There is a reason why I no longer go camping without my camera. It is the same reason I love hiking West Virginia’s backwoods - the scenery.

Of course I can’t go into the Peachtree area on a photo taking adventure and not stop at Peachtree Falls.

Last but definitely not least, this turtle was practically begging for his picture to be taken.

I spent the Memorial Day weekend 26 hard miles south of nowhere and loved every minute of it. I was out on my first real camping trip of the year into the backwoods.

It’s beautiful in the mountains, right now especially. There are a lot of wildflowers in bloom. The most noticeable is the raspberry bloom, or to be more true to my roots - them dadburn briar thicket flowers.

You could be blind and know you are in the vicinity of a raspberry bush when they are in bloom. They have a very strong sweet fragrance.

I’m going to have to look for help with these next three flowers. The first one I know but it has been longer than my memory can hold out nowadays. I just can’t remember the name.

When I started posting to this blog again I said I wasn’t going to talk about mountaintop removal but I am with this post just to simply say - this is why I fight. Why would we want to destroy something so precious?

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Adding - I believe the orange blossom is a variety of Honeysuckle.

I went back to the field a couple of days ago and checked on the nest of the Red-wing Blackbirds and found they are indeed lucky parents. They will only have one mouth to feed. Or more than likely they already have the one mouth to feed. I’ll find out tomorrow.

There is not much to do on the mountain today. It has been raining off and on since late last night. So I took the opportunity to play with the camera a little bit and a couple of photo enhancing programs.

I took this particular photo because I like the way water beads on plants and I wanted to see if my fairly inexpensive camera could capture the essence. The jury is still out on that one but while playing around with some software I think it created some interesting views.

I love to sit on my back porch early in the morning. It is amazing the activity from birds and animals as the sun comes up. This morning I watched these two deer play in the field for over an hour.

I had also been seeing a lot of Red-winged Blackbirds. With just a short walk in the field I found a nest.

I would say in the next week or so this nest will contain eggs. Hopefully I can continue to photograph the nest even after the new family is present. I watched the area for some time after taking the photos and the female Red-wing was right back at her work.

Adding this picture of the blackbird. To see a good photo you can visit the link above. This bird is the guardian of the nest and seems to be very reluctant to get his picture taken. It is the best I can do for now.

I would have to say out of all of the photos I have taken in the past few years this one is my favorite.

Not only is it a rare thing for a hillbilly from Bolt Mountain to be in a position to take a photo such as this one but it is an even rarer event to be a hillbilly from Bolt Mountain standing on a CSX bridge in the middle of the Potomac. I would almost guarantee you could count the number of times it has happened before on one hand.

I did get one other picture the same night which is almost as cool but it doesn’t have monuments in it. The train in both photos is an Amtrack train on an adjacent track (50 to 100 yards away) travelling in opposite directions.

It seems like for the longest time I haven’t done much writing here. Even though that is the case this blog has been the one to remain consistent. I may not have updated it much but it has always been right here.

This blog has just hit one milestone and is about to hit another. With Google’s last update this website hit a pagerank of 4. I think that is simply awesome. It is the first time I have ever had a blog with a pagerank higher than 3. The Backwoods Drifter blog probably would have achieved a 4 with the latest update as well but moving it from Blogger to it’s own domain reset the pagerank to 0.

Another milestone for this blog, it is two weeks shy of one year old.

Lately I have been attempting to come over to this blog more so than in the past. Since I’ve been fighting mountaintop removal on two other blogs, this one is becoming my means of escaping to sanity. For the most part I am going to keep MTR off this blog from now on. I do have a page here for mountaintop removal photos but as far as talking about it here, I’m not going to do it.

Big Coal River

Edwight, West Virginia