Tuesday, March 16, 2010

An Easy Hike to Burgess Falls



My hiking buddy and I spent a rainy Sunday afternoon at Burgess Falls, a state natural area bordering Putnam and White counties near here. It’s a great place fora family trek to the outdoors any time of year, but because of the weather we had it to ourselves. Passed only one other hiker during our three hours there.

There’s a couple of short trails. The main trail, mile and a half loop, winds along the Falling Water River and three small water falls. The main event is Burgess Falls itself, a picture perfect waterfall. You can climb an enclosed stairway along the bluff, then a rocky trail down to t the base of the falls. In summer, it’s a great place to swim, or just get cooled in the refreshing mist.

We hiked the river as far down as we could and past the remnants of two hydro-electric power plants which once provided electricity for nearby Cookeville. The first of these, nearest the falls, is pretty dangerous as the concrete floor ahas rotted through. Stay on the trail. The foundation of the second, further down stream nearby, is still intact, and there’s odd pieces of high equipment lying around for your speculative pleasure—try and figure out how they were used.

Back on top, you can follow the service road back, and there’s a ridge top trail look that leads you to some nice vistas of the gorge below.It’s a flat run through the woods. Both the river trail and service road trail have one steep climb, otherwise it’s a n easy jaunt in the woods for hiker’s young and old.
At the parking lot there’s picnic shelters and a children’s playground.
All in all, Burgess falls is a nice place to spend an afternoon, with some great scenery, in any season.

Monday, March 8, 2010

The Thaw....

Finally a day that feels like early March. Actually it’s been warming a few days now but we’re finally hitting stride after what has been an unusually cool winter. Not that we had a lot of snow, but the two small snows we had lingered for days as temperatures barely pushed past freezing.

In the woods, I’ve got my sap buckets set out on the maples. Been making syrup for more than a week now, we probably have a solid quart of maple syrup— that would mean I’ve gathered at least 40 quarts of sap. There’s a 40 to one ratio of sap to syrup, so that means we’ve been doing a lot of boiling.

Process pretty easy: bore a hole into maple tree about two inches, insert some sort of spigot or pout to catch and direct the sap into a bucket. gather sap at the end of the day and boil it down.That’s all there is to making maple syrup. This year I tapped five or six trees.

Over the weekend the ground actually thawed enough that I could fire up my old tiller and turn my garden sports. Not much of a gardener really, but it gives me a real sense of reward to sow a few seeds each spring, then watch the grow. And the harvest — no matter what it is, when you grow something yourself — it always tastes better.