Part Three, Day Three is not the end

There will be at least two more posts of swamp pictures.  Hopefully y'all aren't tired of Okefenokee yet.  I'm still enjoying writing about the trip.  Please comment and let me know if you've enjoyed looking at these posts.

Again, this is what I think of as classic cypress swamp.  I enjoyed looking back into the forest, realizing that the water continued along with the trees--despite the fact that it almost looked like we were on the lake in the midst of a mountain forest.

It was scenes like this that really made me think we were in the forest.  I'd hear bird calls and the wind whistling through the trees just like I've heard it so many times in Colorado.  I miss the west...

So many still surfaces made for great reflective pictures.

I tried to capture several pictures of canoes passing through trees.  I think a couple of the other photographers got a picture of our canoe doing the same.  I need to take a look through the nine plus gigs of pictures (which I burned to 3 DVDs) that represent our combined photographic efforts.

This sign actually turned out crystal clear.  I'm pretty sure this referenced the shelter where the Boy Scouts decided to eat lunch.

I wonder what caused this tree to grow into such an unusual shape.  It certainly wasn't snow or ice.

This was an important gator.  I saw him and called out a warning to the canoes behind ours--not to watch out, but to slow down so they could get pictures.  We then steered our canoe back the way we'd come so that I could get more pictures.  I then discovered that there was another gator behind this one.

This is my favourite gator picture from the swamp.  I've been using it as the desktop background on my computer ever since I got back from the trip.  For a time it was even the lock screen image on my iPhone, but I change that frequently.

This is the gator from the last shot.  He actually ducked down into the water a little further than you can see above, but here you can see how part of his tail is still above the water's surface.

Deb and Marty took both pictures and video of the gators.  I haven't looked through their pictures, but I'm sure they had a good angle on the gator on the log.  All I could see of him was his backside.

Denise certainly didn't want to be left out--but she was just a bit further away and her camera only has a 10x zoom (mine has 12x).  She did get several great flower pictures that I either couldn't master or was too impatient to get.

This mile marker was the end of the road...er...river.  I didn't take many pictures during the stretch between the last gator and this sign.  We exited out of the narrower part of the swamp (though the lakes were much wider than some passages had been the previous day) onto Billy's Lake.  Some darkish clouds were overhead.  I really thought I felt drops a couple times, so I thought it might rain.  My first reaction was that I didn't want to be rained on, then I realized that as long as my camera was safe it might actually be fun.  We'd prepared for rain, but it hadn't actually happened--so why not?  ;-)  However, the clouds simply blew over and the day stayed hot and warm.  It didn't start raining until I started driving home.

Perry and Stephanie had waited on the water for us to catch up.  After the rush of the day before we decided that there was no point rushing this past day (as I think I mentioned previously), so we were fine with being the last canoes to arrive, especially as we were still earlier than our planned exit time.

Stephanie grabbed this shot of all of us around the last mile marker.  There was a sense of accomplishment, realizing that we'd paddled 31 miles in three days.

Billy's Lake had many other boats on it, including boats with tour guides, double-decker craft, and awninged (I can't believe spell check allowed that word) craft like this one.

This turn-off marked the last leg of the road into Stephen Foster State Park.  Plenty of the park is swamp land and even has some canoe trails, but there was also a road that came all the way to the Okefenokee refuge border.

In case you were wondering where to get just about everywhere in the swamp you could follow this sign board.  I bet plenty of people still get lost, however.

Dry land and vehicles seemed a somewhat strange sight.

Our canoe had actually created a wake a couple times.  Once just for the heck of it we raced across a lake, paddling as fast as we could (and this isn't as easy in a fully laden canoe as it is with one empty of all but two bodies--the live bodies of the paddlers that is).

I assume these canoes belonged to a rental company.

This was the van that had come to pick us up.  He'd arrived early and told us later that he always arrives early as many people end up finishing before they think they will.

This was the last picture that I took from the canoe... :(

We had so much equipment that it wouldn't all fit into the van.  We had to repack the bottom canoes with equipment from everybody else's boats.

After packing everything up we headed into the small store and nature center.  I'll post pictures from those locations next, then iPhone pictures (my camera's memory card was full) from the visitor's center in my last two swamp posts.  I might try to scrounge videos for a video post but I'm not sure if that will happen soon or not.

~Matt