A Night in the WIlderness
On Friday, the 18th July, 2008 I embarked on a 20 hour adventure in the wilderness. Specifically, in Clifty National Wilderness Area, a part of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Since the area was designated a US Wilderness area in 1984, the region has been closed to all vehicles with the exception of canoes and kayaks which are allowed on the Red River. The area is also part of the Red River Gorge Geological Area which has locations of both geological and archaeological interest. There are lots of cliffs, caves, and arches.
My journey began with a trip by car that was a bit longer than expected. I had planed (and prepared directions) to stop at the Ranger Office in Stanton on the way there. Stanton is a small town located on the Mountain Parkway, so it wouldn't be far out of the way, unlike the Gladie Center, which is in the middle of the Gorge, far off the highway, and in a very different part of the Gorge from my destination. So Stanton seemed like the natural place to stop. I know that they would have the overnight hang tags I needed to spend the night in the Wilderness, and unlike the "various local businesses" that are the other source for the overnight permits they would have some maps I could look at and could verify that there were no special condition such as fire restrictions.
When I got to Stanton, It took me three passes to find the office, as it was not well marked. Then I discovered that the office had been closed four days earlier. Now This was not a complete surprise to me. I knew that there was talk of closing the office, because there had been a notice online that they had requested to close. This notice promised further notices if and when the plan was approved. Well, I didn't see any such further notice, so I assumed that it was still open. The first notice was only from May '08 and the government doesn't generally move that fast after all...
Well, I had to find a new place to place to get a permit. I wandered around Stanton for a bit before I asked a local if Stanton had any shops that had permits. They did not, so I headed on to an exit that was likely to have permits since it was where most people enter the park. That worked, so I could get back on the parkway again and head another 10 miles or so to the exit that I really wanted. And so I arrived at Rock Bridge Road, the southern boundary of Clifty Wilderness.
I drove down the length of the road so I could match the road up with my map. The map wasn't going to help much if I didn't know where I started. There was a convenient spot with room for a couple cars that was near one of the spots I had picked ahead of time as my entrance point. My goal was the confluence of two streams roughly in the center of the rectangle of wilderness bounded by the road to the south, a well used trail (the Wildcat trail - I only assume it is well used. I've never seen it) to the north, another road to the west, and a decent sized creek to the east. Now I didn't have any reason to believe that this would be a good place to camp. In fact my topographic map didn't show any sizable area of horizontal ground anywhere near there, but I figured I'd be able to find something that would work.
I entered the woods at about 5:30pm with three and a half hours to sunset. The confluence is about four tenths of a mile from the road (as the crow flies), so my delays so far didn't bother me much. There was actually a trail head at the place I parked. Which is really not that surprising. Parking along this road is very limited, so I am sure that the trail is there because there is a place to park. I started in along the trail and after just a few minutes found a well used campsite. In fact there was a tent already there. I didn't see any people there, and I didn't stick around to find them. I was not spending a night alone in the wilderness to make new friends.
After five or ten minutes I began to worry that the trail was headed in the wrong direction. Naturally it was not the route I had planed, since human-trails often follow ridge tops, and my plan was to follow a stream bed to the confluence. So I turned west off the trail and rather obliquely made my way down to the stream bed. So far the forest had been rather open, with a density my fellow Ohioans would be familiar with. One can see come distance, and could run if one really wanted to -- though not in a straight line. As I got down to the lower elevation and moister soil, the nature of the vegetation changed. The forest was now very close with with a mix of tree as and rhododendrons (Rhododendron maximum).
I followed the left (west) slope for a while as the mix moved more towards the moisture loving rhododendrons. It was then that I meet the only vertebrate that I saw in the wilderness (myself not included, of course).
If you can't make out the snake in the picture, I don't blame you. I nearly stepped on it and I was not looking though the lens of a cellphone camera. (Yes, my cellphone was part of my ultralight gear - but not documentation and sunset alarm, not for communication.) The snake slithered part way into its hole, which was just feet away, and paused long enough for me to photograph it. I tried to get closer for a video, but it slithered the rest of the way in its hole just as I pressed record.
Shortly after that, while there still was such a thing as "the ground", I came across some flowers in bloom that weren't attached to the omnipresent rhododendrons. This was the only time I saw these little red flowers.
