Tunnel Hill State Trail

As I prepared to wrestle The Van back up the narrow road that got me into Jackson Falls I had a full schedule for the remainder of the afternoon. I had to get to the ranger station in Vienna before they closed, then I needed to cross the state to the west side, pick up a few supplies and find a spot to nest for the night.

But before starting out I made one last check of my official Shawnee National Forest map and there it sat, right between where I was and where I was going. Something called Tunnel Hill.

I had absolutely no idea what that was, but when a railfreak sees the word tunnel they automatically think railroad!

So after I worked my way out to US-45 via Ozark Rd. I kept my eye out to the right for County Road 12. It was a small, unassuming intersection but I found the turn anyway.

A short-mile later the road drops into a narrow valley and there it was on the right!

I had been expecting the brown signage of the National Forest so I nearly drove right by the place, in fact I went by the first entrance and had to double back through the overflow parking, because this isn’t a Forest Service site at all but rather a state rails-to-trails site.

Tunnel Hill is actually a little hamlet that originated with the crews brought in to dig the tunnel for the Cairo and Vincennes Railroad in the early 1870’s,

and now some 55 miles of that defunct railroad have been turned into a hiking/biking trail.

I should have known that, but to be fair, due to tireless efforts of so many people and organizations, there are a ton of rails-to-trails out there and I can’t know them all!!

(Everybody has the national TrailLink map bookmarked at the top of their list don’t they??) 

In addition to the parking and info-boards here at Tunnel Hill, there’s also a few picnic tables, potable water, and his & hers pit toilets, but I was limited on time so when I saw this sign just down the trail saying the tunnel is two tenths of a mile ahead I grabbed the camera, stuffed a small bottle of water in my pocket and, without even bothering to change out of my slipper-like Crocs into proper hiking boots, took off.

Though not visible from the parking area, with a little walking the tunnel was soon in sight

and I was so engrossed I didn’t notice that the camera lens needed to be cleaned of dust and spider webs - badly!

A few steps after I took this photo I was struck by a deliciously refreshing cold-front wafting out of the tunnel.

As I entered and was enveloped by the 55 degree air I looked back and thought; This would be such great sleeping weather! I know I’m not allowed to drive The Van on the trail, but would it be OK if I just pushed it down into here for the night??

OK, probably not, and I waved the thought away like I was clearing cob-webs, or flying monkeys,

and continued making my way towards the far end.

Originally this tunnel was 800 feet long but at one point a section of the roof at the southern end collapsed and after repairs the tunnel itself is only about 570 feet long now.  Just long enough to make a light of some sort worth thinking about.

On this day the tunnel floor was slightly wet but firm, unlike some I've been in with a foot of loose guano underfoot.

The new south-portal after cleaning up from the collapse

Because of time issues, once I poked my head out the other end of the tunnel I turned around and headed back, but this is a place I’ll be back to!

At 55 miles one way, starting/ending at El Dorado in the north and ending/starting at White Hill in the south, it would be a little much, to say the least, for the out-and-back ride the single-vehicle, lone traveler must do, especially if he is old and pokey and doesn’t spend all that much time in a bike-saddle in the first place, but there are plenty of intermediate parking areas along the trail to break it up into segments. The grades are reported to be mild, with Tunnel Hill being the high-point of the trail, but I’ll still probably plan for the outbound leg to be towards Tunnel Hill saving the downhill ride for the return leg.

One final thing I want to point out before I need to get on out of here is that as relatively short as this tunnel is, even though it's two sides of the same ridge, the rock at the south end

is distinctly different than the rock at the north end. I suppose it has something to do with how deep into the ridge the cut is, but I don't know for sure.

I often think that it sure would be nice if I could carry experts in my pocket. It seems like I’m always wishing there was a geologist, a research librarian, a historian, a biologist, a botanist, a theologian, etc. available to answer questions and enlighten me.  Yes, I know, I do have the web in my pocket, but a few quick finger-pokes at the internet are a poor substitute for years of focused education and study.

For now I’ll have to settle for returning to The Van and getting to the ranger station in Vienna in time to ask a few questions about the obscure little Kaolin Pit; namely, can I get The Van into it, and can I park there overnight even though it’s a trailhead.

OK, a word of warning! When driving south on US-45 into Vienna there’s a big USDA sign on the right. That’s not the ranger station.  It’s some sort of agricultural land-use office and they don’t have any information about the Shawnee National Forest. The place you want to go, the Hidden Springs Ranger Station, is about a mile to the south on the left side of the road.

