Sanity! (Or What passes For It Around Here)

 

If Dad's last pair of work gloves and Mom's thimble (tucked into the gloves) are on the dash it must be time for a ROAD TRIP!

Dad grew up outdoors (After his father lost the Plymouth dealerships and the big fancy house during the depression, they lived full time - in Michigan - in a tiny three-season cottage with a lake in the front yard, the woods out back, and the winter winds and loose windows leaving a dusting of snow across the furniture.), and Dad taught Mom, a city girl, to embrace the outdoors lifestyle too. (To the point where she was willing to camp in a borrowed tent with a two-month old me!)

As kids we camped as much as their jobs would allow and as retirees they spent months at a time traveling in whatever rig they had at the time. So now when I'm traveling they get a front-row seat because they're the ones that guided me to this feral lifestyle of mine.

Except this time it wasn't so much a ROAD TRIP as just a road trip. A short, mental-health break squeezed in between medical crap in an attempt to keep the monsters at bay. An escape from the shitty "realities" of "civilized" life to my more basic happy-place.

Publicity shot, not my image. That's  the Frio River and Mt. Baldy

My options for a quick trip here in Texas are limited and I've used most of the obvious choices many - many times over the past 40 years. So this time I chose the popular,  but seldom frequented by me therefore still relatively new, Garner State Park, about 4 hours away.

Because it's popular (the weekend following my stay, the three-day Indigenous Peoples' Day weekend, nearly all of the 300+ campsites across 8 campgrounds were booked and a Saturday dance was scheduled in the dance-hall.), it's a place I generally avoid. In fact this would be only the second time I've been here. Oddly enough, the first was one of the last trips I took before I got shut down for a while by the cancer diagnosis.

By intent, I managed to snag a site in the least popular, water-only, limited river access, farthest from the main activities at the south end of the park, Persimmon Hill campground,

where, despite what the reservation website implied (I think they mark a bunch of sites as reserved even when they're not - Either that or they have an 80% short-notice cancelation rate!), I was one of only two occupied sites out of 34 on this loop.

One nice thing, among many, about the teardrop is that, once it's unhooked from the Ranger and the 90 pound bike is unloaded off the tongue, I can horse the 110 pound tongue around and move the trailer to the perfect spot on these awkward, two-side-by-side-short-car-parking-slots, tent sites. (No vehicles off the pavement!) Mesquite tree shading the east side, canopy protecting the south, and wall keeping the westerly sun at bay, because, though we had a comparatively mild summer, it's hanging on with a vengance with highs for 37 of the last 37 days above average.

The Frio Canyon trail - though in reality Frio Canyon is more valley than canyon -

passes by just a 100 yards west of my campsite on the otherside of a tree-line. So that’s where I headed my first morning there.

Being relatively flat, the Frio Canyon Trail is a good first-day pick that also connects to the backside of the Nature Trail located near the main entrance for just a little extra kick,

and, along the west side of the Canyon trail, there's a number of information posts

designed to entertain as well as inform. 

The logs you're supposed to try scampering on like a squirrel at this post are gone. Probably too many complaints from helicopter-parents raising little snowflakes that are going to be ill prepared for the bumps, scrapes, and challanges of real life. Though, on the entertainment side, I'm not sure trying to flap my arms as fast as a bat is a good idea.

I came out here to decompress. To recenter myself. And I'm on a nice quiet (Didn’t run into any other hikers at all), nearly flat, non-technical trail doing what has worked for me for over 60 years, putting one foot in front of the other in a non-urban setting,

yet somehow I managed to tear through the trail at a pace not that much slower than what I maintain when doing workout-laps around the property!

Not sure what the hell was going through my head. Probably nothing if my parents and teachers were to be believed.

My normal recreational hiking pace is just over 1 MPH (I tend to stop and lolly-gag a lot) so this hike should have taken around 4 hours! Where the hell did I think I was off too?!

Maybe it had something to do with the helicopters?

Within a quarter mile of starting off this morning the trail skirted a large open field with road-access that was being used as a staging area for training flights. There was a Texas Parks and Wildlife Department chopper, as well as one from the Texas Department of Public Safety (the state cops), and a chopper from some US government agency all lined up in the field waiting thier turn with the refueling trailer. Over on one side was a whole mess of people in tactical gear getting briefings and equipment.

For the rest of the day, and at least the next two days as well, the choppers would take off, head out to thier respective training areas and the personel would practice getting winched down ro the ground and back up. Then the choppers would come back to staging, pick up a new batch of trainees and do it all over again.

Point is, helicopters and I don't get along all that well since I've been knocked out of the sky twice in them. So maybe that's  why I was triggered into churning around the trail like a cartoon character with its feet on spinning legs.