And so I continued on, until I suddenly found myself at the base of a cliff. This is something that can happen quite easily in the Gorge. It is far more disturbing when unexpectedly find yourself at the top of a cliff. I have a video the cliff that surprised me, but I think I will refrian from posting my video clips. I apparently had my phone set to "annoying mode" for video. The phone seems to randomly decide how long to record. Consequently, my videos are chopped up into short clips that tend to cut out in the middle of my sentences. I have since found a setting that be default is on "limit for message" instead of "normal". I'm not sure what that means, but setting it to normal seems to fix the problem. I think that this is the first place I have ever seen a setting with a "Normal" option that is different from the default option.
So I found myself at the base of a cliff. Ahead of me was a very dense laurel slick. (...which is apparently what such things are called -- I called it a "thick thicket of rhododendrons" at the time. NOTE: These plants are unrelated to the true Bay Laurel, but are sometimes called Laurel, or Great laurel anyway, since they are evergreens with clumps of flowers that have twisted ) I very laboriously made my way into the slick. Visibility was around two yards, and was no longer such a thing as "the ground". The soil, such as it is, consists of a think peat-like humus formed by the rhododendrons. This is covered with layer upon layer of dead leaves. Rhododendron leaves are very hearty, even off the trees, so this is very different from the leave litter in an oak or pine forest. Add to this the deviously twisting branches and one hardly feels as if there is a any real ground beneath the plants. "It turtles all the way down." Well, rhododendrons in this case.
This is not an environment in which one walks. Nor does one crawls. Rather one must plan and then struggle, not just each step, but the four, five, or even dozen moves that go into moving ones foot from one location to another. One might wish for a machete. Even if such violent abuse of plant life were not likely forbidden in the Wilderness, it would not benefit one much, as there is no room to swing the blade, and the woody branches of these wild tree-bushes is much harder than the jungle vines machetes are designed for.
So after some time (likely 30 minutes or so) pressing forward I came to a spot where it was possible not only to stand, but to see above the plants. This view convinced me that I must turn around and try a different path. I could see that this slick continued down nearly to the stream bed some 50-60 feet below (thats vertical distance) and there was no obvious end pressing forwards along the slope the direction I had been moving. Thus I made my way back to the bas of the cliff that had startled me earlier which took surprisingly less time that it had taken to get there. This time I saw that there was an easily navigable path along the base of the cliff. That was an important lesson that I took to heart the next day.
The easiest paths are: the stream bed (a fact I learned long ago), the ridge line (which is where many of the marked trails run), and the tiny little narrow strip along the base of the cliff. They all have their drawbacks. Streams become hard to follow if they get enough water to prevent walking down the middle of them or if the stream reaches a cliff. Ridgelines can end in cliffs, and you must leave them if you want get most places. And leaving them means a steep climb back up the to the next. And the bases of cliffs have a habit of disappearing when the cliff ends.
So I quickly passed by the laurel slick that had held me up so long. But I had two new problems. (1) I was thirsty and my meager supply of water from the civilized world was nearly gone (I promised myself not to finish it until I could replenish it.) (2) My sunset alarm had just gone off, warning me that I had just one hour before sunset. So I needed to head downhill to a stream to get water to quench my thirst, to cook dinner, and for the morning. But I also needed to head uphill to find a place to make camp. I was not about to sleep in a stream or the side of a hill.
Well, Obviously I had to take care of water first, and then find a campsite, since my site would not be near water and I would not have time to leave the site for water once I found it. So I set myself on a course angling down towards the stream. I was certain that I was nearing the confluence that was my goal (and I was, although I was never to see it.) so I wanted to keep heading down stream a bit instead of heading directly down the hill.
When I came to the stream bed I was very pleased to see that there was water in it. Perhaps I should explain that streams often are not visible in the hills of Kentucky, even when there is water flowing. They can easily flow underground, either simply through the soil and rocks, or under places where a slab or boulder has fallen across the stream, raising the ground above it. And of course, this close to the source of water (that is, the sky) the quantity of water is far more variable than further down stream. This particular stream was little more than a trickle (again, not unusual for the location) but it was wet and at the surface. I wandered down stream a few yards and found a spot where the stream flowed over a drop of about a foot. It was not enough that the water actually fell through the air, but as it ran down the nearly vertical side of the rock, I was able to easily, if slowly, redirect it into my waterskin without wetting the outside. I would not be so lucky the next day. I drank my fill after tasting the water for any obvious signs that I should not drink it, and refilled my skin as full as I could.
