Vickery Cave Leads to Gid

To get the kids out of the house today, we braved the icy weather to go to a cave located just off the highway on the Guion Road (Ar-58). It's been on our agenda since beginning the site so we decided to use it to get the young'uns away from the X-Boxes and Tivos for a few hours.
The Vickery Cave doesn't appear to be much more than a deep hole in the ground. The opening of the cave has collapsed in the not-too-distant past and to enter the cave proper, one must negotiate a tight crawl under that collapsed rock. The cave is known to have been rich in artifacts and was well occupied in ancient times.
As we approached the cave, we noticed a plume of steam jetting from the mouth of the cave into the crisp January chill. Upon making the descent into the hole we found that very warm air was gushing from the small entrance at the bottom! It is an amazing phenomenon and the kids absolutely loved it.
Since we didn't go into the cave, we didn't spend a long time at the site because...well...there wasn't much more to see than what I have described.
So we decided to go down the raod a piece to Gid and show the kids the waterfalls there.
We were rewarded with clear flowing water over green-mossed ancient flowstones sporting long, glistening icicles at the Gid Waterfall.
As the kids approached the Old Gristmill waterfall a few minutes later, they actually yelped with delight upon seeing the broad rockface of the falls covered in massive white sheets of ice with great icicles hanging over the frozen spray at the bottom.
It was cold today...so cold it would have been easy to stay at home and watch football or something really crazy like that. But we didn't...and I at least...am glad!

Lookout!

The First and Second Lookouts have delighted the crew this past month. We've been on several excursions to both of the lookouts and found some pretty cool stuff! For a few days, we were enamored by the Chamber of the Morning Sun, a cave a landowner told us about, and which we were delighted to find catches the morning sun and casts a beam on the cave floor.
We've taken several trips to the second lookout and explored below the bluffs there. We located a small cave, a very interesting shelter and a bluffline that sports many cvisual and geological delights! The panoramic views experienced at different points along the bluffline - both along the top and the bottom - are worth the energy expended negotiating the steep hillside.