Here's Pip all geared up and ready to go. He brought the orange cone to put at the trailhead so we'd know how to get back to the car.
Bringing that net was not a waste. Almost immediately we were in an open field dotted with butterflies. Pip proved me wrong by pinning a butterfly to the ground after only a few minutes of chasing. Once it finally calmed down, we got a good look at it. It looked just like an old, dry leaf. It's actually under the net here...this is not just a re-enactment.
So we plunged down into the thick of the wilderness and soon came to a murky swamp. Pip was annoyed with my attempts to get a cool picture.
We kept going along the trails. I hope some of my orienteering skills rub off on him. I took a picture of the trail map with my phone and needed to refer to it often. There was quite a maze of white, yellow, red, green, and blue trails weaving throughout the area. One thing not marked on the map was this patch of quicksand. We probed it with sticks and determined that it was not going to swallow us up, but we still treated it with caution.
We finally settled on a cool spot for our picnic lunch. This was a deep and still pool. A nearly sign warned people to keep their dogs out because it was a vernal pool which would serve as a home to many frogs and salamanders. Pip is excited to come back in a few weeks to see if any have hatched.
Finally, we found an "active" section of the Bare Meadow Brook. Pip amused himself by sailing a bark ship down through the rapids, under this log, and into a lazy portion of the stream. When we had to go, he placed his ship on the log for the next kid to play with. All in all, a nice little outing. I won't spoil it, but we found one of these! We'll try for more soon.
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