Sunday, November 16, 2014

Tickfaw State Park

Tickfaw State Park is in Springfield, LA near Hammond. This is a great park with lots of elevated boardwalks and a great nature center. We stayed 3 days and 2 nights at site #37. The sites on the tent loop and RV loop are spacious and have trees in between each site for privacy. Here's what our space looked like:
This is just the tent pad. Each site has a picnic table, fire ring and paved parking spot. The best part of our camp site was the cat that showed up! He was so nice and tame. I think he lives at the park. He loved the beef jerky we fed him. Here he is sitting in Dave's lap.
The cat stayed with us until we walked to the nature center. Tickfaw has a really nice nature center, it has a huge aquarium in the center and a big taxidermy display.
The nature center has a trail leading off the back porch that goes through the swamps. There hasn't been much rain so it wasn't very swampy. It was so cold Saturday morning and we didn't see any wildlife on the trails except for squirrels.
Another unique feature of Tickfaw is the huge bald cypress tree called the grandma tree. The sign says it was around in 1812! I couldn't get close enough to get a good picture so I took a picture of the sign. I originally wanted to walk up to the tree and stand next to it so you could get an idea of the size, but it was in standing water and I knew the mud would suck me down and I'd probably loose my shoes. I'll try again in summer.
I'm pretty sure the holes in this tree were caused by a woodpecker. This tree was right off a boardwalk on one of the trails. We saw a woodpecker at our camp site. They have a bright red head so they are easy to spot. He was high up in a tree so I couldn't get a picture of him.
This picture was taken on the last trail we walked on. The trail is called the river overlook/bottomland hardwood trail. The bridge stretches over the Tickfaw River. I thought it looked more like a bayou than a river. That's all for this blog post. If you want to see pictures and videos, follow me on Instagram. My username is msexton1227. If you're reading this on a laptop the link will be in the top right corner. Until next time!