Old man, Ava and Eric head back after lunch.
Tinker Creek Greenway from Plantation Road to Carvins Cove and back. 4.8 miles.
Ava took advantage of every bench on the trail; Aden graciously joined her on most of them.
It’s not often that family comes along on our weekly forays, but this week was an exception as son Eric and his kids Aden and Ava made this ideal family walk with us on a breezy day that turned out to be cooler than we thought. The hero of the day was of course Ava, 6, who walked every step—up the mountainside, down it to the water and then back up and down. She did try, at a few spots along the shore of Carvins Cove before the trail’s endpoint, to get us to go ahead and do lunch. But of course that’s nothing that The Day Hiker herself doesn’t try when we make this walk.
At the midpoint on the way up, we were surprised to see a car—an old Dodge minivan—backing its way along the forest road that runs along part of the ridgeline. A kindly gentleman got out with is pickaxe and talked about how, on the slope down toward the water, where he and other trail builders and maintainers had placed rocks along the edge of the trail, that bears keep pulling the rocks up in the springtime to look for grubs. He was on his way down the other side of the mountain, to cut a water bar into the trail where it runs under the giant electrical-wire stands and thus tends to go bare and wash out.
We spread the blankets just shy of the boat dock, which was empty, and looked out over a choppy reservoir as the breeze came in. The water too was empty save one fishing boat near the far shore.
The changeable weather—breeze to calm, sun to clouds—kept us all adding layer and taking them off again, though everybody kept them all for the walk back, along which we saw the cut in the red dirt that Bill had made to run the water off to the side.