Meriwether Mike

Ran another backtrack today. This time was a bit shorter, only 6 miles. Few things to make note of, first off the blazes from the Goodwin trail head to where it picks up on the old river to river are crap. There is enough of them... I think. The issue isn't amount it's that they are brown. Yes brown diamonds nailed to trees in a forest. Very hard to notice. See they redid the trail from Hutching's Creek to Goodwin. And I can understand why. It needs to be understood that I don't like to double back on the same trail when I don't have to. So today I didn't. There was enough of the old trail left that I could still travel along it, and I had the path on my gps if I had lost it. The old trail was heavily eroded and had a large number of trees across it. They had the whole forest to fall in and they choose right across the path. I suspect it is a result of the May 8th storm. For those of you not from the area there was a major wind storm last spring and by major I mean winds of 109mph. And if you are from the area and didn't know what storm I was talking about.... that was one heavy rock you were living under.

I was quite pleased with the weather again today. When I got into my truck at my aunt's house it was raining, but by the time I reached Hutching's Creek it was sunny and warm. Loved it. Once at the creek I figured out that if I hadn't led us down the hill, shortcutting the switchback, we'd have managed to stay on trail. So yeah... my bad on this one. The creek crossing was interesting. To walk from blaze to blaze would get you quite wet. That is the thing about creek and river crossings though, unless you put a bridge in they are gonna change. If I might get a bit philosophical for a moment, creeks and rivers, well any body of water for that matter are beautiful in the way that they are living changing things. As water flows it erodes the bed and changes where sand or gravel bars are, even moving entire boulders. Beautiful in its destruction. But that is why creek crossings don't always work. So basically once you hit the creek, find a way across and look for this point: N 37d33.691m W 89d24.027m This is where the trail meets up with the east side of the creek. I opted to put the coordinates in the form that my Garmin has them this time rather than the Google earth format. If you're gonna use 'em odds are it'll be on a handheld gps. And for the record the only difference is that Google goes out to decimal seconds while the typical handheld gps does decimal minutes.

The creek was strangely beautiful. A nice warm sun, only sounds to be heard was the squawking of a bird and the wind as it blew through the leaves. Not even the water flowing was making any noise. I should have spent more time out here while I was in college.