Elmer Tangles With the Toilet - the Toilet Wins

Aaahh yes,  another day; another adventure with Elmer.

This one is actually a two-parter. Out of a sense on propriety I was going to ignore the first part, which was included in Elmer’s first-day hijinks, but when part two landed in our laps yesterday via another spat of Friends And Family Plan abuse, I changed my mind.

Just after we bought the travel trailer for Elmer we changed out the stock plastic toilet, (Think ‘builders grade’; functional but cheap.) for a decent foot-flush, porcelain-bowl, toilet with a spray-arm attachment. Because let’s face it; plastic bowls attract skid-marks like kids in their Sunday clothes attract grass-stains.

And contrary to what you may be imagining, the optional spray-arm is not for personal hygiene, but rather for rinsing out the bowl, because sometimes even that nice slick porcelain bowl needs ‘extra’ cleaning power. Especially when regularly faced with the tail-end of a man that can scarf down a platter-sized serving of biscuits and gravy for breakfast, a handful of burritos from  a roadside stand for lunch,  and a Texas-sized chicken-fried steak for dinner!

In case you’re unaware, RV toilets differ in one significant way from residential toilets. After all, at the end of the day it wouldn’t be much fun for someone if the trailer were jostled and bounced and rolled down the road with a toilet bowl full of water sloshing onto the bathroom floor and racing forward at every stop and then turning around and exuberantly charging back aft at every go. In order to avoid that particular adventure, RV toilets are designed to leave either no water or very little water in the bowl after being flushed. Of course this requires the extra step of adding water just prior to doing your business.

Anyway - - - Elmer has spent many winters down there on the Texas coast living in that trailer, which, of course, includes using that nice porcelain-bowled toilet on a regular basis, so he’s clearly familiar with the routine. But something didn’t quite connect for him that first day, maybe some of those brain synapses were running a bit slow, working-to-rule perhaps, and he promptly dropped trou, backed in, (RV bathrooms tend to be small) and pooped into a dry bowl. . .

Now even nice slick porcelain bowls are no match for the noxious, steaming pile of – well, you know – sitting there; and adding water after the fact was about as helpful as repairing the fence after the cows have already gone walk-a-bout.

Of course, after he cleaned up that particular mess, (And I don’t want to know the details!) Friends And Family got a workout as, much like a five-year old proud of his accomplishments, he spread the word of his latest miss-adventure far and wide.

I’ve no doubt that the toilet was sparkling, Elmer has a thing about that, but I renewed my vow never to eat anything in the trailer that isn’t still factory sealed. I mean we’re talking about a man that will bleach his underwear until it shreds, but then, while standing at the fish-cleaning station, he’ll fumble a cigarette out of the tin in his shirt pocket with fish-gut slimed fingers!!

Like I said, my plan was to keep my damn mouth shut about all this, but yesterday there was another round of Friends And Family as word of his latest – umm – escapade was spread.

This time he managed to slide off the toilet sideways. How I have no idea since there’s just barely enough width there between the wall and the vanity to fit the standard American butt let alone slide it around, but he managed. And in the process he broke the toilet seat, apparently clean off the toilet!

After a half dozen phone calls back and forth we finally convinced him to take the broken seat up to the local plumbing supply and compare it to a standard seat off the shelf to see if one will fit.

At the moment we are waiting to hear the results of this little fact-finding excursion. If a standard seat will fit then I only have to make the 4 hour round trip once, to install the new one, if it won’t fit I’ll have to make the trip twice. You see, it seems that Elmer can’t find a model number on the toilet, nor the packet full of trailer paperwork which includes the toilet paperwork, that is sitting right there in the cabinet over the head of the bed. (I know for a fact that’s where it is because just the other week I had to shake it out to make sure there weren’t any mice or snakes filed away with the rest of the paperwork.) so if a standard seat is not the answer I'm going to have to go down there to get the info necessary to order the proper seat, then back again to install it.

So right now I’m on standby, puttering around gathering supplies and making a plan while I wait for word from the coast. . .

Jackson Falls Recreation Area; Just Passin’ By - Sort Of

Not far from Bell-Smith Springs in the Shawnee National Forest is the Jackson Falls Recreation Area. Like Bell-Smith, there is no fee to get into here, but contrary to what the title of this post may imply, it’s not a place you ‘just pass by’ either. You have to be trying to get there.

