Blue Ridge WMA

Early last June, I was talking to Raqueline about how I spent last winter camping and exploring the Jones Creek area, pretty relentlessly, and somehow that sounded like fun to her too. So, the next weekend, we drove up and camped in my favorite spot.

On the way up, we stopped at the grocery store for some raw materials, and laughed at the "summer" themed housewares. Yes, we'll go with summer-themed.

If you know, you know, and you laugh!

We got there with plenty of daylight left, so we went for a quick hike up to Silver Dollar Falls.

Or, whatever it's actually called. I called it The Falls with No Name for most of my life. Google maps calls it Smith's Waterfall.

Right as it was finally getting dark, I made some fajitas for us, but they didn't go over so well. When I make fajitas, I don't cook the peppers, or at most, I just warm them up. I love them crunchy, but I think I'm alone in that!

It started raining, lightly, almost immediately as we went to bed. As long as you're warm and dry, I don't think there's anything cozier than light rain when you're camping. It rained most of the night, but cleared up early the next morning, before we woke.

We had eggs and toast for breakfast, and she had some instant coffee too. I've gotten to love coffee over the past few years, but that which I love can barely be called coffee. I haven't figured out how to make a satisfying vanilla latte in the woods yet, so I stuck to plain water.

For the rest of the day, we hit the local sights.

First up was the, definitely unnamed falls below FS77A. The one that you can hear from the road, but it's really hard to see.

The weather was nice. It was warming up, but still cool at that point, and the spray was a little chilly.

Next, we took FS77 and 28-1 over to near Camp Merrill, crossed the Etowah, parked, and hiked out to False Black Falls.

Again, that's just what I call it. It's that falls on Montgomery Creek, on the Bee Trail. Ages ago, I'd see photos of it, alleging it to be Black Falls, and people would call it that when we were riding out ther, but it's definitely not Black Falls. Thus, False Black Falls. The spray there was strong and freezing, but it felt pretty great!

Then we backtracked a bit, took FS80 up to Cooper Gap, and FS42 over to Hawk Mountain. The gate was closed, so we walked up the road.

At the top, we checked out the aerial marker, and I noticed that one of the numbers (or maybe the letter) is almost completely obscured. You have to actually look for it now. I didn't remember it being like that the last time I looked. Maybe it's less obscured in winter.

After that, we headed over to the ruins of the old Forest Ranger Station at Winding Stair Gap, and walked all over the old cement slabs for a while.

Then we headed down to the Hickory Flatts Cemetery.

It's rare that I'm there with anyone else, so it was fun to be able to ride the weird merry-go-round thing!

We walked down to Long Creek...

But I misremembered how the AT/BMT were routed in that area, and was surprised that we couldn't pick it up there and take it over to the falls.

So, we hiked back up, drove over to Three Forks, hiked over from there, and took in the local sights.

That night, we camped in some random spot on Noontootla Creek.

Raque loves cold water, for some reason, so she just waded into the freezing creek and submerged herself, like that's something that a person ought to do! I followed her, but after being in the water for like 10 minutes, I started getting a weird cramp deep in my abdomen that took like an hour to go away. No idea what it was. I've had it before, but not from cold water. She seemed... not only completely unaffected, but genuinely satisfied with the whole thing.

We had signal there, so she made some phone calls while I cooked some chicken and pasta.

It got dark quickly, and there were a billion stars, just in the patch that you could see above the creek. It was amazing. I always forget about light pollution until I get deep enough into the woods. We saw a few shooting stars, and joked about UFOs. I pointed out what I thought was a satellite. A dim little dot, moving slowly across the sky from west to east. Then that dot made a long, slow turn to the north. Ha! My everything-is-probably-mundane brain came up with the idea that it was probably a bug that was just bright enough, and just far away enough to look like a satellite. If it wasn't, though, it was quite a conincidence!

We got up early the next morning, packed things up, headed home, and that was our camping trip.

I rarely spend a lovely, relaxing weekend in the woods, but it's such a great thing to to do, from time to time!