.

The woodpecker accomplishes that with only the body he was given by the Good Lord.  Laser levels?  Bah!  The woodpecker needs none of that!

All my pictures from our visit to Bottom Creek Gorge are available on my Flickr site.

Thank Goodness I’m with the Puparazzi

Earlier this week, injured Sean was eating lunch.  Food alone is enough to attract the dogs, but I wonder if they could also sense Sean’s vunerability.  Both dogs were extremely attentive and watched Sean’s every move.

“All eyes are on you,” I told Sean, “It’s like the paparazzi.”

“The puparazzi,” Sean corrected.

I was uploading pictures to Flickr today and I realized it is good that I am subject to the puparazzi and not the paparazzi.  One of the perks of visting my parents’ house is getting to catch up on back issues of The Enquirer and Us (my parents have subscriptions to both).  It’s a guilty pleasure– not the most productive use of my time and it’s probably not the best influence on my self-esteem. 

I’m not worried about comparing myself to pictures of scrawny Kate Bosworth or Nicole Richie.  I am, however, concerned about Britney Spears.  Over Christmas, I saw a picture in The Enquirer of a hefty, slobby looking Spears.  The caption under the picture read (paraphrased), “The 5’5″ singer has reached 140 pounds.”

Suddenly my care-free entertainment stopped me dead in my tracks.  You see, I’m 5’5″ and I’m pretty darn close to 140… and the way I think I look has very little resemblence to the picture I was gawking at!

If I were to fall under the scruntiny of the paparazzi, though, I would have bigger problems to ponder.  Every now and then a magazine will share two pictures of an actress commiting the cardinal sin of, *gasp*, wearing the same outfit more than once.  Catherine Zeta Jones and Liz Hurley were two that were cited.

Redundancy is good for hardware, web servers and databases, but not so good for Hollywood fashion.

Which brings me back to Flickr.  Today I uploaded some new pictures from a hike at Bottom Creek Gorge.  I was looking at this picture of myself:

See not a thing like Britney Spears

The shirt stuck out.  It reads “Rocky Mountain National Park” and is a souvenir from my Colorado trip last July.  It turns out that shirt has made a number of cameos in my pictures.  Here are some just in the past month:

Hiking with Brian Nenninger

Decorating Cookies with Penn

Now the paparazzi may have taken issue with my redundant warddrobe.  But the puparazzi don’t care one bit… especially if I happen to have food on hand.  🙂