Whitney this weekend

This weekend Emma and I headed off for Whitney state park to take a walk and look at nature.
It's not one of those super charged state forests with drive by nature and a gift shop. It's "just" a forest with lots of nature.

For reference you can find more information about Whitney state forest here: http://www.stateparks.com/whitney.html.

As we are just getting out of winter (hopefully) the trees doesn't have leaves just yet. So one thing we are doing is walking around trying to find shapes in nature. This is mostly trees that are in funny shapes or look like something else.

First up is our Cinderella castle. It takes a little time but after a while it actually makes sense ;-)



Next was a pile of branches that made it look like a tent so we had to look closer at that to see if there were any animals hiding in there. Not too many today...



We all know how trees look but we found that there are more than one color. Here is a little cheese wood...



Hopefully we will have the birds back pretty soon and starting to build their nests. We checked this bird house but nobody in there just yet. oh yeah I did see the bottom being open so it was safe to let Emma check it. She did check it by sticking her finger in there and nobody bit her so no birds in that one...



What we did find plenty of was different type of fungus. Not the most interesting find in your house but out in nature it can be pretty cool ;-)



This one I didn't let Emma walk up to and stick her finger into. She sure would have but as I told here we are not really sure who lives in there and they might not like getting her finger in their face.



A little more fungus at the end of a log.



With a little imagination here is a snake climbing a tree...



Whitney has a little stream running through it too. We usually go on the main path which has a road that goes over the stream. Going on the small paths Emma took us on today we had to cross it twice... We didn't slip and didn't get wet :-)



This is one of the fantasy animals. One arm a couple of antennas, eyes and a mouth.



Along the path we spotted small red "markers". We started counting but after the first 5 minutes that wasn't fun anymore ;-)



Here is a guy on a swing... obvious right?



Here is the branch swing that Emma and Mom was sitting on last time and we got a photo of them hanging somewhere in the house.



I spotted this thingie in the middle of the woods... haven't got a clue as to what it is though...



Spring must be getting pretty close. There were quite a few butterflies around which I really didn't expect with the snow being here just this past week. But here it is...



Venturing back to the truck we had seen tracks from horse shoes so we knew that some people would ride the horses in the woods. Emma was excited by the thought of it. Then we were lucky enough to actually see horses riding through the woods just before leaving.



ohh yeah and just as we were leaving we saw a couple of big birds. Yep they sure ain't pretty...



As you can see we like heading out to Whitney state forest even though it's "only" 147 acre. It's pretty close to us and it is nice and relaxing just taking a walk.