A pattern is definitely emerging here... At the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024, I just couldn't get enough of car camping and exploring obsure trails behind Bull Mountain, and the weekend of January 27th was no exception.
It was a bit different though, in that I got up there early enough to do some hiking on Saturday, before camping. It was also different in that it rained and rained all day, and was still raining when I arrived.
I'd been needing new tires for a while, and the wet and slippery conditions just made it that much more apparent.
No matter, though, I made it, and pretty quickly I was ready for Adventure!
There was an old roadbed not too far down FS77A from FS77 that'd been a dotted line on my map for far too long. And when I say "old roadbed", I mean OLD. I mean, just look at it:
I promise that's an old roadbed.
A little way in, there was a leveled area, cut well into the backslope, below a food plot.
It was large and irregular, and it reminded me of the hundreds of other such cuts that I've seen up in the mountains along modern roads where they need a flat spot to build something, so they just dig out the backslope. Maybe there had been a structure there at some point. Maybe a house. Maybe the food plot had been the owner's field. I looked pretty hard, but I didn't find any ruins or trash, or anything to back that up, though. So, really, who knows?
A bit further up the old road, I did find some bear sign.
But I didn't see any actual bear that day.
A bit further, still, I ran across a small waterfall.
Of course, there was also a Mylar Balloon on the trail.
And up near the farthest reaches of the old roadbed, there was another small falls...
...followed by a much larger falls.
I mean, that one just went up and up and up. It was honestly pretty spectacular, especially for a random, uncharted falls.
The whole creek appeared to have been fed by this very large spring.
On the way back down, I discovered a different kind of bear sign, but again, I didn't run into any actual bear.
By then, it had stopped raining, but it was still very overcast. At a point, I had to swap the batteries in my GPS, and it took like 20 minutes to rediscover satellites.
My outing had been fruitful, but I needed to get back to camp before dark. I was getting hungry, and I had big plans for dinner.
Back in the early 2000's, when Glen's shop was in Douglasville, there was a restaurant in the same complex called the Yummy European Cafe, and the guy that ran it made this amazing dish called Chicken Milano - baked chicken, mango, walnuts, and raisins with a honey glaze. I ate it a million times, and when he closed his restaurant, I was distraught until I figured out how to make a decent facsimile myself. I've been making it for like 15 years now, though, and figured I'd try making it in the woods too.
It wasn't as good as the version I make at home, but it was close enough! Man, I love that dish.
As I'd done the week before, I was cooking at the foot of my bed, standing under my lift gate. This is mostly convenient, but the bike rack really is kind-of in the way, even folded up, and I have to stand pretty close to it to reach the stove. As such, I'm milling around, shins inches away from the various parts of the rack, as well as my trailer hitch. So, of course, I managed to ram the same shin that I bludgeoned the week before, directly into the part of the rack that inserts into my hitch. It didn't do much new damage, but it stoved my leg almost as badly as when I first smashed it.
Lord, the pain!
I finished making dinner, cleaned stuff up, and got settled in for the night. And, just in time too! As soon as I closed my door, it started raining again. Hammering!
I watched The Green Knight and Jackass Forever on my phone, before drifting off to sleep under what had died down into a pitter patter of rain. Off and on all night though, it would pick up and die back down. At some point, the temperature dropped fairly suddenly, too. I was as cozy as a guy can be though, and it made for a really pleasant night's sleep.
The next morning, it was cold and wet, and again, I made eggs and hot chocolate inside.
When I was satisfactorily fueled, I rummaged around a bunch of campsites, old roadbeds, trails, and side-trails. Just about everything was old and overgrown, but I explored it all, anyway.
Someone had apparently forgotten a chair at one of the campsites, forever ago.
Well, there was this one road to a food plot that wasn't overgrown, but it was just about the only road that wasn't, all day.
Here's that washout on that old road that I mentioned last time.
This time, I actually followed a spur of that road that crossed Jones Creek, then paralleled it for a while...
...before abruptly diving down into it. Maybe there was an old ford there way back, or a bridge. The other side was much higher though. If there had ever been anything, it was a long time ago.
At one point, all of Jones creen was choked by this unintentional dam of deadfall.
I was fairly impressed that such a clog could even occur.
I also found a bunch of mylar balloons.
...of course.
Toward the end of the day, I ended up on the same old roadbed that I'd explored the day before, but didn't recognize it until I ran across this old bridge remnant.
I'd seen it the day before, and it looked familiar. Somehow the trail hadn't.
I remember being really exhausted at the end of that day, and I'd managed to bump my shin into everything you can imagine, all day. You never realize how often you touch things with some part of your body, until that part is wounded. I mean, how often to you touch things with the inside of your upper, right shin. Turns out, constantly!
It was still sprinkling when I drove out, and I remember passing some gravel riders at the old game check station lot. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize any of them.
On the way home, I drove through Dawsonville, and passed the Gift BoxXx, as one does. Valentines day was only a few weeks away, and the sign cracked me up.
"Girl, we know you don't have a boyfriend..."
😂😂😂
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