Noland Trail Trip

As I walked along the Noland Trail my attention was caught up above at the trees' leaves. I noticed all the different colors of the leaves. They were changing and getting ready to fall off the branches of the trees. As I was looking at the leaves up above, it was almost like they were waving at me or trying to communicate something to me. Though it was the winds effort of doing this, still I felt as if they were trying to tell me something. Something else that I noticed along the Noland trail were the big bumps on some of the trees. I couldn't help but wonder what they were. As I got closer to the tree, it seemed like it needed help and looked sick. When I came back from this trip, I sat down and did some research on why some trees get these bumps. I found out that these bumps were actually called burls. These burls occur on trunks of trees from bacteria. fungi, insects, wounds, or even environmental stress. Even though I did not know what these were at first, something inside of me was pulled to go and look at the trees with those burls on them. It was as if the trees were trying to communicate to me that there was something wrong with them, that they were sick.

Though there were many other things that caught my eye, I just wanted to focus on the trees. The reason why is because the whole time I was out on the Noland trail, all of the trees were communicating with me. My head was looking up most of the time because I could not stop looking at the beautiful and unique trees.