Mammoth Goes Birding…and stuff, Day 6

 Sunday April 13

Bye, Dino valley!

 

 

 We treated ourselves to breakfast at the Watermill restaurant at the top of the hill. In walking distance, but since the Jeep was already unhooked and because hill, we drove.

It was good but not great. A buffet. The scrambled eggs were tasteless, but the biscuits and cooked apples were great.

 

 

Then the drive to East Fork State Park was very trafficky and bad, but short. Somewhere in Kentucky the time zone changed.  It’s always fun to lose an hour in the middle of a drive…not.

 

The campground was easy to find. We filled up water at the dump station but had to block one of the two dump sites to do so, probably annoying the several campers waiting in line to dump. Not our fault—they should have been out of the park two hours earlier.  It was a weird arrangement, having the water fill situated so that it blocked a dump site, but I imagine the logic was that people wouldn’t be filling water (on the way in, typically) while people were dumping (on the way out, typically).

It was a lovely park on a lake.  The campground consisted of a very long, straightish road with “loops” A-L widely spread out along it. We were in the very last site in Loop L.  Like all Ohio State Parks I’ve been in, it was immaculately clean and very well maintained. Although they’d trimmed the brush back a little too vigorously, for my taste—it looked hacked. 

They’d apparently suffered some flooding recently—the campground road went on to the boat ramp and swimming area, but that was all under water. They had a Road Closed sign up with barriers, but Ed and I walked down there.  Typically at boat ramps there’s a sign “road ends in water” but in this case, the road really DID end in water.  You couldn’t even see the signs.

No birds except blue winged teal on the lake, towhees galore, and a bald eagle circling the lake. I didn’t get a good look at it, but most likely it was an immature bald eagle.  All I know is that it was certainly an eagle.

 

The campground was very empty—nice.  Only one other camper came to our loop, arriving after we did, but you couldn’t see them from our site. They were back in the loop part of the loop while we were in a straight part…odd design but nice. 

At 6pm, when I wrote this, it was still 55 or 60 degrees outside. On our evening walk Molly and I saw one deer and 3 bats.