Ken and Ray were coming by today to go for a hike up through Armstrong State Park to Pond Farm.
They arrived about 11 and after shooting the bull for awhile we took off up the road from my house to the park, about a quarter of a mile.
Armstrong Redwoods State Park
Here we are just entering the park.
We entered the redwood tree area and took the road to the right.
Going through here.
We made some remarks about the things we could see in the base of this big redwood tree that we passed by.
This is looking up at that big tree. This one is likely over 1500 years old and not really one of the larger ones I’ve seen. The largest one I’ve seen in this area is about 24 feet in diameter. That’s a big tree.
Shortcuts to Pond Farm
I diverted off the roads and took some shortcuts I knew about as we headed for Pond Farm.
We had to duck under this old fir tree that fell across the trail.
Headed for the pond
I took this other shortcut that heads to the pond.
The pond is actually two little ponds. Here’s what it looked like as we approached the smaller one.
This is the pond that makes this place Pond Farm.
The larger section has a little island on it. The kid that used to live here had a little wooden raft and he’d take you to the island. It barely floated. Ray said he’d been on the island on the raft. I’d been there too and the kid took the raft back to shore and said ha, ha, you’re stuck on the island. I threatened to tell his dad that he’d killed one of the ducks on the pond with a rock and he came and got me. That was all a long time ago.
Nathan’s garden
From the pond we headed over to Nathan’s house and entered into his garden through the back gate.
He has quite a garden with hundreds of roses among other things.
I called out to let him know we were there, but I didn’t get an answer. It turned out he wasn’t home so we took a quick tour through his garden.
One of his roses.
Lunch break
We left his place and stopped here by the creek to have lunch and take a bit of a break.
East Ridge Trail home
After lunch we took what they call the East Ridge Trail which goes down the ridge to the park’s main parking lot and if you know where to turn off it, you end up at my house which we did.
Here’s a small piece of the East Ridge Trail we hiked on.
We made it back to my house. About a five or six mile hike. We were all beat. Ray took off for home and Ken left for home shortly and I went in for a nap.
After my nap I spent the rest of the day chair hopping and enjoying the evening in my yard.
That was my day for a nice one and I got some exercise too.
Thanks for the nice hike, ticks and all! I didn’t hear the story about traveling to the little island and getting left behind when you were a kid. Was that when John lived up there?
Good luck with the chickens, put me down for a dozen eggs after they start laying.
That is my kind of day! How nice that you are so close to a state park! And the trails on the way back home would be very nice to walk.
Great way to get exercise, with friends.
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Header Pictures
There are over a hundred pictures that are served up randomly every time you visit or change pages. They are of earlier pictures of interest and also some just to remind me of things.
A Sony AX33 4K, a video camera that takes stills too. What am I doing with that? I take pictures from my Kayak a lot. I found I was missing interesting shots, because my pic was being processed in my camera, before it would let me take another pic. Since I like to take what I call action stills, I bought this camera to take videos, that I could make stills out of, but, as a bonus, this camera also came with buttons to just take stills and that's what I mostly do, unless something is real interesting or too far away for my still zooms. My digilat zoom setting for video goes to two hundred x, and sometimes I need that, but usually, I only use the 10x lens zoom. Because this camera is HD and 4K, the quality has to be real good and it has a lot of stabilizers on it which really helps out a lot for taking pics on the water.
The other thing it has that is a must is a view finder and I had to buy Sony's top of the line cam to get it. This is a must for taking pics on the water, as you must hold the camera as still as posible and putting that eye piece to the eye forms a tripod with your arms that helps a lot. The eye piece is also a must as it works way better than a LED screen to see what you are taking a picture of in the daylight as the LED screens wash out easily in sunlight.
I also have another video camera, a Canon VIXIA G30. I use them both to mostly take stills. The Sony takes higher resolution stills than the G30. That was a bit of a disappointment as I bought the G30 to replace an older camera I dunked in the river, but then had to buy the Sony to get higher still picture resolution that the G30 was lacking.
Thanks for the nice hike, ticks and all! I didn’t hear the story about traveling to the little island and getting left behind when you were a kid. Was that when John lived up there?
Good luck with the chickens, put me down for a dozen eggs after they start laying.
That is my kind of day! How nice that you are so close to a state park! And the trails on the way back home would be very nice to walk.
Great way to get exercise, with friends.