Date: 2005-04-18
From: somewhere (I'll fix this soon)

To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

"This stream is listed as contaminated." - Me"Yeah, but that might just mean that someone of a different religionthan wingfoot baptised their child in it" - Freeze DriedAhh, the wingy humor never gets old. We had a good campfire tonightat..unmentioned yet obvious campsite near...unmentioned yet obviousstream. Between the six of us at the spot tonight, no one reallyknows exactly where we are. Red has an idea, but there's no concreteway to back it up, guess we'll find out tomorrow.Anyway, enough with the guidebook bashing. Today was another gorgeousday. Gorgeous because the highs were in the high 60's and low 70's,gorgeous because there was no chance of rain, gorgeous because thetrail was nice, gorgeous because...oh yeah, we ate more town food. The nice folks at the hostel who's lawn we slept on, their nameunfortunately escapes me right now, were nice enough to give us a rideto town for some good down home breakfast.   Man, southerners don'tmess around with breakfast. Eggs, bacon, biscuits the size of asaucer and hash browns all for something like 6 bucks. Oh, and Ishould also mention...more sweet tea.As we ate breakfast, our tents and gear were supposed to be dryingfrom the morning condensation. Let's suffice it to say that when wereturned, we got to spend another hour or so of chill time waiting forthem to dry some more. However we did get to feed the goats in thattime, and those goats were pretty rad. They had interesting eyes thatwould stare at you and plead "please please mister, feed me whateverthat thing is in your hand". I had to disappoint the goat at first,my socks just weren't ready for goat-fodder yet, so I appeased thepoor fella with some carrots and some of Quinn's honey roastedpeanuts.Finally on the trail at noon after another gracious shuttle from thehostel folks, the hiking was pretty mellow. As I descended one hill Iwas greeted by an arrow of Freeze Dried and Capt. Patagonia's hikingpoles that pointed in the opposite direction of the trail. On anearby tree stood a sign, "Jones Falls". This is one .1 mile blueblaze trail that's worth following.Jones Falls is one crazywaterfall/water-flow-over-the-rocks-type-thing. It was definitelyworth a few pictures, and a lunch break, and for Freeze Dried and I,an attempt at climbing to the top.Imaging the bone-crunching and skin-scraping fall down the falls, wequickly decided that we would try and bushwhack our own way throughthe woods. "The woods" ended up being some heavy freakingundergrowth, I don't know how long it took us, but that stuff tripledthe time it should've taken. Regardless of foliage-related issues, wemade it to the top of Jones falls, which is pretty much a small streamthat cuts through a huge rhododendron thicket, then drops off a wholelot. Freeze dried and I screamed and did the woohoo thing from thetop, noticing that our friends had left, but new people had showed up. Introducing the "slacker confederation", Giggles, Box-o-fun, Unknown,and Fraggle. These four hikers have a habit of doing some shorterdays, but they seem to enjoy the hike as much as anyone else, so morepower to them.Freeze dried and I soon parted ways with our slacking friends andcranked out the miles to here...wherever here may be.