Top O' The Hill Farm: Monday trail ride and beavers at work

Monday is Keri and Teasel's day out. Where shall we go ? I suggested trotting up Fletcher Hill. We have not really explored up there much-- there are a lot of trails and we don't know where any of them go yet-- we started the trek by heading up my little mountain road headed toward Zoe's house.

Some of the trails are running brooks.

Lots of photo's of Keri's ears this morning. We trot by Zoe's house, cross the highway and trot up Fletcher Hill Road, where we have our choice of trails.

Because of the tremendous amounts of falling water we've experienced.. the woods are very damp.. the evaporating mists make it seem like we can see the sunshine.

We are thinking to try to head toward Ephraim and the "pink house' -- so we know we want to cross Pleasant Valley Road at some point-- so in choosing the turns, we try to get situated in that direction. There are so many choices-- we are definitely going to head back here for more exploration. A couple of times we turned around and trotted back to try a different turn.

We ended up behind the large beaver pond-- we've been on the opposite side many times-- never here.

As we look around-- there is still trail.. but silly beavers have begun construction on a little dam across the trail and are forming a new pond.

Keri is looking at that dam-- thinking... you are NOT going to ask me to hop that dam and walk through that pond ??

Yes- my dear lovely Keri-- that's exactly where we are going-- I can see the trail over and across. I actually took several photo's of this little dam partly to heckle Keri about it..

I know that's not particularly nice or polite-- but Keri and I understand each other and our little bratty digs at each other are merely tokens of affection :) Some days she's the brat-- somedays I am.

I am hoping the other side of the dam is fairly solid pond bottom and not sinking mud.. but my thoughts are.. it's a pretty new project since some of the saplings in the dam still have leaves on them... so the ground is probably still somewhat firm.

At any rate--- onwards and upwards-- back on dry trail, but we still need to get over to the other side of Pleasant Valley Road.

As we trot through the woods-- we see the road. In order to get across-- we need to travel down through someone's yard-- so a lucky co-incidence.. we know this person so I am sure she won't mind us using her property as a pass through. Doing some landscaping here..

Once on the road- we change our route a bit to add a little more mileage. We head down Pleasant Valley Road to Rassmussen Road-- which leads up past the Vista View Farm and ends up as a trail over Mount Ephraim. I have posted views from this farm before-- but so beautiful !!

onto the Mount Ephraim trail .. we got in some great canters here.

We arrive at the 'pink house' on top of Mount Ephraim.. one of my favorite places. Here is where Stellafane hosts their annual star gazing in the fall.

Views are very pretty !

The old Porter Turret telescope as you can see built in 1930.

They don't use this anymore as they have built a very new modern telescope. You can see the pink house in the background.

Well, according to the sun dial here.. it's time to get trotting home. It's actually 1:00... but I guess there's no way to adjust the sun dial to daylight savings time.