The Ups and Downs of Pate Hollow Trail

When reading the reviews on one of the campground-finder web-sites someone said "Blackwell Horse Camp is a great place. Too bad it’s in Indiana".

Now I agree that there are parts of Indiana I’m not in love with, such as Indianapolis, and parts that are so-so, such as much of the northern 1/3 of the state, (With some noted exceptions!) but I think southern Indiana deserves better than to be dismissed like that.

For example, just 6 miles from where I camped at the Blackwell Horse Camp, one mile out to the highway on Tower Ridge RD, then 5 miles north on SR 446, is the National Forest’s Pate Hollow Trail.

This 6 mile loop trail wanders around the sharp ridges and deep hollows near the northern shore of Monroe Lake. But when it came time to find the trail, despite being a favorite of the rangers I talked to back at headquarters in Bedford, there's no signage for the trail out on the highway

Sign at the trailhead, if you can find it!

making it slightly difficult to find.

The fact that the trailhead, and the parking for it, actually sits on the property of the Paynetown State Recreation Office and Indiana Conservation Officer Headquarters does pretty much nothing to lessen that confusion.

In fact there’s nothing to tell you for sure that you are in the right place until you park on the big, steeply tilted, but otherwise unmarked bit of asphalt there behind the state building and wander over to the north edge of the parking area where the trailhead sign sits tucked into the trees. (I took this photo while standing at the trailhead sign.) In fact, at this point I was still standing in the Paynetown State Recreation Area and wouldn’t reenter the National Forest until I was a few feet down the trail.

I was actually a bit concerned at this point because I knew from research that the Pate Hollow Trail gets down to the shoreline of Monroe Lake, but after crossing the causeway over the lake it sure did seem like the highway did a whole heck of a lot of climbing before I got to the trailhead! Climbing that I was now going to have to undo on foot then redo all over again to get back to The Van.

But I bravely hitched my pack up onto my back, grabbed my hiking stick, and set out.

But only a few feet up the trail I got temporarily sidetracked by the starkness of this hollow at the base of a tree right on the edge of the trail.

These kinds of hollows are actually fairly common, in fact another one would play an important part of this hike later on, but the unnaturally clean, sharp edges of this one make it stand out.

A few steps later and I understand.

Someone has gone to some effort to fit a board into a natural hollow here and create a geo-cache that at one point came complete with a hinged door.

A few steps later and I was immersed in the up and down world of southern Indiana where everything is either a narrow hollow, a knife-edged ridge, or the slopes in between.

Most of Hoosier National Forest exists because in the 30’s the feds bought up hundreds of little farms that couldn’t make a go of it on the thin, barely fertile soils of the ridgetops and the dense, wet tangles of the hollows.

There's an old road in here, maybe put in by Pate as he attempted to make a go of farming the area?, that cuts across the middle of the loop trail. I would have loved to learn more about who put the road in and what was at the end of it back then, but that info wasn’t forthcoming and I stuck to the trail instead,

which, for a while anyway, wandered off along a separate ridge.

But ridgeline, slope, or hollow, in late August this place was an arachnid paradise and I ducked whenever I could, but spiders were soon frantically rappelling off the brim of my hat as I walked through unseen web after unseen web.

And I was right about that downward slog, but eventually there appeared a brightness behind the trees that hinted at open space of some sort just ahead. Rare in this dense hardwood forest.

Yep, there’s the lake at about the 2.5 mile point, (If hiking the loop counterclockwise which is my default unless there’s a compelling reason to go the other way around instead. Don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm left handed.)

but if you took this hike because you are a ‘lakie’ you’re going to be disappointed because there’s actually only about a quarter mile, if that, of actual lake-side hiking, before the trail turns up-hollow again.

This particular hollow starts out wider and flatter than most in the area and I have to wonder if this is was actually Pate’s hollow, though after casting back and forth for a while, cutting a fat-man sized zig-zagging swath through the spiderwebs, I can find no sign of road or structures or old fence-lines.

And it isn’t long before the hollow narrows and the trail starts to switchback up towards the ridge above.

