Hocking Hills and an Ice Cave

Friends of ours invited us to join a large group of their friends at a cabin in Ohio several weeks ago.  In fact, it was the last time I saw any of our Ohio people before I started my hike, but that happened after we left the cabin.

By the time we reached Athens, the predicted snow had started, and grew steadily more serious about its intentions as we neared the cabin itself.  Only two cars arrived before us, and the two guys who had arrived with said cars had to help push my brave little Tardis up the slope to our parking area.  It was a portent of things to come.  One of those guys, eventually exhausted by our efforts to clear the driveway and get other cars parked, finally retreated to the cabin.  Whoever else was up there collaborated on dinner that night (I had already made my contribution) while our host and I spent the two hours following my arrival trying to get everyone into a legitimate parking space.  We were nearly successful, but I think he was greatly disheartened.  He needn't have worried; I think everyone was so excited to have a great place to spend the weekend that we weren't too concerned about the conditions, once we knew everyone had arrived safely.

Most of us went hiking the next day.  We had planned to drive to the nearby state park and hike there, hopefully getting to Old Man's Cave (a location I remember from several childhood outings), but our difficulties with the driveway precluded any option requiring vehicles.  Instead, we walked down the road to its intersection with the Buckeye Trail and followed that toward the park.  Our intention was to hike until we were half tired (or until our daylight was half gone), then return, hoping to find something interesting along the way.

She is one with the ice

Shortly after the bulk of our pack became half-tired and returned, the six of us who remained found an icy overhang.

Later, we crossed a frozen river, and on our way up the next hill, we saw a small opening between a rock ledge and the snow heaped up beneath it.  I peeked in over the log at the entrance, and immediately decided that it warranted further investigation.

We enter the ice cave.

We kept calling it an ice cave, but technically it was just a deep, low rock cave whose floor had been 80% covered in ice.  In warm weather it would be a short, curved tunnel, but when we visited, the other end of the tunnel was blocked by icicles.

The far wall of the cave, usually a doorway.

What at first appeared to be an insignificant hole ended up occupying a solid half-hour of our afternoon.  Each of crawled throughout the enclosure, peering closely at odd ice formations and the second, inaccessible room beyond the icicle wall, and trying to body-luge down the sloped floor at one end.

The cave became our turnaround point for the hike, but nobody was disappointed.  We were so excited about finding something so neat in such an unexpected manner that we were pretty certain we wouldn't be able to top it in the half-hour or so we had before diminishing daylight would necessitate our return.

Lacy ice drooping down from a horizontal crack in the ceiling.

That night brought chili-fueled gaming, Olympics coverage, and slightly fewer hot-tubbers than the previous evening.

The Girl was our champion body-luger, probably thanks to her snowpants and aerodynamic hat.

The next morning, we had to push a van out of a ditch (with the help of several bearded strangers from the next cabin), but after the plow arrived to sand the dirt road, we managed to get everyone out safely before the snow started falling in force.  That night was my farewell dinner with family, when we hastily made plans to meet again during my hike.  Dad brought me a new, lighter pocketknife for the trip, and delivered my passenger.  My aunts told me they were proud of me, and I haven't even done anything yet.

We like to make our weekends as densely-packed as possible.

I can't explain this, but every toilet in the cabin bore the same pictograph.

She is the champion

We've had a busy couple of weeks.

Last week, I started my AT thru-hike; something I've been building toward for over a year.  Three days before we left for Georgia, we returned from California, where temperatures were nice enough for shirt sleeves and everyone wore coats and complained about the bitter cold of 60F weather.  That trip helped schedule my trip; while I was hiking the Shenandoah last fall, The Girl became restless and signed up for a marathon (she heard they had nice bags for this one).  Later, when it came time for me to pick a departure date, I had to work around the schedule she had set, which helped give a more defined structure to my original plan of "some time in March."

We set course for the left coast early enough to give us some time to be touristy and poke around San Francisco (I'll save that for a later post) before the run and Napa Valley (at least one more post) afterward.  The theme for the trip turned out to be Serendipity: we kept doing things on a whim and later finding out that they were the sort of thing most people set out to do intentionally, or local secrets upon which we unwittingly stumbled.

