Vacation 2016: Boiling Springs State Park

This year, our summer vacation was a roughly 3.5 day tour of northwest Oklahoma.  This is part of our system of having vacation in Oklahoma one year and out of Oklahoma the next.  Due to random technology issues, I'm going to blog by site we visited rather than in chronological order.

Location: Boiling Springs State Park, near Woodward, OK
Date: 8/2/2016
Highlights - beautiful forrest, crystal clear streams, oldest Burr Oak Tree in OK

Ok, so, spoiler alert, that video is the extent of the "Boiling Springs" --- that said, do not let that dissuade you from visiting as this is a completely lovely, beautiful park with so much more to offer.

 Boiling Springs was the 3rd of the 5 State Parks we visited, but the first time the staff explained the awesome State Park Passport system.  Our kids are very excited to visit them more parks, get their passports stamps, and achieve the various medallions.  Check it out!  The staff at this park seemed over joyed to see us and is even mailing us stamps from the state parks we had already visited.  SO cool. Also, note the cool stone work. Almost all the parks we visited were built by the Civilian Conservation Corp or WPA.  That was a heck of a program and decades later the work has held up/been maintained beautifully.

 The first, short trail at this park lead to this "River" B seems skceptical.  M is still clutching her passport.  We talked about animal footprints near the bank and why this water is clearer than in some other places we have visited.

 Here is E walking back from the stream.  He spent most of the time in this park clutching the trail map.  He doesn't know how to read maps, but liked to think he was navigating.  We also tried to spur some of the hiking along by pushing him to be the leader and go a bit faster than he was at the back of the pack.

 The colors are really off in these photos, but it was gorgeous.  This was mostly the kind of forest/wood with few under story plants, but just lovely

 The streams were all completely crystal clear and spring fed into sand streams.  There were zillions of tiny frogs all over.  Everyone wanted Ro to be there as he would have adored it.  Just so many frogs and these interesting bugs with blue bodies and black wings.

 This was the lead pack, waiting for Mr. E to take the path at his own pace.

 It doesn't really fit in the photo, but this is the allegedly 300 year old Burr Oak that is 18ft around.  Allegedly the oldest Burr Oak in Oklahoma. This trail was 2 miles long and the kids just did amazingly great.

 So many trees, so many photo ops.  M and I really lead the pack on the way back as there was a little bit of Pokemon hunting happening too.  Interestingly the GPS in the pokemon app seemed to work better in most of these places than our map aps or the paper hand out maps, hmmm.

I am a sucker for a beautiful walk in a quiet wood.  It was a lovely cloudy day and a perfect day for a walk in the woods.  Oklahoma remains full of delightful surprises!