Happenings

 Mike and I hiked for a few hours today on the Weehawken Trail, and as always, it is a hard trail for me.  I'm making it my training trail, and when I finally get to the Overlook, I will be as fit as I want to be.  As Mike says, I'm a work in progress.  

Hundreds of springbeauty on Weehawken

A very cool dead tree

Dempsey loves to rest

Just a little snow to eat and lie in

When we came back around 11 this morning, there were two new friends on the upper pond, a pair of geese.  I'm reasonably sure we did not have geese last year, just the coots.  Dempsey has been barking at them, and he will find out soon enough that geese are not very friendly.  I wonder how long they'll stay.

We have our hummingbird feeder out because we saw a scout just the other day.  We've always worried just a bit about bears getting to it, but I can't reach it so I hope it's not enough for all the work they'd have to do.  

And speaking of bears, I got a text from Arnold (2) yesterday just before six that there was a mama bear and two cubs down below the lower pond.  And last night, we had bear visitors because a canvas cover over a broken deck swing in back of our house was ripped and a big log turned over.  They are active!

Yesterday, I threw blue dye packets into the pond, on Aaron's direction.  Tomorrow or the next day, we'll go out in the canoe and throw out the bacteria.  Not to brag or anything, but the pond is looking so clean, very little algae, no dead floating fish, not much debris.  We scooped a small amount of algae out of the lower pond, and it's looking clean enough for bears to drink out of.

Algae hunting

Only one of these buckets of bacteria packets will go out.
The other is for later or just in case.

Blue dye packets
I've ordered another bag to have, just in case.

If you enlarge, you can see the blue dye 
starting to disperse

I saw my first Jeep tour Wednesday morning.  It was cold!  The Jeep of course was parked in the middle of the road, and it was full of tourists completely bundled up against 32-degree temps.  

Mike and I have really missed riding our bikes.  It is something we did in Colorado Springs a lot.  We had dedicated bike lanes starting near our house and going downtown, about a mile and a half.  Mike would ride back and forth to his office in nice weather..and sometimes not so nice, and I'd go out just to get away from my home office.  We've gotten our bikes out here and are starting to see how far we can make it up Mineral Farms Lane and hope to branch out to Camp Bird Road.  Stay tuned...