Hickory Flats and the Mill Creek Valley

Last Friday I took the day off. I'd been working extra, extra hard for weeks and my fitness and sanity were both suffering. The last few months had been really tough, I'd been pulling hard, but things were just starting to improve. We might have turned the corner, it seemed like I might be able to sit up for a second. A day off seemed appropriate.

Unfortunately, despite the cycling analogies, no cycling was involved in that particular day off. The brakes on my mountain bike need some tending-to and the big ring on my road bike is just worn completely out. I guess I can find the cash to fix them, but the time is more difficult to find. It ends up just being easier and more immediately satisfying to go for a hike, especially when it's been raining, which it had been.

So, that was again the case this past Friday, but I didn't feel like I was settling for a hike because I had a very specific destination in mind, In fact, I was kind of excited about it.

I'd been trying to follow the old (circa 1882 and maybe before) route from modern-day Nimblewill (near Bull Mountain) to Stock Hill (at the bottom of Noontootla Creek Road/FS58) and so far, I'd explored everything from Nimblewill Church to the Hickory Flats Cemetery. There was still a long section from Hickory Flats to Stock Hill though, that I'd barely ever been on. I'd seen maybe a quarter mile of it, 8 or 9 years ago.

So I headed up to Hickory Flats to try to knock out as much of that section as I could.

I kind-of went up the dumb way though. I wanted to approach from the Noontootla side, but I auto-piloted up 400 because that's just how I usually go to get up there. This error added like 30 minutes to my trip, but it wasn't all bad, as it also added a stop at the Dutch Monkey, where I ran into Chris from Reality Bikes, whom I hadn't seen in like 5 years!

Eventually, I made it to Noontootla, but I stopped near the Friendship Church to get a photo of a historical marker nearby.

I guess there was a school there, at the bottom of Noontootla. It doesn't specifically say, just mentions a teaching job. Also, I'm guessing that the Fannin County Heritage Foundation put it there, but it doesn't say that either. I'd actually seen the marker before, but I couldn't remember if I had a photo of it. I definitely didn't have a GPS marker for the location, so I got that too.

Speaking of markers... As I drove up to the cemetery, I noticed yet another marker, kind-of across the street from it.

Apparently there was a school there too!

I had, in the past, assumed that the community of Hickory Flats was confined to the actual flats down along Long Creek, and that the cemetery was located on the hill overlooking the community. Historical topo maps suggest the same, and do not show a school anywhere in the vicinity. It would seem that the maps are incomplete though. I wonder if the Fannin County Heritage Foundation has better maps...

As I pondered this, I parked at the cemetery.

There is an actual cemetery there, but the area is more like a campground. There's a pavillion with tables and chairs, and I've never seen fewer than a dozen gallons of water put out for whoever needs it.

There's also a bath house, with luxurious facilities.

I love the red carpet that leads to the throne.

There's always paper. It is funny though, there's a curtain that you can draw, but if you do, then the draft slowly pushes the bottom of it toward you until its wraps up around your calves and knees. Good luck trying to hold it away from you, it'll just slowly wrap around your hand too.

There's also a "shower", with a drain, where you can hang a bag of water and bathe. It's typically stocked with soap and shampoo.

Outside there's a weird merry-go-round/see-saw thing that I swear was there a long time ago, then was gone for a while, and is now back.

There's a fire ring to the left of the pavillion, and the cemetery itself is behind it.

The whole place is kind of the last maintained remnant of the Hickory Flats community. We can thank the New Bethel Baptist Church for that. I believe they own the property and maintain it.

In antiquity, there was a road leading down the hill behind the cemetery to Long Creek where it allegedly teed into another road leading up and down the creek, and that's where the community of Hickory Flats proper was. I'd been down that road once before, but only once, like 10 years ago.

I took it again that day, and really noticed how braided it was. There were at least 2 former routes off to the right. Maybe more even. They all coalesced at the creek though.

Whoo! The water was cold. It was in the high 30's outside.

My phone didn't like that too much either. The battery works really badly if it gets cold. It was at 100% in the car, but it was at 49% not 10 minutes later. I ended up taking it out of the case and tucking it between my running tights and my left hip so my body heat would keep it reasonably warm. This actually worked, and hours later it hadn't dropped below 47%.

