Travel Post #1-Hawk Mountain Sanctuary
For any followers who may be out there for this site I hold dear and love, I decided to not only share some photographs for the site, but tell people about the places I go. I am the one, in the a million and one people who have travel blogs and i'm fully okay with that. Anyways onward to the traveling portion.
The past two years have been eye opening and tough for sure. A bit ago I realized how much of life I was kind of passing off because I had a quick to think mentality of things I wanted to do, but actually going out and doing them. In college I took a intro class to photography that I didn't realize I would have to actually have a DSLR camera for.....and had to go spend over 500$, YIKES. I could have dropped the class but I had a good feeling about it and decided to make my wallet cry and get the camera. So after that experience I realized how much fun it can truly be to just go out and capture moments, not just taking pictures but appreciating the beauty that is life and whatever comes along with that and photograph it. Among this I wanted to get out and just do more, live life, not just watch Netflix all the time!!! Me and people close to me have been starting to hike and discover new places to experience so my first post is about Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania.
From the idea of a fellow human we saw the view that this place had and decided to make the hour and a half trip to see it for ourselves. HOT DAMN, if your using a gps to get there you may run into some trouble. First we ended up at some random place that the GPS believed was hawk mountain, we clearly looked like outsiders and realized that the gps had failed us so we typed it in again. The next attempt brought us into a random place in which we passed chickens in the road and a nice random old man who I should have known by his confused look that we were headed the wrong way. This way was scary as hell because it took you on a thin winding road which my anxiety convinced me we we're very close to tipping over and falling onto our death. As you can see my anxiety was wrong since i'm here making this post. Finally we make it and i'm fully prepared to make a real hike to get to this beautiful location we saw on google but it was literally 4 minutes into a trail that the view was there.
I took this of my nature squad of the view we had, it was so beautiful. For a minute I just wanted to take a minute to take it in before my Nikon had its way with it.
One of my favorite shots of me, it's crazy how small I am in this huge crazy world. But damn that view.
So after we took in the initial beauty it was onward to the rest of the park. I am in no way experience all that much with hiking and nature. Not to mention I have a high fear of ticks and brushing up against anything gives me high anxiety, but i'm slowly becoming less afraid of it, and allowing myself to relax and not be so tense when i'm surrounded by the beauty within the park. Through some rough up's and downs in trails we ended up finding our way on a new trail that little did we know, was the most difficult trail in the entire park. After getting over my panic, this trail included literally climbing huge rocks, and with fear in mind, brushing and touching ALL the nature. However, where we ended up was INCREDIBLE. The only way we know to found our way back was to go through this really difficult trail. None of us wearing anything remotely close to hiking shoes, so there were minor slips and moments of "holy crap I almost fell". In the end we ended up at the top of Hawk Mountain, and boy was the struggle worth it.
We climbed to a height of over 1520 ft! It was nuts, especially since we've never done anything like it. I could have stayed up there for hours just simply looking at the world around me. The climbing turned out to be the best, and was actually fun, terrifying but fun.
We had to celebrate with a group pic, and after that climb I honestly felt so in control of whatever the hell I wanted to do, and that I can totally do it! The walk down was a relief and allowed me to just further live that moment at the top. I definitely plan to go out and experience random little trips of nature, earth and adventure and come on here and share my experience. I definitely recommend this park and take the blue trail. Difficult but in the end worth it. Everyone have a lovely day!!
