We are blessed to live very near a beautiful state park that is full of hiking trails…and we never seem to make time to take advantage of this blessing.
But this weekend we made the time…
The temperature reading at our house was in the mid to upper 90’s, it was at least 10 degrees cooler in the park 
After checking out the visitor’s center {which had some really great displays}, we headed up to a short trail that would lead to a vista of our town.
When we got to the beginning of the trail, we discovered a humongous rock that had beautiful specimens of what we had just been studying in our science book {Exploring Creation with Botany}.
The kiddos found some wonderful samples of moss growing on the ground.
And a bunch of lichens all over the rock formation.
As we headed up the trail we noticed bunches of ferns growing next to the trail.
And even some small clumps of wild raspberries.
And we found even more lichens growing on the rocks up there…and these lichens were greener {our book taught us that the greener the lichen, the cleaner the air}.
Of course, I had the kiddos stop and pose by the trail sign…and then we headed back down the trail.
On the way down, we spotted a number of trees that sported woodpecker holes…
And ds9 spotted a tree with a fungus growing on it {we saw a sample of this particular fungus at the visitor’s center}.
We finished our afternoon with a trip to a nearby playground area, known as “the tire park”.
This playground is one of our kiddos’ favorites mostly because it is so unique. Instead of wood chip mulch, the mulch is made of recycled tires {which is much softer to fall on}. There’s also a couple of really cool tire swings,
and much more…
I told dh that we definitely have to plan more hikes and take advantage of the beautiful parks that we have in our area.
1 comments:
Wow what a fun nature walk. Nice pictures too!
Monica
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