Sept 24th - Hiking Day

I guess it wasn't actually much of a hike but we did spend 3 hours doing a "walk-about" on our TN property. We took the "trail" (it is starting to get overgrown, not enough traffic) from the campground area down to the south end of our property.

Not 50 yards from the RV the trail gets steep, with a lot of exposed rock. The rock was damp with wet leaves on some of it. Within our first 100 yards Kathy slipped and fell but fortunately all she got from it was bruises. Praise the Lord for that.

We then walked across the south end of the property and, for the first time ever, I walked the 4000' west property line. Kathy took another trail that goes to Tom's shop. The terrain along the west property line was challenging at times. There were several ravines, at least 50' deep, where I looked for anything I could grab while going into and out of them. No rock climbing, but slippery wet/damp leaves and a steep slope. The GPS said we only walked 2.85 miles but it is obviously defective <grin>. The difference between our maximum and minimum elevations was 280'.

The people who bought Junior Norris's property, which adjoined ours at the southwest corner of ours have moved out. Someone still keeps the lawn mowed. They had made a lot of improvements and I'm not sure why they left. (See the 1st photo below, everything that is not cleared is our property, for 4000' from where the photo is taken.)

There are cemeteries at both south corners of our property. The Norris cemetery has 30-40 headstones in it. We were surprised that we did not see a headstone for Junior Norris.

The cemetery at the southwest corner had only two headstones in it, I think both were for people who died in the 30's. Kathy was checking it out and found the headstone for Jay, the guy who used to be our neighbor at that corner. (He died a few years ago when the fork truck he was working on fell on him.) We know that he loved TN but since his wife and all his children still live in CA we were surprised to see him buried there, next to one of his dogs that had died a few years before him. (I walked past the cemetery a few hundred feet, on Jay's driveway, and took a photo of his place. Sadly it just sits empty. No one knows what his wife is going to do with it, as far as anyone knows she has not been back since Jay died.)

In the afternoon I did worked on the edges of our driveway, moving rock around to try and better define straight lines for the edges of the driveway. Kathy cooked for Mary Lou's birthday dinner yesterday evening.

We were in bed at a little after 9.

Formerly Junior Norris's place. Everything you see that is not cleared, for 4000' north, is ours.

Jay's place. The view from his porch is awesome.

Kathy on one of the "nice" rock outcroppings on the trail. Everything that is not vegetation is a solid chunk or rock.

I didn't expect to see a turtle while walking through the woods.

This tree a couple of hundred yards from our building (the only way I could find it again is using the GPS). There is no support at the right side, as you can see in the 2nd photo. These are decent size trees. The one on the left is over 15" in diameter and the one on the right is over 12" in diameter, and they are TALL. The big chunk of white is a T-rex skull, actually it is a rock.

Looking back up from the bottom of the first ravine. It is way steeper than it looks. This one was 50-75' deep. This one had a wide flat bottom with a small stream (avg 30" wide) running through it.