august trail keepers

We had a much smaller group this time. Thursday was Stella's birthday, so she had her very important dinner date with her dad, and Daisy stayed back with her mom to help finish up some stuff for Stella's birthday and help watch Lyle (very sweet Daisy). Hazel came along with us. The Cooks couldn't make it either. It's a long drive in from Danielsville for them, so they decided to not consume the gas to drive into town for an hour. But, as always, the path was filled with lots of interesting finds...

Here are Jason and Rachel looking at Kudzu blooms. I am from around here and I can honestly say I NEVER knew Kudzu bloomed. India gave me one of the flowers while we were walking and I was super excited about how pretty it was until we saw it growing on the kudzu and I had to leave it behind. Thankfully, we don't have any kudzu on our property and I sort of want to keep it that way. I'm a little afraid of bringing it home in any fashion since every part of the kudzu plant is reproductive in some way...

Here's a picture of the blossom. It is very pretty... Also very deceiving. It's a shame this plant isn't used more. It can be used to make paper, baskets, food for both animals and humans, and medicine (potentially to treat alcoholism). I was just reading about the many ways of dealing with it to get rid of it and I saw where some people have goats that eat it since they will eat anything green. It can be used for agriculture feed. There is so much of it and it grows so fast, we should use it more.

Here's the group walking down the path... Rachel and Joe had Georgia along. A treat for all of us and her I'm sure...

Here's Georgia helping us out.

Another cool thing to see was that the river was way up. We've had a lot of rain, so it was nice not be able to see the bottom of the river. It's encouraging after this long drought. It's not that we have gotten enough rain to solve the drought problems, but it is nice to see the water up to a somewhat more "normal" level.

And the most interesting thing we've seen so far... A decomposing Raccoon (?) paw? This is all there was to it and it was just under the bridge where the highway goes over - and no Sarah Cook, I did not bring it home because it smelled really bad. We came (I mean I came) to the conclusion that it was a raccoon for because of the opposable thumb and the way the fingers are jointed. We have a quite a few raccoons that hang around here and this hand seemed about the right size for it... I would be interested to hear of any other possibilities for what it could be. It did get us thinking about how there would only be a hand and no body, but since it was under the highway, there is really no telling.