Saturday in spite of the cold weather I took to the outdoors and visited a state park called Big Sugar Creek State Park and was reminded of one of the reasons why I think Missouri is a cool state. It’s south of here near the town of Pineville. I would say it’s the closest state park to Joplin, but it’s probably a toss up between it and Prairie State Park – which is interesting because the two parks are about as opposite in terms of landscape as you can find without leaving the state.
It’s a really small park and has only one trail (3.5 mile loop) and no visitor center or anything like that. It gets it’s name from nearby Big Sugar Creek, which on this day was VERY big due to the recent flooding. What I found particularly enjoyable was the crystal clear streams all along the trail. The MO State Parks website said the trail went through native pine groves, but I counted exactly zero pines inside the park. There were however, lots of Red Cedar (which are an evergreen, but not a pine) and some of them were exceptionally large.
Here are a few pics:
One of the two small creeks that flow along next to the trail. Eventually they merge and then I would assume flow into Big Sugar.
In this pic you can see why I was so impressed with the clarity of the water.
Here is Matt, with Grant hiding behind him hanging out above a deep pool of water.
This looks like a really cool place. I love it when you can see the bottom of a deep pool. It’s very surreal.
That was a good day. Say, why is the email field required to post to this blog?
It’s an anti spam measure. If it’s your first time posting then it won’t actually post the comment until I approve it. But once you have had a comment approve then they automatically go through from then on.
You would not believe how much comment spam gets posted on blogs. I have a spam filter and it keeps track of how much it cathes… a few slip though but it gets almost all of it. It says it’s caught 22,367 since I installed the filter. Right now there are 501 in the queue.
So, spam makes its way into blogs? I guess that makes sense that people try to post all their dumb ads in blogs…but I guess I’ve just never seen it before. Apparently blogs have better spam filters than email inboxes…wonder why one can filter better than the other, or if email just get so many more that they show up more often. So every time someone changes their email address, you have to approve the new comment. So, it doesn’t really make sense for me to come up with clever, gay, email addresses for your entertainment b/c you just have to approve one more message (or not approve it at all). I’ll keep that in mind.