Hocking Hills State Park

Striking a pose at Upper Falls

Saturday - January 16, 2010 began with a hike from Hocking Hills Welcome Center - Old Man's Cave entrance to Cedar Falls (2.5 miles). During the week before the temperature had been rising which made the trail very icy and muddy which caused unstable footing for us and the 1,000 plus people that were there for the 45th Annual Winter Hike. The state park had continuous starts of people leaving from the visitor's center all morning. Half way through the trail, they provided refreshments and for us shuttle bus returns.

Cedar Falls was a beautiful spot where we spent some time taking in the scenery, snapping some wonderful photographs of the falls and watching people. Many, many people!

After leaving the falls we boarded the oasis of school buses that were waiting to take us back to Old Man's Cave to our car. We were all feeling like old men and women and didn't think we could make the +2.5 mile trek back on the trail. In the summer we probably could have, but with the ice, snow and mud we encountered on the trail every step of the way, we were exhausted. We were never so happy to see those yellow school buses.

After having a great lunch at the Millstone BBQ http://www.millstonebbq.com/ we headed back out to the park to take the trail from the Upper Falls to Old Man's Cave. Upper falls is pictured above with all of us. Below is a picture of the water fall at Old Man's Cave, and our group's "old man" breaking off a chunck by accident from the waterfall. Oops.

This last picture was taken inside one of the caves. We learned a lot about how to take this photo including that you can set the timer on a Canon longer than 10 seconds, unfortunately is was after the photo was taken!