Self portrait, Christmas on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
For Christmas day doings, Henry and I packed up an outdoor dinner. For those of you familiar with the Blue Ridge Parkway, we went to Julian Price Park, hiked the Boone Fork Trail (about 5 miles) and then cooked out our noontime Christmas meal.
Boone Fork is a great trail. It's got a good bit of variety down through a gorge and along river and stream. There's also a high meadow and beaver-made wetlands. Clearly recent heavy rains have done some wash-out damage, but it's still a good trail. When there's no snow like Christmas this year, I recommend gaiters. I got my pants pretty muddy. But then I always seem to manage to do that...
Our menu was a buffalo steak (a "Cowboy" steak, bone-in ribeye, to be precise - from our friends at wildideabuffalo.com), baked potatoes (pre-cooked the night before) and a pop-top can of corn. We also had bright green-iced cupcakes, which we actually ate first because we were too hungry after the hike to wait for the main course to get done! Needless to say, the food was excellent. It was good to cozy up to the cook fire in the grill, too. Temps were in the low 30s so we cooled off from the hike pretty quickly.
Boone Fork is a great trail. It's got a good bit of variety down through a gorge and along river and stream. There's also a high meadow and beaver-made wetlands. Clearly recent heavy rains have done some wash-out damage, but it's still a good trail. When there's no snow like Christmas this year, I recommend gaiters. I got my pants pretty muddy. But then I always seem to manage to do that...
Our menu was a buffalo steak (a "Cowboy" steak, bone-in ribeye, to be precise - from our friends at wildideabuffalo.com), baked potatoes (pre-cooked the night before) and a pop-top can of corn. We also had bright green-iced cupcakes, which we actually ate first because we were too hungry after the hike to wait for the main course to get done! Needless to say, the food was excellent. It was good to cozy up to the cook fire in the grill, too. Temps were in the low 30s so we cooled off from the hike pretty quickly.