Amicalola Falls

My dear friend Nikki and I took a trip to Amicalola Falls here in Georgia. We headed there to see the waterfall, of course, but also just to get away and spend some quality time with mother earth, which too many people don't seem to do anymore.

There is something about a waterfall that is awe-inspiring. Maybe it is the idea that something as simple as water and gravity, two things that are not uncommon in our daily lives, can make something so magnificent. Possibly it is the sense of power that this simple act of falling water gives off. You can hear some people talking and a bit of wind noise in this one, but you get the sense of what the waterfall sounded like: noise.

  Amicalola Falls by Googe

Yes, I do realize that water and gravity are not simple things at all. And that in reality, all sound is noise.

We continued our trek through the woods enjoying the conversation and world around us. We noticed that the path that we were now walking on was recycled rubber, and that the newly patched areas were very bouncy. So we bounced our way down this path. I'm sure that anyone who saw us thought we were insane, and I am perfectly content with them thinking that.

We reached a spot a little ways into the woods away from the falls. There wasn't anyone in this area, I suppose most people were there to see the falls, not the forest surrounding it. I noticed a lovely bird singing it's song so I stopped and got a recording of it with the falls in the background.

  Birds Chirping Distant Waterfall by Googe

By this point we were starting to get pretty tired. We had already hiked a bit and climbed 175 stairs and there were 425 more steps to climb to get to the top of the falls.. We decided to turn around and head back to the car and drive to the top.

Upon reaching the top we jumped out of the car and headed towards the top of the falls. The first thing Nikki noticed was that there was a coconut in the water.

 We stood there and contemplated why there was a coconut in the water. It seemed completely bizarre to me that someone would throw a coconut in. Nikki finally came to the conclusion that it was some kind of tradition. I questioned this and then we shrugged it off and Nikki noticed something else. There was a spider slowly makes its way between the trees above the water, suspended in mid-air.

That little black dot in the middle of the picture is the spider.

Noticing this spider brought me to the question: "How did the spider get it's web from one side to the other?" I just did a search for "spider webs" and checked the wikipedia page "Spider web" which brought me to an interesting study done on spiders in zero gravity.

Here's a beautiful picture of the mountains that we saw when we found our way down another path that no one seemed to be using: