Land Between the Lakes

In April we went on a camping trip with my parents to Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area.  My wife had scouted out the area ahead of time and found several good campgrounds in the area.

Access over 300 miles of undeveloped shoreline, 200 miles of paved roads, 500 miles of trails, and 170,000 acres of forests and open lands.

As part of America’s great outdoors since 1963, Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area manages over 170,000 acres of forests, wetlands, and open lands on a peninsula between Kentucky and Barkley lakes in Western Kentucky and Tennessee. The family friendly recreation area offers one of the largest blocks of undeveloped forest in the eastern United States.

With 300 miles of natural shoreline, lake access provides idyllic settings for camping, picnicking, hiking, fishing, boating, wildlife viewing, and water sports. Licensed hunts for deer, turkey, squirrel and other small game animals occur throughout the year.
--from Land Between the Lakes NRA website

We stayed at the Piney Campground in the southern portion of the area.  It sits on the lake just south of the Kentucky-Tennessee state line.

There are a number of lake-side sites in the campground.  We scouted the area out in person before selecting a site.

We saw a rather interesting camper as we drove around.

Ultimately we settled on this site.  It had some shade, but also plenty of sun (nice in the cool spring) and wasn't too far away from the lake.

We had two tents to set up as my parents have gone back to tent camping after selling their fifth wheel camper a number of years ago.

Our humble tent.  Once we started camping with multiple tents we upgraded to a larger tent that could accommodate our sleeping bags, a pack and play, and space for more kids.  Yet it isn't so large that it takes up too much space.

It really was a beautiful campsite.

 We enjoyed several beautiful sunsets.

We had a number of fires and even did some cooking over the fire.

The sunrises next to the lake were also beautiful.

While driving around one day we drove by the site of an old blast furnace.

I always read the signs when I see them and then photograph them so I can read them again later.

While only the stone is left the furnace used to be a decently large operation.

We may not have ancient ruins in America, but it is cool to see stone structures from the past couple hundred years.

Looking at it now it is hard to imagine how hot this chimney once was when active smelting operations were underway.

We also spotted some bison while driving around.  Though we ended up seeing quite a few more later.

We also went to several places in and around the area that I'll blog about separately.  The general photos from the Land Between the Lakes are in this album.

~Matt

Norris Camping

As I mentioned previously after staying in Old Faithful Inn for one night we camped in the Norris Campground for the next three nights of our stay in Yellowstone National Park.  It was a beautiful campground and I would definitely recommend it.

This 100 site woodsy campground, open from late May to late September is centrally located on the west side of the park, 21 miles south of Mammoth Hot Springs and 12 miles west of Canyon.  There are a few walk-in campsites, many nice tent sites, and limited RV sites for vehicles over 30'.  All sites have a fire ring and picnic table with firewood sales available on a limited basis.  Flush toilets are provided with potable water.  Arrive early to get a site at this popular campground.  Camping is $14 a night.
--from NPS Yellowstone site, Norris Campground section

We pulled into the campground early on the morning of June 9 and drove around two of the loops several times, trying to decide which site we liked.  We ended up settling on one in the lower area between the creek and river.  One plus was that the previous camper had left a good bit of firewood behind, so we didn't have to buy any.

We set up in fairly quick order including a shelter that I had bought in Idaho after seeing the weather forecast.  It was rain I was afraid of and wanted to be able to cook even if rain was falling.

Of course rain didn't turn out to be a problem in the slightest...it was snow that we got!

But the cover did fairly well at protecting things, even stopping snow from blowing in--though it was almost blown over a few times.

On the night it snowed I took this video while walking back to our campsite from the restroom.


One evening I took a panoramic video of the campground area so you can appreciate more of the scenery.


We had several fires, though some of them were easier to start than others. I think the wood we were left was somewhat green, so I had a difficult time starting it to burning.

Here was one of my attempted fires.


And here one of the successful ones.


We had a nice parking space with plenty of room for the car, and I imagine another tent or two would have fit along with another car.

There were plenty of bison sightings also, not only one evening as we came back to the campground from our long drive to the Tetons, but other times in the evening and morning also.

One morning we also saw a sandhill crane.

~Matt

Camping again!

At long last we are once again camping. Amy and I are spending several days in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation area. We drove down Saturday morning after I finished working an overnight. We had some rain, but thankfully it wasn't too heavy and had died off by the time we set up our tent.

Over the next couple days we plan to see several local areas (e.g. South Fork visitor centers), Cumberland Falls, and the Cumberland Gap National Historic Site. We'll also spend some time relaxing, :-).



I've learned my lesson and always put a tarp down. Before this trip I had to patch a hole in the bottom of the tent. On our last camping trip water leaked in the last night and wasn't fun!



We had a tasty dinner of rice and beans.



Amy really likes fires--mostly because they're warm. :-)


~Matt

-- Posted from my iPhone
(c) 2012 iWolff Ltd.

Location:Stewart Rd,,United States

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