About Demeter

About Demeter

Hi, my name is Amy.  My trail name is Demeter.  I LOVE hiking and backpacking, and finding wild edibles. Join me on a quest to travel and have fun backpacking.  I also want to identify as many plants as possible. Hikers, backpackers, and other sportsman who spend time roaming around can boost nutrition while on the trail.

Connecting with nature helps to reset my batteries. I always say there is not a problem that can't be fixed by an hour in the woods. I lead hikes and backpacking trips with a local meetup group, and love taking new backpackers into the wilderness. Life is too short to sit around, so I am determined to get out, have fun, and make memories!


I am by no means an expert, but I have a passion for the woods.  The call of the woods has always been very strong for me; when I was 11, while other girls played with dolls, I pretended to be lost in the woods, making sassafras tea to "survive."  Living in Colorado at the age of 12, our church took some kids to Breckenridge to climb mountains, where I bagged my first "fourteener."  

The weird thing is that I didn't inherit my love for the outdoors directly from my parents. Mom always said her idea of "roughing it" was a Holiday Inn with a black-and-white TV.  We joke that if I didn't look so much like her, I would be convinced I was switched at birth. But, I am still not so sure that out there somewhere is a hippie, tree hugging, pagan family with Betty Crocker for a daughter and her parents are scratching their heads, wondering where they went wrong. 

The first time we went family camping, my parents rented a pop-up trailer and we went to Corpus Christi for a week-long vacation.  Long story short, we were in a hotel by day three of the adventure. I think the last straw was when Dad ran over my mom's portable TV. Need I mention this was the last time we went family camping.

To fulfill my need for the outdoors, I backpacked and hiked during college with friends, and continued with my fab husband. But then, life happened. We had kids, trading in the tent and backpacks for a succession of campers, eventually ending with a 35' Class A motorhome, replete with slide outs and a king-sized bed.  We spent our vacations cruising north to Maine, and south to Key West. There aren't many KOA's or Jellystone Parks we haven't been to in the Mid-Atlantic area. When we camped in state parks, I would start off my morning with an invigorating trail run, followed by exploring with the family.

Fast forward 15+ years.  I had two teenage children who were more or less independent, and we relocated to a gorgeous area near the Chesapeake Bay, where my DH decided he wanted a boat more than a motorhome. After the sale of the RV, I had the itch to get back in the woods and explore mountains. Unfortunately for me, the Delmarva peninsula, while a fisherman's dream, is extremely flat - the highest point in our county is the trash dump. The woods, while plentiful and full of wildlife, are mostly tidal wetlands. Granted, there is a state park 45 minutes away, but I was weary of hiking the same trails every week.  Not to mention the entire 15 miles of hiking would give me a total elevation change of about 300 feet. 

The mountains were calling and I absolutely had to go!  I joined a couple meetup groups, grabbed some plant identification books, and the rest is history!

We can identify plants year round. Winter will be quite paltry, but we can still do some identification. If you live East of the Rockies, north of Florida and south of New England, then you should be able to find the same plants within a week or two of when I post them. I also make wine and jelly with wild edibles, so we'll look at wild food in the kitchen, too!

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Please only use this as an introductory guide. Anyone thinking of foraging for wild food must identify with absolute, 100%, certainty before trying even a nibble! Plants are food, medicine, and poison. Be sure of what you eat!! You should identify a plant with three different guides before eating.

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