Sat Apr 13
I chased a lot of warblers in the morning but never caught one. The pair of Canada Geese hanging out nearby were unbelievably loud. What a wake-up call for the people camping there!
Our site photos
The park was pretty full that day, with both campers and day users. Most people were fishing.
We took a long, slow drive down the road to the south end of the park, where we found another campground which looked brand new. It was called Storm Creek Campground; it had big, 50-amp sites and some gorgeously huge cabins. But there was no lake view--it was just sites cut out of the woods. There was a little lake to the south that you could walk to, and of course if you had a boat you could launch it. So it's work remembering. (And there were almost no people there other than a very nice park ranger)
We drove back up the Crowley's Ridge Parkway. At the 'overlook' you could see, barely, at the very limit of binocular vision, the brown mud of the Mississippi River.
I think I've written about Crowley's Ridge before. To recap, it's a narrow rolling hill region rising 250 to 550 feet above the alluvial plain of the Mississippi embayment in a 150-mile line from southeastern Missouri to the Mississippi River near Helena, Arkansas. The flora and fauna of the ridge seem more closely related to the Tennessee hills to the east than to the Ozark Mountains to the west. The vegetation is predominantly oak and hickory forests, similar to vegetation found in the Appalachian Mountains. Examples are the tulip tree (or yellow poplar) and the American beech. Ferns and flowers abound here, including the American bellflower, fire pink, butterfly weed, cardinal flower, blue lobelia, phlox, verbena, wild hydrangea, hibiscus, aster, and yellow jasmine.
Fascinating place. I just wish I'd seen more birds.
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