Just past Long Creek, the old road leads to a food plot.

But, legend had it that there's an old road leading up the adjacent ridge. In fact, there was! But it was pretty overgrown and it took quite a bit of meandering just to go the first 100 yards. Fortunately though, after the first 100 yards, it cleared up nicely.

It looked like I'd been on a "former route" and the most current route came in from the right at that point.

For the next mile or so, the trail was reasonably clear. You'd probably struggle to get a horse or a bike down it, but on foot, it was no problem.

Eventually, it seemed like I was getting close to FS251B. I think I crossed a Kelly Hump or something. And, looking for the road, I almost missed this stake in the ground, off to my right.

I figured it was one of the orienteering markers for the Rangers at Camp Merrill. Maybe one day they'd quit using it and taken down the actual marker, but left the stake in case they wanted to use it again.

But something else caught my eye as I walked over to get a photo of the stake. Just over the hill...

Wow!

I ran into a bigfoot legend about this crash ages ago. The story was so full of inaccuracies though, that I assumed it was completely made up. I hadn't seen the AJC article about it at the time. I never thought I'd randomly discover the crash site.

I was surprised, intrigued, and sad all at the same time.

Adventure!

The biggest irony, is that I'd actually been on that particular section of the old road before and not seen any of it. Like 10 years or more ago, I rode my bike out that way, parked it, and went walking down the old road until it got too overgrown. I used to do a lot of that. Apparently I had lower standards for "too overgrown" way back though, because these days I wouldn't call it that.

The old road kept going on the north side of FS251B and I kept following it. That side was substantially more overgrown. I was glad it was winter. Before long it started looking a lot more like a creekbed than a road.

Hard to believe _that_ was the main drag at one point.

There was a reasonably large poplar down in there too.

The astute observer may notice a weird black X floating in the air in front of the tree.

I have no idea what the purpose of this weirdness was, but black cordage was tangled all over the tree and nearby saplings, and it seemed to have been put there, intentionally, as it was knotted around all kinds of stuff nearby.

Maybe that's where the Rangers had been trained to make a last, desperate stand against a Predator, or maybe against bigfoot.

The old road descended the left side of the draw, and continued along a ridge to the north. It was a bit of a geographcal oddity, actually; a draw that funnels down to a ridge. I can't think of anywhere I'd ever seen that before. The creek was rather dry that day, but appeared to flow downhill to that point, and then alternately drop off to one side or the other depending on the century. It looked like it currently dropped off to the east. From the west, a newer looking road joined in, and for a while, the trail ahead was clean and clear. You could have driven a truck down it.

It looked like a modern logging road had been built down to that ridge from FS251B and then bulldozed over top of the old road. I actually expected to run into something like that though, because in the old black and white USGS DOQ images (aerial photos) of the area, that were taken in the 80's (I think), and which were once available online, you can see where the ridge had been logged and started to regrow, but still looked different than the surrounding woods. The ridge to the east appeared to have experienced the same fate. In those old photos you could even make out much of the logging road. When I'd seen those photos, I figured it was just another random logging road. I had no idea about its historical significance.

Oddly, there wasn't much logging along the road at first. No stumps, fairly old-looking growth. No "dirty jungle". But that changed eventually. The border of the clear-cut was pronounced, and the road beyond was the longest stretch of overgrowth that I'd ever pushed through. This photo sums up the experience:

Yeah, push through that.

It wasn't like rhododendron hell though. I didn't have to climb over and under and around. I mostly just had to put my forearms up a few inches in front of my face and walk forward. My forearms bent the little branches out of the way as I walked. I swear though, 1 in 5 was short enough to spring back and whip me in the face, which I reasoned was better than just pushing them out of the way with my face, and also better than taking hours to duck under and in between every branch.

Toward the end, conditions improved rather suddenly.

It looked like maybe a controlled burn had eaten up a lot of the undergrowth. Hog rooting was fairly prevalent as well. Between the two, the trail was much easier to get down.

In the first few hundred feet, I found the day's balloon.

It was black and gold. I could make out any writing, but maybe it had flown in from New Orleans.

Go Saints.

