I picked up Boom Blox for the Wii today.

Even in playing it for only a bit, it is truly an awesome game. The physics are just flat out fantastic.

Basically, you throw a baseball like thing at towers of blocks into which various colored glass blocks are integrated. To pass a level, you have to knock all the glass blocks to the ground within a certain number of throws. Fewer throws than the goal yields more bonus points, etc…

Throws are accomplished by flicking the controller. The controls are quite intuitive without any frustration.

Simple premise. Brilliantly executed.

The graphics are solid, but the interaction between the bits of the tower are just patently brilliant. You can move the camera about and it is quite amazing to watch this balanced tower teeter back and forth with some of the blocks moving just a bit differently than others.

In any case, I have barely scratched the surface of the game and it is a lot of fun. I’m just cranking through single player. There is also two player competitive and cooperative modes along with the ability to create and share new levels!

Great game.

Full size. Desktop works well.

Specifically:

And then there were those who looked from a distance at our model of battery caged hens, read our sign about WHY VEGAN, but didn’t approach. As one blogger frankly posted in a reference to Bay Area Vegetarians “various ‘activist’ vendors pushing everything from a vegan lifestyle (been avoiding that booth)”.

What I said in my original post was:

Gone are the generic arts-and-crafts vendors from the years before, replaced with various “activist” vendors pushing everything from a vegan lifestyle (been avoiding that booth) to awesome chocolates to composting toilets to amazing beer.

Their site seems to be having some stability issues. My response, in case it is lost (in all of its unedited wordpress submission form glory):

That particular quote is just ever so slightly out of context; beyond the “avoid” part, it was meant as a compliment to the organizers of the Faire in that they opened up what had been a cheesy vendor area to a group of people that were passionate to selling their causes in such a venue.

But let me take a moment to explain the “avoiding that booth” part.

You might not be surprised to find that the image of the chickens in cages offended me, but you might find it interesting why.

I find industrialized meat production to be an extreme offense to nature and to the health of the human race. It is unnatural. It is poisoning our land and us.

Of that, I think we all agree. You might be surprised to learn that I also shun the “organic” products of the likes of Whole Foods, many of which are flown in from far away places (thus consuming mass quantities of fossil fuels) or have been made with such oddities as “organic high fructose corn syrup”. No thanks, if I’m gonna be “green” like all the hipsters, I know that asparagus in August is unnatural.

My avoidance of the booth was more because my initial impression was that your stance is fundamentalist. That Bay Area Vegans were there to sway opinion and gain supporters through sensationalist headlines and viscerally unpleasant imagery.

I have little patience for fundamentalism, regardless of form, and I had no energy or interest in confronting fundamentalism in the otherwise open forum of ideas that is the Maker Faire.

With that said, I am the first to admit that I have no experience with this organization and am looking forward to learning more. In particular, I would like to understand how an entirely animal free method of food production is compatible with the various species of commonly eaten domesticated vegetables that have been selected to best survive in conjunction with domesticated animals as their source of fertilizer.

Thousands of years of symbiotic, human perpetuated, evolution is awfully hard to overcome. The industrialized meat and vegetable complexes made a hell of a success at such denial in the last 50 years. I would like to see us not make a similar set of mistakes in the next 50.

The pendulum swings wide and the answer to sustainable perpetuation of species typically lies somewhere in the middle.

Regardless of anything else, the Bay Area Vegetarians have quite a collection of what look to be very yummy recipes.

The Maker Faire is always full of surprises.

The fine folks at Far West Fungi had a wonderful display of growing mushrooms, were selling mushroom mini farms, and were sharing a lot of mushroom lore. I’ll definitely be ordering some fresh mushroom products from them in the near future!

On my third pass by their booth in the process of taking a new set of friends on a whirlwind tour of the fair, I noticed they were also selling Truffle Salt.

Coincidentally, my first experience with Truffle Salt was at a dinner party not but a few weeks ago. The menu was a simple combination of fresh broccoli, potatoes-au-gratin, and slow roasted chicken. On the table was a small salt dish containing truffle salt. The food was awesome on its on, but the truffle salt put it right over the top.

So, of course, I grabbed a little pot of truffle salt from Far West! The stuff is awesome! Casina Rossa Truffle and Salt contains 5% dried, powdered, truffles suspended in your basic high quality italian sea salt.

