Canaan Valley NWR, West Virginia

There's a little marsh park with a boardwalk in the Canaan Valley Nation Wildlife Refuge, called the Freedland Trail. It's just a short walk, but it leads to a beaver-dammed bog with a bunch of dead trees.

 

 

All those dead trees would be a sad thing, except that they were full of Cedar Waxwings. I've never seen more than two at a time, so it was pretty exciting to see a flock of them. Really hard to get a shot of them, too, because they almost never stop moving. They'll perch for a couple of seconds, then off they go. See the little red "wax" tips on the ends of their wing feathers? Click on the photo to get a better view.

 

 

This panorama is one of my favorite shots from the trip - it looks so peaceful:

 

 

The farm is just across the road from the bog.

 

 

No idea what this flower is, just pretty and kind of frothy-looking. The flowers in bloom in the marsh are different from what you see in northeastern Ohio. The Highlands are said to be closer to Canada ecologically. This is the area that got snow dumped on it last week, during hurricane Sandy.

Pretty gloomy weather, as you can tell from some of the photos, but good for photography.

Potomac Highlands, West Virginia, September, 2012

For those of you who get this via e-mail, it looks a lot nicer on the blog. The formatting looks better.

Blackwater Falls State Park

Chuck and I went to West Virginia for a short vacation Labor Day week. We stayed at the Bright Morning Inn in Davis, just a few minutes drive from Blackwater Falls State Park. Blackwater is in the Potomac Highlands on the east side of the state, just below the Maryland panhandle. Pretty spectacular scenery, deep gorges, rocky outcroppings, and a hundred waterfalls on every stream. As you can see in a couple of the photos, the Blackwater gorge was invisible in the fog at times.

The first three photos are were taken from the Pendleton Point Overlook shortly after we arrived at the park. 

 

 

The view below is from the overlook at the Lodge a couple evenings later. It's a HDR to cope with the contrast in the sunset and mountain sides.

 

We stopped early in the morning for sunrise - but got dense fog instead. It look like the world ended just past that ridge.

We made friends with a young cat - he was just a bundle of energy, zooming around the terrace, chasing leaves and grasshoppers. Quite the cutie.

That white behind Chuck is a wall of fog blanketing the entire gorge.

An elderly deer pretty much ignored us as she snacked her way down the side of the road.

More photos to come - it's just a beautiful area.