a wider view

We took a walk today up a neighborhood trail – the trailhead’s a few miles from our house, off an offshoot of one of my running routes. We took Panama Dave with us.

Kevin got his own pair of FiveFingers, but his are a bit more colorful, no?

What’s not to love about this shelf mushroom? He has a nose!

Lots of colorful leaf litter.

Our path crisscrossed numerous old stone walls from the way-back machine.

And, we traveled through several different types of forest – a sugar bush, a whole section of hemlock, an oak/hophornbeam savannah – some of everything,

We were headed to the top of a north-south ridge with a great view of the Green Mountains to the west. Near the summit, we hit a zone of nice-sized beech trees.

Like this one.

And this one.

Here’s a different kind of shelf mushroom…

Nearing the summit…

AAAAAHHHHH….. Looking more-or-less north by northwest…

 

…northwest…  

…and due west. That’s Mt. Stratton. I’ve climbed Stratton a couple of times, the first time on the epic post-college hike of 1990.

 

Yay!

Tomorrow: assuming I don’t wake up with a sore throat, which has been threatening me lately, I plan on joining this guy for a run tomorrow.  I read Matt’s blog – the No Meat Athlete – largely for the overall fuel-nutrition tips. And when I realized that his 50-mile ultra-marathon tomorrow (Sunday) was not an hour from our house, I spontaneously offered to pace him for part of it. He said “sure!”

I looked into it this afternoon, and learned that they only allow pacers for the last eight miles.

So tomorrow I’m running eight miles on a trail with a guy who will have been running for eight hours and change already. Hopefully I’ll still be able to keep up with him. Or vice versa. Or something.