To do that you turn off of Ozark Road; crossing the top of the Google Earth capture here; onto Glen Street Falls Road. Except that it looks more like you’re turning into someone’s driveway, complete with a big house perched up on a hill guarding the gates, but no, really, this is the road! You can tell because the actual driveway, there in the lower right, is much nicer than the road.

Oh, and be forewarned, Glen Street Falls Road is more of a single narrow, rocky two-track winding down through the trees and the official word is that it is best suited to high-clearance vehicles. I’m sure they’re right about that after a rain, but on the dry day I was there I think pretty much any vehicle, driven carefully, could have made it in. (But only before you repair you car Steve because it will rip off low-hanging bumpers and air-dams!)

After what feels like driving right through the yard of that first farm, there are two more to pass by/drive through before the road takes a definite downhill twisting slide to a low-water crossing. The turn into the Jackson Falls trailhead parking is on the right just before the water. (If you are going past this point make sure you stick to the road and not the creek. The crossing is at a shallow angle and they both, road and creek, look pretty much the same right here, except that if you get onto the creek you're going to get high-centered on a16” drop-off coming up pretty quick!)

Distance from Ozark Road to the trailhead parking is about 2 miles.

The web-site points out that you can camp anywhere in the area for up to 14 days but the Forest Service also has a general rule about not camping within 300' of a trailhead so I'm not sure if camping in The Van in the small trailhead parking lot is technically allowed, but since I was only stopping for a couple hours it didn't matter.

As implied by the fact that it's a trailhead, there is a trail system here but if you want to get from the relatively short green trails (It’s maybe a quarter mile from the trailhead to the falls where the green trails ‘Y’ to the left and right.) to the longer black trails, there’s a 30’- 40’ sheer bluff in between!

The black trails can also be reached from about a mile and half farther on down Glen Street Falls Road but I have no idea what shape that part of the road is in and the FS website says it turns to dirt after the low-water crossing then deadends out there somewhere.

In the meantime, from the trailhead it’s quite a pleasant stroll alongside the creek

This is looking right down over the edge of the falls.

to Jackson Falls themselves. This is a seasonal falls and as you can see, it was out of season when I was there, which is probably why the road in was no problem.

This recreation area’s main claim to fame is rock climbing and there are a number of anchors located on the bluffs to either side of the creek below the falls for those who insist on throwing themselves backwards off of cliffs.

Me, well, all I have with me is a hundred feet of 550 para-cord, and while technically that should hold even my weight,

I leave it in the pack while carefully heeding the warning in the official site-brochure and spend a pleasant couple of hours just sedately poking around the area.

Other than two people that came up to the falls on the lower trail, (Which makes me think that maybe Glen Street Falls Road is passable down to trail 049 because I was the only vehicle at the trailhead, besides, they clearly were not rock-climbers that has scaled the bluffs.) I had the place to myself, but a ranger later told me that they had to close the place down on eclipse day because the traffic backed up all the way out to Ozark Road.

Though how you could do any eclipse viewing from down inside the forest here I have no idea.

The Adventures of Elmer

Note: The names have been changed to protect the innoce – – – OK, so maybe there aren’t actually any innocents involved in this at all, but I’m changing the names anyway.

Not long ago it was all about the saga of prepping and moving the travel trailer to the coast so the father-in-law, Elmer, could move back into it. Well a few days later Elmer was delivered to the trailer, handed the keys, and the adventure began!

Just moving Elmer from his home-base in Missouri down to the Texas coast has all the logistics and complexity of a minor military expedition. (and almost as many explosions and slow burns!)

You see, Elmer is nearly 90, blind in one eye and can’t see too well out of the other, almost deaf without his hearing aids, which is much of the time since they’re not high on his list of priorities and spend much of their time miss-placed, he’s had one heart attack and two notable strokes seasoned with several ‘minor’ strokes, one of the arteries in his neck is pretty much completely blocked and the other is getting there so we’re never sure just how much blood is getting to his brain (maybe not enough based on some of his decisions!), he has one bum knee (shot full of cortisone just before he came) which, along with his adamant insistence that he does not need a cane or any other sort of assistance, only exacerbates his natural lack of coordination and clumsiness (that’s a family trait, not an age thing.  For the last 3 generations every male in his line has either shot themselves, or been shot by someone else, at least once, all accidents. And falls, running into door-jambs, tripping on completely flat surfaces, shutting fingers in drawers; those are all daily occurrences, unfortunately occurrences that The Wife, true to her lineage, shares in.)