Truffles have an intense flavor to start with; an almost smoky and extremely rich kind of woody flavor.

I made popcorn (on the stove, of course) and used a pinch of truffle salt. What normally would have resulted in about a half of bowl of left over popcorn was entirely devoured.

Awesome stuff. Amazon has Casina Rossa Truffle and Salt at a slightly cheaper price, but the shipping is really high. Amazon also has a Black truffle salt 10%. More truffle for the money, but it might be overwhelming, too!

Update: I found FungusAmongUs Truffle Salt (6% Truffles) sold through Amazon itself and, thus, eligible for Amazon Prime based delivery. I know nothing about this particular truffle salt, but have ordered some to give it a taste test.

Update 2: FungusAmongUs Truffle Salt received! Delicious stuff. Quite significantly more pungent and flavorful than the Casina Rossa product. At half the cost (taking into account shipping), I’ll stick to the FungusAmongUs until something better is found.

Every kitchen should have some!

Maker Faire 2008 Day One is over and done with. The show feels like it is about twice the size of last year. The scale of awesomeness is definitely 2x.

There have been a number of changes beyond the scale.

The various displays/booths have been re-organized and the organization makes sense.

The event took over the back parking lot of the fairgrounds and, as such, there is lots of room for various fire arts, very large statue stuff, and various outdoor events.

Gone are the generic arts-and-crafts vendors from the years before, replaced with various “activist” vendors pushing everything from a vegan lifestyle (been avoiding that booth) to awesome chocolates to composting toilets to amazing beer.

The food is awesome this year. While the various carny style food-vendors-that-you-see-at-every-character-lacking-street-fair are still there, you’ll find awesome little bay area food vendors in between. What really good tacos? No problem; beef, whole roasted pork, or braised lamb cheeks — all delicious. Home made yucatan peninsula style tamales, too. Oh, and fresh grilled organic asparagus with a delicious dressing is just around the corner.

Many vendors — TechShop, O’Reilly, EMSL, etc.. — seem to have made the transition from “hey, look, cool stuff” to “hey, look, cool stuff and here is where you can pay some $$ to participate”. Seriously — the show is starting to take on an air of professional marketeering. Only it is still all good– there are many more opportunities to make cool stuff for free than ever before.

The whole show is about interaction. And interact, you do!

Oddly, there are many more decent pinball players this year than last. I’m looking forward to comparing this years audits with the first year’s.

Of course, there is still the grand assortment of kids being exposed to well maintained pinball machines for the first time. Their first reaction is generally “ooh, what is this?!?!?”. Then it becomes all concentration. And, finally, it is the parents reminding them that there is lots of other cool stuff to see!

Awesome stuff. I took a handful of photos in between chatting with many folks about pinball machine restoration.

I’m utterly beat. Have no words. Here are a couple of more pictures. Off to bed to charge up for tomorrow!

This is a perpetual pinball chaos machine. Balls bounce around and trigger lights depending on which color pop bumper is hit.

This little girl met R2D2 and decided to have a dance.

The creator of the amazing artoo detoo robot — Chris — commented with a link to a video of the same dance event.

Thank you!

In the forest, the various bugs common to the leafy undercover were waking up, too.

This is a red velvet mite (Trombidiidae).

They play a critical, if slightly surprising, role in the health of the forest. Namely, the larval stage is parasitic and effectively controls populations of locust, grasshoppers and other plant destroying insects.

As adults, the red velvet mite is a ferocious predator that will take out mites and insects many times it size. In particular, the mite seems to favor insects that eat bacteria and fungus.

Thus, the mites help ensure that fungus and bacteria remain abundant within the forest and, by doing so, help ensure that the decomposition process remain high.

While the red velvet mite is related to chiggers and ticks, they do not bite humans and are quite the sociable little bugs.

I have no clue what this bug is other than “beautiful”.

It has gigantic jaws for its size, clearly designed for biting and ripping.

The bug really is that brilliant color of metallic blue. Even more amazing, the bug flew a few feet and landed on a tree. When the sun strikes it at a different angle, it turns a gorgeous metallic green.

Unfortunately, it moved too quickly for me to snap a photo, but I’ll definitely be keeping a lookout for these on our next visit.

More bugs on the click-through….

While wandering through the woods, we would flip over the occasional rock to see what might be hiding underneath.

