Fortunately it was only another half hour or so to get to the park. We took a side road first, the "spur road", which took us up onto a high ridge with pine trees. The woods around there are mostly deciduous, which are bare and gray at this time of year, so the deep bright green of the pines was really eye-catching. The bare trees meant that there was a long view through the woods on either side.
We had to turn around at the end of that road and go out the same way, but from there it was only a minute to get to the visitor center. We've been in there many times, but we always have to walk through the exhibits! Favorites are the huge chunk of rock full of gastropod fossils that are partly crystallized and very sparkly, and of course the giant aquarium. While we were looking at the fish, a group that seemed to be two or three families traveling together, with a whole bunch of kids, came in - so it was fun to watch them looking at the fish!
We left the visitor center and Dad thought he made a wrong turn - so he overcorrected and made an actual wrong turn, and we ended up at a picnic area we hadn't been to before. We might as well get out and look around while we were there... and fairly quickly ended up in a creek bed. That happens a lot with us.
(I will be putting photos in at this point, and while most of them were mine, there are several that my dad took with his camera. This means there will actually be pictures with me in them!)
That's me on the left and Joanne on the right.
This tree really split apart when it fell!
Most of the gravel bars in this part of Missouri look about like this. It's almost all chert, aka flint - related to quartz, it is extremely hard, so it is all that's left when the softer rock weathers away, and those chunks remain in the river beds.
This bit of ice was about an inch above the water - apparently the level had dropped since it froze.
My parents on the bridge over the creek. My dad got a picture of me taking this picture.
About the water level dropping - apparently it can get pretty high, if the roots along the bank are any indication...
It did not take long before the creek bed opened out at the Meramec River!
This is a mullein plant. Their leaves are very thick, and covered in furry fuzz. The outer leaves here snagged a bunch of dirt when the water was high, but the inner leaves are still soft and green!
As we were wandering around the gravel bar, looking at dirty mullein plants and trying to find flat rocks to skip across the water (chert does not tend to break into flat pieces!), that same group with all the kids came down to join us! They were having a grand old time skipping - or at least throwing - rocks. Just after they got there, someone spotted a bald eagle flying overhead - and then another one! The two were circling, and because it was very windy they were really moving fast! Sadly I didn't get any pictures, but I did get a photo of some other wild animals...
(Their dad was encouraging them to scream like rabbits in order to attract the eagles back.)
Rather than go back up the creek bed, we walked back through the woods and found a neat old stone picnic pavilion.
Some of the flagstones in the floor had ripple marks!
We got back to the car and drove to where we thought we had been driving before the wrong wrong turn - another picnic area, with a cave you can walk to! Sheep's Cave is a big open cavern, and in winter it is often filled with spectacular ice formations. We've gone several times in recent winters, and often it was difficult even to walk to the cave because of all the ice and snow... This time it was 55 degrees F.
As it had been last year, the cave was closed in order to keep people from disturbing any bats which might be hibernating inside. It was disappointing but not surprising; we were lucky to have been able to go inside a few years ago.
Even without going past the sign, we still got a great view of the ice formations!
According to my dad, who taught geology for thirty years and is the go-to expert on such things in our family, the large mouth of the cave is what allows these ice statues to form. There is always water dripping from the ceiling of the cave, from the rock which insulates it from the cold. Because the cave mouth is so wide, the air inside gets very cold - a small opening would mean limited air flow, so the cave would be more insulated. With the water dripping onto such a cold surface, it freezes as it lands, making all sorts of strange shapes. It's kind of like a sped-up version of the process that forms stalactites, stalagmites and other cave formations from dissolved minerals being deposited by dripping water.
Pretty cool, huh?
As I mentioned earlier with the pine trees, any bright color, especially green, really draws the eye among all the drab grays and tans of the winter forest. This rock was covered, not only with brilliant moss, but with walking ferns.
They're not feathery like most ferns, but they are a fern. Where the tip of the leaf touches the ground, new roots are put down - so it seems to be walking its way across the moss.
I think this is hepatica. Just another pretty leaf on a vivid background!
As we were walking back to the car, I spotted another splash of color.
These dark pink berries are buckbrush. Now that color really stands out!
The white trunks of the sycamore trees really stand out as well.
We drove on to the campground and stopped at Fisher Cave. (Yes, another cave. There's a reason Missouri is called the Cave State... we have a LOT of caves!) There were some big chunks of ice there, but nothing like Sheep's Cave.
This cave has a gate to protect the bats. Actually, it has two: that lighter colored one on the side was put in place by the CCC in the 1930s, but was replaced in 1999. It turned out that the holes were too small for bats to navigate easily, and the close grid was actually affecting the air flow into the cave! The new one is all long, wide, open slats, designed to better protect the cave habitat. The original gate is now an exhibit about the history of the cave, the work done by the CCC in the park, and the bats! What a great way to preserve a piece of history.
After taking a few pictures inside the cave, I walked a little ways on the trail along the bluff, where there were some more ice formations where water had seeped out of cracks in the rock and frozen as it flowed.
Another dash of color! Box elder trees are easily identifiable even in winter because of the bright green of their branches. (That spot of blue in the background is my dad taking his own photos of the ice flows...)
Our final stop was at the "swimming beach", a big gravel bar at the far end of the campground. There were more big ice flows on the bluffs across the river as we were driving out to the end.
Same tree... when you walk around to the other side you can see it is hanging on tight!
As we walked along the gravel bar I spotted a lot of beaver sticks washed up on shore. This is a good sized chunk, almost three inches thick - but it still probably only took a few bites to cut through it before chewing off the inner layer of bark as if it were corn on the cob! (When we drove back out the way we came, later, we noticed a number of chewed-off stumps that we had missed on the way in.)
The dark green here is mostly red cedar, which can get a foothold on bare rock where hardly anything else can.
Another leaning tree...
This caught my eye - a set of twining vines, each one a slightly different color!
Just a fringe of ice along the water's edge on the opposite shore.
I really do love sycamores. They're one of my favorite trees. I love their white bark against the sky.
Double color - buck brush berries and box elder branches!
We stopped once on the way back out, to get a better look at the ice formations across the river, and then headed out of the park. It turned out to be a good thing we had such a late second breakfast... because by the time we sat down to lunch at Dairy Queen, it was almost 3:00! At that, it felt like we were leaving too soon. I could have spent another few hours there. Maybe next time!
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