Hurricane Creek and new falls

Today is one of Matt's magical Friday's Off.  I love these, it's like an all-day yippee, like he's bailed on work to hang out with us and on occasion, just me.

Today we slept in and around 10, decided to go for a hike.  The weather was supposed to be bad until noon, but it cleared out early and so we ran around getting ready.  I cleaned the house up and he got a geocache ready to drop off, we packed backpacks for weight to get some hiking in with loaded packs on the rougher terrain at Hurricane Creek.

We got to the park around 2 and John said he had to close up at 5, so we needed to scoot on our hike, we did the South Ridge Trail and it was perfect-lots of climbing and I got sweaty, but felt great.  Matt dropped the cache off the trail and we took a handful of photos, wanting to keep momentum more than snap shots.

In the valley by the creek, wildflowers were coming up in profusion!

Look at the may apples all setting up their umbrellas!

There was SO much water flowing today, the trail was soaked, the falls were all flowing,
the overhangs were dripping, it was a damp day!

After we left the park, there was at least another hour of daylight, so we decided to find a few geocaches.  We ended up outside Cullman a few miles at a town called Welti and picked up 3 caches in that area.

Cache # 600!

And 601!

While Matt was logging the find above, I was poking around in the cache files and found one with 'waterfall' in the title that was only 7 minutes away, so off we went, not knowing what we'd find.

It was almost dark when we pulled over and parked and followed the creek to the source of the constant falling of water.  Who knew THIS was off in the woods just outside Cullman?

Back home, we had dinner and baths and I found a tick on my leg.  UGH!  Durn things.
In all, a great day and the kids seem to have perked up some with their day home, I am hoping we all head out together tomorrow.