Throw in the attention span of a 5 year old and the maturity of a 15 year old and you have a great recipe for – umm – nope, I’m going to keep calling it adventure! – because if you can’t laugh the alternative sucks!

Clearly turning Elmer loose on society to make his own way between his home-base and the Texas Coast would endanger others significantly, so after a bazillion phone calls between his three daughters, (in birth order, The Wife, Dale, and Sammy) a plan is hatched. (for some reason, the fact that they’ve done this at least a half-dozen times already doesn’t seem to cut back on the abuse of the Friends And Family Plan) The end result for this particular versions of the adventure is a fairly typical campaign.

On the night before T-day Dale drove the two hours from her home to Sammy’s home, leaving her severely domestically-challenged husband a fridge full of prepared sustenance. The morning of T-day the two girls car-pooled to Elmer’s home 20 minutes away. With Elmer stuffed into the back seat of his own car along with a two day supply of cigarettes (this takes up about the same space as an Army duffle-bag! The man has his own rolling machine for crying out loud, and can crank out cigarettes as fast as the factory!), and one girl in each car, Dale’s car is dropped off in short-term parking at the airport, leaving all three of them in Elmer's car. With both Dale, who really prefers to do all the driving, and Sammy, who insists on doing her share, if not more, of the driving, in the front seat and Elmer wedged into the backseat between his cigarettes, fishing poles and snacks for all, they headed out for Marshal Texas, 12 hours away. At Marshal Elmer was installed into his own (smoking!) hotel room while Dale, a born-again non-smoker with a compromised immune system due to a previous brain cancer tries to snatch a few breaths of (relatively) clean air while she and Sammy share another room, preferably on a completely different floor!

In between leaving the home-base and actually falling asleep in the hotel room in Marshal the Friends And Family Plan continued to be severely abused with numerous status reports between Dale and The Wife, Sammy and The Wife, and Elmer and The Wife. Location updates from Elmer can be confusing because he naps then isn’t sure where he’s at when he wakes up but doesn’t want to ask, plus he has a tendency to claim ‘we’re going through  <insert town of choice) now’ anytime he sees a sign indicating it’s less than 100 miles to <said town of choice>.

In the morning, after yet another round-robin of phone-calls to keep everyone updated, Elmer, Dale and Sammy resumed their southward journey. In the meantime The Wife worked herself up into a snarling frazzle with last minute cramming of crap-Elmer-is-going-to-need-whether-he-knows-it-or-not into the car before she headed out herself. But, though the coast is 2 hours away in one direction, she headed toward the city, 2 hours away in a completely different direction, because anytime The Wife gets into the car it is going to involve eating out. (back when she still used to travel, road trips were planned from meal-stop to meal-stop, not from start-point to destination! In one way it was kind of nice, because all I had to do in order to be her hero-of-the-day, especially in those pre-smart-phone days, was to locate a Red Lobster or Golden Coral in a strange town.) Somehow, during these let’s-move-Elmer campaigns it has become tradition for them to all meet up at Little Papasito’s and to find one of those you have to go to the city.

From there, stuffed full of chips and salsa, and rice, and beans and shrimp and cheese and chicken and - well, you get the idea, they convoyed in two vehicles the 2-plus more hours to the coast and spent an intense couple of hours moving Elmer and all his crap, the stuff he wanted and the stuff he didn’t know he wanted but really did, from both of the cars into the trailer.

Then the sisters all piled into The Wife’s car for the trip back to the city where they holed up in a hotel room and partied like only 60 year old, physically tired, mentally exhausted women can. In the morning Dale and Sammy were dropped off at the airport for an early flight back to home-base where Dale’s car was waiting. By 1500 Dale had made the two hour trip from airport to home, where domestically-challenged hubby was still alive after binging on cold food and Steven Segal movies for three days, and the campaign was officially complete.

But the adventure was just starting!!

The day of arrival Elmer was pretty beat so a couple trips around the small town and talking the ear off two of the campground caretakers carried him though till an early bedtime. But the next day he was up and at it!

