Cunningham Falls State Park

Today was an absolutely gorgeous day outside, as slowly but surely, spring is pushing winter on its way. To take advantage of the favorable weather, we decided to take a day trip to Cunningham Falls State Park, near Thurmont, MD.

It just so happens that this weekend, the park was having a maple-syrup festival, where they gave live demonstrations of how they tap maple trees for their sweet sap and boil it down into pancake syrup. We stayed around a little while, listening to the demonstration, but soon found ourselves out on the trails, for which we came.

The forest in this park is very rocky, with rock outcroppings all over the place. Even most of the trails are littered with rocks, large and small, and of course, moss is decorating nearly all of the rocks.

I couldn’t have attached the moss on the rock below any better than nature itself. Beautiful, with the full covering, and yet enough gaps exposing the rock underneath. In fact, now I’m going to have to try and actually duplicate this kind of wonderful moss/rock work in my aquarium one of these days.

To start out, we took the trails that everyone takes to get to the park’s main attraction — the falls. Being a series of cascading falls, descending what is probably 4-5 stories, they are pretty impressive. Below is a picture of the bottom two sections of the falls.

Finally, we headed off to some more difficult and less frequented trails so that we could take in the forest, believing we were the only humans around. (For the most of the hike, that was the reality.) While the forest was still bare from winter, many of the trees had buds, ensuring that if we came back in a couple months, the woods would be entirely new.