highlights since September pt 1

First off, on Saturday, September 18th, Rachel and I went on a little hike to Yankee Jim's Indian Creek trail (or something like that). We've been there a couple of times before, once with some of the Elmer clan and once with my mom and brother B.J., but each time we enjoyed the North Fork American River so much that we didn't explore the pools and waterfall that are supposed to be found further up indian Creek. In fact, I wasn't even sure if we had found Indian Creek. So that was the mission of this trip.


Just a little way up the creek we found this cool rock. I have another picture of Rach stretched out sunning herself, looking very much like a beautiful mermaid, but didn't think she'd want that one posted for all to see.


The next thing of interest that we found was this plant that was covered with ladybugs. We found three or four of these ladybug infested plants and thought they were pretty cool.

According to this book I was using, we were supposed to come across a few pools before we came to the waterfall. We never really saw any obvious pools, but would see smaller ones like this and wonder if they were what the author considered pools. So we still weren't sure we were on Indian Creek.


Then we found what we were looking for:

a waterfall. We were indeed in the right place. I decided to investigate further.

I wanted to see what was beyond the waterfall, but the walls were too slick to go any further.
So I posed for a picture. Here you go:


We saw some wildlife on our trip:

There's a hummingbird in the middle of the photo,


and a bird I think is called a water dipper,


and a frog (or a toad?),


and what we think is called an alligator lizard.


The river had some wildlife too, like this bass,


and that beautiful mermaid with an interesting evolutionary adaptation coming out the side of her head. I believe it's similar in nature to a periscope.


This is us at the end of our trip. I decided to leave the mermaid and go home with Rachel. I've grown accustomed to her.

When we showed the pictures of our hike to our kids, Meghan named this place the "Waterfall of Love" and whenever Rachel and I don't appear to be getting along with each other quite as well as Meghan believes we should, she tells us that we need to go back to the Waterfall of Love.