He’s always slightly manic when he first gets to the coast and this trip was no different. Considering all the phone calls back and forth all day long I’m not sure when he had time, but he read the paper, found out a permit had been issued to demolish the historic hotel where he and his late wife used to spend their winters, went over to visit the hotel (and talk to anybody he could get to stand still long enough! Actually, he's been wintering in this town for 30 years and is beloved by many there.), missed friend Ike by a few minutes at one breakfast place in town and friend Tommy by a smidge at another, went fishing at the pier across from the hotel, went fishing at the campground, lost his phone, went fishing at the pier again, fell off the pier (there was no declaration of pushing being involved, but he did blame the fall on too many people out on the pier, which happens to have 4' high railings, but such is the life of the clumsy.), came back to the campground because after his dip in the bay he needed to shower and wash his hair (he hates to shower, and hates washing his hair even more!!), found his phone, hooked up with Tommy who had a prior engagement but offered to leave the outside light on at his river property so Elmer could go up and do a little night fishing.

Now you have to understand that driving at 20 miles per hour around a tiny little town he knows well is one thing, but Tommy’s river-place is 10 miles away down a 70 MPH two-lane road and for Elmer to be driving at night is – well, insane! This resulted in an evening long round of phone calls between the frantic sisters that nearly had The Wife (with me driving of course because she doesn’t drive at night anymore) driving the two hours down to the coast and trying to find him. I nixed that idea but the calls went on until they finally heard that he was safely back in the trailer for the night – oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering, he didn’t catch anything he could keep.

With the exception of him threatening to drive himself to meet The Wife and I halfway for lunch Monday since neither Ike nor Tommy were free to drive him, which The Wife gently coaxed him out of (Elmer is very stubborn and absolutely convinced he is not only right but also knows better than the next guy, a trait The Wife and Sammy also share, which is why those two can’t be left in a room alone together. Sammy hasn’t yet got it through her head that telling Elmer he can’t do something is a sure fired way to guarantee that he will do it, but The Wife has learned how to coax and coerce until he comes around to her thinking while believing it’s his own idea.) it was a fairly uneventful day, but Elmer made up for that this morning.

I was under the car trying to install a replacement tail-light-to-trailer-lights converter when The Wife came out all scrunchy-faced and upset. Sammy had made a checkup call to Elmer and he mumbled and slurred something about ‘on the floor, can’t get up, flies in my mouth’ then hung up. This set off a whole new round of frantic ‘what do we do, what do we do?’ calls between the sisters and by the time The Wife came out to kick me out from under the car so I could pay attention and commiserate while she hiccupped her way through the story, they had agreed to wait while Dale, the one that frets and worries the most, but is also the most rational of the gang, tried to contact Elmer.

A half hour later everything had settled down and The Wife was laughing over yet another typical Elmer fiasco.

It seems that a fly had gotten into the trailer (I don’t know what it is about old people but they sure do hate flies!) and Elmer rolled up his morning paper to go after it. (The paper is about 4 pages thick so I’m not sure it qualifies as an adequate fly-swatter!)  For some reason (maybe the fly also has blocked arteries in its neck cutting down blood flow to the brain) the fly was on the floor and Elmer got down on his knees, not an easy thing at his age, plus, for sanitary reasons as well as defense against the ever-present cigarette ember, I pulled the carpet and replaced it with a hard, unforgiving laminate floor 15 years ago. Apparently the fly, probably not the brightest bulb in the bunch, wasn’t bothered by this at all and just sat there, so Elmer wound up with his improvised swatter and took a mighty swing. So mighty he knocked himself clean over! After the shock of crashing to the floor he discovered that rather than pain, it felt kind of good laying down there, so he took a nap. When Sammy’s call woke him up he was pretty zonked out, had been snoring straight onto the floor and had a mouth full of dust-bunnies, (Have I mentioned that Elmer’s idea of clean would horrify most people??) and couldn’t get up and handle the phone at the same time.

Well he eventually managed to sort himself out and satisfy Dale that all was well. (No word on the condition of the fly though.)

Since then it’s been a fairly quiet day, other than the fact that he went to the grocery store and for some reason now has three full boxes of cereal plus the one that The Wife stocked him with.

But holy crap! He’s only been down there 4 days now and what with the cost and hassle of prepping and moving the trailer, we figure he needs to stay a good 4 months to make it worthwhile!!

Oh well, we all die in the end and he’s having a hell of a lot more fun down there than rotting in a recliner in some dark room while underpaid staff keep him going day after miserable day.

The Trails of Bell-Smith Springs

Good morning everybody! Did you sleep well? I did.

