Happy Trails!

Various photos from some of my hiking and backpacking trips. Just the trails, thanks. If I can recall where I took each one, I'll list it. (Let's see how well the old memory works.)

The Big Butt Trail, Black Mountains.

Trail in Big Ivy, Pisgah National Forest, Black Mountains.

Birkhead Mountains Wilderness.

Dolly Sods Wilderness, West Virginia.

Dolly Sods Wilderness.

Panthertown Valley, North Carolina.

Mount Rogers area, Virginia.

Kubrabow State Forest, West Virginia.

Appalachian Trail, Round Bald, Tennessee.

Avalanche Peak, Yellowstone National Park.

Mount Washburn, Yellowstone National Park.

Blue Lakes Trail, Mount Sneffels Wilderness, Colorado.

Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado.

Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado.

Switchbacks leading up to the Continental Divide, San Juan Mountains, Colorado.

The Thornburg Tract

There are a couple of trailheads where you can enter the Birkhead Mountains Wilderness. The most popular of the two is at the Thornburg Tract. This piece of land was a working farm in the very recent past. Some government agency--I haven't figured out which one--is keeping the property cleared as a farm, even if the fields only grow hay and weeds, now. The purpose appears to be mainly to keep it open as game land, since quail and white-tailed deer both do well in such country.

The farmhouse itself is still standing and must receive at least minimal care, but it looks to be edging toward dissolution if no serious work is done to preserve it. The barns are in better shape than the main house, as I suppose they are kept up to house working machinery from time to time. One shed at the very rear of the property is actually falling apart and will soon, I suppose, be going back into the earth.

You have to hike for a quarter of a mile or so through this property before you get to the wilderness boundary. Unlike some wildernesses where I have hiked, the trails in Birkhead are signed and are maintained to keep them free of debris and undergrowth. So in that way this is a different kind of wilderness and does not stick to the true wilderness aspect. All in all, though, I plan to go back, once the ticks are gone.

The parking lot at the trailhead at the Thornburg Tract.

The old farm house.

Barn and sheds.

As with every wilderness I've ever hiked, hunting is allowed here. However, there is a sign at the entrance to the wilderness reminding hunters that a house is very close to wilderness boundary and to take care not to shoot toward it, as it is inhabited. In addition, the home owner also erected this sign informing hunters that his children often play outside the house and to please not fire in that direction. You can see how the gun-humping sons of bitches have replied.

This is the building farthest from the house. The entire front fell off recently. I give the rest of the structure a few more months, at most.

I took this stitched panorama on my way back to the truck. You can see that the house was once quite a pleasant spot, with even a grape vineyard standing on the left.

Two Videos of Birkhead Mountains Wilderness

This was taken in a very nice bottomland hardwood forest on the Birkhead Mountain Trail.


This one was also taken on that same trail. Love the birdcalls!

Walk in the Woods

I decided to get out of the house yesterday and test my knee. I've hardly been anywhere since the surgery, so I needed to work my muscles a bit. The hike went okay. I chose to go to the Birkhead Mountains Wilderness which is about 60 miles from my door. I'd never visited the place so I thought it would be interesting and as they are very low mountains, that it would also be easy on my knee.

What I didn't count on is the fact that ALL of my muscles are out of shape due to the fact that I've gotten little exercise over the past few weeks. I hiked about seven miles and while there were only some moderate ups and downs on the hike, I was exhausted and sore when I returned to my truck.

Also, I was covered in ticks. There were four attached to me, mainly on my thighs. I pulled about a dozen from my clothing, including my socks and pants. Found them crawling on my arms. I never leave a living tick when I find them. I don't toss them back in the brush. I take care to completely kill them, which is a chore when you're talking about ticks. You have to take the time to crush them between hard or sharp objects. I don't stop crushing their bodies until I'm sure that they're pulped.

As for other wildlife, I saw a single white-tailed deer and an indigo snake. That was the first indigo snake that I've seen in many years. I've been told that they're not very common anymore, so from personal experience I'd have to agree with that. Both of these animals fled so quickly that I could not get any photos. The snake actually crawled between my boots as I stood and watched. It's amazing that something with no legs can move so fast.

The Birkhead Mountains Wilderness is made up of a bit over 5,000 acres of second growth forest. There are no old trees there, as this was all a working farm/plantation in recent history. Most of it was owned by a single family in whose name these old "mountains" were named. And they're not much in the way of mountains. The highest peak in there is just a whisker over 1,000 feet in elevation and only a few of the peaks rise as much as 600 feet above the Piedmont. But, as they're the oldest range of summits in the USA, I will cut them some slack and refer to them as mountains.

They're composed mainly of rhyolite which is a metamorphic rock of igneous origin. Apparently at one time these mountains were volcanic. Ryholite resembles flint and is easily worked and holds an amazing edge. I looked around in some cleared fields for arrowheads or other Native American tools, but found nothing. Not even worked chips or blanks. I also found a lot of quartz along the hike and sometimes quartz was used to make tools, but again I found no sign of worked quartz anywhere I looked. I know Indians must have lived here, but unlike the nearby Morrow Mountain, the signs of tool-making is not obvious wherever rock is exposed.

One thing that did surprise me about the wilderness is that there are large tracts of nice hardwood forests. It's not virgin forest, of course, and there are no really big trees, but the recovering habitat is pleasing to see. The bottomlands and the woods in the little canyons and coves are very nice. I'd like to go back in the winter and do some bushwhacking in there. But I wouldn't recommend it during the spring and summer. The tick population is just way out of control and I certainly don't want to emerge from these forests coated in these blood-sucking pests.

I had a good walk, but I realized by the time that I made it back to my truck how out of shape I've become. Fortunately, I haven't gained any weight since the surgery, but my muscles have atrophied to an alarming degree. I was exhausted and sore after the hike. But now I know that I can get out and start reconditioning the knee. More hikes are in the planning stages, and then it's back to work.

The hardwood forests, especially in the bottomlands, were surprisingly lush and impressive.

On some of the ridge tops there was a lot of quartz. In places the trail was composed almost entirely of crushed and broken quartz.

Signs of past human habitation are to be found throughout the forest. To be expected since most of the trails are old roadbeds.

Flower.

Mushroom pushing up from the forest loam.

One of the more interesting rock formations along the trails. This one was composed of rhyolite, the capstone that forms these little mountains.

Standing chimney from one of the old farmsteads that made up this property once upon a time.

I think this is some type of centipede. I've never seen this particular bug before.

Bent tree.

The streams in the wilderness were either dry, or nearly so. I'd heard there was a drought going on in that part of the state, so it's obviously true.

Forest canopy.

A leopard frog that was in one of the isolated pools in the drying streams. I was overturning rocks trying to find salamanders. I found none of them, but lots of these leopard frogs.

More of the rhyolite capstone.