My friends Toby, Stephen, Jason and I were going to meet in the wilderness and start a hike along the numbered trails on Thursday, October 7. Three of us were leaving Memphis TN and one was coming from Columbia TN and planned on meeting at the Borden Creek bridge. Team Memphis was about two hours late because of some last minute office woe as well as a travel event; Team Columbia made it there right on time.
As we were approaching our destination, we started noticing a lot of traffic in Haleyville, Alabama. This seemed unusual. We joked about it being rush hour. Then we started noticing some extremely heavy and slow traffic, as well as a lot of small American flags planted in the ground. We were moving anywhere between 2 and 5 miles per hour. After taking a moment to think about what was going on, I realized that what we were part of was a memorial for Senior Airman Mark Forester. People had chairs set up in their front yards, and they sat there displaying flags for those passing by. The cemetery had fresh flowers on every marker as far as I could tell. There were cars parked everywhere. I looked up his name as we were going through town. He was 29 years old and died serving his country in combat in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan.
There must have been thousands of people involved in this. I've never seen anything like it. It was truly remarkable and humbling to witness such a swell of remembrance and support for this man's life and his family.
We were about two hours late meeting Jason at the bridge. At that trailhead marker, there was a Lost Dog notice that somebody has posted on Labor Day weekend. I thought that was sad and we took a car to the Randolph trailhead to start our hike.
When we arrived there, we found a Found Dog notice that somebody had tacked to a tree. The picture of the dog and the description matched the description in the Lost Dog notice, so I took a picture of that sign and phone number and reminded myself to take a picture of the other number so that I could call them both later.
Night 1: Snakes and Bugs
Our plan was to take trail 201 down to Thompson Creek and hopefully cross it and find a campsite soon enough. Immediately upon entering the woods I thought that it might have been a little premature to be here; the trail was pretty well overgrown and there were a lot of bugs. So it goes.
On the way down toward the creek, Stephen noticed that three of us had stepped right over a big gray snake on the trail. It was gone by the time he was done telling us about it, but it was a good reminder to watch out for snakes. Same thing happened as we were trying to cross the creek; there was a snake hiding in the exposed creekbed who was not happy about being disturbed, but he seemed dizzy enough from the colder weather that he wasn't going to do much about it.
We tried crossing the creek. It was easy to get down on our side, but hard to climb up the other side, and it was getting dark. So we pitched camp without crossing the creek, and as it got dark the bugs showed up. First it was ants that we noticed which were no big deal, but then it was spiders and even a scorpion. I haven't ever seen one of those there before, but so help me, there it was. I don't have a picture of that but I do have these little guys:
We woke up the next morning and broke camp and found a spot to cross safely without making any more snakes angry. But first I took some pictures:
Three of us were hanging, one of us was on the ground.
We made it across in an area that really should have been covered in a whole lot more water and then started up the trail to climb into Whiteoak Hollow and then West Bee Branch canyon. There was a lot of face-slapping branches and blowdown to climb over here and really for the rest of the hike with a few exceptions. There is a really cool part here where you have to scramble over several rocks to get down into the canyon, but alas it was dry as a bone and much easier.
West Bee Branch was pretty, but the water was so low:
Made it to the Big Tree in East Bee Branch (all waterfalls were shut off):
The Brain Tree:
Night 2: Teenagers and Dogs
We exited East Bee Branch along the ridge trail there that leads to 204 and hiked down to the Sipsey River trail (209). We saw a guy there with a little dog who asked about any water sources nearby; there weren't any. We hiked down the hill and rested at a site by the river. This guy came back down and said he was going to stay by the river. That was a better idea IMO.
After eating plenty, we signed off early that night. I was pretty tired and wanted to get settled in before it got cold. I had been asleep for a while when a loud group came stomping by once, and then I guess they decided to go back to wherever they came from later. They were laughing about something, and one of them thought that one of their friends was in our site. Stephen said that he wasn't there and told them to have a nice night and they were off.
A little later there was a lot of shouting and a dog barking and screaming at something at a site further down the river. It sounded terrible. I think that dog got involved with something that it shouldn't have, and I hope it was okay.
Woke up early the next morning to some damp cold atmosphere. We cooked some breakfast, packed up, and were off. There's a bonus picture here of some unknown black substance in a glass jar that we found settled up against a tree. Don't want to know about it.
The sun rose nicely while we were on the trail, and we got to see some nice features as we got closer to the parking areas. There were a lot more people camping around these places.
Finally, I remembered to take a picture of the Lost Dog sign so that I could call the owner, and I got a shot of us all before we split up and went home.
All in all it was a fun tough hike that happened a little earlier in the season than I'd recommend to anybody but I liked it a lot. After the bugs and snakes and leaves recede after the fall, and after the place gets a few good solid thunderstorms it should be right back up to its normal self.
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, but he has started hanging in the developed camp grounds so it won't be long.
Par Si Vis Pace Para Bellum
Originally Posted by bigbamaguy
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