I don’t know what y’all are up to today but I’m going hiking.

There’s several trails wandering around here. A mix of ridge side and creek-bottom hiking.

The trail system starts just a short walk down from the campground and across the first parking loop,

but after a little scouting around yesterday evening, I've decided to move The Van down to the seond parking loop where it can pick up some decent solar once the sun gets up over the trees.

The parking isn’t very level but my compressor-fridge doesn’t care about that, I just have to watch that the sliding side-door doesn’t get away and take an arm off!!

There’s supposed to be a scenic overlook a short way down-hill from the trailhead and there is a fenced off ‘platform’ down there, but the scenic part is mostly wishful thinking.

The view wasn’t much more than branches and treetops with just an occasional glint of something brighter down  below – which was the creek shooting intermittent rays back up from the concealed depths.

Just a couple dozen steps west of the non-scenic overlook is a set of steps flowing down through a narrow crack in the limestone bluff.

At the base of the bluff the steps take a sharp right turn and tuck in under an overhang.

Don’t forget to duck until you're below that first step!

I wasn’t the only one out for a hike this morning, but I was the only one wearing boots!

Down at the bottom there are a couple trails to choose from. Initially I stuck with the Natural Bridge Trail which tracks alongside Boy Creek for a bit then crosses over to the other side.

You’d think that there would be a sign pointing out the feature the trail is named for, but you’d be wrong.

Arches can be sneaky things, not revealing themselves until the viewing angle, and light, is just right, and this arch, or natural bridge, was no exception. As I was hiking along I just happened to spot a part of the bluff that was inexplicably lit differently than the rest, (Right in the center of the photo above.)

and when I left the trail to investigate this is what I found.

The arch is actually pretty decent in size.  I took this photo while standing under one end of the arch which, at its center, was a good 20-25 feet over my head.

After surviving the underside of the arch without getting conked on the head by falling bits I re-crossed the creek and picked up the blue, or Sentry Bluff Trail, which meanders up one side of Boy Creek then back down the other, eventually reconnecting with the Natural Bridge Trail

Sentry Bluff Trail is a combination of bluff-top and creek-side hiking that arches around a large S curve in the creek before tip-toeing across to the other side and coming back down towards the arch.

The cross-over is not long after passing Chute Gap.

OK, there’s no signs for features marked on the trail map, but there are signs for features not marked on the trail map?

From what I could deduce (fancy word for reckon) from observations on the ground and my topo, this is where a short little feeder creek comes down into Boy Creek - well, maybe a creek when it's raining hard - but I have no idea why it gets a sign all its own when other, more prominent points go un-signaged..

After crossing to the other side of Boy Creek at the far end of Sentry Bluff trail there’s a bit of a scramble up the rocks out of the frame to the left, and, in the absence of any sign to confirm it, I am guessing that this is Sentry Bluff with  views both up and down the creek.

On this side of the creek the trail sticks to the hills, forgoing the waterside in favor of sticking close to the bluffs.

I found a couple formations like this one along here. (OK, optical illusion time here. That bright band of rock in the lower third of the photo is only about two arm-lengths from the lens and is maybe a foot thick.)

Forming the roof of the overhang is a light colored ‘plate’ of hard, fine-grained rock laid down horizontally, and capping that is another layer of coarse, softer rock that has eroded into small horizontal plates that sweep upwards into reddish vertical fins.

It’s pretty cool, and frankly a little eerie. (This time the band of rock at the bottom is closer to two feet thick and the overhang in the top-left corner is a good 15 feet over my head.)

In other spots it was clear that mud was laid down, compressed and hardened into sandstone, eventually tilted and sheared off by erosion, only to have additional layers of mud laid down and ‘sandstoned’ over top of it.

I hiked Sentry Bluff Trail clockwise in order to have a dramatic finish.

After about 4 miles the blue Sentry Bluff Trail dead-ended into a corner of the yellow Natural Bridge Trail. By staying to the right, or high side of the Natural Bridge Trail I soon came to the top of the arch or natural bridge.

Here I’m standing on the north end of the arch with the creek to the right and the gap between arch and bluff just barely discernable to the left.

I didn’t expect the ‘bridge’ to be so flat and wide. It’s easy to imagine people coming out from town with the family on a Saturday to bounce across here in their Model A’s before the Forest Service got involved and put a halt to that sort of thing.

