One Beautiful In April

This is where we started the hike, at the visitors center.

We had wanted to get out and hike for a while now, just waiting for the weather to get a bit warmer.  Earlier in the week, the weather was really warm, but we had other things to do.  So, looking ahead, I saw that Friday, April 12, 2019 would be sunny with highs in the low 60's and just a little wind.  So, we planned our hike.  The plan was to go to the Hobbs State Park visitors center and hike from there.  We did a bit of the Little Clifty Creek Loop, going down to the bottom where Van Winkle Hollow joins the loop trial.  I had planned to hike about 4-6 miles, but ended up doing about 8.5 miles when it was all done!  

Here we are on the trial for a day outside.  We started about 10:00 am and it was a bit cold so we had a some cold weather cloths on for now.

 The Dogwood and Redbud trees were in bloom and showing off their beauty!
Not too many wild flowers yet, but we saw some getting ready to bloom shortly.

We did see these ferns all rolled up and some were already unrolled!

Some flowers were in bloom  and in the left picture you can see the iris leaves out getting ready to bloom.

We hiked down to the creek bottom and took a spur trail to the Van Winkle Homestead trail head where there is a bathroom and picnic table.  We decided to have lunch here before taking a side trail to view to homestead site.

These are just some of the sites we visited.  This was a beautiful place for a homestead.  When they were there, Beaver Lake was not there, so the road went all the way to Elk Horn Tavern at the Pea Ridge Battlefield.

Now it is time to head back.... with a pretty good climb to get out of creek bed.

This picture is of another climb we did which was pretty steep.

After we finished, we found we had done 8.5 miles, which quite a bit for us, especially for our first hike of the season.

We were tired, but felt good to have done this.!!