The blog post of July third mentioned this park located in Jefferson County Missouri. The original owner had claimed that it was a " wild and woody area with lots of canyons" which John and I were most desirous to find- but not the first day we were there because of having our young grandchildren along. We came back towards the end of August and started out on the Sandstone Canyon Trail.
Immediately coming onto that trail I detected a very foul odor. I blamed it on the masses of mushrooms along our path, and they very much looked like excrement. Upon closer examination, I deduced they were mushrooms, of the type which I had not seen before, and at home later I was not able to identify.
The canyon trail was assessed as "moderate" and it was a bit of a challenge. We traversed up and down ravines on rocky paths. Fortunately we thought to bring along our walking sticks. Pictured above is one of several rock walls we saw. And we kept thinking that soon we would see a canyon, with no luck. It was a warm and humid day, after about 2 miles on the trail we took a connector tail off the canyon trail and headed back to our car. But before we did that we met up with a gentleman who pointed us to another part of the same trail and encouraged us to take that path to view some awesome canyon sightings. Sounded tempting, but that would have entailed us walking two more miles on another rough part of the trail. We were too hot and tired to consider it.
We returned to the park a couple of week later on a much cooler day. I took the above picture by turning around and getting the shot upward on the path. Should give you an idea of the rocky paths we encountered hiking alone the ridge line of a box canyon- pretty much the type of trail we had also encountered on our last trip there. The challenge of the trail did not bother us this time, we knew now we were going to see a canyon. And so we kept trudging along yet still no sight of a canyon. John made the comment that some people who had not been to the Grand Canyon just had nothing to compare the canyons here with the sights out west.
Looking down off our path we started to see the box canyon. Still hard to determine whether that is what we were looking for.
Sorry, that is the best I can give you of what we saw, between all the brush and trees and the presence of bright sunlight I just could not get the awesome picture I was looking for. I would imagine in winter it probably could be more impressive. I will end here with another natural wonder which John noticed as we finished the trail. It is a natural stone bridge which we crossed on our path.
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