Having taken care of priority one, I moved onto to finding a campsite. Things did not look promising. The valley I was in was decidedly V-shaped rather than the slightest bit U-shaped, so there would be no stream-side campsite in a small flood plain. Besides, camping next to waterways is forbidden and liable to get you wet. So I needed to get up. I headed up the East slope this time - I didn't feel like going back up the way I came, and this was the sunnier side. Light began to matter at this point side the day was fading fast. I was beginning to think that I would have to sleep in a laurel slick after all as I slithered my way up the slop under another one thick patch. This would was no where as bad as the one that had thwarted me earlier, but this one did steal the towel I was using as a bandanna and it may have been the one to steal my maps as well. I felt the bandanna loosen, though it was staying put. I couldn't fix it just then, as I was bellying me way along and couldn't have reached both hands to the back of my head very well. But I didn't actually feel (or notice) it go. I must have been concentrating on something else when it went. All I know is that when I stood up again, it was gone, and so were the maps. But I hadn't looked at the maps in hours, so they could just have easily gone in the first slick.
Ten or twenty mroe yards up hill, I discovered two things at once that ended my search for a campsite. The first was an opening. Not a clearing, mind you, but an opening. This was a good thing, because one cannot safely build a fire, even a small one, without clear air above the ground. This still didn't look much like a good place to sleep though. The opening was just a spot on the slope where a relatively recent tree fall had knocked out an area maybe 5 by 8 feet. It was still on the side of a hill. But the second discovery convinced me that this was the be I was likely to find. At this point, I had maybe 30 minute before sunset, and I wasn't sure how long the light would last beyond that. The length of twilight in the hills depends a lot on the precise local topography.
The second discovery that I made was that just beyond the clearly was a small cliff. I could not really see how high or how wide, but I clearly was not going to continue my current trajectory up to the ridge. So I made due.
To build a fire, my new first priority, I first needed to create a level surface so that my fire would not fall down the slope. The location for this was not really something I had to choose. There was just one spot that would work.Just above a small snag (the trunk of a tree, about 5 inches in diameter and ten inches high) There was a little area with nothing overhead, and no exposed woody roots or snags. I pulled off the mat of roots and decaying vegetable matter and formed that into a bit of a wall around the down hill side and moved some of the solid below enough to get something that resembled horizontal. This gave me a place to build a (very) small fire and the snag below, along with my bedroll, gave me a place to sit without falling down the slope.
This picture sadly doesn't show the scale very well, nor the slope just below this spot. The two sticks were the ends of a thick stick that I added to the fire to late and ran out of patience and fire before they burned completely. This was about the biggest thing that I burned.
So with a fire started. (I used matches rather than the magnesium starter. I lost patience after the first pile of shavings failed to ignite anything else.) I had surprisingly little appetite. I was hungry, and did eat, but I had expected 3 and half hours of steady and somewhat strenuous activity to make me quite hungry. But I guess the heat of the day had a bigger effect, or maybe my body was convinced that I needed to ration food. For what ever reason, I wasn't that hungry. Dinner consisted of about half the bread I had planned on baking and about a cup of "chicken dumpling soup" (chicken broth with a few bits of bread dough stirred in since I used the same spoon for mixing both dishes). I did't even touch the beef jerky that I had brought for dinner.
The bread was flour, salt, baking power, and some olive oil, premixed at home and then mixed with water. I "baked" it in my mess kit prying pan with the bowl on as a lid. They aluminum mess kit is so light and thin that the bottom burned very quickly. I had to pull the half cooked bread out of the pan after a couple minutes and scrape the burnt bread out. The bread was ok. It was essentially what you get when making Bisquick drop biscuits, but they were essentially steamed, so there was no crispy crust (unless you count the burnt layer I scraped out.) Had I the time and campsite for it, I would have actually kneaded the dough to build up some gluten, and baked flatbread on a hot stone. I'll have to try that another day.
