A Return To Hays Brook, Part 1

I loaded the dogs into the car and headed southward one recent Saturday morning to pick up a new dog to join our family. We stopped along the way for a rest stop at our beloved Hays Brook Trail. There were no other cars parked there and we had the whole place to ourselves:

Monstrous brown mushrooms lined the trail and mingled with the mosses and blueberries alongside the trail:

Big pines and spruces filled the forest on both sides of us, every bit as magical a setting as I'd remembered:

And the Lowbush Blueberries were ripe. They were small, but tasty - and I tasted quite a few of them:

We arrived at a spot with fallen logs which I remembered marked a deer path:

So we left the trail and walked across the emerald moss carpeting to see where it would take us:

This looked to me like the nursery rhyme Black Forest scenes of childhood fairy tales. Fergus seemed to think it was all pretty darn nifty too:

Madeline chugged along like a little furry locomotive, sniffing her way through the forest:

Daphne and Clover kept running ahead and I kept shouting, "Stop!" Apparently, they still hadn't fully grasped the new rule about sticking close to me:

We continued on the mossy deer path, headed toward a high ridge:

The incline was gradual and easy. Even an old codger with bad ankles like me had no trouble:

We continued upward, on alternating series of flat and sloped surfaces. I had no idea what I'd find when I reached the top, but that will be in tomorrow's post: