An Expedition on the Homestead Trail outside of Homer.

The Homestead Trail is a pretty easy four mile hike just outside of Homer:

That is the route back.  I use Runkeeper to track my walks, and sometimes it forgets, so I have started cutting most hikes in two.

There are disadvantages of that, however, as if we get lost, it will not help us get back.

We prepared rigorously for this hike:

and we plotted our course carefully:

and were ready for wind or sun:

It turned out to be another beautiful day in Alaska

and stayed that way all day long.

We did not see many birds. Some Little Brown Jobs, and some birds that looked a lot like Robins.

Some of them were robins but this one:

was a Varied Thrush. Nice!

You can see that there is a lot of fireweed and other long weedy grasses that we had to walk through.

Doreen liked to go first through this, earning a new nickname, "Dew Catcher" as she cleared the dew off the grasses so I wouldn't have to get wet.

You can also see that there were s number of places where we had to walk through trees.

Doreen earned another nickname in these areas, "Spider Catcher" as she liked to go first and tear down all the spiderwebs that crossed the train. Sometimes she didn't get the high ones though. It wasn't nice when I had to walk into them with my face.

It was a beautiful walk through the meadows and the copses of trees.

We did see the eponymous homestead:

and the big payoff was at the top of the trail, that was setup as an overlook of Kachemak Bay:

We bought some nice new Nikon binoculars before we left Houston (10x25) and have been using them plenty.

Quite a place.

There were many plants that we didn't recognize on the route. Some with interesting berries:

and some that looked like little forests.

with my finger for scale:

We saw a baby bird on the way out, and were fussed at by the momma:

and caught the glimpse of a bald eagle (we have seen plenty already) as we got back to the cabin.