Last weekend, Sarah and I hiked the Lake Trail at Yellowwood State Forest. Well, sort of. We don’t like half of it, so we do the half we do like as an out-and-back. This way, we have lake views most of the time. Here’s a map of our hike.

It was a gorgeous fall day, highs in the 60s, sunny … perfect, really. It felt good to hike again. Aside from another hike the previous weekend, I’ve hardly hiked since my foot surgery in the spring. Then again, we usually do most of our hiking during the winter anyway.

The lake level reflects how dry things are here. The field below is usually part of the lake.

Some leaves are starting to turn. Some just died and fell off the branches, due to the dry weather. Others are still green.

This is a creek … usually.

Below is a creek crossing that can be tricky, at times. Now it’s dry, you can just walk right across.

You can sort of see below that much of the lake has no water in it. It looks like a big field or a mud pit in the photo. That’s normally lake.

Sarah sure was enjoying herself.

Again, the big open area is normally all water. Now it looks like there’s just a small stream.

Of course, Rob ran into the water on numerous occasions, getting extremely muddy in the process. It was gross, but he loved it!

You can sort of see some switchbacks in this next shot. These help make the climb more gradual.

As we neared the dam side, the lake had water in it. The clouds looked ominous, but we didn’t get any rain.

We lingered on the dam for a while, taking photos and enjoying the view.

Then, we turned around and went back the way we came. We hiked around 4.8 miles. It was a wonderful fall day for a hike.  I look forward to cooler weather, it makes hiking even better!

We’ve been back from our vacation since Saturday, but I’ve done a horrible job of keeping up with writing about some of the things we did. I guess I took a bit of a break from blogging, too.

One day last week, we headed to Jockey’s Ridge State Park in Nags Head, NC, with our friends who we rented the beach house with. Our friends had been there before, and told us that the park was home to some incredible sand dunes. It didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting to convince us it would be worth the trip.

The trail is sand from the start, and goes through some trees/shrubs and up a hill.

When you crest the hill, the view is absolutely breathtaking, and the scene looks like some kind of crazy desert.

The scenery truly was beautiful, and surreal.

Things got more surreal when we came around a corner and saw water not too far away.

The trail followed the water for a bit …

… before heading back, across the sand dunes.

Animal tracks were all over the dunes … I think these are fox and hognose snake, but I’m not sure.

The trail was short, but beautiful. We did another, similar hike after this, though it was through some wooded areas and had less sand dune scenery.

Afterwards, we headed to Mama Kwan’s Tiki Bar for some great seafood, and drinks. This parrot was filled with a very refreshing tropical beverage. A great end to a beautiful hike.

On Saturday, Dave and I went hiking at Yellowwood State Forest. He had spotted something on the satellite view in Google Earth that looked like an undiscovered pond, so we set out to see if we could find it.

We started on a horse trail, and hiked up a hill. Once on the ridge, we bushwhacked down into a ravine. We saw a creek at the bottom, and worked our way down. Along the way, we saw bare spots where turkeys had made their beds.

We didn’t find a pond, instead, we followed another, very muddy horse trail out to a nice view of the lake.

We turned around and got on another trail … just because we didn’t find the pond didn’t mean we couldn’t hike more.

We climbed a bigger hill on the 10 O’Clock Line Trail, a 14-mile trail that ends in Brown County State Park. Once we reached the top of the hill, we followed some horse trails for a while on some narrow ridges.

We looked through the trees and thought we spotted a pond. Dave got out his binoculars and it was pretty clear there was SOME kind of water down there. We couldn’t tell if it was a wide creek or a small pond, and the ravine was too steep to go down and check.

We got to the bottom and followed the road back to the car, getting some more views of the lake.

Later, we looked at my GPS and realized we had been pretty close to the water we spotted from the top of the ridge. We just turned the wrong way. Next time, we’ll be able to go there and see if there is, in fact, a pond.

It was a fun hike of about three miles, with a couple of good climbs and some great scenery. And it was great to see Dave, I hadn’t hung out with him since before Christmas since he was sick, and we’ve both been busy.