Sunday, November 17, 2013

Bogue Chitto State Park

We spent the weekend tent camping in Franklinton, LA at Bogue Chitto State Park. This park was opened in 2010 and is the newest Louisiana state park. There are many different types of trees here and they are all showing their fall colors. This is one of my favorites spots in the park.
We tried to fish on this pier but we both had bad luck. Take another look at the second picture. See those tree branches hanging over the pier? I wish the trees had been trimmed because its not a good idea to have low hanging branches where people fish. I got my bait suck in a tree twice and I ended up loosing it. Then one of the eyelets on David's pole broke! We weren't meant to catch any fish that day, so we went walking on the trails.
These stairs lead down to the lower gorge trail. You can't see our truck from this angle but our truck was parked way up at the top of the stairs. Once you reach the bottom you are surrounded by mature trees, mainly pine and oak. Here's what the trail looks like:
This huge pile of red dirt was at one end of the trail. The top of the pile reaches the park's main road. I felt like an ant standing next to it. I could see footprints going up and down so some brave person had climbed to the top. Red dirt is everywhere at Bogue Chitto and its also prevalent in the surrounding parishes. It had rained recently and there were red mud puddles along the road.
This was our campsite for the weekend. We stayed at #134 in the Bottomland RV loop. The site had a nice large tent pad, a fire ring, and a picnic table on a wooden deck. We had two visitors to our campsite: an armadillo and a raccoon. The armadillo didn't care about us and just walked on by. The raccoon realized we were eating chili for supper and waited nearby to steal from us. We ate supper at the picnic table then packed up the chili and put it in the ice chest. Then we sat by the campfire...that's when the raccoon made his move. He ran on the picnic table, stole our Fritos bag, ran back in the woods and tore the bag open and ate the remaining chips. That's all my pictures from our trip. I didn't take too many this time. I wish we had seen more wildlife. Not sure where we will go next time, stay tuned.