Last year I went hiking with my friends Paul and Brad to Ellicott’s Rock where we were just a little too early to see two pink lady slipper plants blooming. 
So this year, we waited a little longer and tried a place that Paul found near Coopers Creek. Unlike last year, there wasn’t really a hike involved because it turns out there are hundreds of pink lady slippers just off of the roadway. It is a few miles down a dirt road, so it is surprising how many people we saw around there, but there are also a lot of camp sites, so maybe not all that surprising.
The pink lady slipper is an orchid, not that rare in some parts of the country, but not really that easy to find in Georgia, plus you have to look at just the right time.
In the first picture you can see a brown stem with a pod on the end that we think must be last year’s seed pod, but we couldn’t see any seeds.
Here is a picture of a patch of these things and there were a few patches like this where we went:
We also saw some other kind of neat plants as we made a few stops along the way. At one place I saw some purple flowers (wild geranium) and also got a good picture of a trilium with a hitchhiker.
We saw some orange flowering trees or shrubs which Paul said were wild azaleas. Here is as close as I could get to some of those flower:
