Oh deer oh deer

So, I have yet to actually start doing any yoga. Instead, I am completely pre-occupied with my new hobby. Hiking. 

I was at the bookstore last week (again) looking for cookbooks and a map of this thing called PATHways--which is a system of paved bicycle/jogger/walking paths that run through DeKalb county and on towards Alabama. I couldn't just look up a map of the paths on-line, I had to order a book. And silly me, I figured the LOCAL bookstore would have a map of the LOCAL project. I was totallly wrong. 

But they DID have this great book called 60 Hikes within 60 Minutes of Atlanta. And that sounded much better than the PATHways thing. So I bought it.

And so far I have only hiked ONE of the 60. And not even the whole thing. But I'm completely obsessed now with exploring every area this book recommends. And let me show you why.

The place I've gone to, twice now, is called Arabia Mountain. It's about 30 minutes east of Decatur (where I live). Now I will quote the Arabia Mountain website: "Arabia Mountain is known as a rock outcrop and a monadnock. A monadnock is an isolated hill standing above the surrounding area, in this case wooded Piedmont land." 

Arabia is made of a kind of rock that used to be granite, and was transformed into something called "Lithonia gneiss" (apparently pronounced "nice.") It's about four hundred million years old, and has been an area of human settlement for the last seven thousand years. 

How cool is that?

Now, Arabia Mountain is in this big park that is, of course, a Nature Preserve. And I have to say, out of the two thousand acres this park encompasses, I have only hiked about three miles.

 

It's about a mile through these woods to get to the lake and the granite. And while I was trekking along, there was a tremendous rustling in the underbrush, and DEER came leaping out and bounded past me and off into the woods. DEER. 

 

Clearly, this is the lake.

 

 

 

And after trekking alongside the lake for a bit, there's this path of granite here, which leads to, oddly enough, granite.

  

  

  

  

  

  

And then there's these mysterious building remnants, and more Piedmont forest. 

And all of that was just one section of the Arabia Mountain Trail. Pretty neat, eh?