Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Off-the-Bike Photos

6 and 8 December

On the road it's been too cold to stop for pictures, and besides, with full-fingered gloves I'm all thumbs with the cell phone's buttons.

So, instead, here are some pictures I took when I tagged along on a hike up the Sourland Mountain with Mike and Theresa.

Hiking up the Sourland Mountain is easy. The first time I did it I was wearing sneakers. We went up a newer trail, one I don't remember having been on before. There's no view from the top on this trail. Instead there are lots of big rocks.

Mike found one to climb. While he was doing that, I took pictures of some other big rocks.





The Sourlands are like this. There are boulders strewn all over, and diabase rocks are covered by only a thin layer of soil. This makes for pretty bad farming, which is why so much of the Sourlands are still open space. Development threatens, but conservationists are fighting back, and maybe even winning for a change.

On our way down we saw a stone dam off the trail. Mike veered towards it like an iron filing to a magnet. As we walked across, Mike was singing the theme to Indiana Jones. In my head that mutated to the Monty Python's Flying Circus theme, which makes for some interesting hiking music (it is, after all, a Sousa march).

Here's the dam:



Two days later I went to the gym for an early morning Spinning class. I walked out around 7 a.m. to see this over the parking lot:



Ah, sunrise over Mercerville.

Whatever.

No comments: