I brought the backpacking tent as a backup in case our ancient Coleman dome tent gave up the ghost. Turns out the REI Half Dome serves ably as a gear tent, freeing us from the morning ritual of digging out from under piles of stuff and things in the sleeping tent.

Cicadas are everywhere in Red River Gorge, Kentucky. I caught this one molting on our tent Wednesday morning. When we moved our tent to a better spot the other morning, we left behind an outline of cicada shells where we’d flicked each day’s visitors off our tent.

It’s a bit hard to tell from this angle, but this is a natural double arch in Daniel Boone National Forest. It’s called, you guessed it, Double Arch. We only had time for one photo because it was raining and we were shielding the camera with my hat. A minor thunderstorm made the hike out exciting, but we were well-equipped as always with rain gear, headlamps, extra food, 20 bottles of MRE-size Tabasco sauce, etc. A fellow hiker had forgotten his emergency poncho, so we gave him ours and were rewarded with two replacements in stylish green and blue when we happened to run into him again back at Miguel’s. This was good all around because we remarked to each other after giving away our one emergency poncho that we, being two people, really should have two emergency ponchos. Now we do.

Can anyone identify these flowers? They’re everywhere in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge and seem to come in two colors, white and pink.

Update: They’re laurel. Identified thanks to p. 43 of John W. Snell’s book, Red River Gorge: The Eloquent Landscape.

Jami shows Bethel (5.10a) who’s boss. We both top-roped this route at Johnny’s Wall in Muir Valley thanks to some nice German BMW engineers (really!) who let us hop on their line while they ran our rope up another. Jami thinks this is her first 5.10, but I’m pretty sure she’s crept ever so carefully up Mighty Thor (5.10c) in The Garden before.

Ahh, iced-animal cookies. The perfect road-trip food: never go stale, icing doesn’t melt, and when you finish them the resealable bag serves as a great trash receptacle for gooey banana peels and such to help you Leave No Trace.

This pretty blue bike was just sitting in a meadow behind our campsite at Miguel’s. I was exploring a short winding path through a stand of bamboo when this magical scene suddenly appeared.

We found a sandbar island in the Red River (at least we think it was the Red River) swimming with beautiful butterflies (one of which can be seen in the upper right) and covered with the world’s most perfect rock-skipping rocks. After a lunch of Stroganoff noodles cooked in our trusty JetBoil, and ample rock-skipping, we took a well-deserved if slightly bumpy nap.

Here we are enjoying the view at a waterfall in Muir Valley, Red River Gorge, Kentucky.