Ramblings of a Nature Lover: Hiking on the job, part 2

Today was another hiking excursion. I thought that might be the case, so I brought clothes to change into, which saved some time. This time it was me, Ben and Miriam, who was here last year.

We headed east this time, then north to Yahoo falls (pronounced yay-who) where we hiked the shorter trail to the falls. The pace was a little easier, and I was able to take a few more photos along the way. The waterfall was very pretty – it’s the highest one in Kentucky, at 113 feet, so even without a lot of water going over it’s very impressive. It’s got a huge overhang – like a whole amphitheater behind the waterfall. Of course, there are tons of rocks to walk around that have fallen at one time or another… It was a very pretty hike. Afterward we walked to the overlook, which was also very pretty – and spotted a little lizard on the rocks there!

This is wild ginger! Miriam picked a leaf to show us the sharp smell.

Note the people in the background for scale. This is a very tall waterfall!

This is a partridge berry. I recognized it from the Michigan berry book. It's got two little eyes looking back at you!

That's a tulip poplar blooming just below the overlook! I had to zoom in.

This little guy really blends in, doesn't he?

As we were driving back toward Oneida, it started raining pretty hard. We decided to go back to the visitor center to check the weather, since we would be going right past it. We took a quick detour to the East Rim overlook parking lot, and had to stop on the way back out to help a box turtle off the road. I made sure to put him on the side of the road he had been heading toward, so that he wouldn’t head right back out there!

"Leave me alone!"

When we got to Bandy Creek VC and parked in the back, we almost hit a snake! A gray rat snake, I think. He was enjoying the nice warm pavement, which was still warm despite the rain that was ending already. We harried him off into the grass, and he hid between some tanks.

We checked the weather, but there were no storm systems moving in – the rain had passed on just that quickly. We had plenty of time for a second hike, so we headed back to the car – and there was the snake again! He didn’t want to leave. He liked it there! We really had a time getting him to leave – we tried chasing him, then hooking him with a stick to get him off the road, and that finally got him to head into the woods. (All this was for his own safety! I have to stress that! We didn’t like harassing him, but we didn’t want a snake pancake in the parking lot!)

He didn't like being pushed with a stick!

Our second hike was a double one, actually. We went to the Slave Falls trailhead, which was along the same road as the Twin Arches one that we hiked yesterday. After we hiked a while the trail split off, and we hiked first one branch, then came back and hiked the other. First we went to see Needle Arch, which is not as big as the Twin Arches but quite impressive – and since it is smaller, it can actually fit into the camera frame! We had a fun surprise at this point – we ran into Mary, another Bandy Creek interpretive ranger, who was hiking with her family on her day off! We walked partway back with them, then headed down the other part of the trail, to Slave Falls.

Slave Falls got its name from legends that escaped slaves sheltered under the overhang there. It’s very similar to Yahoo Falls, but you can’t walk out under it.

At this point we had to hurry a bit on our walk back out. It had gotten hot, and the last part was one of those gradual climbs that are so hard to keep a steady pace on, and Miriam was having an allergy attack… but we got back to the VC only a few minutes after closing. No sign of the snake.

This was an amazing two days. It’s definitely going to be helpful having seen these places, and seen how to get to them. I was planning to get to most of them on my own, and I’ll probably go back to some of them – just not all in the same day!