The following Sunday...OK, look...now, I was almost POSITIVE that the next time we'd gone out was a Sunday, but it, evidently, wasn't. It was the Tuesday after that. July 5th. OK.
OK, so maybe John was convinced that he knew exactly where we were going. I was convinced that I was in for another day of heat, mosquito bites, and getting snubbed by the caves and mines. But, hey...I'm in for a pound, right?
We roll right the hell past where we should be going into our first stop at 9:43 am:
Pretty, but we're wrong...for the second time of the morning. Out come the two GPS units, mine on my phone, his attached to his gas tank. We find that "Murder Creek" is further outside the park and head in the direction we've been pointed. Nope. Nothing. Well, we found Murder Creek, it's exactly where it's supposed to me, just not exactly what it's supposed to be. John says something about another park entrance that we should try, so we flip a u-turn and head back in the direction from which we just came.
We enter Akron Falls sports field and ride down a loose stone path (my favorite) to the far end of the field. I manage not to dump the Harley on it's matte finish and dismount managing not to twist my ankle in the process. My first real successes of the morning. 45 minutes after our first stop. I look at John skeptically and he leads us off down a path:
Memorize that path and place it end to end approximately 475 times and you'll have an idea of exactly how far we walked and what we looked at for the next hour. Occasionally John would break from the path to see if there was something we were missing in the middle or off to the side or cock his head to the side sure he was hearing a phantom waterfall that only ever turned out to be wind through leaves. Occasionally, I would look off far in the distance and exclaim, "Hey, isn't the street we took to get down here?!"
Once we'd made the complete circuit of the path and its nothingness, we found ourselves back at the bikes wondering what the hell we were doing. I knew that I was pissing and moaning, as I was forced to walk around in an undershirt because of the stifling heat and that I had a pretty impressive blister on my pinky toe because I was wearing leather boots...well, you'll see in a few minutes. But, in for a pound.....right?
Artsy, aren't I? Heh.
After only a few minutes of rubbing my blistered toe against the inside of my boot walking, we both stopped and cocked our head convinced that we heard the sound of a waterfall. We didn't exactly...well, not really, but sorta. I'll get to that too. We followed the path to the left and came upon:
The source of the sound of falling water. OK...so, we'd found something. I'm not exactly sure WHAT it is that we've found, but it is something. Now, I should probably interject here, that I am NOT a fan of heights. Benny Hill used to joke that it wasn't the fall that killed him, it was the sudden stop at the end. Yeah, well, I don't want to do that falling thing either regardless of the stop at the end, sudden or otherwise.
John looks at me--he really is good that way. I know he's DYING to climb down or up or whatever hare-brained scheme he's contemplating, but I know, with 100% certainty, that if I so much as burped in hesitation, he would put his own excitement in his back pocket in order to accommodate me. But, in most cases, I'll stuff my own hesitations and go right along with him. I know that the payout will be SO much better than just sitting around nursing my own insecurities.
We carefully picked our way down, stopping here or there to assess the best way to proceed. As I have the shortest legs known to man, I have to watch everything John's doing and then see if I can do the same or if I have to find a new way. At one of the one of the assessments, it became much more clear what we were looking at:
Cool, huh?
OK, so the payout was looking to be promising already.
We continued making our way down the side, until we reached the bottom and were able to see the cave and all it's glory:
OK...so not quite as glorious, as say...I don't know, a better lit, better focused, better composed shot, maybe? It's my own fault...no forethought. I didn't think I was doing anything more than just snapping a couple pictures with which I was going to make friends jealous of my adventures. And, now, here I am. Idjit.
Because I didn't stop to take any pictures of the full way down or the bottom once we'd gotten there, you are now forced to look at pictures of John and I hanging out in the cave. John:
Me:
Please note the UTTER blackness behind us in these pictures. Needless to say, we were thoroughly unprepared to go spelunking, so we didn't get too far into the cave (though, don't count it out).
After poking around as much as we could, we took off downstream to see where it would lead. We didn't have to walk very far across this:
We didn't walk too very long before we reached the end of the road:
That was the view straight across from the last step that we could take. This one:
To give you a tiny bit of perspective, here is the path we originally took down the trip before:
Those two tiny people? Yeah, I don't know who they are. Suffice to say, they are standing on the same path that John and I took down last week to get this shot:
And, in case you're wondering, these are my NOT hiking shoes that I just spent nearly two hours hiking in:
And they, John and I are sitting on top of the overhang:
And yeah, that's my sweater again. Too damn hot to be playing Indiana Jones. If you need more perspective, scroll up to the full frontal of the waterfall and look at the rock to the left of where the water is actually falling. That's where he and I are. And, as I sit here scribbling, it occurs to me that directly under where we are sitting appears to be another cave. Yep...I'll be mentioning this to him when I speak with him next.
Stay tuned for next post when I talk about our trek to Eternal Flame Falls and my Nikon D50 that had enough battery to take every picture I wanted right up until we got the the actualy flame itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment