I was invited by my sister’s family to take a ride up to northwestern Maryland to visit Herrington Manor and Swallow Falls state parks today. Herrington Manor is a nice park with a good size lake and cabins for rent.  There is wildlife there and we spotted several young deer and a number of turkeys with poults near the entrance to the park.  The park also has a field that is maintained with wildflowers that draw in numerous butterflies such as the tiger swallowtail below.

What Herrington Manor didn’t have was a lot of people. In fact, the park appeared nearly empty which was strange on such a good weather weekend.  This was not an issue at Swallow Falls, located just a couple of miles down the road. There were tons of people there, and many of them were taking a dip in the Youghiogheny river.  The park has four falls, including Muddy Creek Falls, the state of Maryland’s highest free falling waterfall at 53 feet (below).

With the number of people swimming, and diving off rocks near the other falls, it was not easy to photograph any of the falls without also capturing the army of folks enjoying the park. I concentrated on some smaller areas to capture the water flowing over the 300 million year old sandstone and shale rocks that make up the park.