A couple yards uphill from the fire, there was a spot where the runoff from the aforementioned cliff had formed a relatively horizontal little stream bed. unlike the main stream beds in the bottom of each valley, this one was on the side of a hill and has watter only during heavy rains (or so I surmised from my inspection) and so the soil is NOT washed away leaving exposed stones and gravel, but rather the depression collects soft soil and leaf litter. The result was a rather soft depression about 8 feet long at a slope well within the acceptable range for a bed. I strung my rope from a small downed tree a few feet off the ground down to my friendly walking stick (I served me well throughout the whole trip). This formed a (very) low ridge line that served to create some airspace between me and the canvas which I folded in half, half beneath me and the other half draped over the ridge line. The ridge-line also served to ensure that water would run off the canvas rather than pooling and then seeping. Luckily it did not rain that night, because I would likely have gotten wet anyway, since I was clearly in the path that runoff generally follows. But the canvas served quite well to keep ground moisture from seeping through to my skin.
I was actually rather over prepared for the actual night that occurred. I believe the advertised low was about 64F, so I had not expected to be cold, but by midnight, when I finally laid down to sleep, I had no desire for any blankets or canvas tarps (nor really for the night clothes I brought either). It was plenty warm that bare skin exposed to the air was quite comfortable and in no danger of feeling cool - probably around 76F. I dutifully prepared for cooler weather anyway, since I knew I would likely not wake until after I became uncomfortable cold.
I slept pretty well overall. It was far, far away from being the least comfortable bed I have slept on. In fact, I have slept on less comfortable man-made beds. While sleeping I had one rather interesting dream. It began with me waking and discovering that I was no longer in the wilderness, but on the side of a small hill at the edge of a little town. It went on from there and was quite convoluted and less interesting.
I slept rather past dawn. I did wake at dawn but decided that there was not hurry to leave, since my bed was actually rather comfortable. I got up around 9 and carefully broke camp, ensuring that there were no visible signs of a human having spent the night there. I didn't make a morning fire, since oatmeal didn't really sound to enticing, especially since it would have taken pretty much all the water I had left from the day before. I breakfasted on some waybread as I walked back instead.
I baked the waybead before I left. It is a recipe designed with intention of packing lots of calories and nutrition into as little weight as reasonable. It consists of ground almonds, flour, honey, and salt, baked until golden brown. Notice that there was not water in that recipe - just the moisture from the honey. They are very dense, but not too hard, since the honey is very hydroscopic and keeps them from drying out. I just finished the last one today for lunch and it was still good. Though to make them last for long periods of time you would have to get rid of the honey and throughly dry them out. But even with the honey, they showed no signs of going stale after more than two weeks. (Yes, these are inspired by lembas. No, a single bite will not fill a grown mans stomach, the square you see in the picture a the end is only about 200 calories.)
My trip back began with a bit of fun, as I had to deal with that cliff just a short ways above where I had slept. In the day light, it turned out that there was, not to surprisingly, a little path a ways around it, but I soon found a more daunting cliff. This one however I got to climb up. It wasn't much of a climb, I just needed to get up about 6 feet, and there was spot to just pull my self up, but it did take some maneuvering and required me to toss my bag and stick up ahead of me.
The trip back to the car was less strenuous than the trip there (I took a different route). But it still took about 3 hours. On the way I discovered something I have never seen before. I have seen may caves, and I have now seen several stone arches and natural bridges. But never before has I seen a natural bridge inside a cave. Here is my attempt at patching together 9 cell-phone photos from the inside.
It seems that there were two caves, one immediately above the other, until the stone floor/ceiling between then collapsed. Not that unusual I suppose -- lots of have have their ceilings collapse. But in this case this left part of the boundary stone between them intact, forming the arch you see above. There remnants of the collapse in the back of the cave, which went back 20 or 30 feet. There were several other caves or rock shelters on my trip back, as I learned my lesson from the day before and stuck cliff bases for much of the trip.
Eventually i did get thirsty, so I left the cliff base and dropped straight down a very steep slope top the steam below. This was not a slop that one could walk down. I pretty much slid down it feet first. I couldn't find any drops in the stream high enough to fill my water skin, so I had to submerge it is a pool. It worked, but it left be with a wet sack of water to carry. But since that was about the biggest obstacle on the way out, I wasn't too upset.
I made it back to the car, which was a welcome sight. It was hot again and I was soaked in sweat again, so air conditioning sounded very nice. So did beverages that didn't come from a stream, so I stopped at the first little place on the way out (which sell overnight permits, by the way) got my self a coke, and drove home. It absolutely POURED on the way back, and stopped as neared Lexington.
If this sounds like a good time, you should come join me for a similar trip in the next couple weeks. Or any weekend before it gets cold.
