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.

Chore Avoidance

 

So what do you do with a softball sized pumpkin that, for $2, you couldn't resist bringing home?

Maybe this?

And for those PPMS (Psycho Pumpkin Mood Swings),

perhaps this on the other side?

OK, OK. So I had a chore that wasn't really calling to me, so wandered off on this tangent instead.

I Am A Complete Idiot!

 OK, maybe not a complete idiot.

True, I am a man, and we all know man-brains can sometimes be - well, pretty idiotic. But on the plus side, as a kid I was often told I only had half a brain. So I guess that makes me a half idiot!

Anyway - this particular incident started out innocent enough, if a little unexpected. Then things went caddywampus in a hurry!

Within days of getting home from the family reunion the Wife got a feeling that she really needed to go see her Missouri based sisters. Which was pretty noteworthy since this would be the first time in nearly 20 years that she went anywhere more than a couple-three hours away from the property.

In a moment of stupidity, or was it idiocy?, I offered to, with barely a pause, turn right around from the last trip and drive her back up to near where I just was.

She quickly pointed out, in that all too familiar 'don't be an idiot' tone, that I needed to stay here and once a day toss some food out for the two cats that still hang around the property and water the toad that's living in the barn. (Can't put a stash of food out for the cats to live on because all the other critters swoop in and clean it up within hours.)

 Whew! Dodged a bullet there!

So that lead to me teaching her how to use Google Maps to plot her route, find hotels, and most importantly, locate restaurants. (I think I've said before that she's a food oriented person.)

Well, the Wife is not particularly tech-savvy so it was tough going, involving much repetition and taking lots of notes because she's not any better at remembering tech-stuff than she is at doing it. On top of that she has zombie-fingers so working with the phone can be chalanging. So, to steal a line from Harry Chapin's Taxi, 'the lesson hadn't gone too far'.

Frustrated and completely loosing confidence in her ability to make the drive on her own, not to mention the crippling anxiety she was already putting herself through just thinking about wandering unfamiliar roads on her own, she reached out to the Daughter (her stepdaughter), who runs her own pet-care business in Tucson. Offering to pay her way to and from Texas to spend a week visiting with her mom, siblings, and niece/nephew, as well as rent her a car and pay double her going rate to have the Daughter make the 4 hour round trip from family home to the property daily to kibble the cats and water the toad.

The Daughter could do it, but was already booked up until early October. Well, the trip to see the sisters was too urgent to wait that long (Hey, I've learned that when the Wife gets these feelings the best thing to do is just get out of the way!), which is what lead to discovering that there's a Rover living only a few miles away that was willing to come over once a day and refill the plates

and even water the toad. 

BTW, if you knew the Wife you'd realize just how important this trip must be if she's willing to let a stranger on the property!

So that’s how my idiocy came right back and bit me on the ass in the form of setting out at dawn one morning with the Wife in the passenger seat as I basicly retraced my route of a few days ago back up Texas, across Arkansas, and, by noon the next day, to a destination in Missouri.

The Wife is food oriented and it used to be, decades ago when we still did stuff like this, travel with the Wife wasn't about going from here to there, it was about going from restaurant to restaurant until we eventually got there. - It still is - Only now it's all take-away since she hasn't been able to tolerate sitting in a restaurant among people since about 2020. (We're  a good match in that way.)

I got her as far as a hotel in St. Charles, just west of St. Louis, where her sister from Columbia was going to pick her up the next morning, collect the other sister that lives near St. Charles, and head back to Columbia in the middle of the state for a few days.

It was a little after noon on a Friday when, after several trips, we got the Wife’s stuff shlepped up to her room (Crap! There was a lot of stuff!). Without even closing the door behind us the Wife tossed the last bag on the rented bed, turned around, and told me to go away and come back Tuesday to pick her up.  To be fair, she said this with gratitude and in a loving way as she shoved me back out into the hall and shut the door in my face.

Which is how I ended up, an additional three hours of driving later (the Ranger is 18 months old and already has 30k miles on it!), right back at the Lake Glenwood National Forest campground I had stayed at barely a week before. Different campsite this time, but one I've used before.

(Not sure this video of my firepit-in-a-box will work)

I did some other stuff while I was waiting for Tuesday to roll around, which I'll get to in another post, but on Sunday I transfered the bike rack from trailer to Ranger

and drove over to the tiny little village of New Burnside where there's an access point on the Tunnel Hill State Trail.

