A few weeks ago we decided to get away for a couple days to relax by doing some hiking. Some friends of ours had done the same a couple weeks before and they said we should try out Clifty Falls State Park down by Madison, IN. It’s located on the Indiana/Kentucky border about halfway between Louisville and Cincinnati.

We headed out on Friday afternoon and made it in time to do a hike that night. We hiked up to an old fire tower and watched the sunset.

As my dad mentioned in an earlier post, we are in the process of gearing up for backpacking, so we tried out some of our newest camping equipment at the park campground. We set up our backpacking tent and our hammocks and settled in for a nice peaceful evening.

For the past few years, any camping that we’ve done has been in an RV. It protects one from the weather and a large amount of noise from neighbors, both of which were present that night. The rain wasn’t too bad. It only sprinkled for about half an hour, so we didn’t get too wet. The neighbors, however, would not shut up till after at least three in the morning. It wasn’t the chatting around the campfire kind of talking. No, it was the playing a competitive board game with your overly exuberant friends kind of talking. Needless to say, it took us a while to get to sleep.

The next morning, however, we took a little bit of revenge. I know the Bible says “Vengeance is mine” but we were the human instruments of that vengeance around 7:30 in the morning. My dad woke up and proceeded to get breakfast started. He got the stove out, making as much noise as possible in the process. He yelled, “Hey Gavin.” To which Gavin replied, of course very loudly, “Yeah.” My dad replied, “Come help me,” which in this instance was code for, “help me make some more noise.” It wasn’t too long before our neighbors very groggily crawled out of the tent and proceeded on with their day.

After eating breakfast, satisfied with our successful revenge, we decided to start our hikes to the parks four waterfalls. We were soon disappointed to find out that the only way to see the waterfalls, without going down unspecified trails, was to lean over the fence at the viewing area and look through the leaves and catch a glimpse of the water going off a rock.

But, the park did have some redeeming factors; one of the trails that runs most of the length of the park is down the middle of a creek bed. I would suggest wearing water shoes or at least wear shoes that you don’t mind getting wet. We didn’t have water shoes, so navigating rock to rock became the challenge of the day. We were making pretty easy work of it, but we were not successful at making it the entire way without slipping into the water and getting our feet thoroughly wet.

Another cool part of the park is the tunnel. It’s about an eighth of a mile long and flashlights are highly suggested. They close it during the winter because migrating bats take up residence for the winter. We were somewhat disappointed that there weren’t any bats in the tunnel.

We closed out a long day of hiking the best way possible—a trip to Dairy Queen.

Justin