We hiked to the St. Louis Canyon on our third and final day at the park. But first, here’s a photo of the lodge lobby. It’s very rustic.
This hike is nice because it’s near the cabins so very quick to get right to the trail. We arrived at this little canyon right away and it was cool because of the frozen water and also rushing.
I remember that I took a photo of Kevin right here at this spot the last time we were at Starved Rock. It was a little warmer back then.
It didn’t take so long to get to the end of the trail, St. Louis Canyon, except that there was so much ice on the ground that it was impossible to get close.
If you watch this video you’ll see what I mean.
As we were heading away from the canyon we ran into hikers, the first we’d seen out hiking since our first day. It was three women, all about Kevin’s age, and they were childhood friends I think, and they always got together once a year, maybe…it was a couple of weeks ago so I’m sketchy on the details.
But they were very friendly, and all wearing crampons over their boots so they could get across the ice. They said that the crampons weren’t so great for the hiking on the rocks and it seems to me that it’d be rather terrible, especially since parts of the path were sandy. It was nice to talk to some friendly people and I would have liked to have watched them crossing the ice floe. But we were ready to get out of there…
Here we are close to the end, except there were many steps.
This is the outside of our cabin, which is a quad cabin. I could hear the people in the adjoining the first night, but not so much.
When we got back to the lobby I noticed this picture of the lodge. It doesn’t look like that at all now, but I thought the lodge was built by the CCC in the 40s? They must have remodeled it. Never mind, I took three seconds looking it up; the Starved Rock Hotel was built in the 1890s, and the current Lodge was, indeed, built by the CiIvilian Conservation Corps, in the 1930s.
We got home in the afternoon and of course the only deer we saw on our trip were actually in our front yard.
A good trip.
Ok then,
Mrs. nearing the end of February Hughes.