Will Slusher.net

Part II

So, to pick up with the story from where I left off…

… We had just hit our first major landmark. Our plan, from this point, was to continue on the St. Mary’s trail to the Mine Bank trail, then make camp just passed the intersection…

So, after a brief breather and a quick check of the good ol’ map, we set off down the trail. After a quarter mile or so, mainly following the course of the St. Mary’s River, we came to a little clearing where we took another quick break and continued along the “trail”.

You notice, that I put “trail” in quotation marks… :)

Pretty quickly the “trail” became rougher. Lots of underbursh, rocks, etc. We we camping in a “wilderness” area though, and this was supposed to be one of the less traveled sections, especailly this early in the season…

… of course, things got rougher… and rougher… and the “trail” got harder and harder to find…

“Does this look like the trail to you?”

“I have no clue… we’re supposed to be following the river though, right?”

Finally, and extra river crossing, a sprained ankle, and much confused wandering later, we finally came to the intersection of two streams…. The St. Mary’s trail never comes to the intersection of two streams… :)

After some more map checking, and pondering, and wishing we had a GPS, and laughing our butts off, we finally realized that we missed a nice little switch back… about a mile or so back at that little clearing…

Feeling like quite the expert campers, we decide the best course of action is just to turn around, find our way back to the real trail, and make camp somewhere on the waterfall spur trail…

Finding our way pack proved to be fairly easy, as did finding the unmarked switch back that we missed when the trail became the “trail”…

Anyway, this whole misadventure wound up working out extremely well (well, minus the sprained ankle)… Just passed the intersection of the St. Mary’s Trail and the waterfall spur trail, Kris and I found a great campsite. It was a little more established than I was expecting to find in a “wilderness” area, but that was quite all right with us… After a long day of hiking (and getting nowhere ;)) we were happy to have a nice place to set up camp and have some dinner…

… Ok, that’s it for now… :) Stay tuned for the next exciting adventure, which I like to call “Waterfalls… and the right and wrong way to hang a bear bag”… :)

OH, and you can also check out some pics from the trip here.

Wow. It’s been far too long since I blogged anything… I’m sorry about that…

So I just got back (well, on Sunday) from a truly amazing hiking, camping, backpacking trip with Kristina (for those of you who don’t know, the love of my life). She was on Spring Break last week, and I had Friday off (good ol’ Spring Break Day), so we decided to head out for a nice 3-day weekend in the woods. Neither of us had been backpacking in a while, so we decided on a fairly non-strenuous trail, mostly along the St. Mary’s River, in the St. Mary’s Wilderness, the the George Washington National Forest.

The trip was, needless to say, amazing, but also frought with mishaps, misadventures, funny stories, and just plain incredible moments… So, since there’s a lot to tell, I thought I’d dedicate the next 3-4 entries to telling the story. Here’s the first part:

Adventures in Backpacking, or how I learned to stop worrying and love blazing my own trial

Part I

We got to the trail head around 12:30 on Friday, and things started out pretty well. The trail was fairly easy, we got used to our packs quickly, and the weather was brisk, but not too cold. After about a quarter mile though, we began to see lots of evidence of damage from Hurricane Isabel, downed trees, erosion. If fact, at some points, the trail was washed away completely and we had to make our own way around….

Then we came to the first river crossing… Kris made it over fine, but, clutzoid me managed to put my big, unwaterproofed shoe ankle deep in ice cold water… Not to be outdone, I immediately put the other foot in… so they’d be balanced… :)

A bit farther down the trail we came to, what we lovingly started to call, the “Cliff Crossing of Death”… Basically, the hurricane, or time, had worn away the trail up to a shale rock face… to get passed we had to climb down (just a couple feet… nothing too dangerous), make our way along the riverside, then climb back up… actually, it was kinda fun… :)

Just around the bend from that, we finally, at long last, came to the first landmark, the signpost marking the spur trail to the St. Mary’s waterfall. Our plan was to continue along the main St. Mary’s trail, to the Mine Bank Trail, and make a base camp there…

…here’s where things get interesting… ;)

(Continued later)