Yesterday was a beautiful day!  It was the perfect day for a hike in the woods.  Audrey has been an intern at Bull Run Mountain Conservancy for about 8 months now, and helped out with a lot of the summer camps.  She set up a hike for our Middle School group to tour the mountain.  It was a perfect day! 

We started our hike looking at some of the historic sites around Chapmans Mill.  To the right, Audrey is talking about the ice house—a twenty foot deep cavern in the ground built out like a huge stone wall, that was used to keep things cold by storing ice in the bottom and creating a grid of beams to hold the food items.  See this wall they are all leaning on?  Audrey helped build that as part of her internship.

 

We found a ton of wildlife, which was pretty awesome because they weren’t your run-of-the-mill wildlife.  She found two types of salamanders, a HUGE millipede, a fence lizard (below), and even a baby hog nosed snake, who was VERY cool (left).  He spent a lot of time puffing himself up, and making himself look fierce while Audrey let the kids pet him.  But, completely harmless.  They are hog nosed, because...they have a turned up nose like a pig!