It was mushroom day at the park!

As I strolled the Mill Pond Trail at Yates Mill Pond Park on Tuesday, I discovered it was mushroom day! Both sides of the trail, which follows the circumference of the pond around to the mill and waterfall, were littered with mushrooms, and they were colorful and aplenty.

So I took out my iPhone 13 Pro and took pictures.  

I found out the next day, when I returned for another walk, that my instinct to take pictures of those mushrooms the day before was timely.

On the Wednesday stroll, so many of the mushrooms I'd seen the day before were either gone or severely damaged. There were still a few left untouched, enough so that a family of about seven or so also on the trail had stopped to admire them. 

Of course, what I can't be certain of is whether the disappearances or damage to the mushrooms was the work of humans or wildlife. I suppose it could have been a combination.

I did a quick check online and learned that wild animals such as deer, squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits often eat wild mushrooms safely. Many of those wild mammals have built-in tolerances to specific toxins (like amatoxins) that would be fatal to humans and domestic animals. Fortunately, pets are not allowed in this park, so there is no risk to anyone's dog getting poisoned by them. 

While searching online, I asked to see pictures of the top wild mushrooms, and some of them resembled what you see in the pictures here. I'd always been told to never pick -- and/or eat -- wild mushrooms. I've always abided that admonition.

The good news is that I got all of these pictures in this post when they were still in relatively pristine condition. I did take one more picture on Wednesday's return trip, and I'll save it for the very end because of the reason I felt inspired to take it. 

The mushrooms weren't the only reason I pulled out my photo to take pictures Tuesday. As I made my way through the Creekside Trail, I heard the engine of what sounded like a farm implement. And sure enough, when I reached a point on the trail where openings in the trees and foliage would allow me to investigate, I saw a tractor harvesting crops on the adjoining farmland. 

While back on the Mill Pond Trail, I grabbed pictures of the iconic mill from across the pond. I'm not sure I've ever presented any such photos previously, so they'll be in this post as well as the harvesting shots. 

As always, click on any photo to bring up a larger, sharper version. 

Above: This is the mushroom photo I took Wednesday. The reason I decided to grab it is because it looked untouched, but also because its position nestled against the leaves kind of made it look like it was trying to protect itself from intruders. At least that was a thought I had when I first saw it. 

Introducing new blog header photo

Don't rub your eyes too hard if you think you're seeing multiple copies of the same photo on this page today. 

Because you are. 

Today's post serves to introduce the new header photo at the very top of the page. A copy of the photo also appears as the lead-off photo. A vertical orientation of this scene appears below. 

This shot was taken during a Feb. 6, 2026, visit to Yates Mill Pond Park in Raleigh, N.C. I've done so much shooting at this park, especially in the past year. As any regular visitor to this blog knows, it's become a favorite place of mine for both photography and exercise.

I got the idea to change the photo after observing the ninth anniversary of my residency in North Carolina on July 10. It occurred to me that after using two Indy-based concert photos in the header for the first 17 1/2 years of the blog, it was time to represent the new community in the header photo.

I liked this image on several levels. The clouds and the reflections, foremost. But also the almost total apparent monochrome tone except for slender horizontal sky on the right side and in the pond reflection. This is exactly how the image turned out using my iPone 13 Pro. I did not selective coloring in post-processing.

The landscape scenes replaces the black-and-white photo of Bishops band member Georgette Fraction, who made her debut in the header in October 2021. Before her, that spot was filled by a shot of Indianapolis-area bluesman Tad Robinson singing at an April 2010 album-release concert at The Jazz Kitchen of Indianapolis.

What a difference a day makes

The photo leading off the post was taken Tuesday and is something I had not seen at Yates Mill Pond Park in Wake County, N.C., in at least three weeks. I'm talking about water cascading over the iconic waterfall. 

I'd done a previous post about how most of North Carolina was entrenched in a very serious drought. That previous post used photos of a patchy pond and a waterfall lacking any water falling. I'd not seen such a thing in my nine years here. 

In fact, on Monday, the day before I took the lead-off photo, the falls were still dry (see photo below from Monday's visit). 

What happened was that our area received a considerable volume of rain on Monday afternoon, night and early Tuesday morning.

I don't think it's safe to say the drought is over. Not by a long shot. But, it is safe to say that the long (and occasionally hard) rainfall in the past 36 hours did a lot to revive the park's popular waterfalls. In fact, I heard a couple of walkers cheerfully pass the news along to other walkers who were headed toward the falls.  

I was back there on Wednesday, and I'm happy to say that a high volume of water was still cascading over the falls. 

Next to field of sunflowers is Dorothea Dix Hospital Cemetery

It struck me poignantly Wednesday when I came upon the cemetery where there rest several hundred or more patients of the former Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh. What hit me so hard?

The hospital was North Carolina’s first psychiatric hospital, opening in 1856. It closed in 2012.

Of  those hundreds of graves in the cemetery, there are less than two dozen that have anything more than a 12” by 6” concrete horizontal slab marking their resting place. The slab contains the deceased’s name (sometimes merely initials for a first name) and date of death. 

I suspected that the vast majority of those in the cemetery had no family to claim their remains or simply had no financial estate to afford the cost of a traditional burial. 

And when I hunted around on the Internet after I got home, I learned that indeed appears to be the explanation. 

Patients buried in the cemetery died in the period of 1859 to 1970.

Interestingly, the cemetery overlooks the park’s much more celebrated sunflower field to the east. The first photo below shows one of the headstones with the sunflower field visible through an opening between two trees. The headstone is that of Ida Phillips, which you’ll see in a much closer view in the second photo below. Ida’s headstone is one of the few in the cemetery that is upright.

In the first photo below, note that there are two plain slab markers near Ida’s headstone. The deceased in those graves have different last names than Phillips, so I don’t know if they are a relation to Ida, something I wondered considering how close they are to Ida’s grave.

Above: A number of crepe myrtle trees lines the pathway leading to the cemetery of the former Dix Hospital.

In the cemetery’s southeast corner, under a very shady tree, sits the wall of remembrance that you see in the photo leading off the post. The wall is adorned with objects that apparently visitors left behind in remembrance. I’ll have some closeup photos of some of the objects below. 

But first, here are pictures of all the other graves with upright headstones, followed by four examples of the much more prevailing common horizontal identification slabs. 

Above: Here’s a plain slab marker that somehow was uprooted and turned over. Perhaps by a person operating a lawn mower. 

A long-range view of the Wall of Remembrance (above) followed below by closeups of some of the things visitors left behind at, on or at the foot of the wall.