I was looking forward to enjoying the rest of the trail, but I was out of luck. Suddenly, and definitively, it came to an end.

This was discouraging. I'd hoped that the modern road would follow the route of the old one all the way down to Mill Creek, but instead, it must have diverged from the old route at some not-so-obvious point.

Goodness...

I spent the next 30 minutes trying to figure out where. This was made difficult by several factors: 1) The various knobs of the adjacent John Dick Mountains look really similar from that angle. 2) The trail was super overgrown. 3) I had marked the route of the old road on my map by eyeballing the map from 1914 and doing my best to match up features between the two. The route that I had marked was by no means definitive. 4) I wasn't super confident in the accuracy of the 1914 map. I'd discovered a few errors in it already.

After about 30 minutes, I was very confident about where I was on the map, but I couldn't find any old road descending the ridge where it should be. Either the map was wrong, or I had transcribed it wrong, or the new road had obliterated the intersection so well that I couldn't find it, or it was just so freaking overgrown that there was just no way.

Eventually I backed up, dropped down about 50 yards and sidehilled until I crossed something that looked like a trail. I took it uphill to see where it hit the logging road, and then downhill into the valley. Unfortunately it disappeared into the backslope almost immediately. It probably wasn't the right trail. Or, if it was then it's seen better days.

Screw it! Off-trail! I'll find it again down in the flats.

Almost immediately I stepped into a good bit of old growth, and I made really good time through it.

There was a reasonably large pine down in there.

And as middle-of-nowhere as it seemed, someone had been back in there treating hemlocks.

I did find an old road, but I wasn't sure if it was the one I was looking for. I followed it east to see if it joined up with a trail I'd found years earlier, but I eventually gave up when it became rhododendron hell.

I did find a waterfall though.

Too bad I didn't have anyone to stand in front of it for scale.

Being "Mill Creek", I half-expected to find some evidence of a dam and/or mill nearby, but no luck there.

To the west, well upstream, I did find some ruins. Not a mill though.

The map from 1914 alleged a structure near where I found that chimney, so I wasn't too surprised to find it. Later though, when I compared the location to the old map, what I found was a bit north of where it was alleged to be. So, either the map is wrong, or there might be another ruin back in there somewhere.

Also, is it just me, or do those old chimneys seem way too durable? This one had been hit by two different trees, but was still mostly upright. I'd think they'd be like Jenga. Touch them wrong and the whole thing comes down. But, no, the building they're attached to can collapse and rot into nothing, but the chimney will stand there like nothing happened. Maybe a little moss will grow on it.

I guess it's a testament to that good old-timey mortar.

The road continued behind the ruin and passed in front of whatever the heck this is:

It's hard to tell in the photo, and it doesn't help that it's out of focus, but after walking up in there and looking around, it really looked like a collapsed mine shaft. I've seen a bunch of old rail tunnels on Pigeon Mountain, some of which have collapsed, and a few mine shafts on Sawnee Mountain, which haven't collapsed. It just struck me as similar to those. Plus, the giant piles of dirt nearby looked like way more than could have come directly out of the hole that remained. And, there was an even older road that led up to a spot near the top of the hole.

I guess it could also have been an archaeological excavation of some kind. Either way, really interesting.

The old road kept going, but it had the wrong bearing. An adjacent dry branch had the right bearing but no sign of an old road. Maybe the "road" was just the floor of the draw. I'd seen that twice before. The Logan Turnpike trail is kind of like that.

Blah!

I committed to the roadless draw.

Through this crap.

And there was no road. No nothing. Dangit!

Screw it, bushwhack up to the ridge, take that up to the trail that I knew was above me.

But then the ridge was just as difficult to push through!

When it finally cleared, I walked right by this:

Which is hard to make out in the photo. It's a big hole in the ground. Really big. A pit mine, maybe? It lay on the same ridge as the thing I'd found earlier. It struck me that they both may have been shafts leading into the same mine. I had no idea how likely that was though.

There was a campsite nearby though, and a bit of a trail leading from it up the ridge, so I guess it's a minor point of interest to someone, or maybe it was just a coincidence. Who knows?

I picked up Old No-Name Ridge Road up the ridge, and took that to Watkins Branch Gap where I could clearly see the road that I had been looking for dive down into the valley below. It existed, but I'd have to follow it down from there, if I wanted to see where it goes.

