This hike took place on Sunday, April 25, 2010…

Steve D. invited me on a Radnor Lake hike on Sunday afternoon, one day after the largest storms Nashville has seen yet this year. We took a chance that there would be parking spaces available in the East lot, and we scored a spot. Starting from the East parking lot, we struck out on the connector trail and started to ascend Ganier Ridge.

The first thing we noticed on the connector trail was the excessive washout on the trail. Radnor Lake employees and volunteers have laid down what must be a record amount of mulch and/or wood chips on some sections of the trails this year, and a large percentage of this trail medium was washed away due to the heavy rains that occurred Friday night and Saturday. The extent of the washout was eye-opening.

The vast woodland fields of purple flowers, one of the spring highlights on the East side, have faded away.

Since I learned the call of the Red-Bellied Woodpecker a few weeks ago, it seems I hear them everywhere.

As is often the case when the weather is in question, I checked the radar at weather.com before the hike – and it showed increasing cloud cover and sporadic showers which could possibly affect our excursion. It was indeed very windy – probably gusting up to 25 MPH or more, and it felt great.

We saw several deer and not too much else.

From the east lot, we hiked up and down Ganier Ridge, took a left on the Lake Trail, across the spillway bridge, along the dam to Otter Creek Road, the length of the South Lake Trail coming out on Otter Creek Road once again, and followed the road back to the East parking lot.

We stopped to take photographs at the spillway bridge, on the South Lake trail where we saw several deer, and finally along Otter Creek road where there was quite a bit of red Trumpet Vine growing in the honeysuckle along the lake. Steve and I took more pictures of these wonderful trumpet vine flowers than anything else today.

On the south side of Otter Creek Road there are three cut-off sections of the lake, which basically take the form of swamps. There are two small swamps and one very large swamp. Due to the very heavy rain and storms that occurred over the weekend, the water in all three swamps was brown, even in the big swamp toward the east end of the lake. The wind was really gusting and the sky was darkening as these photographs were taken.

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