That guy you see on the trail up there left-center isn’t wearing a reddish shirt, in fact he’s not wearing any shirt at all. Just a hat, shoes and black shorts and he, with his 4% body fat, stingy muscles and protruding tendons, thumpity-thumped by me at a rapid jog. Good for the health I suppose, (Bad for the knees though!) but I think I’ll stick to enjoying my trails at a quiet snail’s-pace.

Besides, doctors, most of whom are sporting 10, 20, 30% body fat, may try to cram the health benefits of extra low body fat down our throats but I’m not convinced.  Ever notice how often the extremely skinny get run down or sick? Keeping your body in that ‘doctor approved’ condition leaves virtually no reserves for body or immune system, so it might be healthy as long as nothing goes wrong, but we all know things go wrong; then what??

I mean this dude was so skinny that when I worked my way up the ridge right behind him spider webs were still blocking the trail (That out-of-focus orangish blob right in the middle of the photo is a spider hanging out in the middle of her web.) because he slipped right between the strands!!

About the time that jogger was fishing in the secret pocket tucked behind the waistband of his shorts for the car keys so he could get to his lunchtime Pilates class on time I decided to wander off trail and find a spot for my own lunchtime routine, namely a nice, healthy, fat-maintaining snack!

At this point the trail was tracking across a slope just below a ridgetop so I headed upslope away from the trail to find seclusion and a nice comfortable tree to lounge against.

I’ve talked before about the importance of looking back as you’re hiking, especially when you leave a clearly marked trail for untracked parts, and this photo illustrates that nicely.

Although I’m only 10-20 yards off the trail at this point, because of the terrain there is absolutely no hint of it anywhere and all these ridges and hollows and slopes around here look pretty much the same.  But I took this photo looking back the way I had come and if you look close you can see that a tree just left of center has one of those little hollows at its base. (In the photo there’s a yellow leaf right in line with the hollow but to the eye the leaf was not quite that prominent.)

If I hadn’t been watching my back-trail I wouldn’t have seen it, but I was, and this became my landmark to make sure that after turning around several times as I dropped pack and scraped out a seat, and then lounging and just generally zoning out for a while up there on that trackless ridge, I would head the right direction when I was ready to continue.

And clearly it worked because I'm still here to write this and not wandering southern Indiana trying to find the trail!

Though the actual elevation difference along this trail is only about 250 feet from its highest to lowest points, because of the ridge-and-hollow nature of the terrain I actually climbed, and descended, over 1300 feet by the time I got back to The Van.

Some people are not fans of forest hikes, finding them claustriphobic and boringly repetitive, they prefer the openness of hiking above tree-line, but I personally find forest trails soothing and meditative, and frankly this one was over too soon because now I was back to worrying about what hurricane Harvey was doing to The Wife back home. . .

Horseless At The Blackwell Horse Camp

The family reunion that lured me up to Michigan this time was over. I spent another day at The Brother’s getting my receiver-hitch adjusted (For 7 years the add-on hitch has driven me slightly nuts – OK, slightly more nuts – because it projected from under The Van at a slight downward angle. This was especially pronounced when the bike rack with its longish arm was mounted in the receiver. The Brother crawled up under there with wrenches, die-grinders and a welder to finally rectify that. Thanks Bro!) and then another day checking out the changes at The Sisters’ house (It’s been a long time since I was last there.) while partying-down on their patio with pizza. But now it was time to move on.

Except! You may remember that right about now hurricane Harvey swept in and barred me from getting home, inching in off the Gulf, dragging over a year’s worth of rain with it, and blasting all that water around in blinding, horizontal sheets with fierce gusts of tropical bad-breath.  Short of staying put right where I was, and frankly everybody there in Michigan, if not already tired of me, had a life of their own to get back to so I couldn’t see any upside to sticking around, my only option was to stage myself somewhere as close to home as I could to shorten the reaction time once Harvey would let me get back, but at the same time balancing that against the increasing heat of moving further south.

