Limping Toward Moon Lake

We were hiking the Wolf Lake State Park loop trail on an exquisitely beautiful day and everything was almost perfect. I say "almost," because my sprained ankle was becoming increasingly troublesome. I'd debated giving up, turning around and returning to the trail head, but (1)We'd come too far to abort the mission at that point and (2)The trail seemed to smooth out and become less rocky on our last hike here. So I just limped across the rocks and enjoyed the autumn scenery:

This was Madeline's first real, honest-to-goodness hike since she'd been left with me in September and she seemed quite happy about it all:

I didn't see a lot of fungi, but what I did see was rather spectacularly colored:

The dogs stopped for a drink of cold mountain water:

And then we continued onward............Uh oh, what was that giant rock mound up ahead?:

I was snapping hundreds of photos, hoping that a few of them would truly portray the exquisite beauty all around us on that November day:

The trail dropped down abruptly into a stream valley where two split logs formed a bridge. I wasn't sure how to get my sprained ankle safely there, but I was careful and made it without incident:

And then across more ankle twisting rocks as we headed toward another giant beaver pond:

Daphne and Madeline followed a beaver dropped log down to the water's edge for a quick look, sniff and taste:

Silly ol' Seamus actually went in the water. He was happy as could be:

And then we arrived at the biggest, most elaborate beaver dam I've ever seen, perhaps 10 feet high and holding back a veritable lake. These beavers were not ordinary rodents. They had engineering degrees:

The trail took us all around the edge of the beaver pond - which apparently was growing because trail signs were still attached to trees which were by then standing in deep water. The dogs were happy, I was happy, Moon Lake was just ahead. But I'll post about that tomorrow: