One thing that is an absolute fact, we sure enjoy our weekends. Some weekends we have specific plans and you can be pretty certain those plans involve the outdoors. Other times our plan is to have no plan at all. These are the days that we wander aimlessly. This day our wandering led us to the back corners and backwoods of Clearfield County. Most people might say, "Whoda' Thunk" there are so many cool things to be seen while flying by the seat of our pants. Some of these cool things will be shown digitally in this log entry while some others will be shown on our "Enjoying All That Nature Offers" blog.
Now that's what we call a Humongous Fungus!! When we first saw this huge thing we weren't quite sure what it was but we knew we needed to check it out more closely. We have never seen such a large mushroom or fungus. It was actually quite heavy as is evident by her grip on this thing. It was pretty much cylindrical in shape which is saying that it was globe shaped rather than a flattened shape. It was an awesome thing to hold and behold. Had we not stumbled onto it, it may had just rotted away without anyone noting it's existence.
If you see something like this, you would be wise to let it bee!
As we explored the backwoods of Clearfield County we ran across this huge and might I say "active" wasp nest. How would you like to be hiking in the woods and not paying attention and bump your head into this thing? Just the thought of it makes my butt pucker.
Whoda' Thunk something so awesome could bee built by a bunch of wasps using nothing but a mixture of chewed up wood pulp and saliva. Ain't nature something!
Wandering aimlessly is one of our favorite past times. You never know what's around the next bend, over the next hill or just on the other side of the mud hole that you probably shouldn't have driven through. Hey, that's all part of the adventure. I don't really believe AAA would be coming to rescue us if things turned sour. Here's one of the rewards of our wanderings. We were following this nice road, which turned into a decent trail which turned into a decent path which turned into a dry creek bed which ended at a railroad track. We had reached a point where we could go no further so we decided to take a look and consider our options. As we walked in front of the Jeep we had an awesome tunnel entrance to our immediate left and a trestle over the West Branch to our right. In the distance we could see I-80.
We decided to first check out the tunnel. We have walked through more RR tunnels than common sense should have allowed but this wasn't going to be one of them. It was obvious that this tunnel had a pretty drastic curve in it's depth as there was no light coming through from the far side. This particular tunnel also narrowed significantly toward the bottom and provided no visible place to stay clear of a passing locomotive. I later checked it out on Google Earth and found it to nearly 3000 feet in length. I couldn't resist walking back in and shooting some time exposures with the tripod mounted Canon. Even while looking at the small camera display I was intrigued by the fog hovering close to the floor of the tunnel.
As I said, there wasn't exactly a road going back into this place.
2 comments:
Tom,
Your mushroom is most likely the Giant Puffball – Calvatia gigantea.
Gee wonder where they came up with that name?
That is one big shroom. And that wasp nest looked like it had those white faced bees, which I have found are the meanest bees out there. And that is one cool tunnel. Where was it?
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