Huntsville the First

2025-04-01
Huntsville, AL

Today is the cooler of the two days I have in Huntsville, so I decided to use it for a hike while tomorrow I can take advantage of the air conditioning. I headed over to Monte Sano State Park to tackle the Sinks, Stone Cuts, and Northern Plateau loop. I learned early on that Monte Sano has a lot of trails and it's pretty easy to make a wrong turn. Even on the map, the slight right vs the slightly more right are hard to pick out. Thus I managed to stretch the 2.5 mile loop to 3.1 miles, with the occasional backtrack

Spring is just reaching Alabama, and many dogwoods, cherries, and redbuds are in bloom. The leaves are coming in on the trees, and it feels like everything is waking up.

The Stone Cuts are the most unusual part of the trail. For the avid blog follower (thank you both!) it isn't that much different than parts of the Ledges Trail at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Large chunks of stone have split, and a challenging trail goes between them. It does involve a bit of crawling, climbing, and wishing you had eaten a smaller breakfast.

Around that corner is a rock pile you need to climb

The other goal for Monte Sano was to visit the Civilian Conservation Core museum. I have hiked many trails carved by these intrepid workers, and I was hoping to get a little more insight into their life. I had planned to seek out the museum after the hike, but I stumbled across it while hiking. As museums go, it's rather small. The building is about the size of a small bedroom, maybe ten feet square. Of course it's locked. There is no sign nor posting on the web site saying what their hours are, so all I can say about when it will be open is "not today."

I wanted to find out if 50 workers slept in this cabin

After hiking, I met up with Ron, a former coworker who had retired in 2016. I figured he would have this down by now, and to be fair, it seems he does. He suggested that we meet at the former company office. Unfortunately Google was unable to find "previous office location" and kept suggesting the current one, so he gave me directions and we met up.

I think he had a growth spurt in retirement.

You can just barely see where they scraped the company name off the front of the building.

We strolled around the lovely grounds. It's very natural. And there are very few people on this campus these days. I don't know if corporate offices will ever recover, or if they will find new purpose.

Ron also knew about the DNA trail, where they have double-helix paths and literally a sign for each genome. It's pretty cool, especially for a corporate park trail. We wandered over there, but I soon realized that I hadn't put on sun screen (not needed at home yet) and my legs were tiring so we headed back, and found some shade to chat a bit.

Each gene and what it does. Study while you walk!

We ended up talking for about two and a half hours and I could have listened for far longer. Adding friends to this trip seems to be working so far. My best wishes to Dave who is with his sick mother and unable to meet me this trip.