On Sunday morning, I drove us from the hotel, dropped her off at the starting line, and parked the car.  Then I realized I had nothing to do for four and a half hours.  I'm accustomed to that; it was not my first marathon.

At 5:15 that morning, I stood at the end of a dead-end street, a local high school's athletic fields to my right.  The sky was still black and starless, but the Alta Heights mountains to the east were crowned with a thin band of murky pink light.  Far across the field in front of me, a group of coyotes sang to each other, answered by a pair of roosters to the north.  When the coyotes calmed down, I could hear frogs trilling in the shallow stream that led almost to my feet.

When I wandered back to the high finish line area, I saw a group of young volunteers wrestling valiantly but ineffectively with the crowd-control fences they were trying to align.  I watched for a couple minutes before approaching the guy who was clearly in charge and offering my assistance.  He was surprised by the offer, but thrilled to have the help, and I spent the next four hours setting up tents, teaching the fence-wrestlers to set up tents, hanging signs, mending fences, building banners, erecting the large inflatable arch at the finish line, and running other small errands.  I did it on a whim, expecting at most that I'd get to stay near the finish line and get a good picture of The Girl crossing, but by the end of the morning I was a full-fledged staff member, recognized by the people officially in charge of the event and other volunteers who were more officially-sanctioned, but arrived after I did and sometimes looked to me for direction.  At one point I told the harried Finish Line Coordinator (the man I had first approached offering to help) that he needed a few assistant managers.  He laughed, then offered me the job.  "Will you buy my plane ticket?" I asked him.  He gave it enough thought that I half expect to hear from him next year.

I did get to stand at the finish line, right behind an official photographer.  I also received one of the official runner bags (a pretty nice duffel for a morning's work) and a volunteer T-shirt, both far beyond what I had expected.  I just did it to fill the time, but I was glad I did for all that I learned about the running of a marathon on the other side of the finishers' tape.

The Girl, for her part, beat her own PR by over three minutes.  I must have a thing for fast women.  The next afternoon, in another of our random, serendipitous encounters, she was congratulated on her performance by Gary Erickson, the creator of Clif Bar.  That alone was a highlight for both of us (he and his wife also wished me well on my hike.  They're great people.)

Day One

Today is the first day of my thru-hike.

I've never been so excited, or so anxious, about any other undertaking.  I've been actively planning and training for a year, but I've been preparing, in some ways, since I was five and Mom and my aunts started taking me on volksmarches.  They were little organized hikes, usually in some local nature preserve, and I remember getting really excited when we did one that was five miles long, because in my mind that was a REALLY long walk.  When a dear friend in Oregon said in an offhand manner (still sounding a little impressed) that I was "a very good hiker," I gave credit to the volksmarches.  That was somewhere around mile eight of a twelve mile excursion over Glass Butte.

It had never occurred to me that I was "a good hiker."  I just knew I liked to do it, but I did notice when other people were not good hikers.

Now I'm starting a 2,185.3 mile hike through fourteen states.  Someone gasped when I told them the total length, but I reminded them, "You don't look at it like a 2,000 mile hike.  You look at tomorrow's hike of fifteen or twenty miles.  Fifteen miles is easy.  Then, the next day, you do that again."

When I started this blog, one of my earliest ideas was to somehow use it as a fundraiser for the things that matter to me.  And every time I go hiking, especially on the Appalachian Trail, I think about Mom.  I've started a Mosaic page for her with the American Cancer Society.  Donations made there are in her memory, but they all go into the same big ACS bucket.  Maybe, by the time I reach Katahdin, the page will raise a dollar for every mile I've hiked.

In January, when I was helping my brother with some home-improvement projects, I told him something that had been on my mind for a few months.  "It's not my hike," I began.  "It's not about me.  It's for Mom, who never got the chance to do it, and you and Dad, who want to but can't get out there yourselves.  It's not my hike.  I'm just the one doing all the walking."

I'm never as eloquent as I intend, but hopefully you get the idea.

Posts will continue here over the summer, with both trail updates when I get the opportunity to write them, and adventures past whose stories I've been saving for this occasion of limited internet access.  I hope you enjoy them.  I hope they inspire you to have adventures of your own, big or small, because that's the real point of this blog--I want you to get out there and have as much fun as I do.

