Posts tagged #Flower

Hiking Cherokee Marsh Conservation Park in Wisconin

Adventure Tuesday

    Time flies, and today I am posting the 6th Adventure Tuesday post. It's fun to share some of my every day adventures. An adventure doesn't have to involve a risk for your life rafting down the Grand Canyon, or climbing the tallest mountain in the world. You decide what your adventure is, your pace and how far you are willing to go. 

Cherokee Marsh

    This past weekend W and I decided to go to a park that is about 10-15 minutes by car from our house, so basically in the near vicinity of Madison. We had something else planned originally but had to switch those plans and ended up doing this instead. 

    Arriving at the park I immediately spotted all the water droplets on the spiderwebs even before we stopped the car. The morning started off as a foggy surprise and it definitely continued to surprise us, well at least to me. 

    We started off by walking up the trail from the south side of the marsh and immediately got some views of the Yahara river which flows into lake Mendota. 

    As I mentioned earlier the weather was foggy and a bit cloudy. This walk varied between open fields with views of the river and beautiful stretches through oak forests.

    We kept seeing more spiderwebs of different shapes along the hike, mixed in with the vegetation.

    Again, as many of the other hikes we do, this one was not that far. But I am mostly interested in getting outside and also to take some pictures of all the cool plants and insects I see.

    I try to identify time as time goes by, so if some of them are unnamed check back later on to see if I managed to identify them, or better yet, if you know the name of the plant let me know!

    It's incredible how many different types of flowers there are here. Ok, there are a lot of flowers and such around fairbanks too, but not like this. Or maybe I am just biased because a lot of these flowers are new to me. 

    We did run into the giant wasp here too, but now I know they are harmless and it did make me feel as if they were less intimidating, but man, look at that size. Also I managed to snap a few pics of two different butterflies. 

And then summer arrived...

Since I have been so busy lately, I haven't had time at all to update. I was updating so infrequently as it was before the summer, so yeah, the updates have been closer to zero than anything else. But summer finally did arrive, late, much later than what I have been used to. W left in June to do his PhD in Madison. So we have two cats, Olive and Tycho, but Olive is his cat, and Tycho is my cat (even though i secretly think Olive loves me more...). I had both cats for a while and then I shipped Olive to Madison in August. But I will see her soon enough :) This below is Olive:

Olive

And Tycho, Tycho was a stray cat and he lost his ears because of frostbite (like many other cats at pet-pride in Fairbanks).

Tycho

This summer was so dry, almost no rain all summer, and anyone who knows Alaska knows what that mean, fire.

Smoke

One of my favorite flowers, fireweed, the color is just stunning when it's all in bloom. I love seeing the color of fireweed, makes me realize summer is here for real.

Fireweed

They say that when the fireweed has bloomed out, summer is over.

summer is over?

This summer did feel extremely short and long at the same time. Short in the sense that I kept busy, and long cause I felt like I had so many things to do, and I missed W of course.

I had a nice garden this summer too, I grew potatoes, cucumber, zucchini, beets, lettuce and basil. The cucumbers did great, mostly cause this summer was so hot.

The Garden

I didn't do that much hiking this summer, I guess I was too busy. I did get to travel south, to Ninilchik, close to Homer. That was a blast. Not the 12 hr car ride it involved, but the trip itself :)

Down South

The sky in the summertime is beautiful, well I guess that is true in the fall, wintertime and spring too....but the summertime is the only time you get amazing colors and shapes even though it is really late at night.

the Sky

Often times I don't have my "real" camera, only my iphone, but I use it a lot more than the regular camera. And the pictures do come out pretty well there,

Sunset
Fireweed And the sunset

Hope you are having a wonderful week!

Olive