Brown Family, We Love You

We've been spending more time lately visiting our local natural areas and have been very pleasantly surprised about how numerous, how well taken care-of and how wonderful they are.

Case in point: The Brown Family Environmental Center at Kenyon College near Mount Vernon, Ohio.

This part of Ohio is in the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau and has rolling topography, beautiful scenery and mixed rural land use as illustrated  here:

We hiked nearly 4.5 miles through mature forest, rolling pastures and recovering old fields. It was COLD and therefore we didn't get a lot of pics but we HAD to document this old, BIG White Oak:

Here's Steve for scale:

Here's Jennifer, closer still, for scale:

We determined that it takes 3 people, arms outstretched, to span the circumference of this monster! We are very grateful to all of the people who could have cut this tree down, but chose not too. 

Hug your favorite local tree!