A Snake, Some Tears , A Turtle Ghost and More!

Welcome to my Wednesday Walk! I hope you're ready cause this is gonna be another big one! Grab a cup of coffee and get comfy! My photos are from my walk along the South (White Trail) of the Gunpowder Falls State Park in the Hereford Area of Monkton, Maryland. Monkton is also part of Baltimore County.

My walk started off easy enough and some of the views on this trail are just beautiful. This is the entrance to the trail and a couple of shots from the immediate area.

I only made one other short post about this trip and I'll still have a few photos left for another one besides this one. This is the trail that has the I-83 bridge above it.

It was noisy under the bridge but the noise dissipated very quickly after we crossed under it. We (husband and I) walked over this little bridge and I took a couple more shots of the water before we started up what seemed like a slight hill.

I stopped just a little ways up the hill to take a photo of some baby trees that were growing along side of a tree.

This is a photo from the top of the hill. I know! It doesn't look so high and it didn't feel so high either (at this point).

The trail on the hill was winding so it was easy to not feel exactly how high it was becoming and the winding made the walk easy also.

I am glad we weren't around when this one came down! Actually, I don't want to be around when any of them come down!

Here is another tree that looks like it fell a long time ago. I thought it looked interesting how the wood was breaking down.

The trail up on the hill was nice for the most part and we only had to navigate around and over a few fallen trees along the way.

I should mention that my walk is from this Spring so it was a very nice day and everything was turning green and blossoming.

Right about here is where the trail took a downward turn. Looked fairly easy and it was, just had to be careful not to slip on the loose stone.

This spot here was pretty cool to walk through!

This spot was also interesting because it is where I almost stepped on a snake! It startled me but didn't scare me as I knew it was just a very big garter snake. At least, I was pretty sure it was just a garter snake.

Snakes in general don't scare me but I'm also not a huge fan. Made for a nice photo op though and it was a short stop from getting down to the water again.

Now, I know there must be other ways into this area because we came across an area where there use to be a bridge to the other side, a man fishing and a couple of areas where groups of people can gather.

Oh well! Was worth the trip in regardless! We saw a trail leading back along the water so decided to take the lower trail back and of course that made for more beautiful views of the water as well.

We even came across a few mushrooms along the way!

The lower trail was starting to get a bit sketchy at this point and we found ourselves trying to pick it up after it abruptly ended in spots and in one particular spot among the brambles I came across this poor little turtle that had passed away. It was so odd seeing his ghostly white shell. Maybe it was a bad omen!

You see what we didn't know at the time is that most of the lower trail had been washed out by all the rains we had last year. There was nothing we could do except try to get up to the higher trail. Goodbye water and hello hill!

Going up the hill was a lot harder without a trail...yep...no trail! trying to go up a hill and sideways at times about killed me. I'm not joking either. I was in a lot of pain now and was having pains in my chest which was probably a panic attack. I had no idea how far off the actual trail was so I sat down on a fallen tree while my husband scouted ahead. I sat and had so many thoughts going through my head. We should've just back tracked and taken the way out that we came in but oh no that would've been the smarter thing to do. Yeah so this is where the tears came in because I literally felt like I was going to have a heart attack and could barely walk. My husband came back and he found that we weren't far from picking up the high trail. This was the last photo that I took before he returned. I remember thinking that if this was the last scenery that I saw before dropping dead then it wasn't so bad and felt almost serene. I also wasn't planning on making the local news so I rested a few minutes more, put the camera away and pulled myself together to get up to that trail and back to the truck.

It took me a long time to recover from this one folks and I still don't feel like I've fully recovered. Would I do it again? If you asked me that for a few weeks after then I would say no way! Now I can say that I would try it again! Knowing that there was no longer a lower trail would've helped and I know that there are other ways in so we'll be looking that up for, hopefully, a Fall trip back. I think the views were totally worth it as was the snake, some tears and the turtle ghost!

Thank you @tattoodjay for #wednesdaywalk!!