Day 4.180: Christman in July

Having dropped Exile #3 off for a birthday-party-theme-park-visit-sleep-over and become a family of four until the middle of the day tomorrow, we set off to visit somewhere new - the Christman Sanctuary near Duanesburg NY.

Our hope had been to loop around the whole sanctuary, but we had not factored-in yesterday's rain which not only made some of the trails into shallow ponds and some into streams, but made the ford across Bozen Kill completely impassable.  Not that we were disappointed for long.  We saw lots of interesting plants and fungi:

and some insects:

Those damselflies look just like bright blue flying sticks when they are moving around - there's no sign of their wings at all until they land.

The kids had lots of fun including Exile #4's engineering project and E5N1's piece of small-scale land art:

and, of course, the recent heavy rains meant for dramatic waterfalls:

I'm sure we will go back and attempt to access the orange trail, but this was a great introductory visit. We walked about a mile (circuit of the blue trail plus the yellow trail section to the waterfall and back) and that meant we had a bit of energy left for yard-work when we got home!

Now, thanks to the Nature Conservancy, we have another list of places to check out!

All those photos and more are available here.