An Interrupted Trip

I have a little story today that I guess can only be described as amusingly disappointing. I'm beginning to think that my timing is just off for everything right now. Even so, I still got some pretty good nature pictures from the little adventure I'm going to tell you about. Okay, let's go!

About the time I wrote my last post I decided that I was finally going to visit one of the big nature parks around here. Many of you know that I already tried that once without being able to find the place.

But I knew another place to go, and I knew how to get into that one. This time I was going to visit Stone Park, which is a very well known place to anyone who lives around here. I had plans to go up to the highest hill there and get some good pictures of the countryside. There are some great views from the higher places in Stone Park.

So I packed up on Christmas Day to go to Stone Park. It would be my special Christmas present to me and Isabella. This place is about 14 miles from where I live, but it's a straight shot down the road, so it doesn't seem very far at all. It's actually one of the closest places from my little town. It's just on the north edge of Sioux City.

When I got there everything looked pretty good. The main gates were open, unlike the ones at Dorothy Pecaut Nature Center. Everything should be just fine because the weather is excellent here right now.

I drove in around a curve in the road right after I got the pictures of the sign out front. What looks like a wall of trees in the picture above is only partially trees. Behind the trees is a huge mountainous hill. This park is almost all hills. These hills represent where I live better than most pictures I've shown you so far.

I live on the edge of these hills. The land is flatter if you go east or west from me, but north and south are all hills. I feel an instinctive feel of being home when I see these hills. I'll be saying that a lot whenever I show them to you because it's just so true deep down inside of me.

Okay, this is where it gets rough.

When I got around the little curve in the road, i was greeted with another gate. This one was very closed! It was now fully apparent to me that they had closed the roads here for the winter. Nooooo!!!!!!!

The snow that is piled up at the gate in the picture above is obviously from our only heavy snowfall since I've been here. Most of that melted a couple of weeks ago. But in some places where it has been piled up, there are still some traces of it. There's also a little bit of snow on the road here in the park.

I was more disappointed that I can even describe here. I had come all this way with such enthusiasm, and the park was closed! Well, I wasn't going to let this stop me completely. I parked and let Isabella out and we walked past that closed sign just a little ways.

I made sure I let Isabella sniff out as many interesting smells as I could, and I took some pictures of the surrounding area. We stayed for as long as we could before I decided we had seen all we could see for this trip. All wasn't lost, because we at least got to take a little trip away from the house.

I'll have to find out what the rules are for walking around in the park for the winter. If I can do that then I'll go back again halfway soon. Otherwise, it looks like I'll have to wait until spring. In the meantime, there's still plenty of nature to be seen around here outside of the parks. And I still have plenty of good things from this little trip to share in my upcoming posts.


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