Occasionally, this would reveal a five lined skink or some fat grubs (like these that I shot last year).

More often than not, the rock would have a nest of ants under it. Not just any ants, but big red ants.

Given that it was relatively cold out, they were fairly docile. Good thing, too, as I really wouldn’t want to deal with a pile of inch long active ants.

Odd, though. I have been flipping rocks in these woods for a good part of my 38 years on this earth and I honestly don’t remember seeing big red ants much at all, much less under just about every other rock.

In one section of the forest, we ran into a ton of Eastern tent caterpillar (Malacosoma americanum) webs. Each web was built into the nooks of branches off of the main trunk of a set of small trees (species unknown).

The only difference between the two pictures was the ambient air temperature. The little caterpillars that weave these amazing multi-layered tents are masters of temperature regulation.

The tents are designed to capture the heat of the morning sun and the caterpillars — of which there may be hundreds per tent — can easily regulate their temperature by moving between the different layers of the tent.

In particular, the caterpillars always build the largest part of their tent facing the brightest light source in the area. In a forest, this typically means that the tent will face whatever break in the trees allows in the most line from the sun.

While tent caterpillars can largely defoliate whatever tree they are living on, the trees generally don’t seem to suffer any permanent damage and will re-foliate within a matter of weeks.

One must wonder how important said caterpillars are in weeding out week trees and otherwise turning live leaves into a potent green fertilizer right at the beginning of the season when there is so little new biomass being added to the forest floor.

This last photo is of a bug product that completely mystifies us.

This is a random spider web in a field that has collected rain drops (or dew overnight).

Every now and then, one of the drops will be quite distinctly tinted a rather instance hue of some color between red, amber and yellow.

Rarely, a web may even have multiple colored drops. Mom captured a photo of a web with three colored drops out of several dozen; one red and two yellowish amber.

Baffling and beautiful, nature often is!

The New York Times has an awesome article about Gary Stern of Stern Pinball, the last pinball manufacturing company around. This may not be entirely true. There was a company in Australia that bought the rights to a bunch of Bally/Williams IP and is supposed to re-making some classics, but they seem to have disappeared (or it might have been a scam — I honestly don’t know what happened).

Pictured at left is Addams Family. It was the most popular pinball machine ever made, selling 22,000 machines (which is more than Stern’s entire annual production run, these days). Pat Lawlor, the designer, is now at Stern and continues to design some truly great tables.

I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that most pinball machines are sold individuals and placed in homes. The economy of route operated — corner store / pub — pinball machines was always based on conflict that was quite easily resolved by simply replacing all the machines with video games. Lower maintenance, less square footage, easier to move, and easier to simply swap software (these days) to “upgrade” the play experience.

I currently own 2 machines; Cyclone and Addams Family SPecial Collectors Edition.

Both are fully restored and both will be appearing at next month’s Maker Faire, along with a Dr. Who that I restored a few years ago and gave to a friend.

I may likely also be bringing a PIN-BOT. It is quite thoroughly beat and is going to be the target of some radical restoration experiments, I think.

Of course, any time we spend a while visiting my parents in Columbia, Missouri, Roger looks for any and all wild creatures.

Within minutes of arriving, Roger had already found one of these cute little Ringneck Snakes (Diadophis punctatus). Two more followed shortly thereafter.

They are each well less than a foot long, don’t bite and are quite calm.

One did get out of the cage. Of course, it crawled about 15 feet across the floor and onto Roger’s foot. After that, though, the snake cage stayed on the outside porch

More critters on the click through…

The frogs were just starting to emerge. They were everywhere. In the grass around the house, in the woods and all around the creek.

Good sign, too, as it means that the air and water of the area is not terribly polluted. Over a decade ago, the frog population was pretty much non-existent.

At night, there is a small swampy pond near the house (that is often completely dry in late summer). It is full of “peepers”– frogs like these that make an unbelievably loud racket on warm spring evenings.

By “loud”, I mean completely deafening. Roger and I wandered over to the little pond at about 9pm and hung out. It was nearly painfully loud with high pitched frog noises. And then the bullfrogs came in with their bassoon like chorus.

Incredible. I wish I had a means of recording it.

We also ran into a number of 5 lined skinks. They like to hang out under the deck by the house and under rocks in the woods.