I wanted to, but it was getting late. Not late in the absolute sense, but I was like 6 miles from the car and it would take a few hours to get back to it, like 2 or 3 hours. #planningahead.

I bumped up to the Benton MacKaye and headed back south.

Oh, man, quick progress on an actual trail! It was a joy I had hardly experienced all day.

I ran into another blank stake, I think at the gap uphill of whatever creek Noontootla Falls is on.

There was no memorial nearby, but there was a bit of a hole in the ground, and then another downhill to the southwest, and another beyond that. Maybe it was a really old firebreak. Maybe it was nothing at all, just where trees had fallen down and the fact that they lined up was coincidental.

If the stake was a former orienteering marker then it was the furthest one I'd ever seen from Camp Merrill.

No telling.

There were at least a half dozen rock piles up there on the next knob.

Indian graves?

As I crested the knob south of the rock piles, I noticed a new-looking double-blaze and some trail leading off to the right. It turned out to be a set of switchbacks that I hadn't hiked before. I don't know how new they were, but they were new to me. They looked pretty good too, with that IMBA flow.

They crossed the spurs that trail off of the end of the No Name Ridge Road. I don't know if that was intentional, but it couldn't have been better executed if it was. They managed to cross the ONLY other trails in the area.

At the next gap... Oh, the irony.

It reminded me of a photo I once saw of a road sign that said: "This sign has no purpose."

This gap has no name.

There are lots of unnamed gaps, but I guess the distinction here is that the name of this gap IS "No-Name Gap", which is perfect, as it lies along No-Name Ridge.

The sun was getting low when I hit the food plot, but I felt good about the progress I was making so I spent a few minutes taking in the general serenity.

From there, the BMT dropped down to Long Creek, and took on a very different character.

There were 2 dudes down there setting up a tarp shelter with a blazing fire so warm that I could feel it from across the little creek between us. More folks were camping down by Long Creek Falls too.

It was darkish when I turned onto the AT, and officially dark when I got to the road by the cemetery.

It was also officially cold - mid 20's. I was wearing running tights, barefoot shoes, a base layer and a wind shell. I had warm gear in my pack, but I hadn't gotten cold enough to change into any of it. It was only after changing back into my street clothes that I wished I'd changed into them instead.

Brrrrr.

My phone was feeling it too. I'd had it on my hip all day, but I'd put it in my car while changing in the bath house and it had gotten cold. I had signal, and the battery had been at 47%, so I figured I'd give Kathryn a call, but as soon as I unlocked it, it went to 20% and gave me the low-battery warning. As soon as I acknowledged that, it gave me the 10% warning. When I acknowledged that, it showed 3% and turned itself off a second later.

Ha!

When the car got warm, I warmed the phone back up, and when I turned it back on, it was back to 47%.

Keep your batteries warm, kids.

As had been the case on the previous hike, I had forgotten that I'd left myself a doughnut in the car, and was elated upon remembering. I was a bit too aggressive in eating it though, and had to stop twice on the road out, to put the doughnut down and drive more precisely, lest I put the car in the wrong rut.

I grabbed some dinner in Ellijay. Shanes Rib Shack, again, and it really hit the spot.

This time, I did have that good, whole-body tired going, but unfortunately I got a little sleepy on the way home and had to stop in Jasper just to walk around a bit and wake up.

So, I'm not sure if this particular hike counts as the ultimate in weekend Adventure, but on paper, it looks pretty good. 8+ hour day? Check. Significant diversity of trail experience? Check. Discovery of historically significant points of interest? Check. Discovery of a waterfall that's not on the map? Getting a little bit lost? Off-trail navigation? Discovery of new trail? Hiking out in the dark? Whole-body tired? Check, check, check, check, check, check!

I don't know, it's a pretty good candidate.

On the drive home though, I passed not just one, but two horrific accidents, neither of which looked survivable, and it took a few hours to get over how bad I felt after seeing them.

So, maybe not such a good candidate after all.

What a way to end the day.

Upper Frick Creek

A few weeks back I mounted another solo expedition along the old forgotten route from Nimblewill to Stock Hill.

