The clouds that rolled in carried rain with them. It didn’t rain a lot but it still got everything wet. We all slept in a bit to let the rain burn off. When we got up, the dad and kids were gone, but there were a couple more women across the Goat Trail from us.
Today was wide open. We thought we might head down to Granny Henderson’s cabin and possibly head up the Sneeds Creek Trail from there. While we were inside looking around, an older guy came up and started talking to us. He said he grew up in the area and remembered Granny. He started telling us stories about the area and told us about a rocky flat on up the creek that was big enough to land a 747 on. We said we were headed up that way and he was welcome to join us. We took off straight from the front porch and headed to the creek. Once again, this would have been a great time to have an accurate map.
We ended up bushwhacking up the creek for a mile or so always thinking we had found the trail to only have it peter out again. We did run across a baby deer on the other side of the creek that had been parked their by its mother and was following orders. We didn’t want to scare her too much so we moved on. After crossing the creek a few more times, we found the flat rock the guy was talking about.
There were several shallow pools that were inviting to sit in and cool off. Once I took off my pants to sit in one, the old guy took off. Usually, I only have that effect on women and I don’t even have to take off any clothes. We filtered water, and explored further up the creek a bit. There were lots of shallow caves and some decent camping sites. We decided to eat lunch in one.
Since it had taken us so long to get up to the rock area, we decided not to push further up the creek and start heading back. We came to the southern end of the rock and found a trail that lead right back to the northeast corner of Granny’s cabin in less than ½ mile. A good map would have been nice.
From the cabin it was only ½ mile back to our camp. When we got there, some slimeballs had thrown a bag of trash into our fire pit. We burned off what we could and compressed it down and carried it out since they were too burdened to pack out their trash.
Tonight, for the first time, we had the area to ourselves. Everyone had left. We collected firewood, cooked supper, and had our usual campfire. This was a low key outing with not much effort put into anything other than eating.