I did a little poking around in my Delorme Topo and decided that the Hoosier National Forest would check-off several points. It would get me closer to home. The fact that it was only 260 miles closer (Out of the 1300 I needed to cover) might not sound like much, but at the same time this had the advantage of not taking me so far south the nights would be unsleepable. Yes, at this point there was still an AC unit on top of The Van but not only were electric hookup-sites outside the budget, but I hadn’t run that AC unit in – well – a couple years and didn’t even know if it would work, in fact I was pretty sure it wouldn’t. (Mud Daubers like to get up inside there and their nests unbalance the fan to the point of shaking the whole thing to pieces!) And finally, I hadn’t been there, Hoosier NF, before and checking it out seemed like a good use of my storm-enforced exile.

(Oh Lord that's a convoluted paragraph and I should be ashamed of writing it!!)

When visiting a National Forest I haven’t been to before, horse-camps are like get-out-of-jail-free cards. Since people drive trucks with stock-trailers to them I know I can get The Van in there without having to do any scouting first;  Most NF horse-camps are no-fee;  And many are open free-for-alls with no designated sites so even if it’s crowded when I do arrive there will usually be some corner I can squeeze into. Oh, and you don’t have to have a horse along in order to stay! (When picking a spot to park at a horse camp I try to leave the best ‘horse-sites’ alone, in this particular case, the corners where it’s easy to ‘corral' the horses with truck, trailer, and a little rope.)

It just so happens that one way for me to get to Tower Ridge Rd, and the Blackwell Horse Camp would be to cross a little piece of US50 that I skipped in favor of diverting up through Nashville (Indiana) and Brown County State Park, when tracing that longest of US highways several years ago.

Back then getting through the town of Seymour was a long, slow process because there was some sort of street festival underway. This time getting through Seymour was a long, slow process because the crossing arms guarding the Louisville and Indiana RR near the interchange with CSX were down for no apparent reason and stayed that way for a lonnng time.

For a railroad nut this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing as long as there was railroady stuff to photograph, but in this case it was just us drivers staring dumbly through our windshields at each other across the empty tracks guarded by the flashing arms.

But eventually the arms got tired of the game and I made it to the horse-camp

Where I quickly set about killing the rest of the afternoon by chillin’ in the shade of the open rear doors.

I got there on a Thursday

and the place was occupied by less than 10 camps. (The Forest Service lists this place as able to handle 100 camps but I think that might be a bit optimistic!)

Come Friday night, contrary to what I expected, there were even fewer camps. Notice that the motorhome that was down in the far corner is now gone.

(The tent there in the left foreground isn’t someone crowding in on me, that’s a cheap little 4-man tent I carry to act as a placeholder so I can temporarily drive The Van off to various trailheads, which I’ll get to in other posts, but still have a place to come back to.)

Saturday night a truck-trailer combo set up down there in that far eastern corner

and a pair of truck-trailers corralled up against the fence to my west.

That was pretty much as crowded as it got.

Not actually Larry! Who wasn't really Larry anyway. (You'll have to read the text below to make any sense of this.)

But I have to admit that one event, actually a pair of events, humbled me, in fact knocked me clean off my high-horse with a hefty clout up-side the head.

One afternoon after hiking the morning away I was doing my chillin’ routine when some guy broke my solitude. This guy, let’s call him Larry, though that isn’t his real name, was a caricature of everything I try to avoid when it comes to humanity. He was a loud talking, shirtless, beer-drinkin’, cigarette smokin’, scraggly-haired, skinny-assed redneck with political and social views so far towards the other end of the scale I had to use a telescope to see them. (Well hell! Someone has to balance me out!)

Larry was tent-camping (In a tiny little two-man tent that has seen better days.) down around the corner with his girlfriend Judy. (Again, not her real name.) Judy, an EMS for the county, had taken the car and was off to some sort of first-responders fund-raising golf event for the day. Larry decided golf wasn’t his thing so stayed behind but now was getting bored and apparently I looked like an easy mark to break up the boredom with.

Unfortunately I’m not a complete ass so couldn’t just tell him to piss-off. Instead I grudgingly put my magazine down and joined Larry in the shade of a tree, both of us leaning on hitching posts arranged to protect the tree from the chewing of neurotic horses, while Larry eased his boredom with diarrhea of the mouth.

