Cat's Adventures in the Wild: 4/5/2024 - T-minus 3 days to Eclipse

4/5/2024

Being sick on a normal day is not fun, but being sick while camping is another kind of miserable.

Camp site is up. It's very cold. Sky is cloudy, though it was cear at dawn. I got a great picture of the waning crescent before the sun rose behind it.

Waning crescent was a reminder of why we are here & counting down to eclipse, 3 days from now.

KOA campground does not disappoint for convenience & cleanliness. We are ahead of the other campers. The campground is full this weekend.

Eating an apple - old staple of the BRAT diet. Helping get sugars in me.

Going to check out Ferne Clyffe State Park. Dedication.

This is the lake that welcomes us as we arrive to Ferne Clyffe. It is buzzing with birds we have yet to identify, swooping down to skim insects off the surface (we assume) and sometimes hovering in the air like hummingbirds. They are a bit larger than a goldfinch, about house wren sized. They are light framed, have brown backs, yellowish or white bellies and dark wings (gray or black).

The spring flora here is in full bloom (Illinois Spring Flora). An assortment of Spring Beauties, Rue Anemone, Red Trillium, Mayapple, and others.

But of course, the very exciting part of this venture was to scope out the climbing walls and get in some hiking to investigate. No climbing would be done today, but we met a couple of nice travellers from Chicago who had also come down for the eclipse. They had come down in 2017, but did not realize there were climbing bolts set here at Ferne Clyffe (to be fair, the climber of them had only begun climbing since Covid, so he wouldn't have been looking at the time).

Several great little caves & potential bouldering for those who swing that way.