Hi T:
man you sure pepped me up on day I was feeling not so.
very flattered….. thank you.
okay …. my friends house backside is completely the side of a sloping cliff.
the top third story has a cave … and and encloved area they put up bird wire and kept various birds in it that are found injured on their property which has (in fact) the same river running thru it that runs thru my backyard though they are up river.
They have an absolutely huge aquarium made out of …. I guess they carved it somewhow out of the rock at the bottom story which has kept very large catfish and such alive in it for ….. well a long time ……
between the top and bottom is where the cliff really slopes and she has planted many different flowers and such and its covered in that area with a glass roof to allow sunlight in.
the steps going up in places are made out of rock. other places they are probably man-made rock steps.
They have on more than one occaison found a water-moccasion (poisonous snake) waiting for them in the bath tub. 
look before you leap eh?
the father passed away some years ago …. but the mother is still alive to my knowledge …..(haven’t talked to any of them in …. way too long).
although the father was very outdoorsman-like (though a dentist .. and not one you’d care to see if you are wanting a lot of pain medicine lol) …. I strongly suspect the house was built by her insistance.
She’s really nature-minded. She was the one that always found the hurt animals and took them in.
You’d have fallen in love with the boys. all good-looking and women loved them. I lived with one and was best friends with him for years right after high school and loved getting the girls he wasn’t interested in .
The oldest boy was a trapper .. a hunter … and could skin anything. He went on to become to my understanding …. one of the best known brain surgeons in the country and last i heard .. lives in Hawaii though that was years ago.
a very interesting family. living with the baby raccoons was such a treat! being nocturnal myself … I used to play and play with them at night.
but they always turned them back into the wild when they were trained to take care of themselves.
The mother was also an artist. She …. God bless her …. actually coached me into making a …. what I consider a good drawing of a red-tailed hawk she brought to school that had a wing shattered from what was likely an unscrupulous hunter that shot it. she was in process of rehabing it and brought it to school as a model for us to draw. Normally i can’t draw stick men that don’t look like spaggetti.
Oh … there was a spring at their house that had the best water …. and once I road an iceberg down the river that we chopped off an area where the ice was still thick and their were 4 of us on it. it broke into 4 pieces … each of us on our own piece.
it headed for an ice break … an area where trees had fallen across the river and had caught up the big chunks of ice that had taken down the river .. and if not for a third friend who jumped off his piece of ice onto the tree and reached out and grabbed my friend who lived there …. he’d surely have died going under the flow of the river where it went under the ice and trees.
we weren’t very smart sometimes .
thanks for asking
S.