I learned more about Larry and Judy than even his therapist should know! I also learned that Larry’s idea of an ideal shopping experience is Dollar General. (All the snacks and drinks you need for a dollar a pop! And hey man! You can even get the toilet paper you’re going to need later! Ha Ha Ha.) And I learned that despite Larry’s challenging economic circumstances, his political position is dangerously close to falling clean off the right end of the spectrum.

Since it's virtually impossible to change someone's beliefs, I’m usually pretty good at keeping my political and religious views to myself in circumstances like this, so with no extra fuel from me to keep the fire going, after what felt like hours, Larry word-vomited himself out and moved on.

I sighed with relief, picked up my magazine, and tried to get back to the state of bliss I was in BL (Before Larry.)

Later on I was putting the finishing touches on some made-from-scratch rice and beans when I heard Larry calling my name. In fact pretty much the whole horse camp heard Larry calling my name.

Since pretending not to be there probably wasn’t going to work too well, I stuck my head out the open back doors to see Larry, and presumably Judy, his EMS girlfriend, coming my way.

Hey greg! You got any bread?

Well actually I used up the last of my sandwich-rounds earlier that day so I could truthfully tell him no.

That’s OK. We do. I’ll go back and get some. Hang on.

OK, this wasn’t making any more sense to me than it is to you! But before Larry could run off to ‘go get some bread’ I learned that the Tupperware container Judy was carrying was full of left-over pulled pork slow-smoked overnight for the first responders fundraiser and they were intent on giving me some!

I turned off the fire under the rice and beans, hopped down from The Van, and followed them back to their camp where Larry pulled a couple slices of bread from the makeshift kitchen in the trunk of a rusted and aging old car, which Judy then loaded up with a couple generous fork-fulls of steaming, tender, pulled pork.

After some questions about how the fundraiser went (The guy who did the pork had been drinking beer all day so they had to take the ambulance keys away from him. . .) I trundled my way back across the camp with sandwich in hand, both hands actually because you sure don't want to be dropping slow-smoked pulled pork on the ground!

It was a little heavy on the protein, but instead of my intended dinner rice and beans with a salad on the side, that night I had the rice and beans with a pulled-pork sandwich instead, courtesy of a couple of people I would normally take extra pains to avoid, but who turned out to have big ol’ generous hearts of gold.

That'll teach me and my snooty, sky-high nose to make judgments about people without all the facts.

I stayed there three nights and Blackwell Horse Camp turned out to be a very pleasant little spot in the middle of the Charles C. Deem Wilderness which is in the middle of the Brownstown Ranger District of the Hoosier National Forest.

But it hardly seemed fair for me to be enjoying weather like this while Harvey was crapping all over the homestead, and The Wife.

Holly State Recreation Area

For all its faults, one thing you can say for Michigan is that when it comes to preserving bits of the natural landscape the state has always been forward-looking, from its earliest days buying up and preserving land all over the state. And one of those little chunks of preserved land is now Holly State Recreation Area which the state bought in 1946.

Back then, and even as recently as when I was a kid growing up in Michigan, Holly SRA was out in the boonies halfway between Pontiac and Flint. Since then population growth has been relentless and pretty much all of southeast Michigan has gradually morphed into one huge, contiguous town where you’re never more than a few minutes from a Walmart or a Myers, but Holly SRA is an oasis there in the middle of the bustle designed as a place where people can get away from all that and spend a little time doing outdoorsy type stuff.

Today there’s even an inflatable ‘Water Adventure Park’ off the swimming beach on Heron Lake! When I was a kid we had to make do with 55 gallon drums under a wood deck and ratty bits of foam strung on a string to mark the swimming area.

Day-tripping out here is no issue.

Traffic might be heavy, but if you live within daytripping distance you’re used to that anyway. And if you got a slow start in the morning you might have to elbow out your piece of the beach among the weekend crowd, but if you want to spend that same weekend in the 100+ site campground just north of McGinnis Lake (There are four separate lakes in the recreation area.) you better have a reservation!!

This year our annual family reunion campout was here and campsite reservations open up 6 months before the date of your intended stay. We all had our instructions from the reunion organizer, including which campsites to grab up so we would create a family enclave, and I, along with the other members of the family, had the computer warmed up and the satellite connection ready to go as zero-hour approached, but even so, within minutes of becoming available for reservation, one of the designated campsites was snatched out from under us and an alternative had to be found!