It was a cold day, so this little guy was actually quite slow and made a perfect photography subject.

Roger caught it and it was quite content to hang out in the warmth of Roger’s hand until it warmed up enough to drop into “high speed mode”.

The pond is quite busy with birds this year, too.

The ducks are back, no surprise. However, this american coot also showed up and seems to have taken up residence.

As well, the wood ducks have been quite busy — more so than usual.

A great blue heron showed up, too.

And on the last day of our visit, Sadie — mom’s new dog — brought a turtle up to the yard. The only thing missing from this trip was a toad!

Roger and I (and Christine, for most of the week) have spent the last week in Columbia, Missouri visiting my family

In other words, Roger and I have spent most of the last week hiking around the land that surrounds my parent’s house every day.

I took a handful of photos of water tumbling over the rocks in the creek below the house. To capture that “blurry moving water” essence, I cranked the aperture to maximum and used a nearby rock as a tripod to keep the shutter speed open as long as possible.

I specifically positioned the camera such that it would catch the reflecting sun off the surface of the water. As the sun was acting as a point light source, I figured that it would be interesting to see the sun traverse the water surface over the course of the exposure.

Certainly was! Surprisingly so! The end result looks like someone scribbled with a light pen on the surface of the water!

Detailed explanation (for my seester Ann): I used the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro Lens to capture these 2″ tall waterfalls. They were taken in very bright afternoon sunlight. I cranked the aperture to f/32 to achieve as long of an exposure as possible. For these, the shutter was open for all of 0.2 seconds (1/5th of a second). To keep the camera steady, I propped the camera on a [somewhat muddy, oh well] rock and held the shutter button down to take multiple exposures, hoping at least one would be steady.

Given the angle of the sun and the water, the water was acting as a mirror for the sun. Reflecting a point of light directly into the camera lens. Unlike a mirror, water is… well… fluid and, thus, the surface is ever changing and the point from which the sun is being reflected changes constantly as the shape of the surface changes.

The key to the squiggles, though, is that this particular waterfall is moving at just the right speed such that the surface tension of the water is never broken in the primary flow. The surface remains smooth as it flows over the small fall.

Neat! I suggest clicking through to the largest size to get the full impact of the light scribbling on water.

Now, this little tumble of water was not exactly natural…

Given any random creek that has a decent flow, but nothing dangerously swift, that runs through an area that receives enough rainfall that the river is regularly reset, it just begs to have a dam built.

So, a dam Roger and I built.

The creek has large, flat, rocks every now and then that divert the channel of flow to one side or the other. We chose one and piled rocks in the channel.

We actually managed to raise the water level in the pool behind the dam enough to submerge a good part of the flat rock!

Not only that, but the main channel of the river now flows over the rock on the other side.

Quite neat to see the changes made to the flow with such relatively little effort.

The flat rock isn’t entirely flat and, thus, when we caused water to flow over the rock, some of the water fell off a nice little edge and made for some waterfalls upon which the sun reflected so nicely.

This is a picture looking upstream from below our dam. We came back and built another dam the next day on the flat rock just at the edge of this picture.

The first dam was built one pool further up.

While everything looks kind of grey, the green of the grasses and the rich green of the evergreen trees in the background indicate reality more accurately.

This is a woods on the verge of exploding with spring growth.

During the first weekend in April 2008, Roger and I headed to Castle Rock State Park for a bit of a walk in the woods.

Castle Rock State Park is located about 20 minutes from downtown Saratoga, CA off of Skyline Boulevard.

The park has lots of trails and there is an excellent high resolution PDF map made by a third party. Roger and I hiked a 3.5 mile loop.

The terrain is quite rocky and the trails hug the mountain side.

This is actually a photo of the trail we hiked along from the distance. You can sort of see it carved into the side of the mountain.

While it looks treacherous, the actual trails are quite nice. Generally fairly level and wide with only a few areas where you need to scramble over some rocks.

While the 3.5 mile loop we took dropped and climbed several hundred feet, yet we spent the entire time near the top of the mountain.

Thus, the views are often spectacular. On a clear day, you can easily see all the way south to Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay.

Looking north, you can see the Pacific in the direction of Half Moon Bay.

Rarely, though, is it that clear.

There is typically a bit of fog rolling off of the Pacific ocean that obscures the view.

