“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach….”
Henry David Thoreau
I asked my wife what she wanted to do on Valentine’s Day – our anniversary. I offered her a meal out (something we haven’t done much since the pandemic started) and several other options, including a walk in our woods. She chose the latter but wanted us to explore another part of the land we hadn’t seen before.
I should tell you that we live on a good-sized piece of land in south-central Kentucky, in the middle of a forest. It was heavily logged over 25 years ago, so the woods are fairly thick with all the young growth and have overgrown many of the old skid trails. So, it makes moving around the property difficult in places.
We’ve been opening up some of the trails since we started living here so that:
- We have better fire breaks. Even though we live in an area where we get about 50 inches of rain a year, fires do break out from time to time.
- The wildlife have small corridors (they don’t like big ones) to move around on but quickly escape. What’s been interesting about this activity is we’ve found that not only deer, bears, and other mammals use these trails, but birds do too – especially the blue herons and ducks that visit our pond. They stay below the tree line on the nearby trails while gaining speed and altitude when taking off from the pond below our house.
- We’ve opened up a few small clearings to provide a more varied habitat for the wildlife.
- Encouraged the spread of native plants. This combined with only mowing the fields in the fall of each year (some of the locals have complained about our 6-10-foot-tall wildflowers that attract bees, butterflies, and birds. But have you ever stood in a field and heard the drone of thousands of bees all around you as they collect pollen? It’s an incredible experience.
It’s not always easy to spot the trails, though. We have a unique micro-climate that has enabled a huge diversity of trees and plants to grow here. For instance, even though we live in the South, we have several groves of cool-weather-loving white pines and hemlock with 2 – 4-foot-wide trunks that soar well over a hundred feet into the air as well as rhododendrons, ferns, and whatnot. Everything seems to grow fast here as it’s an ideal growing climate (e.g., we’ve seen tree sprouts that grow 8-10 feet in the first year). With all that, we’ve (mostly my wife) had to use Google Earth Pro’s historical pictures to spot the trails. For us, that usually means going back to the pre-2007 images to see where the old trails were, then going out to the area and searching for them. Some are easy to find. Others aren’t.
If you remember, I wrote in a previous post about finding a new cliff on the main creek cutting through our property. Well, when we climbed up from that cliff, we spotted the remnants of a trail we’d never seen before. So, we followed it out and marked it to make sure we came back another time.
At Christmas, we went to the property on the other side of the creek (it’s not a small creek as it averages about 75 feet wide with 6-foot-tall riverbanks). We found one of the three trails we were looking for and followed it to another cliff area on the creek. It was especially exciting for us because it was the spot where we’d taken my youngest son one time, and he excitedly said to sell another piece of property I used to own and buy this property. That was over ten years ago, and we’d never gotten back to the spot. So, we were very excited to find a relatively easy way to get back.
On New Year’s Day, we went back to do a little bit of clearing on the trail we spotted on Thanksgiving. We found, to our surprise, that it was a big loop. If you’ve ever cleared trails before, you know it’s hard work, so we don’t explore much of a newly discovered trail on any given day. We did once a long time ago and overdid it as we literally had to prop our arms up to drink afterwards.
We went back to that trail on Valentine’s Day/our Anniversary and followed it down to where it ended. We had no idea it would take us all the way down to the main creek, on the opposite side of the cliffs we found on Christmas day. For us, that is a super-exciting day – discovering new trails to cool spots.
On the way back, I looked over to the side and thought I spotted a little trail. We hacked our way through the dense growth, but it turned out to just be a game trail. However, it was worth the effort as it led us to where one of the smaller creeks empties into the main creek and found the cliff-cave pictured below. You can get an idea of how much cooler it is down in that area (I estimate 5-10 degrees cooler than up where our house is) by seeing the rhododendrons in the background, along with all the icicles hanging from the cliff.
I wonder what other surprises are out there in our woods, waiting to be discovered.
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