Hiking Glendening Nature Preserve

Sunday, August 9, 2020

Hi Blog!

We are on our own today. Matt and William went up to Philadelphia to visit Katie. We spent yesterday shopping, eating and catching up with Weina. She has a lot of work ahead of her to prepare for the upcoming school year. She's looking forward to a quiet weekend to get caught up. The boys will be back on Monday.

After doing a lot of driving yesterday, we looked for a hike close to our camp and discovered the Glendening Nature Preserve. Named after the former governor of Maryland, Parris N. Glendening, the preserve has a number of different hiking trails. If you strung them all together you could hike over seven miles. We decided to hike the perimeter of the preserve, but first we stopped at the butterfly garden.

Just beyond the parking lot was an amazing flower garden.

This had once been someone's farm, but we couldn't find much on the history of this land.

We must have spent at least 20 minutes wandering around the flowers trying to take pictures of butterflies.

We did manage to get these flowers to sit still long enough for a photo.

Here's our best butterfly.

As we mentioned in a previous blog, this area was in the path of Hurricane Isaias. Most of the damage to the trail was from flooding rains. While Southern Maryland saw two twisters, we were spared much of the high winds.

As we began our hike, we found ourselves climbing up to a sandy plateau above the Patuxent River. The sandy bluff is home to Loblolly Pine and Prickly Pear Cactus. Yes, there are cacti in Maryland. The Eastern Prickly Pear is the only cactus native to the Mid Atlantic and New England States. It is a low growing, nearly spineless cactus with bright yellow flowers.  It does have glochids.  These are tiny, hair-like barbed spines that look like tiny tufts of reddish brown hair.  When touched, or even slightly brushed, they go into the skin and become very irritating. We kept our distance.

We couldn't resist taking a stroll out the Chris Swarth Boardwalk. 

The boardwalk stretches some 450 feet through wetlands to a bend in Galloway Creek as it winds its way toward the Patuxent River. That spot will become a stopping point for canoes and kayaks on the Patuxent River Trail. The feeling you get as you leave the woods and enter the wetlands is expansive.

We haven't seen open space like this since we were in Alaska. We can't wait to get our kayaks over to this part of the Patuxent and explore Galloway Creek and Jug Bay.

After soaking up some sun, we ventured back into the woods. We came across a lean-to teepee.

We couldn't resist going in. We found a curious rock. We thought it might be a traveling rock, but we could find no web address or hashtag. We even checked our geocache app to see if there was a cache nearby, but nothing showed up. We put the rock back. Some questions just can't be answered.

As we made our way from the Red Oak Trail to the Cliff Trail, we took a small spur trail out to a point overlooking the Wrighton Branch. Part of the creek was dammed to make a small farm pond.

The recent rains left their mark on the Wrighton Branch. Much of the creek bed was scoured out.

We finished our 4.25 mile hike with a leisurely stroll along the Blueberry Trail. Unfortunately, it was well past blueberry season and the bushes were bare.

As it was getting close to lunch time, we decided to return to the Jeep and head over to the Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary Visitor Center and eat our sandwiches in air conditioned comfort.

More on today's adventures in the next blog.