Where I was: map
What I carried:
My gear:
I think the total weight something like 15-18lbs., more than half of which was the bedroll.
The snapsack was made from a Montgomery Inn apron that I got for free at a Reds game.
The canvas tarp is a used paint drop cloth, and is actually canvas.
My journey began with a trip by car that was a bit longer than expected. I had planed (and prepared directions) to stop at the Ranger Office in Stanton on the way there. Stanton is a small town located on the Mountain Parkway, so it wouldn't be far out of the way, unlike the Gladie Center, which is in the middle of the Gorge, far off the highway, and in a very different part of the Gorge from my destination. So Stanton seemed like the natural place to stop. I know that they would have the overnight hang tags I needed to spend the night in the Wilderness, and unlike the "various local businesses" that are the other source for the overnight permits they would have some maps I could look at and could verify that there were no special condition such as fire restrictions.
When I got to Stanton, It took me three passes to find the office, as it was not well marked. Then I discovered that the office had been closed four days earlier. Now This was not a complete surprise to me. I knew that there was talk of closing the office, because there had been a notice online that they had requested to close. This notice promised further notices if and when the plan was approved. Well, I didn't see any such further notice, so I assumed that it was still open. The first notice was only from May '08 and the government doesn't generally move that fast after all...
Well, I had to find a new place to place to get a permit. I wandered around Stanton for a bit before I asked a local if Stanton had any shops that had permits. They did not, so I headed on to an exit that was likely to have permits since it was where most people enter the park. That worked, so I could get back on the parkway again and head another 10 miles or so to the exit that I really wanted. And so I arrived at Rock Bridge Road, the southern boundary of Clifty Wilderness.
I drove down the length of the road so I could match the road up with my map. The map wasn't going to help much if I didn't know where I started. There was a convenient spot with room for a couple cars that was near one of the spots I had picked ahead of time as my entrance point. My goal was the confluence of two streams roughly in the center of the rectangle of wilderness bounded by the road to the south, a well used trail (the Wildcat trail - I only assume it is well used. I've never seen it) to the north, another road to the west, and a decent sized creek to the east. Now I didn't have any reason to believe that this would be a good place to camp. In fact my topographic map didn't show any sizable area of horizontal ground anywhere near there, but I figured I'd be able to find something that would work.
I entered the woods at about 5:30pm with three and a half hours to sunset. The confluence is about four tenths of a mile from the road (as the crow flies), so my delays so far didn't bother me much. There was actually a trail head at the place I parked. Which is really not that surprising. Parking along this road is very limited, so I am sure that the trail is there because there is a place to park. I started in along the trail and after just a few minutes found a well used campsite. In fact there was a tent already there. I didn't see any people there, and I didn't stick around to find them. I was not spending a night alone in the wilderness to make new friends.
After five or ten minutes I began to worry that the trail was headed in the wrong direction. Naturally it was not the route I had planed, since human-trails often follow ridge tops, and my plan was to follow a stream bed to the confluence. So I turned west off the trail and rather obliquely made my way down to the stream bed. So far the forest had been rather open, with a density my fellow Ohioans would be familiar with. One can see come distance, and could run if one really wanted to -- though not in a straight line. As I got down to the lower elevation and moister soil, the nature of the vegetation changed. The forest was now very close with with a mix of tree as and rhododendrons (Rhododendron maximum).
I followed the left (west) slope for a while as the mix moved more towards the moisture loving rhododendrons. It was then that I meet the only vertebrate that I saw in the wilderness (myself not included, of course).
If you can't make out the snake in the picture, I don't blame you. I nearly stepped on it and I was not looking though the lens of a cellphone camera. (Yes, my cellphone was part of my ultralight gear - but not documentation and sunset alarm, not for communication.) The snake slithered part way into its hole, which was just feet away, and paused long enough for me to photograph it. I tried to get closer for a video, but it slithered the rest of the way in its hole just as I pressed record.
Shortly after that, while there still was such a thing as "the ground", I came across some flowers in bloom that weren't attached to the omnipresent rhododendrons. This was the only time I saw these little red flowers.
And so I continued on, until I suddenly found myself at the base of a cliff. This is something that can happen quite easily in the Gorge. It is far more disturbing when unexpectedly find yourself at the top of a cliff. I have a video the cliff that surprised me, but I think I will refrian from posting my video clips. I apparently had my phone set to "annoying mode" for video. The phone seems to randomly decide how long to record. Consequently, my videos are chopped up into short clips that tend to cut out in the middle of my sentences. I have since found a setting that be default is on "limit for message" instead of "normal". I'm not sure what that means, but setting it to normal seems to fix the problem. I think that this is the first place I have ever seen a setting with a "Normal" option that is different from the default option.
