
Saturday afternoon on our way home from Lafayette we drove down to Pine Hills Nature Preserve. Collin has a radio spectrometer on loan for a couple weeks, so he wanted to get some hemlock, Canadian yew, and pine needle samples for his remote sensing research. Pine Hills is very near Shades State Park and Clements Canoes. It's got very steep topography changes (read: very tall, narrow cliffs) and two serpentine creeks. Cool place.

Annie slept most of the hike, which worked well for all of us. I was trying to figure out why I can hike easily up and down cliffs with a 10 lb baby tied onto my belly, and would have been totally unable to do so with a 6 lb baby inside my belly. The best answer I could come up with was that since I can take Annie on and off now, I'm not so tired when I need to hike. I'm not entirely satisfied with that answer.

For the steeper scrambles up the cliffs we had to hand Annie off to each other.

We hiked across a ridge called Turkey's Backbone, sometimes just a few feet wide and dropping sheerly off about 50 feet to either side. Then we climbed down to creek-level, forded the stream, and prepared to hike up to Devil's Backbone.

There's the backbone. It's always hard to get an idea of how steep any cliff is in a photo, but take my word for it, that's a narrow, shear drop off. It had tons of deep carvings in the rock, many chiseled in the late 1800s.

This dove has a speech balloon with the date 1877 and the names Elkannah and Howard.

Annie wasn't too impressed with the scenery, but didn't mind the climb either.

Up at the top of the backbone we found this card, dated Oct 31, 2009 (that day). It was right on the edge of the highest point, and my first thought when I saw it was that it was a little commemorative altar to the place where someone had fallen to his death. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a birthday card, apparently waiting for some dad to find it. When we hiked by the first time, there was just a feather with the card. When we passed by on our way back, someone had added a Snicker bar. Mysterious.


Getting back in Louis, ready to feed Annie and head home.

Driving through the back highways and little towns made for a beautiful way to spend the evening. We passed through a couple small towns and saw some really cute groups of trick-or-treaters. To top it all off, we stopped at our favorite diner, The Monon, in Greencastle. It was our first dinner at a restaurant since Annie was born, and it went really well.

Once we got home, Collin brought out the radio spectrometer (that white/gray box with the tiny old laptop and all the cords coming out of it) and tried it out with his samples. He still has a lot to do with it, and all the needle samples are still sitting in plastic bags in my fridge. Being married to a biologist makes me smile.