I was so inspired by my weekend photo workshop that I decided to take an early morning walk along the KATY Trail and take some pictures and also find out more about the wild hops that are growing along the trail. This was a Tuesday morning and not much was going on. One couple passed my on bikes and we talked briefly. A park ranger drove by and then turned around and drove back so I had to haul my camera and tripod out of the way twice for him and then a farm truck lumbered down the trail and parked by a field of soy beans. More motor vehicle traffic than bike traffic. 
Mainly just testing my camera
We are having such a pretty Fall this year -- probably because of all that rain we had in the Spring and early Summer.
Hops!!
A week earlier I hiked along this stretch of the trail and was amazed to see wild hops growing along the north side in the trees. The vines were so thick they looked like kudzu in some places but were also intermixed with grape vines and Morning Glories. This is between the trail and the rocky bluff and it is sort of a micro-climate...exposed to the south but protected from the north.
I took a few home and discovered that they have some respectable hop bitterness and some aroma. I guess that they escaped from a shipment heading to St. Louis breweries by train. The trains stopped running on this stretch probably 30 years ago. I can remember a derailment near Wainwright some time after we moved to Jefferson City in 1976. The hops have been growing here long enough to have established a sizeable patch that spreads 50 or 60 feet away from the trail (old KATY RR tracks) and alng the trail for several hundred feet. Hops are perennials so once established they will spread by rhizomes or by seeds.
Katy Trail, October 25th
We had our first frost last week but it warmed back up into the 80s. I took another walk along the trail this afternoon and it was a beautiful day but very windy. The wind was blowing out of the south so it was hitting the bluffs and then shooting up vertically. Two falocons were soaring on the wind currents over the face of the bluff...barely captured in the picture.
I walked a short distance up the face of the bluff to shoot a few pictures. Surprisingly there are a lot of maple trees along the bluff, possibly a product of the micro climate or a remnant of colder, ice age period vegitation.
After my last experience of falling off the cliff at Graham Cave State Park I decided not to climb too high.
Maybe, just maybe, I solved the puzzle of the hops. Not far from where the hops are growing there is a farm building. I'm not sure whyat it is used for now but it might have been a hop barn at one time. If so, the hops just jumped over the track and escaped into the woods. Maybe there was no train transport required.
The cupola on the roof is normal for hop barns. I've never seen anything like the fillagree ornamentation along the roof ridge of the barn. There are no wires that I can see and it doesn't look like a lightening rod of any kind. Was it related to a former use of the building? There are a couple horses in a nearby pasture but no other farm activity at present.
We had our first frost last week but it warmed back up into the 80s. I took another walk along the trail this afternoon and it was a beautiful day but very windy. The wind was blowing out of the south so it was hitting the bluffs and then shooting up vertically. Two falocons were soaring on the wind currents over the face of the bluff...barely captured in the picture.
I walked a short distance up the face of the bluff to shoot a few pictures. Surprisingly there are a lot of maple trees along the bluff, possibly a product of the micro climate or a remnant of colder, ice age period vegitation.
After my last experience of falling off the cliff at Graham Cave State Park I decided not to climb too high.
Maybe, just maybe, I solved the puzzle of the hops. Not far from where the hops are growing there is a farm building. I'm not sure whyat it is used for now but it might have been a hop barn at one time. If so, the hops just jumped over the track and escaped into the woods. Maybe there was no train transport required.
The cupola on the roof is normal for hop barns. I've never seen anything like the fillagree ornamentation along the roof ridge of the barn. There are no wires that I can see and it doesn't look like a lightening rod of any kind. Was it related to a former use of the building? There are a couple horses in a nearby pasture but no other farm activity at present.
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