And we’re off … the fall hiking season is underway!
The first hike is in the bag and what a beautiful day to be outside.
It all started well enough at the parking lot in McLean and quickly went downhill shortly after departure when we found 66 closed!!! With a few detours everyone managed to get to Sky Meadows State Park and were rewarded with a truly lovely spot to hike.
On the face of it a 7 mile hike isn’t too onerous, but lordy, this hike had some lumpiness. The loop to start introduced us to some cows in the valley floor and meandered around until we got to the base of the ridge.
Maps are quite handy things if you have the vaguest idea what you’re looking at. For most, if not all the scouts, the maps seemed to simply be pieces of paper, stuffed in plastic that were incredibly annoying and should be folded up, placed in a pocket and not looked at again. However, given their staggering inability to follow blazes the odd subtle clue offered by that now crumbled piece of paper could have come in handy.
Oh and don’t start me on the fact that not one of the 17 scouts had a compass with them. They’re useful little fellas that I’m sure the scouts will learn to love one day, especially when asked to point in a certain direction. Given their absolute and complete failure in that task a tiny piece of equipment costing less than $10 could have come in handy! Oh well, next time.
Once we got to the base of the ridge the climb up to the AT is, in the words of your scoutmaster, “sporty”. This definitely caused a quietening of the adults and a dramatic increase in water attraction. The temperature was awesome but it was humid, very humid and we were walking up into the cloud base. It seemed that with every step you were not only expelling water but attracting it from the air around you. But all puffing and dampness aside, once we got to the top we had a lovely stop for lunch at the scenic overlook of the little town of Paris. OK, so you could only see 100 yards off into the cloudy mist but it was still scenic!
After lunch (and some pawpaws) we headed back down the trail to the parking lot. Congrats to all the scouts and the old people who completed the 7.2 mile loop and a double congratulations to Brandon and Jordon who coincidently not only had their birthday on the same day as the hike, but on the same day as each other! Happy Birthday.
A lovely first hike and we’ll get the next one out soon. I’m confident that boys will brings compasses next time and learn to love those pieces of paper we unfairly forced them to carry with them.
Check out the pix over here.
-Matt Salt