Indian Stairway

My minions

 


Queens of the Hill!





Spider Monkey demonstrating his beast climbing skills on the Indian Stairway



"I get up with a little help from my friends"...MR helps Christina overcome a slight fear of heights



Are y'all coming up?



This picture makes me think, "Yeah!"



My butt's not actually THAT big...it's just my fanny pack.



We found the Flintstone's Living Room!!  The latest in pre-historic furniture design!

Pretty....

Frog's Head.  So...we were amazed as we were told we'd go past a formation that looked like a Frog's head.  Wow...

Still happy.  The point we climbed up from was to the right of the photo and we hiked around the ridge.  We went past several rock houses we climbed down to (Flintstone's Living room) and then climbed back up to the ridge.

You can barely see the Frog Head across the ridge top in this photo.  Sadly, people had carved their initials and other unsavory things on his little head.  Bad vandals...

Adena Arch

Huh...well it turns out I hadn't ever been to the trail called Indian Stairway!  I think where I had been before was actually a place called "Cloudsplitter".  While I have a bit of a  tendency to live in the moment and think that whatever thing I'm doing, book I'm reading, Christmas tree I'm decorating, is the best ever, I think that Indian Stairway, might just be THE BEST TRAIL EVER (in the Gorge at least...thanks for pointing that out yesterday Will...we have hiked cooler trails out West -- that would actually be in the Virgin River in Zion Canyon, Utah!!)  Anyway...where was I...Indian Stairway, perhaps one of the best trails in the Gorge?  It definitely is at the top of the list and Mary Rollins said it was the best trail she'd ever hiked there!

I've heard about Indian Stairway for years but never hiked it because I couldn't figure out where it was.  It's not an "official" trail and I sometimes tend toward disorientation so I've hiked multiple other trails instead of the trail I'm looking for when my minions start to get irritated with my losted-ness.  But, yesterday, we struck gold and I found some awesome directions on the Internet which I copied and pasted into an email I sent to myself so we could keep looking at them in the phone while hiking  I was feeling pretty clever and while I suppose I could have printed them I'm trying to be paper conscious.  Also, I made sure that I had the message downloaded in my phone BEFORE we got out of cell phone coverage which happens pretty quickly in eastern Kentucky.

We did have a few "lost" moments even with the great directions and my iPhone compass and we only nearly took one wrong turn off a cliff (my bad...MR was leading the way and I was trusting her sense of direction as it's usually spot on!) and we found many many geological jewels along the way.  Will and Wyatt said they saw a wolf/coyote (MR sand I suspect it was a squirrel--it is easy to confuse them) and asked me for his pocket knife I was carrying to defend themselves.  Sadly, I could not find it in my bag at that very moment, so I gave him a ball point pen I was carrying.  The boys seemed quite pleased with that as a weapon and scampered ahead on the trail while Christina, MR and I went back for a fanny pack inadvertently left at the bottom of the Indian Stairway.  We made a loop hiking the ridge top with GORGEous views, hiked along a section of the trail that had us on the cliff's edge -- definitely not a trail for small children -- and ultimately ended up back on the Sheltowee Trail and back to our car.  In all, I suspect we hiked about 6 miles.

And a good time was had by all (except Will who claims he'll never go hiking with me again because I don't do what he says...)

"Tent City" behind Miguel's.

And, to end the day:  Miguel's pizza.  Hooray!!  We saw license plates from: Utah, California, Ontario, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ohio and Connecticut.