Blackwater Falls

One last beautiful part of our trip was a couple of visits to Blackwater Falls State Park. We found three caches in the park, and placed 4 travel bugs to race back to Austin. The bugs were keychains with our names on them, from the Museum of Natural History in DC. Here's a picture of them before the race.



Blackwater Falls and Blackwater River are named after the color of the water. It's not black, it's more like tea. This is because there's so much organic matter around, the water contains tannins and is a beautiful dark brown color. Here are the Falls from the upper overlook.



We were down on that platform on a previous visit, and the Falls are just stunning from that angle. I didn't bring the camera! I do have some crappy cell phone camera shots, which I used for the earthcache down there, and if you really want to see them, you can go find my log. There are 214 steps from the trail to the lower platform and the kids enjoyed racing ahead of us then coming back to us. They pretended to be worn out afterwards. I seriously don't think they ever get worn out except maybe at 10pm.

We rented a paddle boat and floated around for a while on the gorgeous water. Didn't take the camera along for that trip either. Too scared it would get dropped in the lake. Honestly, I was scared *I* would get dropped in the lake too!

The caches were harder to find than their terrain and difficulty ratings would suggest. This was a 1.5 terrain.



The terrain got much worse, so I hung back with the kids, and Richard climbed down the side of the mountain, then back up, then found the cache and the trail back out. Turns out we went on the wrong side trail. I don't really blame the cache owner, because signal was bouncing in there, but even the right trail wasn't a 1.5.

More gorgeous scenery in the park. There's a falls in this picture, can you find it?