Trail Day: Fountainhead

For our next trail day (which was in mid-July--I'm way behind on reporting) we went to Fountainhead Regional Park in Fairfax Station. This was where I ran the amazing VHTRC women's half-marathon trail race last September (http://lizer.blogspot.com/2013/09/september.html), which now I wish I had signed up for again this year. Maybe I'll email and see if there are any last-minute open spots... I could totally train in a month, even though I haven't run more than 5 miles at a time since last fall. Right? Ha! Anyway, it was SO beautiful and so perfect. I was excited to bring the kids back.

There's a little marina on the Occoquan Reservoir where you can rent rowboats or kayaks, or go fishing. There's fishing gear for rent too.

The marina is further in, but the hiking and bike trails are near the entrance. So we backtracked, after visiting the reservoir, to go on our actual hike. We went on the blue loop (I call it the blue loop because there were blue trailblazes and white trailblazes) which the guy at the dock said was 2 miles but it really did not feel like that far. So maybe he was talking about a different loop.

Whatever loop it was, not far into it we found a little family cemetery. Spooky yet sweet.

I tried (unsuccessfully) to capture a sense of the height of the trees behind us in this photo. These trees started in the bottom of a canyon of sorts below us, and ended waaaay up above us. Those were some tall trees.

I was grateful for the blazes, because there were dozens of forks in the trail. In fact we got off track a few times. Luckily at least one of us was always paying attention so someone (a different person each time) always noticed when we went too far without seeing a blaze.

Ida and Lars promptly fell asleep on the way home.

We have had a very mild summer and I've tried to plan our trail days to line up with the most pleasant weather days. That effort was mostly successful. This particular day was beautiful--about 75 degrees and low humidity--and we'll definitely go back before the summer ends. Especially if we get more nice days like this one was. We'll go in the fall, too. There is also a single-track mountain biking trail, which I will not be utilizing since I don't have a bike and don't know if I even got the lingo right in calling it single-track, but anyway it has good reviews on Yelp so there's that.

I have a few more pictures of Fountainhead trails which I took during the race last year. I'll have to share those another time, since they're from my old phone and are (I assume) somewhere on my desktop hard drive.