We hiked up to
the Cascades over the Fourth of July weekend this year. Ally was a little trooper and walked the whole 4 miles. It's a beautiful place to visit and a popular hiking trail.
The rhododendrons were still in bloom.
There are lots of ferns along the trail. I like the ones that take root and grow out of the big boulders and rocks.
Ferns usually look lush and green, but they're actually very tough plants with leathery fronds.
Nope, there's very little soft and gentle about a fern. They make an awful substitute for toilet paper and you should always go for the moss instead, but that's another story that I'm not going to discuss today.
Sometimes you can even find a rhody sapling growing in the cracks of the big rocks.
Luna moth. This picture is a little out of focus. I really should have taken the time to get up close and take several pictures of it. That'll teach me.
We also so several of these guys, which I think are caterpillars of the
pipevine swallowtail.
The falls had plenty of water in early July.
The water is usually very cold, but there's a swimming hole in the front of the falls where people jump in to cool off. We were content with walking around in the shallower part of the Little Stony Creek, which has a surprisingly forceful flow as it's channeled through a rock slot below the falls.
We took the fire road back down to the parking lot. There's a big outcropping of rock along the way with an eroded cave underneath it. The cave is very shallow, but it's cool and wet under there.
Shallow cave.
REALLY BIG ROCK.
