A Winter Walk

Hi everyone. Hope the last few days of this year are going well for you.  

While my daughter was home over the past weekend, we went out for a couple of walks. One morning we checked out the Great Bay Wildlife Refuge. It is about 30 minutes from the house, and I have been wanting to walk this trail for awhile now. 

I'm glad we  went early in the day because when we finished there were several cars that  had just arrived in the parking lot with big crowds of people. We only passed 2 couples during our time walking, and I enjoyed being able to walk in the quiet of nature, not the chatter of people.

Our Christmas rain got rid of the snow down here by the coast, so except for a bit of soggy ground, it made nice walking.

I discovered there are 2 trails. The first one we walked  is a 2 mile loop.

The trail meandered through some woodland, by a large field, and then we ended up on the shore of Great Bay. 

The tide was up. It looks cold out on the water. Although it was around 40 degrees  (just over 4 degrees C), it was cloudy, damp and raw feeling.

It was a beautiful place to walk. 

The trail was a bit damp, and in some spots there were some cool ice fragments forming on the ground..

I get a childlike thrill from stepping on this kind of ice and hearing it crack and crunch, but I left it for the next walkers to find.

When we got back to the parking lot, we noticed there was another trail. This one said it was only a half a mile, so we decided to do this also. 

This one was completely a boardwalk trail. It meandered through the wood and down to a small wet area.

There's been some busy woodpeckers I think.

And there was some nice reflections at the  wet area, which I think might also be tidal.

It was a great walk, and I burned off some of those holiday calories too.  Smile!

It is also hard to believe that all this beauty sits behind this former weapon storage area. The area is now known as the Pease Tradeport, but use to be Pease Airforce Base, an offensive air base that closed in the late 1980's.  Since this base used to have nuclear weapons at it, I bet this area is capped underground and why it is fenced off.  To get to the trails you need to walk around this huge fenced off  section. 

I think it is fitting that it is   now a wildlife natural sanctuary. 

As it once was, or as the quote goes, "What goes around, comes around."

Happy second to the last day of 2020. We're almost done!