Sunday Drive on Country Roads

Last week I shared some photos from a winter hike where @jasonrussell and I went to search for some icicles. That was intended to be our only stop, but we had about 3 hours of daylight left and there is so much to see around here in the Missouri Ozarks! We decided there was no need to let a good day go to waste, so we kept on going!

Wait...are those stairs in the river?

More on that later...

Our first stop only took about an hour, round trip, so we decided to hit the gravel roads to go check out some other sights in the area. We followed the gravel roads to a state highway that leads to this river access on the North Prong of the Jacks Fork River. And yes...those are definitely stairs. I guess people got tired of climbing to swing from the rope in the tree and decided to take matters into their own hands. The river is super low right now, but after the spring rains, this swimming hole will be deep enough again to enjoy the rope swing :)

We normally don't drive this far upriver (a whole 15 miles or so) because we have so many accessible places within minutes our home. But this place was really neat and we decided that we need to take the kiddos this spring/summer!

This is on one of the most upper parts of the Jacks Fork River, also referred to as "The Prongs", which you can see on the far left side of this map.

Image source: currentriver.net

Even in the country, people still like to vandalize stuff...

Here, you can see our luxury SUV sitting in harmony with nature 😉 😉 😉 I'm being sarcastic, of course, but in all seriousness, this car has taken us on so many memorable trips!

Onward to our next stop of the day...the scenery is beautiful on these back-roads and we cruised slowly and blasted some music while we enjoyed the drive!!!

We looped around the gravel roads to stop at a place known to locals as "Pebble Dam"

Mister Bash loves to go exploring with us!

Jason shot some long exposures and some videos, so I'm excited to see how his stuff turns out when he's done editing!

Time to hit the old dusty trail to make one more stop before we went to pick up our daughters from their grandparents house...

This is just a low-water bridge on part of the Jacks Fork, so naturally we all refer to this place as "Low Water"

One last nice view on the country roads before we went home

Winter can be a bummer, but luckily for us there's no shortage of great scenery around here. Even during my least favorite time of year. :)