Babcock State Park

I recently spent a week at Babcock State Park in West Virginia with my son and his family.  It's a place where we vacationed often when I was a kid, and it has changed surprisingly little over the years.  Talk about bringing back a flood of memories.  The highlight for me was climbing on the rocks in the stream with my nine year old granddaughter, Sami.  It was like I was a kid again, playing with a friend.

 

The Grist Mill wasn't there when I was a kid, but I love it anyway.  It is now the iconic image of Babcock. 

The mountain stream it's on feeds the old swimming area.  We used to sun ourselves on the large flat sloping rocks.

There is a small island in the old swimming area today, which I caught in the early morning light.

We stayed in adjacent log cabins, each surrounded by trees, on a hillside with the mountain stream close by.  My dad used to read stories of the frontier to my sister and me before we went to sleep at night when we were little.  It was easy to imagine wild Indians roaming about in the woods outside our cabin.

The only nearby store in the old days was in Clifftop, a couple of miles down the road.  The now abandoned building it still there.

I'll close with a photo of Sami.  What a wonderful gift to be able to share something with her that was so important to me when I was her age.