In no danger of getting run over these days, I plopped my butt down, not too near either edge though,  and enjoyed the place and a snack.

I wasn’t in any rush to leave because it's quiet, people-less, and from here it’s an uphill slog back to where I left The Van soaking in the sun.

Redbud Campground; Shawnee National Forest

Even after a good night's sleep at the Illinois Welcome Center I was still feeling pretty beat up by long miles and the stress of saying a permanent goodbye to an Aunt who's been pretty danged important to me all my life. So I was ready for some 'normal'. And in my world a little bit of solitary hiking fits that bill.

The Shawnee National Forest was a morning's drive away and calling to me.

After stopping at the NF Headquarters in Harrisburg to pick up some brochures and get some advice (As it was, the kid behind the desk was way too young to have accumulated all that much useful advice, but I did get the brochures.) I headed for Redbud Campground.

This for-fee National Forest campground is in the (no-fee) Bell-Smith Springs Recreation Area where there is supposed to be some decent hikes. Since I managed to arrive at Bell-Smith too late to do any serious hiking, I bit the bullet and payed to camp here overnight ($5 with my pass) so I could hit the trails fresh in the morning. (Not counting the campground the family reunion was in, this is the first campsite I've paid for in 31 days on the road, but I figure the $5 bucks isn't going to kill me.)

The 20 site campground loop is typical of primitive NF campgrounds, no hookups, some level-ish sites, some not so level sites and a few sites suitable only for tents, and there are a couple vault toilets scattered around as well as a centralized water source,





though in order to get at the water here you have to hand-pump it and the pump squeals loud enough to require hearing protection, that's assuming you can stand it at all since it sounds a whole lot like fingernails on chalkboards there in the otherwise silence of the forest!

I was told later by a ranger that Bell-Smith, and the Redbud campground, are popular places, but on this mid-September weekday I had the place to myself.

As you can see, this is not a solar friendly location (None of the sites are.)  but since I was only staying overnight it was no big deal.

So I set up camp, fixed a snack, and promptly went about making productive use of the rest of the afternoon.

As many of you know, I guard my privacy and identity pretty tightly so I think I did an admirable job here of disguising my broad shoulders, incredible biceps and chiseled abs. And, of course, we all know that the camera adds 40 pounds!

One word of advice, if you're in a large motorhome or pulling anything other than a small trailer, or if the weather has been wet, you might not want to follow the Forest Service directions from Harrisburg down Illinois 145 and across Burden Falls Rd.!

OK, so it wasn't as bad as the photo above, but Burden Falls Rd. is gravel, narrow, twisty and just after it crosses Burden Creek there's a steepish, twisting, rocky scramble to climb up and away from the creek that could be tricky in anything but the best of conditions. As it was, I had no trouble getting The Van up it, but if it was any wetter it might have been more challenging.

An alternative is to take US-45 south out of Harrisburg then follow the 'from Vienna' directions and come in across Ozark Rd. instead, which does eventually turn into gravel but it stays pretty flat and fairly well graded along the way.

The Sounds of Aging

The Wife is not a quiet person. This is an indisputable fact. While my (rare) phone conversations consist of basic, unembellished facts delivered in terse, adverb and adjective-free sentences accompanied by long silences, The Wife can happily talk for an hour, several times a day. She also snores when sleeping (and sometimes when she's awake too!), yelps when startled, (and it takes very little to startle her!) gasps at the slightest contact of shoulder to door-frame or knuckle to closing drawer, and howls at anything more than a minor bump, (And she’s not the most graceful and coordinated of people to there’s a lot of that! But that’s not her fault, it’s a family trait. Her dad has fallen off the breakwater while fishing so many times he’s not allowed to take his cell-phone out there anymore!) and in between accompanies this with an amazing variety of groans and sighs.

I, on the other hand, am a quiet sort of guy, in fact ask both my wife’s, ex and current, and they’ll have plenty to say about the frustration of having to drag every word out of me. And it goes beyond words. I walk quietly, I make a point of not doing the old-man-groan when I get up out of my chair, the only moaning I do when I roll my aching back out of bed in the morning is inside my head, and when I damage myself, cuts (from miss-handled tools), shredded legs (from clearing brush.), or the burned and cracking finger I’m currently sporting (from getting it in the way while soldering a new battery lug with a torch), I suck it up and keep it to myself.

But you wouldn’t have known that last Sunday morning!