Whatever the reason, I spent the rest of the day talking myself down off the ledge with a (forced) leisurely turn around the park on the bike (roads only, ebikes are not allowed on Texas State trails, not even rails-to-trails trails) stopping often to inspect campsites and record the ones worth trying out (the emphasis here, as it is in so many public campgrounds, is on water/electric sites with many of the water only sites, the ones I'm  interested in, looking like afterthoughts, so not as many fit my preferred requirements as you might think.),

and hanging around on the river bank doing nothing in particular.

Maybe I'll do better tomorrow.

A Potpourri Of Hikes & Bikes

 

Blog-wize I'm still stuck in Illinois (This was all several weeks ago but I tend not to blog realtime because I'm a paranoid old cuss who wants to remain in the shadows.), waiting for my appointment to go pick up the Wife from her sister-visit.

But I wasn't just sitting around like a mushroom on a fence post (I have no idea where that came from but when shit like this pops up ya just gota go with it!)

What follows is a collection of hikes and bikes that I occupied myself with during the wait, in reverse-chronilogical order in which I did them because somehow that seemed to make sense when I sat down to write this.

One last shout on Tunnel Hill Trail

I was under instructions not to pick up the Wife untill around 1400 on Tuesday. Because the pickup point was only a little more than 3 hours away I had some time to kill after I broke camp that morning, so I finished off my portion of this trip with one last bike ride from Vienna, down the Tunnel Hill Trail to Belknap, a small collection of homes with a trail access point.

This section of the trail is mostly flat and it's a pleasant, but not awesome, 16 mile out&back ride. 

If you are so inclined and have the time, about 2/3 of the way down to Belknap there's an access point to a section of the Cache River State Nature Area where you can trade the bike for hiking shoes because there's a complex of trails along the Cache River back in there.

Bell Smith Springs

Bell Smith Springs was the last stop of a three-hike day on Monday,

though the short stroll I took here could hardly be called a hike. (For a better look at the trails check out my 2017 visit here.) By now the day was getting on and school was out. Several mothers had turned up in the parking lot with loaded minivans in an attempt to burn off thier kids excess energy

Steps cut down through the side of the canyon

on the steep trails. Admirable, and a wholesome activity, but not my scene, so I didn't hang around long.

On my way out I did poke my head into the Redbud campground just to look around. Nothing much has changed since I last stayed here, except that the well-pump seemed quieter this time. Not quite so chalk-boardy

Jackson Falls

Jackson Falls is an interesting spot, even on days like today when the water's not running.

The steep canyon walls make this a popular climbing area with a number of pitches to choose from.

Those same steep walls that make for good technical climbing mean that there's two seperate trail-systems in here. One up on top and another down below, with no direct connection between them. You either pick the trailhead for the upper trails, or go on down the road a ways, actually right to the end, to the trailhead for the lower trails.

BTW, you might get away with 2-wheel drive back here on FR 494, but it's a fairly primitive, one-lane road in rocky terrain that fords several streams, so high-clearance is recomended.

Today I stuck to the North Bluff Trail up on top of the canyon.

If you take this trail far enough

and look back over your shoulder at just the right spot near Railroad Rock, a little beyond the official end of the trail, you can get a glimpse of the active BNFS tracks taking advantage of the narrow-bottomed canyon on thier way north out of Metropolis down on the Ohio River.

Millstone Bluff Archeological Area

While I was in the area this year there was some re-paving work being done on SR 146 between the campground and Viena, so I was going north and using SR 147 instead to avoid the construction delays, and that meant I went past this small sign several times.

So come Monday morning I decided to stick my head in there and see what it was about.

Turns out there's quite

 an interesting little site back in there.

After figuring out that the self-guided tour starts behind the trees at the far end of the parking lot, and then slogging up the unrelentingly steep trail,

assisted by steps in the more challenging places,

you get dumped out on the edge of the bluff itself, something that would be called a small mesa in the west.

To make the area up here even more defensible than it already was, the edges of the bluff are also guarded by an encircling stone wall. The same sort of stone wall that gave Stonefort its name.

And as you follow the trail around the bluff

it just keeps getting

more

and more interesting.

OK, not something I would notice untill it's pointed out, but here is one of the 1500 year old depressions left in the ground by a family home.

Makes me wonder how many other sites I've just obliviously wandered on by during my thousands of miles of hikes over the years.

I wonder if there's an Amateur Archeology 101 class I could take to highten my awareness?

There's one spot up there where a platform lets you look down on a relativly flat rock surface without actually climbing on it.

If you look hard enough,

and with the assistance of an adjacent "key", you can pick out millenia and a half year old petroglyphs (carved into the rock as opposed to painted on pictographs) there below your feet!

