Shining Rock
Camping this weekend was amazing! So much fun! It was awesome to go out for the weekend with a group of strangers and do something with them that all of us love and enjoy doing: experiencing the outdoors.
I went camping with Southern Adventures, which is a organization on campus that rents out camping equipment, runs the climbing wall and high ropes course, and takes students on different kinds of trips every few weekends. This weekend three of the staff took six students, me included, backpacking to the Shining Rock National Wilderness Area.
First of all, the three "staff" members that took us are just students employeed by the university, so it's not like their mature adults or anything. They were just as, if not more, immature than us. So basically it was nine college students going backpacking together, which is amazing!
Shining Rock is up in the Smoky Mountains, near Asheville. The mountains held true to their name on Saturday cause most of the day we couldn't see more than 50 to 100 yards in all directions on the trail. There were hardly any trees around so we should have been able to see for miles and miles, but that just didn't happen. Over 6,000 feet up on the top of Mount Tennet I could see the thin wisps of a cloud drifting between me and one of the others just 4 feet away, it was cool yet disappointing at the same time. I wanted to see what was on the other side of the clouds!
Along the trail two hunting dogs, with radio transmitters attached to their collars, tracked us down and followed us for a few minutes. Andrew named them "Dill" and "Do". I thought it was hilarious, some of the girls didn't quite have the same opinion. Anyway, Do left us behind pretty quickly but Dill followed us for pretty much the whole weekend. Jen, the obsessive and unrealixtic animal lover wanted us to take him back to Statesboro with us so she could keep her.
Dill had a freaken collar on, it doesn't matter if she was thin and probably not feed very well, it wasn't her place to try and take this dog from the hunter. She doesn't know the hunter, how could she know the hunter "starved" Dill? I dunno, this girl whinning about saving the dog annoyed me. You can't save every sad story you see on the side of the road. Ok, I'm rambling. . .
Once we got to Shining Rock it was awesome! It was this huge outcropping of quratz boulders on the top of a mountain surrounded by chin high brush in every direction for hundreds of yards. I thought they were granite boulders with thin layers of quartz, so thin it looked like ice that you could chip away with your thumb nail, covering the outside. But I was wrong, one of the guys said all the boulders were quartz, they just had some dark spots on them. It's hard to explain but it was an amazing thing to see.
It got cold that night before the sun even went down. So cold that a layer of frost formed on my sleeping bag that I had left out in the "sun" to air out cause it had gotten a little wet the night before. That's right, frost formed before the sun even went down. Needless to say, when the sun went down around 5:30 it was in the mid 20s and we all went to bed pretty much right after that. It sucked trying to go to sleep at 6:00pm in the freezing cold, in a two man tent with three guys in it, on the rock hard ground. Somehow I managed and lived to tell the tale.
They next day there were no clouds and we could see everything! In one word, breathtaking. You know that Jude Law movie "Cold Mountain"? Yeah, well Cold Mountain was the mountain on the other side of the valley from our campsite at Shining Rock and it didn't look as big and dangerous(and cold) as the previews made it out to be(I never saw the movie). Hiking back to the cars was better than the day before because we could actually everything around us for miles and miles. We could see Asheville, and Greenville, and some lakes way to the Southeast of us, no clue which ones they were. When your on the top of a 6,000 feet tall mountain in the Appalachians that's a pretty rare thing, that means you have a unobstructed view in every direction. I could see the distant horizon everywhere I looked.
"To think I might not see those eyes,
makes it so hard not to cry.
And as we say our long goodbye,
I nearly do."
I went camping with Southern Adventures, which is a organization on campus that rents out camping equipment, runs the climbing wall and high ropes course, and takes students on different kinds of trips every few weekends. This weekend three of the staff took six students, me included, backpacking to the Shining Rock National Wilderness Area.
First of all, the three "staff" members that took us are just students employeed by the university, so it's not like their mature adults or anything. They were just as, if not more, immature than us. So basically it was nine college students going backpacking together, which is amazing!
Shining Rock is up in the Smoky Mountains, near Asheville. The mountains held true to their name on Saturday cause most of the day we couldn't see more than 50 to 100 yards in all directions on the trail. There were hardly any trees around so we should have been able to see for miles and miles, but that just didn't happen. Over 6,000 feet up on the top of Mount Tennet I could see the thin wisps of a cloud drifting between me and one of the others just 4 feet away, it was cool yet disappointing at the same time. I wanted to see what was on the other side of the clouds!
Along the trail two hunting dogs, with radio transmitters attached to their collars, tracked us down and followed us for a few minutes. Andrew named them "Dill" and "Do". I thought it was hilarious, some of the girls didn't quite have the same opinion. Anyway, Do left us behind pretty quickly but Dill followed us for pretty much the whole weekend. Jen, the obsessive and unrealixtic animal lover wanted us to take him back to Statesboro with us so she could keep her.
Dill had a freaken collar on, it doesn't matter if she was thin and probably not feed very well, it wasn't her place to try and take this dog from the hunter. She doesn't know the hunter, how could she know the hunter "starved" Dill? I dunno, this girl whinning about saving the dog annoyed me. You can't save every sad story you see on the side of the road. Ok, I'm rambling. . .
Once we got to Shining Rock it was awesome! It was this huge outcropping of quratz boulders on the top of a mountain surrounded by chin high brush in every direction for hundreds of yards. I thought they were granite boulders with thin layers of quartz, so thin it looked like ice that you could chip away with your thumb nail, covering the outside. But I was wrong, one of the guys said all the boulders were quartz, they just had some dark spots on them. It's hard to explain but it was an amazing thing to see.
It got cold that night before the sun even went down. So cold that a layer of frost formed on my sleeping bag that I had left out in the "sun" to air out cause it had gotten a little wet the night before. That's right, frost formed before the sun even went down. Needless to say, when the sun went down around 5:30 it was in the mid 20s and we all went to bed pretty much right after that. It sucked trying to go to sleep at 6:00pm in the freezing cold, in a two man tent with three guys in it, on the rock hard ground. Somehow I managed and lived to tell the tale.
They next day there were no clouds and we could see everything! In one word, breathtaking. You know that Jude Law movie "Cold Mountain"? Yeah, well Cold Mountain was the mountain on the other side of the valley from our campsite at Shining Rock and it didn't look as big and dangerous(and cold) as the previews made it out to be(I never saw the movie). Hiking back to the cars was better than the day before because we could actually everything around us for miles and miles. We could see Asheville, and Greenville, and some lakes way to the Southeast of us, no clue which ones they were. When your on the top of a 6,000 feet tall mountain in the Appalachians that's a pretty rare thing, that means you have a unobstructed view in every direction. I could see the distant horizon everywhere I looked.
"To think I might not see those eyes,
makes it so hard not to cry.
And as we say our long goodbye,
I nearly do."