So I found myself at the base of a cliff. Ahead of me was a very dense laurel slick. (...which is apparently what such things are called -- I called it a "thick thicket of rhododendrons" at the time. NOTE: These plants are unrelated to the true Bay Laurel, but are sometimes called Laurel, or Great laurel anyway, since they are evergreens with clumps of flowers that have twisted ) I very laboriously made my way into the slick. Visibility was around two yards, and was no longer such a thing as "the ground". The soil, such as it is, consists of a think peat-like humus formed by the rhododendrons. This is covered with layer upon layer of dead leaves. Rhododendron leaves are very hearty, even off the trees, so this is very different from the leave litter in an oak or pine forest. Add to this the deviously twisting branches and one hardly feels as if there is a any real ground beneath the plants. "It turtles all the way down." Well, rhododendrons in this case.
This is not an environment in which one walks. Nor does one crawls. Rather one must plan and then struggle, not just each step, but the four, five, or even dozen moves that go into moving ones foot from one location to another. One might wish for a machete. Even if such violent abuse of plant life were not likely forbidden in the Wilderness, it would not benefit one much, as there is no room to swing the blade, and the woody branches of these wild tree-bushes is much harder than the jungle vines machetes are designed for.
So after some time (likely 30 minutes or so) pressing forward I came to a spot where it was possible not only to stand, but to see above the plants. This view convinced me that I must turn around and try a different path. I could see that this slick continued down nearly to the stream bed some 50-60 feet below (thats vertical distance) and there was no obvious end pressing forwards along the slope the direction I had been moving. Thus I made my way back to the bas of the cliff that had startled me earlier which took surprisingly less time that it had taken to get there. This time I saw that there was an easily navigable path along the base of the cliff. That was an important lesson that I took to heart the next day.
The easiest paths are: the stream bed (a fact I learned long ago), the ridge line (which is where many of the marked trails run), and the tiny little narrow strip along the base of the cliff. They all have their drawbacks. Streams become hard to follow if they get enough water to prevent walking down the middle of them or if the stream reaches a cliff. Ridgelines can end in cliffs, and you must leave them if you want get most places. And leaving them means a steep climb back up the to the next. And the bases of cliffs have a habit of disappearing when the cliff ends.
So I quickly passed by the laurel slick that had held me up so long. But I had two new problems. (1) I was thirsty and my meager supply of water from the civilized world was nearly gone (I promised myself not to finish it until I could replenish it.) (2) My sunset alarm had just gone off, warning me that I had just one hour before sunset. So I needed to head downhill to a stream to get water to quench my thirst, to cook dinner, and for the morning. But I also needed to head uphill to find a place to make camp. I was not about to sleep in a stream or the side of a hill.
Well, Obviously I had to take care of water first, and then find a campsite, since my site would not be near water and I would not have time to leave the site for water once I found it. So I set myself on a course angling down towards the stream. I was certain that I was nearing the confluence that was my goal (and I was, although I was never to see it.) so I wanted to keep heading down stream a bit instead of heading directly down the hill.
When I came to the stream bed I was very pleased to see that there was water in it. Perhaps I should explain that streams often are not visible in the hills of Kentucky, even when there is water flowing. They can easily flow underground, either simply through the soil and rocks, or under places where a slab or boulder has fallen across the stream, raising the ground above it. And of course, this close to the source of water (that is, the sky) the quantity of water is far more variable than further down stream. This particular stream was little more than a trickle (again, not unusual for the location) but it was wet and at the surface. I wandered down stream a few yards and found a spot where the stream flowed over a drop of about a foot. It was not enough that the water actually fell through the air, but as it ran down the nearly vertical side of the rock, I was able to easily, if slowly, redirect it into my waterskin without wetting the outside. I would not be so lucky the next day. I drank my fill after tasting the water for any obvious signs that I should not drink it, and refilled my skin as full as I could.
