Natural Bridge

Jason's youngest sister is in town visiting this weekend, and yesterday we took advantage of the beautiful weather to go out to Natural Bridge to do some hiking. If you're like me and like your hikes on the not-so-strenuous-but-still-beautiful side, Natural Bridge is the place to go. Why? Two words:

Chair lift!
What a brilliant idea - you can take a chair lift to the bridge, and either ride it back down again or hike back down. You can hike up, too, of course, but who'd be stupid enough to do that? Not me, I'll tell you that.

Once you get to the top of the chair lift the bridge is only 600 feet away - you come out on top of it, which has some nice views but you can't really tell you're on an arch:

Liza, who wasn't sure about the chair lift ride and was REALLY pissed about being stuck in the backpack, was screaming so loud at this point that - no kidding - it was echoing back off of the hills. We took the trail to the bottom of the arch, where we let Liza out of her prison and took a few photos while the screaming subsided:

The hike down to the bottom wasn't that strenuous, or it wouldn't have been if I hadn't decided that Liza might do better if I carried the backpack instead of Jason. I don't do well on wet leaves and sandy gravel slopes anyway, and having 30 pounds of kid and backpack throwing my center of gravity off did not do my knees any favors. Most of it wasn't bad, but there were a few spots where I got to descend the stairs using all four limbs and a couple of cheeks.

On the positive side, the scenery along the hike was really cool - lots of eroded sandstone cliffs and caves and mini arches and strange sedimentation patterns. Here's a sampling:

(brief semi-sequitur ... I've always been mildly interested in geology, especially when it's cool sedimentary layers that have been twisted and cracked and exposed and weathered. The single coolest thing I've seen in person is along our drive between our house and my parent's house: Sideling Hill road cut in Maryland. Here's a link to where you can see an aerial shot of it. Freakin' huge, and SOOOO cool. I want one for our back yard!)

PS - I get total bonus points for this post. I tried to post it yesterday, got all the photos loaded, and then somehow deleted them all from the message with one keystroke. Today blogger has been fighting me, only letting me post one photo between when I hit the "Save as Draft" button again and again. I've been trying to get this one message done since whatever time the last message was posted, which was WAY too long ago. You'd better appreciate all the hassles I go through to bring you such scintillating prose and photography!!