Heart of Stone

about 1 month ago

Although the nights have been chilly here, the days are thankfully warm and full of blue skies and sunshine. In short, perfect weather for hiking around at the local parks.

Let's just follow the ~~yellow brick road~~ gravel path into the woods and see what we can see...

The Beautiful Sunday and Sublime Sunday tags are some of my faves! I want to thank @ace108 for running the beautiful Sunday tag every week and keeping such detailed stats and supporting the accounts. Also, a shout out to @c0ff33a for the sublime Sunday tag where your random Sunday posts are always welcome!

One of the obvious differences that I have seen in Virginia, as opposed to Michigan, is the quality of coloring of the various rocks and boulders that are scattered around the landscape.

The sun was very bright today and of course the camera was not able to resolve that level of shininess and glare coming off of the water. Although the brightness pretty much ruined this picture, I included it anyways because I wanted to share what I call the Heart of Stone. If you look very hard you will see that there is a heart-shaped mound of rocks in the middle of the stream. Get it? Heart of Stone!

The sparkles on the water did make for cool looking bokeh balls though.

On most trees, one can see evidence that Spring is in the air by observing all the tiny buds of soon to be leaves springing out everywhere!

Here is a closer up view of the Heart of Stone.

Apparently the trail is getting a good amount of horse use.

Seeing some holly growing natively, it reminded me of the Christmas season.

I thought this old piece of wood had either a crocodile or gator as an inspiration because it certainly looks like one to me. Can you see it?

This poor tree has seen better days. He has at least three good-sized holes in the trunk from the likes of a woodpecker, I suppose.