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Before leaving the motel I took another photo of the tree across the street. I should have done a better before and after thing with it. You can go back to day one of this to see how it looked to start. Also before leaving, I loaded google earth to see the exact terrain in the area. I wondered where exactly the hills were. The plan was to drive into se NE or maybe ne KS. While looking at google earth I noticed Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge only 5 miles away. I then remembered my sister had been to one in this area and mentioned a cool trail up to the top of the hills. So I called her to see if it was this one, and sure enough it was. So that was now my plan, go there and play around.
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I'm now at the refuge. All I could find was this portion of the trail going up. It was a pain in the butt though, since trees were down on it. You can see the one above broke the fence.
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I got through some trees and into the open, but was having a hard time committing to the trip, thanks to the numerous falling branches at this time, plus all the large trees. I really didn't care to be smacked by one, or pinned by a larger one, left to die in the cold in there. So I walked back out. Above I'm pushing through some tree branches. A forest just isn't the brightest idea right after an ice storm....but....I wasn't giving up yet, just on this particular route.
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Here's a shot of the woods/hill I was wanting to get through. It was a completely trashed mess, and was continuing to fall apart.
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Well I really wanted to get to the top of this hill, so I had to locate the other end of the trail. I found it. It was flat for a long ways, through a maze of broken trees.
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Here's the flat portion of the trail. This is a gif alternating between two still photographs. This is how common it was for branches to be breaking. I heard a crack and pointed the cam and snapped away as the branch falls. If you look dead center of the image you can see it fall. The larger, very loud sounding ones, were quite intimidating. I wasn't seeing too many of them, but was walking through trees that would readily end my life if they were to do the same. I tried to look ahead and plan my route the best I could.
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After maybe a 1/4 mile of flatness the trail began to go up. At least as it did so, it was in this small ravine, that way any large trees if they were to fall would hopefully lay across it. |
