Hiking in the Casades

After having an amazing breakfast of french toast, we packed and started driving towards the Cascade mountains. It took about an hour to get into the mountains so as Chris was driving I was reading aloud from a book called Uglies (it has a futuristic setting where once you turn 16 you get this operation that makes you incredibly beautiful, some of the 15 year old 'uglies' are suspicious of the operation and start to revolt thinking there is more to it than just the outward appearance. it's interesting so far but we're only on the first book in the series.) we had a thought to go to one of the state parks that was close but as soon as we entered the parking lot decided it was too crowded and we'd find somewhere else. We kept driving down WA-2 and saw a sign advertising the 'deception falls' and pulled over.

The first trail we took led us away from the water falls and down along the river where we stopped to sit on the rocks under this bridge and play around. the water was perfectly clear, 

:) I found a long stick and poked it under the rock trying to find crawdads, it seemed a likely place, but the only thing that came out was a tiny fishy. unfortunately the slow moving water made for a lot of big mosquitoes so we decided to start walking up the river. there were a lot of rocks and enough places to walk that we didn't need to worry about getting wet.

A little ways up river we found this little water hole that had a small waterfall running into it. The water was perfectly clear and we could see all these different colored rocks on the bottom of the pool. It was very beautiful.

After eating lunch, reading a bit more next to the water fall, and spending about 15 minutes lamenting over the fact that we didn't have our swimming suits we decided that it was far enough off the trail and secluded enough that we'd go swimming anyways! : ) This lasted about a minute and a half due to the freezing cold water!

Pretty soon it was getting late and we decided to head back towards the Waterfalls to take pictures and play around there before heading home, As we walked back up we stepped off the trail and found the part of the river where the small waterfall was going down into our swimming hole. It's hard to see but in this next picture the swimming hole is down behind Chris.

I have no idea what these things actually are called but they grow all around my grandparents cabin and we used to eat them all the time when we'd go to visit, Grandpa Stark calls them huckleberries and he knows a lot about plants and that sort of thing but I'm not sure if that's really what they are because they don't taste like anything I've ever had with huckleberry flavoring, still they are very tasty and it was a fun reminder of times at the cabin.

After taking a few more pictures of the swimming hole and eating more berries, we continued up the trail to the main waterfalls for more pictures. The falls were gorgeous,