So Long Parks

My last day with the State Parks was Oct. 7th, and the rest of the staff and I ended it with a great hike - The Three Gorges Hike. In total, it's about 8 miles long. We started at the top of Robert H. Treman State Park, then hiked down through the gorge, hiked up another gorge called Lickbrook, and then ended by hiking through Buttermilk and came out at the bottom of Buttermilk Falls. It was a great hike, and amazingly we had a huge turnout. I think we had over 30 people that went. I was leading it with three other park employees. We made several stops along the way to do mini presentations - I started off with an icebreaker and then on the hike I talked about tracking and migrating monarch butterflies.

This is hiking up Lickbrook. It was a pretty steep climb, just look at Ryan!


Towards the end of the hike, we were coming around a bend in Buttermilk when all of a sudden a great blue heron came flying around and was only about 15 feet from us! It landed right on top of these falls. It was so neat. There are a ton of herons in Delaware, but it's much harder to come by them here.

Here we are at the end. Since it was such a large group, it took really long. I think it was supposed to be 5 hours but ended up being closer to 7! But most everyone stuck it out and had a good time.
So who knows if I will be going back to the parks next summer. Only time will tell, but I can say for sure that I had a really nice summer working with them and it wouldn't be all that bad to go back :)