In Hiding...and Smiling

North of "my" property line is Missouri Conservation land, designated as such only about a year ago. So I'd never explored it until this winter, and here I found beneath a sandstone cliff along a shallow run of the LaBarque a nice sandy place to sit and rest. That pure white isn't snow but silica sand. It doesn't stick to your clothes; its grains are more spherical than crystalline. It's similar to the sand at the Great Salt Lake. It makes beautiful white sand bars and beaches and little beds as you see here. And it's all from the sandstone cliffs just like the one you see. I hid and rested under this overhang, perfectly happy; it'd make a nice place for a picnic or romantic encounter. Even in December, the determined sort of people could manage. The trees? The old creek banks are eroding (severe drought/flood cycles don't help) and we are losing lots of old trees, oaks and sycamores. It's nature.

Waterfall #2

This one trickles from top left and falls down a 20-foot, water-worn chute into a small pond.

Fossil Fields

The bed of the mighty LaBarque Creek is a motherlode of fossils and a rockhound's Eden. The rocks are a perfect Chex Mix of limestone, sandstone, shale, chert (sometimes resembles arrowheads!), dolomite, hunks of iron, hardened clay, and marble. I find that the rocks with fossils are almost always turned fossil side up. Most fossils here are those of ancient marine plants, both simple and leafy, and simple animals, sort of like coral, called crinoids. My guess is that what you see in the close-up photo is crinoids. I don't know how or why I sleep when there is such cool stuff not 200 feet from my door.

The 20-Foot Waterfall

Back in the woods is an intermittent stream. On its way to LaBarque Creek, the stream makes a leap and then plunges down a sluice, 20 to 25 feet in length, that in size and shape resembles a water slide, and ends in a fresh cold pool. The way to get there and see it as I did today is to bushwhack through steep, rocky, jungly, and pathless Eastern Ozark terrain. Or you can see the photos, the first I've ever taken of this secret, unnamed waterfall.

Snake Suicide

This snake in the creek had its head plunged into the mud underwater. Oddest thing. It did not look dead -- it was still holding its curves, its musculature, and wasn't limp -- but I didn't poke it to make sure. Using the photograph I ID'd it as a Northern Water Snake, Nerodia sipedon, a common Missouri snake, and harmless. Approximately 16 inches long, this one must have been young.

You can see that the water here was about an inch deep, and and because of the heat and drought, the water left in the creek had warmed and thickened. I suppose the snake was trying to keep cool -- it is cold-blooded, after all --but I also wondered if I was wrong and it was dead, and the long, long drought that kept closing in, drying the creek down to nothing -- had driven it to suicide.