Weekend Hiking and wildflowers

This weekend we had some crazy weather. My parent left early on Saturday morning, just missing all the craziness that blew through. We had two 70-80 foot pine trees behind our house snap completely in half. One just missed taking out the goat fence. Had they fallen forward, instead of backwards they would have both hit the house. Two more tree went down across the road, and Kenan had to go out with his chainsaw and cut them up and move them out of the road. We were feeling very fortunate that nothing worse had happened, especially after seeing reports about all the tornadoes there were.

As soon as the system blew past, the weather turned gorgeous. We went for a walk through our woods to see if the creek was flooded, and too look for other downed trees. Sunday was equally as beautiful and we spent the rest of the weekend just playing outside and 'recovering' from two weeks of company. We went morel hunting, and took a Sunday drive over to Panther Creek to see the wild phlox blooming on the rock faces.

i couldn't get good pictures to really show how incredible this is. The rock faces are huge 40+ feet and completely covered in the wild phlox.

After the rain everything was in bloom and glowing green.

i also spotted Wild Bleeding hearts.

and lots of columbine.


The water was raging after all the weekend storms.

Sunday afternoon we headed out in our woods to look for Morels. i love morel hunting, it always such a challenge. We have found some every year they we have lived here except the last two. This is partially because it's just really difficult to do any real hunting with Sage at this age, and our favorite hunting spot seems to have dried up.

We didn't find any morels, and may be looking a bit early. Our trillium have budded, but are not yet blooming. The may apples are just pushing up from the ground. Typically morels begin to fruit when you have a week of nighttime temperatures in the 50's. It is still getting pretty cold at night here in the mountains, so i guessing we have another week at least.

If your interest in morel hunting here are a couple good sites with info to get you started. http://www.morels.com/ and http://thegreatmorel.com/

Happy hunting!