Hiking: Keystone State Park
I hit the trails with Judith today at Keystone State Park. Another well maintained set of trails that interconnected enough to give us options to explore. We hopped on the first blaze color we encountered, yellow, and had an interlude with the blue blazed trail, which found us exiting about an hour later. This wasn't enough, we evaluated the map, saw there was an orange blazed trail further out that we had managed not to see. We headed out in search of said trail.
We found an outer loop of the yellow trail, another unexplored branch of the blue blazed trail... finally we took a turn and realized we were no longer on a blazed trail but continued on. We found ourselves in some wetlands underneath power lines. Power lines? Where did I see that on the map? Oh yeah. We are WAY off course. But in the spirit of exploration, forged on up the hill (which Judith so named Maud) under the power lines. We thought if we could reach the road we would easily reorient ourselves in the right direction. We saw a road, but could not reach it.
We turned off onto a small side trail, shortly into the woods we happened across the wooden skeleton of a tee-pee and a couple make shift shelter structures. We hypothesized we were hiking in above the campgrounds, that maybe this was a boy scout site for more primitive camping excursions. We continued on until we reached someone's large back yard. Hrm. Turn around.
Somewhere along the way we really led ourselves astray as the "trail" we were on continued to diminish until the point where we were bush whacking our way along a stream. If we followed the water, we theorized, we could find our way back to the wetlands where the unblazed trail led us into.
To make an already long story shorter, we backtracked and bush whacked the best we could only to emerge from the woods onto a portion of the original yellow blazed trail we had taken in.
Three hours later we emerged, only a little scratched up, victorious from the days adventure. We had a precarious bridge to cross, observed interesting fish formation swimming, swarms of butterflies and skippers, bee-flys, and the emerald green cicindelids out in force.
I had left the GPS with Mark (he had planned on a long ride today), so I estimate between six to seven miles were covered. Today would have been a really good day to have the GPS with us.
We found an outer loop of the yellow trail, another unexplored branch of the blue blazed trail... finally we took a turn and realized we were no longer on a blazed trail but continued on. We found ourselves in some wetlands underneath power lines. Power lines? Where did I see that on the map? Oh yeah. We are WAY off course. But in the spirit of exploration, forged on up the hill (which Judith so named Maud) under the power lines. We thought if we could reach the road we would easily reorient ourselves in the right direction. We saw a road, but could not reach it.
We turned off onto a small side trail, shortly into the woods we happened across the wooden skeleton of a tee-pee and a couple make shift shelter structures. We hypothesized we were hiking in above the campgrounds, that maybe this was a boy scout site for more primitive camping excursions. We continued on until we reached someone's large back yard. Hrm. Turn around.
Somewhere along the way we really led ourselves astray as the "trail" we were on continued to diminish until the point where we were bush whacking our way along a stream. If we followed the water, we theorized, we could find our way back to the wetlands where the unblazed trail led us into.
To make an already long story shorter, we backtracked and bush whacked the best we could only to emerge from the woods onto a portion of the original yellow blazed trail we had taken in.
Three hours later we emerged, only a little scratched up, victorious from the days adventure. We had a precarious bridge to cross, observed interesting fish formation swimming, swarms of butterflies and skippers, bee-flys, and the emerald green cicindelids out in force.
I had left the GPS with Mark (he had planned on a long ride today), so I estimate between six to seven miles were covered. Today would have been a really good day to have the GPS with us.