After our long Lake Higgins Hike, we figured the kids could handle a mountain, so the next day, we drove up to Stone Mountain State Park and climbed to the summit.
The hike wasn't nearly as long as the Lake Higgins one, so they managed to make it with very little complaining. If fact, they were all in pretty good spirits for the whole hike.
The hardest part for me was keeping the littles focused on something that would get them moving forward. :) I decided to ask them to point out as many trail markers as they could. It got to the point that they had a "James Woods from Family Guy" moment:
If you don't know what I'm talking about, here it is:
Along the way, we spotted wildlife
and flora.
But it wasn't long before we reached the top.
It's quite a view from up there. It turned into a very gray day, so we couldn't see as far as on a clear day, but it made for a cooler, more pleasant hike.
The kids took some time to play on the rocks.
It's always fascinated me how a tree can find the smallest crack in a sheet of solid rock and grow, grow, grow...
After the summit, we went the other direction on the trail and went down to the waterfall at the bottom.
It's a 200-foot slab of rock that looks like it'd be a great waterslide...except for that sudden stop at the bottom.
The kids looked at the mud on the bottom of the shallow pool and noticed something:
If you look past the glare on the water, there's a lot of shiny, silvery flecks in the dirt at the bottom; tiny bits of the rock worn down by the waterfall and deposited here. They found that to be very cool.
They all wanted to wade in the water, even though it wasn't the warmest of days, but this wasn't the best place to do it, so we climbed back up to the van and headed around to part 2 of our visit to Stone Mountain.