By the way, as a non-resident visiting any of Michigan’s state lands can get expensive. Your options are to pay the $7 daily entrance fee (In addition to the hefty camping fee) or buy a $32 annual windshield sticker. (Residents can tack $10 onto their vehicle registration and get unlimited access.)

The main reason for selecting Holly SRA is that at the other end of the park from the campground, there on the southern flank of Wildwood Lake, are a pair of reservable (One year in advance because they are so popular) 4-person cabins, each with running water, (Including hot) a kitchenette and full bathroom.

I guess should point out that much of the family has aged over the years since we first started visiting places like this and now many of us are either approaching or already working on our 60’s, which means the matriarch is into her - well, rather than get myself into trouble here I'll let you do the math. Point is, cabin camping with real beds and running water is a whole lot easier for old bones than tent camping and a walk to the pit toilets!

At one point this spot the cabins are sitting in used to be a small beach area open to all, but now when you check into your cabin you also get a key for the locked gate, so for the cost of the cabin you are also getting a private little spot on the lake, especially if you coax enough family out of their tents to fill both cabins, which we did!

Also included in the cabin rental are canoes, life-jackets and paddles (No need to break out the inflatable kayak!)

which were put to good use for a little father-son fishing,

as well as some husband-wife alone time, although, in this case one of the participants wasn’t at all sure of this tippy-canoe crap and quickly downed paddle in favor of just plain hanging on!

Though the public beach on Heron Lake is probably the main draw, there are a couple of decent trails in the SRA as well.

One encircles the four loops of the camping area on the north side of the SRA and is nearly 6 miles long, though it can be shortened via several ‘cutoff’ trails, and another loops around the twin lakes of Valley and Wildwood.

The latter trail is just over two miles long,

sticks close to the water

for much of its length

and crosses just behind the cabins  

so was easily accessible for us.

Ma! There's a monster in the woods!

One morning, while still back at the campground before the family festivities started up over at the cabins, I tried out the north trail, the one around the camping loops.

This one is more of a through-the-woods trail

though much of Michigan is swampy and you are never far from potholes (The kind created by chunks of ice left behind as the glaciers retreated, not the infamous Michigan Potholes created by tires on crappy pavement!) and marshes.

Interesting point:

Michigan is the only state that has two separate Initial Points (The intersection of the Base-line and Meridian where all other surveys within the state are referenced from.) The swampy terrain was so difficult for the surveyor working ranges 3 and 4 along the Base-line east of the Meridian that his work was found to be wildly inaccurate and had to be re-surveyed in 1824. Wampler, the man doing the re-survey, decided that the only way to sort out the mess and tie everything together was to establish a second Base-Line point on the Meridian a full 935.88 feet south of the original. (In survey work, even back in those days, that kind of error would equate to a pilot landing in a New Jersey scrapyard instead of at LaGuardia!)

But that wasn't the end of survey-gate for the state! The surveys done between 1836 and 1840 up through the upper half of the lower peninsula and into portions of the upper peninsula  were found to be so sloppy, or sometimes just plain faked, that it took 4 years of work to go back and correct the mess!

(My dad's initial career was as a ground-pounding surveyor and I've always remembered him telling us about this, though admittedly I did have to look up the details.) 

Because through-the-woods trails that don't come out at any particular point of interest are at the bottom of the trail hierarchy except for biologists and Boy Scouts perusing yet another merit badge, I pretty much had the trail to myself, though I did encounter one red-breasted trail-thumper along the otherwise silent (If you ignore the constant sound of traffic on the roads bordering all sides of the SRA.) hike.

Fortunately I heard him coming from a distance and had plenty of time to get out of the way.

Though, to be fair, this family of Whooping Cranes checking out our lakeside gathering later in the day was pretty noisy too.

OK, for obvious reasons I’m not going to be sharing the couple hundred family photos I took during our extended weekend (We stayed three nights so had two full days of activities, which mainly featured eating!!) but I think we all enjoyed ourselves and, for what it was intended, the location worked out pretty darn well.