Having taken care of priority one, I moved onto to finding a campsite. Things did not look promising. The valley I was in was decidedly V-shaped rather than the slightest bit U-shaped, so there would be no stream-side campsite in a small flood plain. Besides, camping next to waterways is forbidden and liable to get you wet. So I needed to get up. I headed up the East slope this time - I didn't feel like going back up the way I came, and this was the sunnier side. Light began to matter at this point side the day was fading fast. I was beginning to think that I would have to sleep in a laurel slick after all as I slithered my way up the slop under another one thick patch. This would was no where as bad as the one that had thwarted me earlier, but this one did steal the towel I was using as a bandanna and it may have been the one to steal my maps as well. I felt the bandanna loosen, though it was staying put. I couldn't fix it just then, as I was bellying me way along and couldn't have reached both hands to the back of my head very well. But I didn't actually feel (or notice) it go. I must have been concentrating on something else when it went. All I know is that when I stood up again, it was gone, and so were the maps. But I hadn't looked at the maps in hours, so they could just have easily gone in the first slick.
Ten or twenty mroe yards up hill, I discovered two things at once that ended my search for a campsite. The first was an opening. Not a clearing, mind you, but an opening. This was a good thing, because one cannot safely build a fire, even a small one, without clear air above the ground. This still didn't look much like a good place to sleep though. The opening was just a spot on the slope where a relatively recent tree fall had knocked out an area maybe 5 by 8 feet. It was still on the side of a hill. But the second discovery convinced me that this was the be I was likely to find. At this point, I had maybe 30 minute before sunset, and I wasn't sure how long the light would last beyond that. The length of twilight in the hills depends a lot on the precise local topography.
The second discovery that I made was that just beyond the clearly was a small cliff. I could not really see how high or how wide, but I clearly was not going to continue my current trajectory up to the ridge. So I made due.
To build a fire, my new first priority, I first needed to create a level surface so that my fire would not fall down the slope. The location for this was not really something I had to choose. There was just one spot that would work.Just above a small snag (the trunk of a tree, about 5 inches in diameter and ten inches high) There was a little area with nothing overhead, and no exposed woody roots or snags. I pulled off the mat of roots and decaying vegetable matter and formed that into a bit of a wall around the down hill side and moved some of the solid below enough to get something that resembled horizontal. This gave me a place to build a (very) small fire and the snag below, along with my bedroll, gave me a place to sit without falling down the slope.
This picture sadly doesn't show the scale very well, nor the slope just below this spot. The two sticks were the ends of a thick stick that I added to the fire to late and ran out of patience and fire before they burned completely. This was about the biggest thing that I burned.
So with a fire started. (I used matches rather than the magnesium starter. I lost patience after the first pile of shavings failed to ignite anything else.) I had surprisingly little appetite. I was hungry, and did eat, but I had expected 3 and half hours of steady and somewhat strenuous activity to make me quite hungry. But I guess the heat of the day had a bigger effect, or maybe my body was convinced that I needed to ration food. For what ever reason, I wasn't that hungry. Dinner consisted of about half the bread I had planned on baking and about a cup of "chicken dumpling soup" (chicken broth with a few bits of bread dough stirred in since I used the same spoon for mixing both dishes). I did't even touch the beef jerky that I had brought for dinner.
The bread was flour, salt, baking power, and some olive oil, premixed at home and then mixed with water. I "baked" it in my mess kit prying pan with the bowl on as a lid. They aluminum mess kit is so light and thin that the bottom burned very quickly. I had to pull the half cooked bread out of the pan after a couple minutes and scrape the burnt bread out. The bread was ok. It was essentially what you get when making Bisquick drop biscuits, but they were essentially steamed, so there was no crispy crust (unless you count the burnt layer I scraped out.) Had I the time and campsite for it, I would have actually kneaded the dough to build up some gluten, and baked flatbread on a hot stone. I'll have to try that another day.
A couple yards uphill from the fire, there was a spot where the runoff from the aforementioned cliff had formed a relatively horizontal little stream bed. unlike the main stream beds in the bottom of each valley, this one was on the side of a hill and has watter only during heavy rains (or so I surmised from my inspection) and so the soil is NOT washed away leaving exposed stones and gravel, but rather the depression collects soft soil and leaf litter. The result was a rather soft depression about 8 feet long at a slope well within the acceptable range for a bed. I strung my rope from a small downed tree a few feet off the ground down to my friendly walking stick (I served me well throughout the whole trip). This formed a (very) low ridge line that served to create some airspace between me and the canvas which I folded in half, half beneath me and the other half draped over the ridge line. The ridge-line also served to ensure that water would run off the canvas rather than pooling and then seeping. Luckily it did not rain that night, because I would likely have gotten wet anyway, since I was clearly in the path that runoff generally follows. But the canvas served quite well to keep ground moisture from seeping through to my skin.