Well... as much fun as you can stand, anyway.

Happy trails,
Reynstorm

Blackwater redux

Last year, when an impending snowstorm shut down the federal government, a few of us used the time to go play in the woods.  We had so much fun that we decided to do it again this year, when the promise of more snow bore with it the promise of another chance to use our dusty, neglected snowshoes.  We rented a cabin at Blackwater Falls State Park, filled it with people who in turn filled it with food and beverage options, and spent a couple days playing outside.

More like Windy Point, amiright??

Saturday's hike took us first to Lindy Point, a rocky outcrop over the Blackwater River, whose valley on that day formed a screaming windtunnel of clouds and snow.  Many of us took pictures, working as quickly as possible so as to facilitate quicker egress to the relative comfort of the forest.  The smaller members of our group had to hunker and lean windward to avoid getting pushed around too much on the overlook's high wooden platform.

Lindy Point

Further hiking led us to a wide creek crossing which was thinly covered with ice and thickly blanketed in snow.  Our trail-breaker at the time, a towering, bearded gent known for lifting pick-up trucks in his college days, had carefully picked a path around the pool before the rest of the group decided it was time to eat lunch and turn around.

This tree grew for decades on a rock shelf before the broad and extremely shallow root system failed it.  This view shows the bottom of the root mass and the top of the rock where the tree lived before it fell.

We had one other hiking goal for that day, so we passed the Nordic Center and headed uphill to Balancing Rock.

I am but a medium for her self-portraits.  Nice camera, though!

I probably don't have to tell you what Balancing Rock is.  You're smart; I'm sure your reading comprehension skills will get you there.  Unfortunately, I can't prove your conclusions, because the rock balances in a fairly thick forest, so by the time you're far enough away to get a good picture, trees block the shot.  Instead, I took a few macros of tiny hemlock cones, snow clumps, and droplets of ice.

like this one!

We did make one other stop on the drive back to the cabin.  A couple of us wanted to take a look at Elkalala Falls, after seeing it named on our map and a couple signs.  It's close to the main lodge at Blackwater, and we figured it wouldn't take more than 20 or 30 minutes to walk there, get our fill, and return to the parking lot.

I'm not sure this sign is necessary in this weather.

Just before we crossed the bridge in the above picture, we encountered a couple we had seen earlier in the day, and asked them if the falls were worthwhile.  "What falls?  There are no falls," they assured us.  We consulted our map again, questioned their assertion, and decided to take a look anyway, just in case.  Then we reached the bridge, and realized why they didn't know about the falls: they weren't falling that day.

Elkalala Stand

The falls had frozen solid, which was somehow more satisfying than if they had still been ... um... falling.  A couple of us carefully found our way to a lower vantage point, an activity fraught with Bad Ideas from which I save you, dear reader, by supplying these views.  Remember: I am not a role model.

This very impressive ice cave is about sixteen inches from floor to ceiling.  neat, huh?

Saturday evening was filled with card games, a Munchkin battle prolonged far too much, and the 38-course meal which is a standard with that group of people.  There may also have been a variety of Adult Beverages, some of them home-brewed.  Maybe.

Sunday lunch break

On Sunday, we drove to Dolly Sods and hiked up the side of an active ski run to find a wilderness trail known to a handful of our group.  It was all new territory for me, and as much fun as it was to use snowshoes in conditions worthy of them, I was a little bit sad that I didn't get to go skiing.  I miss my days on the mountain.  Maybe I'll get to go skiing this winter.

Too cloudy for real views, but still pretty.

Our only real goal on Sunday was to hike for a little while; some of us had rental equipment to return, and most of us had long drives between us and home.  We stayed along the ridge after our lunch break (during which the tall, bearded one made us cocoa from melted snow), and a small group of us turned around when we realized we had just enough time to return to the rental center before closing.  The rest of them pushed on to a rocky outcrop they had aimed for in the past but never reached; I'm sorry I missed it, but I didn't want to be too tired before I started that drive.

The Girl leading our sub-group back to the cars.

This is why you shut off the outside spigot in the fall.