Falls Lake State Park

This is a map we have hanging up on our wall. It's hanging directly to the right of me at this very moment. It has a list and location of every single state park in the state of North Carolina and we have been slowly checking off every. single. one.

Pink spots are where we've been, yellow spots are what's left to visit within 2 hrs of us

This post is all about Falls Lake State Park. 

It's about and hour away from where we live, straight highway.

This is not going to be super detailed post because we didn't explore every little section of the park. It's more like a collection of separate parks grouped together to form one park. There are seven different areas to this one park. We wanted to visit Sandling Beach but it was already closed for the winter (PS I was ticked about that considering it was about 70 degrees the day we went) so we ended up visiting Rolling View instead. If you click the link to go to the map, you'll see toward the bottom left a fishing pier, that's where we started off, then we made our own trail along the beach.

The first thing we noticed on the beach was that the water was low, like a couple hundred feet low. Then we noticed clams all over the shore. They were everywhere!

You know what clams mean? LUNCH! Animal prints started appearing all over the beach, it was fun looking at the prints and trying to figure out how long they were there for and if it was more than one animal.

Heron tracks

Charlotte drew her own version of heron tracks, I think she did a great job!

We followed deer tracks, some sort of dog tracks and racoon tracks!

Racoon's have the cutest little tracks

See all the bugs on the water? And the dark fish spots under the water?

The water had left the ground super squishy and we had a really hard time keeping Char and Lexi out of it. At one point Lexi became stuck and I caught her just before she fell down face first into the mud. Both pairs of white sneakers are now brown.

All over there were signs that the water of the lake used to be much higher than it was. There were clams on fallen trees

Dirt under trees was eroded out exposing roots

 and water has carved tree stumps into organic sculptures.

 It's a beautiful park.