You might remember that this is where I turned around on a ride up from Viena along the trail a week or so ago.

My plan was, as is befitting for a person of my - um, accumulated wisdom, to take a leisurely ride on this, virgin to me, northern section of the trail up as far as Carrier Mills and back. A 20+ mile trip.

Just a mile north of New Burnside, tucked into the woods, sits this unexpected little trailside oasis accessible only from the trail.

The little village of Stonefort, named for a nearby stone defensive wall built some 1500 years ago, turned up right where it was supposed to be.

What was unexpected and  pleasantly surprising was the well preserved combo freight and passenger station from the railroad days still standing there.

If you sit and listen long enough, you can hear the faint echos of waiting passengers chatting, the crunch of steel-rimed wagon-wheels on gravel and the clank of the beam-scale as teamsters arrive to drop off goods to be shipped by the railroad, the barely perceptible tapping of the telegraph key at the station master's desk, the creak & squeal of the semaphor signal mechanism as the 'clear' aspect is changed to 'stop' -

Ah-hem! Oops! Kinda got lost there for a moment.

Back to the present - Each trail access point has bike-racks, a water-point, a picnic table or two and pit toilets. So let's top up the water bottle and use the toilet before getting back on the trail again.

Ok, so New Burnside, my start point today, seemed like a nice little village as I got the bike down off the rack and readied it. A few cars coasting down the narrow streets, a teenage couple walking by to stop at the swingset, swing for a while, then head back the way they came, a handfull of dogs running over to bark at me, backing down when I ignored them.

And maybe I was bribed by the presence of the station, but Stonefort seemed a pleasent, if quite, place.

But my next stop, and intended turnaround point, Carrier Mills, had a different kinda vibe.

Maybe because the State supplied watering point and pit toilets at the trail access point were, according to the tattered sign, turned off and locked up due to vandalism, although none was visible. Maybe because I never saw another person, or even moving car, while I was there. But that was not a town that invited me to linger! I didn't even snap a quick photo.

OK, here's where the idiocy really kicked in. After being thwarted by the dry water spigot, locked bathroom doors and the 'deliverance' sort of vibe of Carrier Mills, instead of the packed lunch I had planned on kicking back and eating there before heading back to the Ranger, I checked my map of the trail, squinting at my tiny screen in the bright sunlight, and thought,

'You know what!? I've been to the southern end of this 45 mile long trail a couple of times now, and from here the northern end, at Harrisburg, is just up the way. As long as I'm here I should just go ahead and knock that off too.'

- - - Yep, definitly a 'here, hold my beer.' kinda moment - - -  (que a hearty rendition of the Dennis Steven Wright song 'You're a Dumbass')

Seven and a half miles later, a fact I somehow managed to ignore when making the ill-conceived decision to ride on - but not as I was actually riding it - I gasped and wobbled my way into Henderson.

On top of everything else, the nicely shaded trailside bench on the south side of town, perfect for a half-dead old man who still thinks he's 33, was occupied when I creaked and huffed on by it.

The arrow is pointing at the trail.

Harrisburg is a good sized town of about 8000, much larger than the other stops along the trail, with a Walmart across the way and a whole string of businesses squeezed in between the trail and the main road.

I managed to avoid the temptation of the Dairy Queen and didn't quite need the Urgent Care facility, though it was good to know it was there.

There used to be a long siding here at Harrisburg. Because the city wanted more space for tax-generating businesses between the trail and the road, at least that’s my assumption, south of town there's a sudden jog in the trail as it switches, over the course of a road crossing, from what used to be the main line over to the siding which is a little farther from the highway.

Well into town, past the Dairy Queen but almost still within sight of it, I finally found an unocupied, shaded bench where I belatedly partook of my delayed lunch while trying not to slide off my seat and congeal on the ground like overcooked spaghetti.

Lunch even came with entertaimnent!

Just 20 yards away, tucked up under a tree, a guy was on his feet and head-first into the depths of a large yellow drybag, the kind you see on rafting trips. At first I thought he was just vigorously repacking his bag as he repeatedly attacked the contents with pistoning arms, but I don't care how big it is, it doesn't take that long to squash the contents down into a drybag.

My suspicions that this was not 'main stream' behavior were confirmed when he suddenly pulled a Freddy style goalie mask out of his abused yellow bag and put it on. Whenever someone went by on the trail he would lift his head up out of the bag and stare at them before diving back in. It was funny to watch some of the startled passerby's reactions!