You can see the haze in this photo. Instead of the dirty brown of heavy pollution, it is a bluish fog off the Pacific.

While the haze limits the ability to take sweeping landscape photos, it makes for some very interesting flora and fauna.

Which is what the rest of this post is about. As the fog rolls in each evening, the lay of the land guides the fog in very specific areas more than others.

Thus, a simple 3.5 mile hike led us through 4 different micro-climates. Given that it was early spring, there were tons of early blooming spring flowers out — the little ground hugging flowers that try to get out and bloom first in their competitive efforts for the attentions of the various pollinators in the area.

So… for a photo tour of the flowers (and a few critters) of the area, click on through….

As we walked out of the cool and moist parking lot — almost felt like a cool fall day prior to snow — we descended into a towering red wood forest climbing up both sides of the trail that wound along next to a small creek.

This is the first micro-climate. Beyond the red woods, this area leads down to a cliff face with waterfall and a lookout deck built on top of the falls.

Beautiful. This little valley also guides the fog up through the area and, thus, the forest is fairly lush with ferns and underbrush.

This little lacy fly like bug was hanging out on the leaf of a plant. I certainly never would have found it, but Roger misses nothing!

The fly was, perhaps, about 2 inches long from head to end of wings.

Photo tip: If you want to photograph bugs, do so on a cold day or capture the subject and stick it in the fridge for an hour or two. It won’t hurt the bug and it slows them right down to photographable speed.

As you move more deeply into the woods, the trail angles out of the little redwood valley and starts to cut across the mountain.

While it is still quite lush, the sun starts to break through and shine upon the forest floor here and there.

This is when we started to hear the steady bzzzzzz of flying insects. Bees and bee-like bugs, in particular. Nothing that bothered us. We certainly weren’t nearly as interesting as the hundreds of blooming trees in the area.

This incredibly hairy bee like critter would hover just over the trail with three or four of its friends. Roger labeled it a “Hummingbee” and the description is apt.

As we moved along, we transitioned into the next micro-climate. As the trail moves away from the little redwood valley, it starts to cut across the side of the mountain (eventually below the big rock pictured above).

As it moves into the open, the climate becomes much more mountainous desert. Quite literally, the temperature climbed from about 55 to about 80 in about a hundred yards.

While this area bakes in the sun, there is still the evening fog providing nightly libations to the plants of the area.

Thus, the trees are lush and oft covered in thick hanging moss or lichens. Likewise, the underbrush has lots of little plants, many of which were in bloom as we made our traversal.

This is a wild strawberry or false wild strawberry that we found growing amongst the rocks along the trail.

There were huge patches of these. I have no idea if their fruit is edible to humans, but I would bet that the lizards and rodents of the area find them quite tasty.

Speaking of lizards, it wasn’t long until we started seeing quite a few lizards running around as we passed by.

This is a fairly typical example, though there were others that were much smoother, more chameleon, in shape and coloration.

This lizard was probably 8″ to 10″ from head to tail and moved rather rapidly.

While it looks to be of plain coloration from a distance, getting close reveals that its back is covered in little blue gem like markings.

As long as you don’t move quickly, it’ll stick around. However, as soon as the lizard decides that you are close enough or have moved too quickly, it simply vanishes. The speed with which they move combined with their camouflage makes them quite difficult to find when they aren’t trying to catch a few rays.

Along the path, there were occasional explosions of color.

This Indian Paintbrush is one of only a handful of such bushes we saw. Gorgeous intense colors exploding out of fairly drab foliage.

If you look closely at the left-hand side of the trail picture, the little spot of orange is actually this bush.

At this point, we are quite completely in a desert like climate. The sun is intense. In the summer, this part of the trail can be utterly brutal with heat.

This bush, and the trees, are a bit of an exception. Most of the flowers in the area tend to be flat out tiny.

There was, however, one other explosion of color in the area.

For some reason, this flower reminds me of the planet killing ray gun on the death star.

While the flower, itself, was tiny, it was but one of thousands of blooms on a single instance of this plant — likely some kind of potato?

It was the only bush of its kind along the way.

The bees in the area would take a brief break from the blooming trees to dive into this bush, but they pretty much ignored the Indian Paintbrush. Go figure.

For whatever reason, there were a handful of flies that were in the area of the Indian Paintbrush.

