Northern Iceland is a dream for the adventurous traveler (well, really Iceland as a whole, to be honest!). The Hverfjall crater, or Hverfjall volcano, in northern Iceland gives people the chance to walk the rim of an ancient volcano. It is one of the best preserved ancient volcanoes you can see today. Walking the rim of this huge crater gives visitors a sense of the immense size and dramatic explosion that must have occured when the crater was created between 2,500 and 2,900 years ago.
It was a mild winter day, and we decided to take another walk in a local wetland preservation area. We visited the Swift Wetland Preserve, a small nature conservation area in Delmar, New York, and for just a little while, we were able to get away from it all.
We had a mild winter’s day, and wanted to give our year and a half old son some fresh air. So, we decided to take him for a walk along the boardwalk at the Lewis A. Swyer Preserve. We had a beautiful winter walk that heightened the senses and energized the whole family. Even on a winter’s day, it was a wonderful way to spend some family time together and be closer to the nature that we love so very much.
I love walking in the woods in the fall. There’s something about the smell of leaves in crisp, cool air that revitalizes my senses. We visited the Stewart Preserve on a nice fall day. Though the sun was mostly hidden behind clouds, when it did decide to peek out, the forest glowed. We will definitely be returning to this beautiful place in the early spring to see what else it has to offer.
Our little weekend adventures to the various preserves in our area have been one of the most wonderful things that we have started doing since our son was born. Our initial intent was to get our son out of the city and into the woods. Now, I see that it’s not just about getting him outside, but it’s for ourselves as well. It keeps things in perspective to get out of the daily chaos into a quieter place. This allows us to focus on the little things that matter, like the changing of the colors of the leaves, or the sound of a raven in the distance.
With that in mind, we visited the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy’s Winifred Matthews Holt Preserve in New Scotland, in upstate New York. It is my favorite Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy preserve to date, and that’s saying a lot.
We decided to try a short little hike in the Catskills that we found using our AllTrails app that promised a waterfall along Kiskatom Brook, and stumbled onto a large network of trails created and maintained by the Round Top Mountain Bike Association (R.T.M.B.A.). The R.T.M.B.A. is working on providing riders with more mountain trails, and connecting local businesses in the process.
We found this little walk along the Lower Waterfall Trail and Ale Trail to be a lot of fun. With so many interconnecting trails, you really have a lot of flexibility when choosing your path. For such a short walk, the waterfall was totally worth it. However, now knowing that the trails were created for mountain bikes, next time I return it will be with a bike.
Continuing our day trip hiking adventures, we visited the Bennett Hill Preserve in upstate New York on a gorgeous crisp fall day. The leaves were just starting to change for autumn, gently padding the path, and the sun was shining brightly. It was a perfect day.
We parked our car once the road got too rough to drive on, and walked the rest of the way. The road wound past bee boxes, two beaches, with the blue Aegean flanking your right field of vision the entire way. The road turned around a bend and that was when we saw it. The Drakano Tower stood out starkly against the bright blue sky. We finally made it!
The Keleher Preserve is a conservation area in the town of New Scotland that is managed by the Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy. This is a larger preserve, with over 440 acres and offers miles of hiking trails with some overlooks of the city of Albany. We got a chance to hike around this gorgeous spot to take in the final days of summer. We even spied some leaves already starting to change color on us!
The Adirondacks are beautiful. They are immense, tall, rugged, and powerful. It had been several years since my last Adirondacks hike, when we decided to hike up to Cascade Mountain, I was thrilled. This provides a short day hike to a summit with a glorious 360 degree view of the Adirondack Mountains.