Simpsonwood

I was signed up for a Spartan Race on March 16th, so between March 10th and 15th, I did a couple of easy rides just to keep myself warmed up, but nothing too tough. Me and Indi also went for a hike around Simpsonwood near her place, one evening.

I looked up a map online, and downloaded it into my phone, but it was pretty difficult to follow. There were a bunch of side trails that weren't on the map, and some of them looked like they were more popular than the official trails.

Classic.

It was a nice place to hike though, and the weather was great. It was warm enough for shorts, but not warm enough to sweat.

After milling around, getting a little confused, figuring things out, and milling around some more, we eventually came upon an "Old Chapel"...

...which, I guess was old in the sense that it was built a long time ago, but not old in the sense that it was in ruins.

There were some proper ruins near the Old Chapel though.

Trilliums were just starting to poke through the leaves, too.

They weren't "everywhere" yet, but there were a good number of them.

We eventually ended up down by the Chattahoochee...

...and we could see people walking on the other side. It would appear that there are trails over there too.

It's funny, every now and then, I realize... I've hiked all over North Georgia, including a ton of off-trail hiking and exploration, but I've never hiked Kennesaw Mountain, or very much of the Chattahoochee NRA, despite both of those being basically in my backyard. It doesn't seem like it would take a lot of effort to expore them either. I really should do that.

[continues not to...]

Indi!

...with her cute little dog hat!

She'd hiked there before and seen lots of deer, but we didn't see many that day until it started getting darker, then it seemed like they were everywhere!

At one point, a bunch of guys on mountain bikes passed us in the opposite direction. I have no idea what the official rules are there re. bikes. I don't remember seeing any signage one way or the other, but I think it's rare that bikes are allowed in the Chattahoochee NRA - Sope Creek being a major exception.

Toward the back of the park, we found all of these old moonshine tanks.

It's funny too, because I had just been describing moonshine tanks to her a few days earlier, but I'm not sure what I described made a lot of sense - especially that they were held together with nails. Metal tanks, held together with nails... How would they seal? But, here I was actually able to show them to her in real life!

On the left side of the park, we found a map nailed to a tree that actually had all of the trails marked on it.

We expected the QR code would go to a website with that same map, but it went to some other site that advertised something else. I forget what, now.

We managed to get a general sense of the major trails in the park, but didn't have time to really explore everything before it got too dark to continue. We talked about going back, but we ended up breaking up a short time later, and I haven't spent enough time on that side of town since then to check it out again.

Sadly, the GPS data that I collected that day was irreconcilable with any map that I had, including the one on that tree, so I wasn't able to do put it on my trails site. Maybe I'll go back some day and do a proper exploration.