This rather tiny and very hairy fly posed for me while sitting on a leaf in the sun. I have never seen a fly with such a white head before.

Quite the interesting little snout, too.

Fortunately, like the bees, the flies had no interest in us.

Actually, the only time we have been bothered by bugs in Castle Rock is in the late summer or fall. And, then, they only come after you if you stay still for a good long while.

Nothing that bits, though.

As I mentioned before, the desert area was largely dominated by incredibly tiny flowers.

The details of these tiny blooms are easily missed unless you look closely at the ground near the trails edge.

The little orange flower is one that commonly appears in yards in throughout the bay area. It grows as a ground hugging vine with tiny little orange blossoms.

However, on the side of the mountain, it grew as ground cover. There would be multiple square feet of ground covered by this vine with a couple of hundred tiny orange blossoms.

And by “tiny” I mean “about the size of a dime”.

There were also tiny clumps of these little purple flowers growing in rockier areas that the little orange flowers didn’t seem to care for.

This is another flower about the size of a dime. Extremely tiny, vividly purple, blooms with little flakes of pollen dusting anything that got near, including itself.

While walking along the trail, we would occasionally run into a weedy vine winding its way through the rocks and vegetation.

The vine, itself, was unremarkable. Scraggly. Colorless lowers and very plain leaves.

However, the means via which it tied itself off to anything close by was rather amazing.

This is a typical “tie-down” that vine produces. While the vine is held tightly by these squiggly bits of growth, the spirals add quite a bit of springiness that allow the vine to move about without damage.

Interestingly, any of the little squiggly bits that grew off the vine, but didn’t find purchase, would quickly die and fall off.

Clearly, the squiggly bits know when they have become an integral part of the overall structure and the vine wastes no energy keeping parts alive that serve no purpose.

Makes sense, given the overall rather barren environment that it is living in.

(My grape vines are doing the same).

About this time in our hike, we made an abrupt transition from a desert mountain climate into something more like mountain fields.

And by abrupt, I mean the trail leads off the mountain side into a little thicket of woods with a stream. There is a bench to sit on and it is a nice, cool, place to take a breather.

When you continue on the trail, you come out of the thicket into a long set of steep fields that run down the mountain. Gone are the giant boulders and scraggly trees hugging the mountain side.

Instead, it is all grasslands with the occasional rock and large tree.

This was actually the last flower we saw as we headed into thicket. It was a single stem of flowers sticking out of the hillside as we entered the thicket.

Moving into the meadow environment, it quickly became abundantly clear that the meadows were not just full of various grasses.

There were hundreds of little wildflowers scattered throughout.

Unlike the desert areas, the flowers in this area tended to be larger and the plants grew taller, likely to compete successfully with the taller growing grasses.

While it was noticeably more humid than the desert area, this area was certainly not damp and certainly did not lack in sunlight.

It was actually difficult to get a semi-decent picture of the Yellow flower because it was just so darned reflective!

The flowers in this area tended to be more numerous and spread over larger areas.

Whereas you might encounter only one or two instances of a particular kind of flower on the mountain desert trail, there would be hundreds of any given plant spread across the meadows.

For example, this tiny flower — a geranium, maybe, says my Dad — grew in little clumps all over the meadow.

Oddly, there didn’t seem to be much in the way of flying insects in this area. Whereas there was, quite literally, a constant hum of flying insects in the previous environment, the meadows were pretty close to dead silent!

Lots of lizards in this area, too, but smaller and much faster moving.

Walking out of the meadows, we rather rapidly transitioned into our fourth micro-climate of the day.

A traditional forest. Lots of big trees, not much underbrush.

Flowers were few and far between, but there was lots of interesting life in the woods.

Including these two examples of fungus.

Though a forest, it is still quite clear that this micro-climate, like the rest, is heavily influenced by the nightly fog.

In particular, the trees were generally covered in thick, hairy, moss.

Roger (of course!) found a wonderful spider living in a web made in amongst the moss.

The spider was quite clearly biding its time in the safety of its web, not at all phased by our presence.

From the woods, the trail led back through all of the micro-climates one last time along slightly different trails.

While hiking back up the seemingly much longer than when we started trail to the parking lot, we stopped along the way and could hear water falling.

Looking off the trail, there was this wonderful little water fall cascading into a perfectly clear pool of water.

Quite a relaxing place to stop for a moment on the way home.