I was actually rather over prepared for the actual night that occurred. I believe the advertised low was about 64F, so I had not expected to be cold, but by midnight, when I finally laid down to sleep, I had no desire for any blankets or canvas tarps (nor really for the night clothes I brought either). It was plenty warm that bare skin exposed to the air was quite comfortable and in no danger of feeling cool - probably around 76F. I dutifully prepared for cooler weather anyway, since I knew I would likely not wake until after I became uncomfortable cold.
I slept pretty well overall. It was far, far away from being the least comfortable bed I have slept on. In fact, I have slept on less comfortable man-made beds. While sleeping I had one rather interesting dream. It began with me waking and discovering that I was no longer in the wilderness, but on the side of a small hill at the edge of a little town. It went on from there and was quite convoluted and less interesting.
I slept rather past dawn. I did wake at dawn but decided that there was not hurry to leave, since my bed was actually rather comfortable. I got up around 9 and carefully broke camp, ensuring that there were no visible signs of a human having spent the night there. I didn't make a morning fire, since oatmeal didn't really sound to enticing, especially since it would have taken pretty much all the water I had left from the day before. I breakfasted on some waybread as I walked back instead.
I baked the waybead before I left. It is a recipe designed with intention of packing lots of calories and nutrition into as little weight as reasonable. It consists of ground almonds, flour, honey, and salt, baked until golden brown. Notice that there was not water in that recipe - just the moisture from the honey. They are very dense, but not too hard, since the honey is very hydroscopic and keeps them from drying out. I just finished the last one today for lunch and it was still good. Though to make them last for long periods of time you would have to get rid of the honey and throughly dry them out. But even with the honey, they showed no signs of going stale after more than two weeks. (Yes, these are inspired by lembas. No, a single bite will not fill a grown mans stomach, the square you see in the picture a the end is only about 200 calories.)
My trip back began with a bit of fun, as I had to deal with that cliff just a short ways above where I had slept. In the day light, it turned out that there was, not to surprisingly, a little path a ways around it, but I soon found a more daunting cliff. This one however I got to climb up. It wasn't much of a climb, I just needed to get up about 6 feet, and there was spot to just pull my self up, but it did take some maneuvering and required me to toss my bag and stick up ahead of me.
The trip back to the car was less strenuous than the trip there (I took a different route). But it still took about 3 hours. On the way I discovered something I have never seen before. I have seen may caves, and I have now seen several stone arches and natural bridges. But never before has I seen a natural bridge inside a cave. Here is my attempt at patching together 9 cell-phone photos from the inside.
It seems that there were two caves, one immediately above the other, until the stone floor/ceiling between then collapsed. Not that unusual I suppose -- lots of have have their ceilings collapse. But in this case this left part of the boundary stone between them intact, forming the arch you see above. There remnants of the collapse in the back of the cave, which went back 20 or 30 feet. There were several other caves or rock shelters on my trip back, as I learned my lesson from the day before and stuck cliff bases for much of the trip.
Eventually i did get thirsty, so I left the cliff base and dropped straight down a very steep slope top the steam below. This was not a slop that one could walk down. I pretty much slid down it feet first. I couldn't find any drops in the stream high enough to fill my water skin, so I had to submerge it is a pool. It worked, but it left be with a wet sack of water to carry. But since that was about the biggest obstacle on the way out, I wasn't too upset.
I made it back to the car, which was a welcome sight. It was hot again and I was soaked in sweat again, so air conditioning sounded very nice. So did beverages that didn't come from a stream, so I stopped at the first little place on the way out (which sell overnight permits, by the way) got my self a coke, and drove home. It absolutely POURED on the way back, and stopped as neared Lexington.
If this sounds like a good time, you should come join me for a similar trip in the next couple weeks. Or any weekend before it gets cold.
Where I was: map
What I carried:
My gear:
I think the total weight something like 15-18lbs., more than half of which was the bedroll.
The snapsack was made from a Montgomery Inn apron that I got for free at a Reds game.
The canvas tarp is a used paint drop cloth, and is actually canvas.