Happy Father's Day to all you daddies out there! To celebrate Kirk's first Father's Day, we went for a wonderful hike in the Laurel-Snow Pocket Wilderness Area in Dayton, Tennessee (where the Scopes Trial was held). The hike followed a river most of the way and ended up at a waterfall. It was supposed to be about 5 miles long (more on that later).
Along the way, there were a few old mining caves. Here's the family in front of one of the caves:
Although it was over 95 degrees here today, we stayed relatively cool under the cover of the forest. Rosco was able to stay cool also by swimming in the river every hour or so. He loves to swim but hadn't really spent much time in moving water before. He was really hesitant at first but once he realized that he wouldn't get swept away (it was a super slow moving river), he loved swimming around and playing in the rocks.
There were a couple of tight spots on the way up. Kirk has mastered getting around with Sam in the Backpack.
We took a break up at the top of the trail and had a snack. The top of the trail was amazing because it ended at what was basically a 60 foot high granite wall. We're short on rain down here so the waterfall wasn't that impressive but the setting overall was very beautiful. Here's the waterfall:
On the way down, Rosco stopped to swim in this cool waterhole. The problem was, the trail split right at the waterhole (which we didn't realize because we had stopped). When Rosco finished swimming, he headed down the trail and we followed. About 30 minutes later, when we got to a bridge that we knew we hadn't crossed on our way up, we knew we were headed the wrong way. We followed the trail a little further thinking that it might loop around but I started getting really nervous about the trail never ending so we turned around. We only had to backtrack about a mile before we realized where we went wrong and I felt much better once we were back on track. Our "detour" turned a 5 mile hike into about a 7 mile one but we had a great day.
Probably the best part of the day was getting Sam in the river at the end of the hike. She was LOVING IT!
She even got dunked for the first time in the river. Some people have their babies dunked in holy water - the river is our version :) She was a little shocked and didn't quite know what was going on but she didn't cry and smiled pretty quick thereafter.
No comments:
Post a Comment