A Walk in the Woods

Between the boys going away for a weekend and me going away overnight and soccer games and lots of rain, we hadn't gone on a family hike in the woods in a long while. Finally, this past Sunday afternoon, after cleaning the house and catching up on laundry and papier-mache-ing a sword and a trident, and way too much time playing Legos in the basement, we all headed out on our trail.

I kept my eyes open for interesting fungi,

While the boys hacked at every dead log with their hatchets,

Then made their usual attempt to fall in the river (no one got wet, but when E jumped off a log onto the bank, his shoe went in).

We bushwhacked into the puckerbrush for a ways, with me in the lead, hoping to get to the beaver lodge we found a couple of years ago. We did not find it (C claims we were on the wrong part of the river) and gave up on pushing through the dense blackberry thickets, but we did find this skull.

At first we thought it was beaver, with beavers on our minds and all,

But after getting up-close and personal with this guy, C thought maybe it was a porcupine. We checked the mammal guide when we got home and, sure enough, based on the angle of the nasal bones and the delicacy of the cheek bones, the shape of the eye sockets and the size of the teeth, we decided it was probably porcupine.

To round out the day, we helped propagate the milkweed.

Where have your adventures taken you lately?