Return To The Rutland Trail - Part 1

Our snow had been melting for several days and I decided it was time to take the dogs out once again. We drove to the nearest trail, the Rutland Nature Trail, only five miles from home:

The dogs were so excited that the first part of the hike had me yelling at them to keep them from running too far ahead. Daphne, usually one of the best behaved, was particularly excited on this day and the woods rang with echos of "Daphne, no!" and "Daphne, stop!" She'd look at me with curiosity as if wondering why I was acting so stupidly and then run back to me, all happy and pleased with herself:

Seamus went exploring, looking at a small rivulet through the woods and discovering that it was still so frozen that he could walk across it:

 A little farther on, the rivulet came up closer to the trail and then Clover and Jack decided it might be interesting:


Daphne joined them to check it out:

I learned that the center of the trail was all ice, so I stayed on the snowy sides of the trail. The dogs quickly figured that out also:

We soon arrived at the bridge over Allen Brook:

I paused to take a photo of lovely Allen Brook in winter:

But we soon turned back and headed for the car. There is a side trail along Allen Brook which we've explored briefly on previous trips, so we turned down it once again to see the scenery:

The forest was older there, mostly conifers, and the snow was dotted with lots of wild animal tracks which the dogs found fascinating:

Lovely Allen Brook gurgled and burbled along to our left:

And we continued on, farther than we'd ever gone before, doing a bit of exploring. I'll post about that in Part 2, tomorrow: