Chief Logan State Park

I just posted a video that somebody posted on youtube from Chief Logan State Park. I grew up a couple of miles from the park and I spent a substantial portion of my time there so I thought I would do a blog or two or three...

It was always a great treat to go to the park of course. We had all of our family reunions there and still do to this day. We always had a ball, whether it was just me and Billy and Rhonda or we added in assorted friends and cousins. The big lure was the creek. Every visit would start out with our mothers telling us to stay out of the creek. Our job was to spend the day wearing them down until they finally relented and allowed us to play in the creek or if worse came to worse we would play far enough away that we would just get in the creek anyway.

If we had to sneak into the creek we always had the best intentions of staying dry. Invariably we would slip on one of the mossy rocks that we had to overturn to find the salamanders or crawdads or just get wet doing what kids do in general while wading around. If we had to sneak then we would have to stay gone until we actually dried off because the whippin' for being late was not as bad as the whippin' for being wet. I also learned that there was a time that our clothes looked dry and we could go back as long as we avoided hugs for aunts and grandparents who would exclaim, "why child, you're soaking wet. How did that happen?" Sometimes the excuse, "I accidentally fell in the creek," would work - sometimes it wouldn't.

The other kids were braver than I was when it came to the squirmy creatures that we tried to catch. They would just pick them up and put them in the cup. I always had to have 2 cups so I could trap them. We hardly ever saw a snake which of course was our mom's perennial warning everytime we went anywhere, "Watch for snakes!" One time I saw a world record sized crawdad. It was the size of a small lobster! It was at least 8 inches long and it was surrounded by at least 100 babies. It was truely one of natures marvels. It kept me out of the creek for the rest of the day.

Building dams was our favorite pasttime. Usually they didn't amount to much. But every now and then (usually with the help of our teenage uncles) we would build an engineering marvel that didn't allow as much water to seep through all the cracks as it held back. Then we could lie back in our cool pools of bliss and take it easy. Usually it would take hours to build those dams and we would have to go home shortly after they were done.

One of the greatest days ever was the day my mom took my cousins and us and dropped us off for the day. We followed every inch of every mile of every creek in that park. This was somewhere between 3 to five miles of creek. By the time she picked us up we were so dirty that she wouldn't allow us to ride in the car. We rode home in the trunk! Before you guys start screaming, "child abuse", please realize this was in the 70's when people did things like that. The trunk was open and we laughed and played all the way back to the house. It was great.