Ever since a surprise call 3 weeks ago we’ve been working almost exclusively on prepping a neglected 15 year old travel trailer that hasn’t moved in 5 years for a trip down to the coast so the 87 year old father-in-law can move into it and maybe do some fishing like he used to do every winter.

The 'beauty' shot we had to e-mail to the campground because while the FIL was making arrangements with them, before we knew anything about this plan, he told them it was a 1979 model (Not sure how you get that out of 2003 but he managed) and they kind of freaked out.

For the FIL it has been three weeks of excited anticipation, for us it’s been 3 weeks of crawling under the trailer to check the slideout tracks and gear along with brakes and suspension, climbing on top of the trailer to fix wiring and slap some more caulk on the iffy spots (something I admittedly didn't keep up with as well as I should have),

Some of what was carefully cropped from the 'beauty' shot

scaling rust and repainting an undercarriage abused by too many seasons of being parked within a block of the Gulf Coast,

The bottom of the jack-post just before cutting off that mangled last inch of it.

fixing the end of the jack-post from when the trailer popped off a too-small ball and hit the road (one of the hazards of relying on someone else to move the trailer because we don’t have anything large enough to safely tow it),

The propane tank tray was a little rough too, and the tanks weren't much better. . .

inspecting and changing tires too sunburned to safely roll anymore, hauling storage bins down off the high shelves in the barn and loading the FIL’s stuff back into the trailer – after evicting the mice and snake that had moved in – checking and repairing all the trailer’s systems, replacing the totally corroded battery, dragging new propane tanks home because the old ones are rusted to the point of being scary, Oh! and three days of tree-trimming and brush clearing in order to open up the driveway enough to get the damn thing through and around the turns! (Oh yay! Found the last remaining patch of poison ivy on the property!!)

Throw in the fact that Sunday morning was 40 degrees and 1) we rarely use the heat, 2) the leg The Wife has broken twice is sensitive to temperature changes, especially when they are of a downward nature; toss in a healthy dose of us old people doing all this young people’s crap activity, and it was one noisy morning! And, yes, I was contributing my fair share to the auditory discord!!

Now admittedly our corner-of-the-barn, single-room + bathroom living space is smallish at 380 square feet (if you include the bathroom) so it doesn’t take a lot of noise to fill it up, but between the two of us howling and groaning and whimpering and yelping and sighing and whining and groaning (I know I said that already but there was a lot of groaning); and this was just us getting out of bed!!

If it wasn’t so pathetic it would have been funny.

Too bad our old-people hearing loss hasn’t kept up with our old-people pains. At least then we wouldn’t have to listen to the pitiful cacophony!

Oh, and we still had the final cleaning to wrap up, the sucking in of the slideout while hoping the punky floor doesn’t drop out of it, the disconnecting and stowage of the shore-services paraphernalia, a final check of tire pressures, the disassembly of the fancy steps (at his state of creakiness no way the FIL can navigate standard trailer steps and not die) and stowing them, all 300 pounds worth of them, inside the trailer, to get finished up with because on Monday the guy with a truck beefy enough to haul the 7000 pound, 27 foot trailer is showing up.

Worst of the rust scaled off and painted over, fresh propane tanks and new cover hiding all the work put into cleaning up and repainting the tray. New cable and battery for the emergency breakaway system

We’ll be following it down to the coast in The Wife’s car. We’re telling ourselves this is so we can get the trailer set up once it reaches the campground, but I have on my list to bring a heavy-duty broom along just in case, because I’m not entirely convinced the rickety thing will make it down there without shedding a few parts along the way. . . (Which only seems fair because we shed a few parts of our own getting the damn thing on the road!)

Slideout successfully retracted and disassembled steps loaded in and braced for the trip

Update: The trailer; all of it; made it to the coast just fine. Now all we have to do is get the blind-in-one-eye, can’t-see-well-out-of-the-other, one-heart-attack, two-significant-and-countless-minor-strokes, never-stops-talking-except-when-dragging-on-the-ever-present-cigarette, FIL down here and safely loaded into the trailer.

All buttoned up and ready to go with new tires, and fresh paint.

What with the two corners of the roof you don't dare try to stand on anymore, the slideout floor that is no longer connected to one of the walls, and the fact that I put my finger through the front wall while trying to clean water stains off the miniblinds, it's like putting fresh lipstick on an aging whore! 

Now excuse me while I go crawl into a nice dark hole somewhere to heal – quietly!!