I wanted to take a day trip to hike in an island on the CT river called Selden Island. The CT Audubon society was organizing it so my mother-in-law and I went. There were a tree expert, a bird specialist, and an historian talking about the island and its features. Got some nice photos from the landscape and I am so astonished that in a state like CT where I thought nothing new would strike me, I did get struck in fact by the beauty of nature. We saw a bald eagle on the way, could not take a significant photo of him because he was perched too high on a tree on the bank. I noticed a few other birds like blue jays, chickadees, and the infatigable gulls. Saw blue herons too! Learned a few things about the native plants, especially about dead hemlock trees ravaged by Japanese tree beetles. The historian was fascinating as he was telling stories of how the island was mined for a certain type of stones back in the 1800s, 1900s. We actually saw artifacts old pieces of metals from horse carts, you could actually see as he pointed it out how blacksmiths forged the metal because of certain deformations occurring on the edge of the piece of metal. It was so cool! He also talked about the actual mining of the stones and showed us stones with holes in them that had been bored by hand, mind you, and were used to crack a rock apart. The technique was to bore a hole with a chisel and a hammer, put in the hole a wedge with 2 other pieces called feathers, and as the worker hammered the wedge in, it would push the feathers apart, putting pressure inside the rock, and eventually fissuring it.

One good thing about today's trip was the beautiful weather and a cool, but very bearable temperature that did not make hiking a sweating adventure. I think that the average age on this trip was about 60 years-old. All the other people there were rich local people, retired obviously, and enjoying their last trip of the year in CT before going down to Florida. It was funny to see them walking around with these perfectly nice hiking clothes from expensive outdoors stores and snow sticks that would use in the snow to help you climb. I thought they probably needed the sticks, but they still looked weird walking around with them when there is no snow! lol...