Ball Mountain Dam

For today’s walk Jackie dropped Faith and I off at Ball Mountain Dam to walk as much of the West River Trail as we could before turning around and coming back.

The original plan was for Jackie to drop us and then drive to Jamaica State Park at the other end of the trail and head in the other direction with Holly and meet us (the other end of the trail is nice and flat), but there are large sections of the trail washed away by landslides in between, so she took Holly and walked up and down as far as she could from the other end and then drove back and picked us up.

We had a very nice walk as far as we could before retracing our steps (the path down the dam feels a lot steeper going back up!), and if you look closely at the pictures of the intake tower of the dam you can see behind it on the hillside how high the water got in the floods- it almost overtopped the emergency spillway before they released water to stop that happening!

This picture made me a little sad as it reminded me of one of Dad and June on the same bridge I took seven years and 1 day ago (8/22/16), and I will admit I had a moment and a shed a tear as I sat and watched Faith cool off in the stream under the bridge.

We did this walk back in 2016 when we stayed up here with my parents and my Dad did the whole trail with Holly and June and me when he was 81!

But it was a lovely Vermont summer day, 73F, low humidity, and bright sunshine, so I couldn’t stay sad for long and I’m so glad that Mum & Dad got to come here with us!

We are now back at the cabin, weary dogs and people are taking naps before Jackie and I are going to try the Fat Crow restaurant in Newfane for dinner 🙂