On the map, the trail between New Burnside and Harrisburg appears to be right alongside the highway the whole way. And it is. But not the way you might think.

There's a nice, tree-lined buffer between the trail and the highway, so it's not like you're riding down the shoulder of a state highway. In fact it's actually quite a pleasant ride.

Well, it would have been if I hadn't bit off so much of a ride all in one mouthful.

You know how, when you're about to run out of gas and you start driving faster so you get there sooner even though that's the worst thing you can do vis-a-vis fuel conservation?

Yep, that’s me.

After lunch I reset Gaia to zero and headed back towards the Ranger which was eighteen and a quarter miles away and over 400 feet higher. And somehow I managed to do it in just two and a half hours!

Alright! Alright! I'll concede that, now that I've got the bike back on the rack and the Ranger pointed back towards camp, I just may be a complete idiot! -

Now, if only I could get Dennis Wright to stop singing in my head - - 

Ghosts Of Stickers Past

 

This is how the teardrop came. With large vinyl advertising stickers all over it. Well, at least o. Both sides and a small sticker on the front - you know what? That’s pretty much all over it, so I stand by my first statement.

Now I'm not anti-Timberleaf, they build a great product at a reasonable cost, but I am adverse to advertising for anybody, especially when I'm expected to do it for free.

So this is how the trailer looks after I removed all that vinyl.

But with a coating of dust and under the right lighting conditions, the ghosts of stickers past come out to play.

My trailer is haunted!

Cool!

I Broke My New Bike!

 

Got home from the family reunion, unloaded the still practicly new bike off the rack on the front of the teardrop, removed the protective handlebar cover - and found a handfull of loose shifter parts dropping out of it.

Well that's not right!

The tailpiece of the 1Up bike rack has this fancy ball & wedge setup for a rattle-free connection into the hitch reciever.

The wedge is tightened with this security-hex fitting. Only thing is, no matter how hard I crank on this thing, it has a habit of loosening up again. Sometimes as quicly as within a hundred miles of driving.

Not disasterous, except that a couple of photos ago you may have noticed that instead of a hole for the locking pin that prevents unauthorized separation of rack and reciever, the rack's tailpiece has a slot instead. This allows for adjusting the in&out position of the rack relative to the vehicle before tightening said ball & wedge.

All pretty nifty. But after a few hundred miles of driving, when ball isn't wedged anymore, the looseness combined with slot allows the rack to slide in or out the full length of that slot.

Out is no big deal, but when it slides in, like in this photo, the shifter bashes itself to bits against the front of the trailer.

Which kinda sucks!

Fortunately I still had the cut-off bit of the reciever tube I added to the teardrop, so I sliced off a 2" section of that,

Slapped some paint on the raw edges so nothing rusts too bad,

and slipped this spacer-sleeve over the rack's tailpiece before stabbing it into the reciever. This didn't fix the loosening ball & wedge issue, but now, because of the spacer, the rack can't work its way back into reviever far enough to bash the bike-bits against the trailer.

But I'm  still stuck with an inoperable shifter - which ain't good!

Now I'm not a bike repair guy and was expecting some serious wallet pain to be involved in rectifying the shifter issue, so was somewhat taken aback when I found out a replacement shifter costs less than $20.

It wasn't untill I cut the little nibby-thing that keeps the cable from unraveling off the end of the original shifter and unthreaded it from the tube, that I discovered the new cable was way too short so I had to swap it out and put the old cable in the new shifter.

Fortunately I had made the cut right up tight to the nibby-thing so there was still enough length to get the job done. But note to self, next time make sure to check cable lengths before punching the "add to cart" button!

The cable-adjuster on the rear derailer has a range of about 60 quarter-turns. Since cables never get any shorter during use, I ran the adjuster all the way in then backed off 10 quarter-turns before snugging everything up and clamping the cable down. 

To fine-tune everything after all was said and done I probably backed it off another 3 - 5 quarter-turns.

In case I ever have to do this again, rather than crush the fresh nibby-thing that came with the new shifter down on the exposed end of the cable and risk having to cut it off even shorter someday,

I put a bit of shrink-wrap on the end of the cable instead. Something I can remove without shortening the cable again.

I even managed to get all the bits and pieces back on the handlebar in functioning order! - Well, I'm not 100% on the throttle since I have the ebike configured as a class 1 so the throttle is disabled. For now I'm just assuming it still works.

I've put a fair-few miles on the bike since this repair and so far everything is good.

Now - what the hell am I going to break next?