Fun fact: Indiana's state parks are arranged so that everyone in the state lives within an hour's drive of at least one park. Neat, right? The closest park to our house is Potato Creek, and we love it. We love it in the spring, in the (late) summer, in the fall, in the winter when there's snow, in the winter when there's no snow. If you're getting the impression that we really enjoy visiting Potato Creek, you're on the right track!
One of the great things about our state parks is that even if you've already been there—even if you've already been there a bunch of times!—there's always something new to explore. The landscape changes with the seasons, and the parks are big and interesting. Case in point: Sunday morning we packed up our kids, cousins Kelsey and Jimmy, and Charlie, and set off to hike a trail that we hadn't been on before.
The trail started at a cemetery that Kelsey pronounced "insufficiently old." She was right; I really didn't expect modern dates and headstones, but I suppose it makes sense given that the park wasn't established until 1977. After that, the trail wound around parts of Worster Lake, through forests of beech and maple trees, past an old spring house (which turned out to be a tiny padlocked building over a freshwater spring), and up and down a couple of very gentle hills.
So we were going around this sort of secluded area of the lake, and there were all these giant splashes in the water, and we kept catching glimpses of animals surfacing and then diving back down. We watched them for a long time, trying to figure out what they were, and eventually we concluded that they must be otters of some sort, and the parts that were sticking up must be their feet. There were a whole bunch of them, so we thought it was some sort of otter family. NOPE. I took a bunch of pictures, trying to zoom in as much as I could, and once we got home and looked at the pictures, I discovered that the "otters" had SCALES. And FINS. So I asked my cousins Brady and Tara (both avid anglers) what the heck they were, and the consensus is that these were bowfin, aka dogfish, a kind of gross but also very interesting fish with a prehistoric lineage.
It was a beautiful morning for a hike, and we all had a really good time. I was really glad to have Kelsey along, particularly because Henry is in this nonstop talking phase, and this way we could spread it out a little so nobody got too exhausted (mentally, that is). She was really patient and encouraging with him. And of course, Max's BFF Jimmy made the hike more fun for the bigger boys. It is always nice to have friends along!
State park rating: Tops! Potato Creek has so much to do: swimming, biking (trail and mountain), hiking, boating. And it's so close to home. Will we be back? OF COURSE.
No comments:
Post a Comment