Picture Heavy Adventure (with caves!)

Brandon, Michelle, and I went to the Stone Corral on Sunday. The Stone Corral is one of the very many hiking trails in the area that we hadn’t yet gone to. The nifty thing about it is that there are a couple of caves right on the trails, as well as some other nifty things.

You start off by passing through some trail that runs near a pair of small lakes/ponds. The first has a beaver lodge…though we didn’t take a picture of it.

There is a lot of devils club right along the trail and it’s nearly overgrown the trail. Nothing too spiky, but will likely cause problems if it’s not cut back soon. No one likes to have their legs filled with thorns.

A definite perk to all of the ponds and creeks is that Alita (Michelle’s dog) was able to keep pretty well hydrated. The down side was us getting mud and water all over us because dogs always shake off within close proximity to people.

The first cave! It’s called Corral cave and while not very long, is very cool. Pictures really don’t do it any justice. It was also a very great place to cool off. While there we saw another couple who apparently do quite a bit of caving.

Further along the trail was pretty easy going. It went upwards above the cave kept going until we were atop a very sheer cliff. But before then something very shocking happened.

Alita, hearing the sounds of the couple who were still below at the cave, decided she really wanted to visit with them, but going around via the trail would take far too much time. So she found a sort of crevasse and proceed to jump down about 50 feet (give or take). Of course we didn’t actually see this happen as Alita tends to scurry on ahead of us. All we heard were the gasps of shock as large dog falls from above and lands on some shrubs. The kicker in all this, Alita was perfectly fine. No bumps or scraps, and she kept right now going.

Something to note about the cliff: It is fenced off. No one fell off a mountain that day!

We stopped up top for lunch while we looked on at Castle Mountain(pictured above on the right) and were in a state of awe at how beautiful the area is.

Onward we came upon Porcupine Cave, named so because of the evidence that porcupines once lived here. Maybe they still do, luckily there were none to be seen while we were there. This cave, I did not go into, but Brandon, Michelle, and Alita did. Call me a wuss, but if I can’t just walk in, I get a little anxious.

On our way down we came to the bottom of another sheer cliff, though much shorter than the last.

The trail then started to really head down. It doesn’t look so bad in the pictures, but I was very thankful for the rope. Short legs and steepness are not a good combination.

We then completed the loop and joined back with the main part of the trail.

And then there was a very confused bumblebee who couldn’t fly, so he just walked around atop this stump.