Adventures at Pandapas Pond

I like to hike at Pandapas pond, which is a few miles down 460 from my house. I just found an amazing interactive map of the trail system here: http://www.weaselworks.org/pandapas/pandapasmap.html

Usually I hike Poverty creek for about half a mile, take a left on Joe Pye, and then loop back on the end of Horse Nettle to the pond; this can be done in a little over an hour, and its approximately a 3 mile loop.Today I wanted to hike for about two hours, so I thought I would just walk poverty creek for an hour and then turn around and come back. But then I decided to make a loop of poverty creek, to snake root, and then coming back on more of horse nettle, which I just calculated to be about 5 miles. Thing was, it took forever to finally reach horse nettle. I thought it would take me an hour to get there but it was more like an hour and 20 minutes. And it was steep uphill near the end and I didn't know whether to press on or turn around. Finally found it and found myself walking on a fire road near I guess some hunting areas, and a huge bonfire area. On horse nettle I found a 3-4 foot black snake in the path, which startled me at first but it was super cool. I tried to see what color his belly was, but all that did was make him move away faster. Made it back to the pond and saw diving geese and one of these guys just chillin on the path- obviously he (she?) didn't mind me getting pretty close.All in all a good hike, although very hot (which was the point, I was trying to condition myself for hiking in the grand canyon next week), but awesome nature sightings, and now I've done a larger chunk of pandapas trails :)