Green With Envy

It has been a while, hasn't it? Very busy two weeks producing pictures for the Torch and writing very long and complicated papers. I've still got quite a bit of work to finish before the year ends, but I really can't complain. It's all been pretty exciting!

I got a little reprieve from all the hurry of deadlines and citations last Saturday though. Spent the first half of the day traipsing around Central Park with Dr. Frank Cantelmo, his daughter and the one other person from my class who was willing and able to come on a weekend morning. Our little group was lucky to have Sgt. Sunny Corrao showing us around all the various areas of the park. We also picked up two other people along the way: a young couple from Pittsburgh that were in town for just the day.

In spite of the lackluster showing we had a blast and got to cover a pretty large swath of the park including some bits that are usually off limits, like the Hallett Nature Sanctuary. It was a pretty small part of the trip, but I think I got some of the best pictures there just because it's so different from the surrounding area of the park. Nestled right at the bottom of the park near the Pond, you'd never guess that such a beautiful little glade was just a few yards away.

The cool bit about the Hallett Sanctuary is that it's mostly undisturbed; the only time any fauna are removed is when it interrupts a small path that runs through the area. The entire place feels much more real than the other highly preened parts of Central Park, with fallen trees around the place in various states of decay and wild flowers blooming in patches.

As we moved up north through the rest of the park we began rambling through what is appropriately called The Ramble! A criss-crossing maze of rough paths, it's really easy to get lost there - and we likely would have had we not had Sunny guiding us. On our trip down the maze we happened upon a few trees that were totally covered in these very small white mushrooms. Sunny told us they were called turkey-tails, and that if we were ever lost and hungry in the forest they were actually quite edible (as long as they had a porous underside).

Dr. Cantelmo was pretty elated at this discovery and proceeded to eat a couple before we finished up our tour at Belvedere Castle. The whole trip was a lot of fun, and gave me an opportunity to take pictures of things I normally wouldn't think to like pine trees and rock formations.