Anyway, that's it. Now it's time to head back to the chaotic,  frenetic, confusion of the St. Louis area to collect the Wife and head on back home.

Dickson Spring State Park

 It's Saturday morning and I'm camped at Lake Glendale in southern Illinois.

It "rained" for a good part of last night (I put rained in quotes because it was a fairly gentle rain, not like the hard, fast monsoons of the South West which, after 44 years, are the rains I'm used to.) and it's still raining this morning.

My original plan for the day was a bike ride on the northern section of the Tunnel Hill Trail, but it was just a little sloppy for that and I had no cell-signal where I was to check on the weather report and see what the rest of the day looked like, so - change of plans.

Just a few miles south of me is Dickson Springs State Park and, unlike the trails around Lake Glendale, I haven't hiked the Dickson Springs trails before.

Illinois State Parks are free for day-users (you only have to pay for campsites), so I grabbed my pack, sticks, and raingear and headed that way.

If you've never ventured south of Marion you may not realize that Illinois has two faces (not counting the Chicago Metro area. And who wants to count a face like that!). Unlike the gentle farmlands of the northern part of the state, the southern tip of Illinois can get pretty rugged, which makes for interesting hikes.

Trail signage in the state park isn't great, but I had read that the Ghost Canyon trail starts behind the pool (there used to be several hot-spring spas in the area. I guess this big swim and smaller splash pool complex is a remnant of that.)

After a bit of circling on the narrow, up&down roads of the park relying more on instinct than signage, I parked near a small picnic area, walked past the well fenced pool, apparently closed for the season, through the tiny, cramped, deadend parking lot in front of the pool (this place must be a madhouse when the pool is open!), across Hills Branch Creek on an old, rotting bridge, and managed to find said trailhead.

Shortly after starting down the trail I passed under this rather substantial highway bridge leaping right over Ghost Canyon as if it, the canyon, was an afterthought.

On the way here I drove over this bridge without even noticing it, or the canyon, though to be fair, I was busy looking for the turnoff.

So suddenly coming out underneath this soaring structure on foot was a lot like stumbling into a cathedral where no catheadral was expected, an event that gives pause, no matter what imaginary friend a person believes in.

Religious War:

noun

1) Grown-ass people fighting over who has the best imaginary friend.

In places the trail demanded some rock-scrambling over rain-slick sandstone.

Reminded me of hiking Illinois' Little Grand Canyon where I managed to take one hell of a fall. It's a good thing there was no one else on the trail because I was moving slow and carefull today. Certainly didn't want a repeat of that fall!

Outbound (this is an out & back trail), Hills Branch Creek was on my left and on the right was the rugged limestone wall of the steep-sided,  water-cut canyon typical of the area.

Sometimes I was down by the creek on fairly stable and safe, if wet, ground,

others, high above it on snot-slick rock.

The Gaia map shows a relatively short half-mile trail, but I read one account that spoke of traveling a mile and a half through the canyon before hittimg the state land boundary.

Well they must have been bush-wacking down the creek bed, because, right on que according to the map, I was stopped dead at this 20 foot drop-off.

Disapointing, (a half mile out and another half mile back is hardly enough time to get warmed up!) but the thought of continuing down Ghost Canyon by scrambling over jumbled, wet rock in the rain alone with little chance of help randomly stumbling on by and no cell signal, was like looking into that gaping toothy maw of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. - Feeeed Meee! 

Nope! Not going there! Fifteen, maybe even ten, years ago, perhaps, but not today!

But that's OK. There's other trails here.

But chagota work for them a little bit. No signs say Pine Tree Trail this way, just a small dotted line on the map and one sign pointing to the primitive camping parking lot. 

Even there, no trail-sign, just a path tucked in behind a dumpster leading to 6 or 7 walk-in tent sites,

until finally - - - nothing so crass as an actual trail name, or a directional arrow - unless you're ready to cut the hike short, turn around, and go back where you came from, then they're more than willing to help - but at least there's a hint that you're on the right - well, track.

It's not until you've actually found the trail that they're willing to point you to the next one!

Call me weird - don't worry, you won't be the first - but there's something about hiking in the rain.

It wraps you in the safe, secure hug of an old friend while providing comfortable isolation by creating a sound-bubble and keeping most others away.

It allows a person to climb out of the chattering madness of thier own head and breathe some uncomplicated existence for a few minutes.

And, as a final bonus, there's the hightened gratification of getting back to the shelter of the truck. Though in this case the rain had moved on by the time I got back to the truck.

Dickson Springs State Park, perhaps not an ideal destination on its own, but if you're in the area anyway, worth exploring.