Petit Jean State Park Cedar Creek Self-Guiding Trail

It was the "self-guiding" part of this that was most bizarre, as it's a trail like all the others. There are little red markers that look like they used to have numbers on them, so our guess is that there used to be a pamphlet of some kind describing points of interest along the trail. Actually, there may still be a guide, but we didn't see one. We thought the trail was fine without that added information. I guess you could say we took an extremely self-guided trail, with no guidance except the trail blazes.

The Cedar Creek Trail begins at an old Pioneer cabin:

It's a 1 1/4 mile loop:

There are some areas along the trail where you can see the water better than others.

Here's an example of the red rectangular marker, which we think must have been linked to something of interest on the trail:

The trail has some sections that go up or down at a pretty steep angle:

About half-way along, I think, there's an area close to the creek where the water widens out a bit.

The Younger Son took video from this part of the trail:

I think this was my favorite part of this trail:

Soon after that, there was another bridge:

The view from the bridge:

The route out of the woods wasn't as steep as the way in.

There was some water pooling from a spring on the left of the rocks in this picture, and I saw some bullfrog tadpoles:

I also saw a brown lizard, a blue-tailed skink, and numerous birds. The trail looks so enclosed and tree-covered that I wouldn't have thought you could get much of a distant view while walking it, but this was the view close to the end of this loop trail:

I like walking, and this trail provided a lovely experience.