Barnum Pond And A Return To The Globe Thistle

I was on my way home from a weekend at the farm with all six dogs in the car. We'd had a wonderful visit and I was anxious to get back to Albany, so I suppose I should have stopped taking pictures and concentrated on driving as directly as possible to my destination. But the day and the scenery were so lovely that I just had to keep snapping photos. Route 30 took us right past Barnum Pond, a gem of a mountain lake whose shoreline, as you can see here, is a only a few feet from the road:

I stopped only briefly at Barnum Pond to admire the serene beauty and chuckled at the seriousness of Daphne and Clover as they looked on also:

We drove on through the High Peaks Region and through the Keene Valley to where Route 9N cuts off toward Elizabethtown. There I turned off for a brief rest stop just to see the Globe Thistle plant which had amazed me last year:

Alas, it was past its blooming prime but still had a few blossoms. I'd planned to collect seeds from it last autumn but then forgot. I did go back in the springtime but the seeds were all gone. I really want to try again this year. I'm imagining a whole line of Globe Thistles growing along the wall of my milk house or along the dogs' fence:

And of course there was plenty of Goldenrod in full bloom:

I made a mental note of where the Globe Thistle could be found in the autumn and then continued walking:

Little Clover bounded through the tall grass and wildflowers like a dog on springs:

Daphne was determined to eat as many greens as possible. This seems to be a breed characteristic of Papillons since both of mine are ravenous eaters of greenery:

We turned back toward the car:

I was not able to identify this Phlox-like plant but it was blossoming abundantly:

I arrived back at the car where Wally and Winky were waiting. Both of these old timers are prone to wandering off so I have to check on them frequently:

I got all six dogs loaded back into the car and backed carefully out of the woods onto the highway. From there it was a straight run back to Albany with no rest stops: