Odds and Ends: Old Rag, A Perfect Day, and the National Arboretum

I'm catching up on the last few weeks:

We volunteered on Old Rag two weeks ago on a lovely (weather-wise) Saturday. It was absolute madness. We arrived at 9 a.m. and the parking lot was already full. There was a line of 12 or so cars waiting to turn into the parking lot. The neighbor was already charging people to park in her pasture and she had opened up a second pasture so even more people could give her cash hike Old Rag.  We spent an hour in the lot talking to people about the hike and handing out flyers to recruit for Old Rag Mountain Stewards. When we turned on the radios at 10 a.m., we found an incident had just started. We headed up the mountain, pushing past lines of people and spent the morning assisting a hiker who had taken an unfortunate fall. It was about as smooth of an evacuation as we could have asked for and we spent most of the rest of the day on the summit, talking to people as they passed through. In my haste in the morning, I forgot my camera, so all of these are taken with Michael's camera, which is a point and shoot.

The helicopter approaching.

 I already talked about the crowding. That was before we had to close the trail for almost an hour while we worked to evacuate the patient. If you click to enlarge, you'll see the crowd backed up just after we re-opened the trail.

 The spot near the summit where I always take a picture.

 Changing leaves in the valley.

 Looking south from the summit.

The following week, we were contacted by NPS staff about helicopter hoist training on that Friday. Did we want to attend? Of course! It wound up being an amazing day.

To make it to Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park by the training start time, we left the house at 5:15 in the morning and picked up another volunteer at the metro at 5:45 a.m. There was much grumbling all around, but then we got to see this nice sunrise:

 Looking east from Skyline Drive

 Old Rag on the right from Pinnacles Overlook on Skyline Drive

 Everyone taking pictures!

When we were almost to Big Meadows, we saw a mother bear and two cubs hunting for food near the road. This cub was nice enough to pose for us.

All three of the bears. The bears and the sunrise made us forget our unhappiness at having gotten up so early.

Then there was the training:

We spent most of the morning practicing attaching a litter to the hoist on the helicopter. Everyone had to wear fire-resistant clothing for the training.

Then, we got the chance to be hoisted up onto the helicopter while it was in the air, which was amazing. I am the person on the left in this picture. It wasn't actually all that high, but it was still pretty darn cool. Many thanks to the US Park Police and Shenandoah National Park staff for including us in the training.

Last weekend, the weather was kind of gross, so we went down to the National Arboretum.

 The bonsai exhibit is always fun to walk through. This time, there was a special exhibit of deciduous bonsai trees in the process of changing colors for fall.

 The old Capitol columns.

 The path in the native plants area.

Blue Bottle Gentian (Gentian andrewsii) - the last of the season's flowers.