To get from Nimblewill to Stock Hill these days, you'd take FS28-1 to FS77 to FS58. In the olden days, the route was infinitely more complex and involved substantially more climbing and descending. It would seem that they really didn't like to side-hill back then. And, I guess that makes sense, as it it easiest to navigate up along creeks and ridges, especially when you don't have a map.

For this Adventure I planned on taking the old road down from Fryingpan Gap (NE of Winding Stair Gap) to Frick Creek and beyond, maybe all the way to Hickory Flats. But I'd also throw in a side-route that the old topo maps show running up along upper Frick Creek. Maybe I'd find the ruins of some old buildings that were alleged to have existed up that way as well.

On the drive in, I took FS42 up the ridge from Doublehead Gap, and I noticed something that I'd never seen before, lying on the side of the road, way up the mountain, kind-of near where the AT crosses.

So, there was once a school there???

This was hard to believe. The maps of that area, from that time period, show nothing of the sort. For there to be a school, there must have been a community, and a sufficiently prosperous community, at that. The valley to the northeast was cut by Stover Creek. The AT bombs down through that valley these days, but in antiquity there was a road through there. Conventional wisdom would say it's a logging road, but maybe not. Maybe the valley was populated way back. Again though, the maps from that period show nothing. To the southwest, the valley is cut by the Tickanetley Creek. There are plenty of old roads down that way, and if you go far enough downhill, it's still fairly heavily populated. Maybe it was once populated that way up one valley and down the other and the school served both communities. If the school was really up on the ridge there, then it would have been a heck of a walk to school though, from either direction.

I may have to contact the Fannin County Heritage Foundation. I've seen several of their markers, and they are all very intriguing.

Oh yeah, it was rather chilly outside.

Just a bit over freezing.

I had been a little worried about freeze-thaw on the roads near the top of the mountain, but it turned out to be a non-issue. Everything was dry and solid up there.

I parked at Fryingpan Gap, in the Zombie Hyena lot...

...and took the connector trail over to the old Fryingpan Gap Road.

There are actually 2 roads that lead from Fryingpan Gap down to Frick Creek. The newer road sidehills its way down and is in fine shape. The old road bombs directly down the fall line and is prone to becoming this kind of thing:

...and thus was supplanted by the newer road.

I took the old road down to the point where the newer road crosses it. I'd seen where it continues on down before, but it always looked too overgrown to be worth following. That overgrown section is what the old maps shows as the correct way to go though, so I took it.

Yep, total garbage. Deep below grade, heavily braided. I can see why it was replaced.

At Frick Creek I noticed an old bridge off to my right.

It's funny. The first time I was down there, like 10+ years ago, I thought I saw a bridge, and then every time since, I never noticed it. I didn't even see it when I'd look around quickly for it. Eventually I decided I was wrong about having seen it the first time, but no, I was actually wrong about that. It was just hard to spot.

Looks like over the years, crap had piled up behind it and swamped it pretty badly. I didn't even attempt to cross it.

The side trail I was looking for ought to be off to my right somewhere, and after a bit of searching I found it. It was very overgrown, and very difficult to follow, but since it was notched into the backslope, I could always re-find it when I had to go around some massive tangle of downed trees.

Occasionally it was somewhat clear though, and overall it seemed like I was making ok time.

I saw this pretty regularly too.

Three slanted blue blazes. I'd seen the same markings earlier on the old Fryingpan Gap Road too, and in years past, I'd seen them in other locations in the greater Blue Ridge WMA. Most recently I'd seen them along an old road leading down into the upper Frick Creek valley from Puncheon Gap. I wondered if they marked a loop from Fryingpan Gap, down to the creek, back up to the ridge, and back to Fryingpan Gap. Hmm...

Further down the road I found a few more interesting things.

A cable.

Which doesn't tell me anything, as they were used for a dozen purposes way back.

And a fence post.

Which appeared to be part of a fence line leading due east-west, across the road.

Beyond the fence, it looked like there might have been a field at one point, and it was super difficult to figure out how the road crossed it. Eventually I managed to find it, but then it looked like maybe there had been another field, separated from the first by a small stand of trees, and it was again, quite difficult to re-find the road.

That old field (if indeed that's what it was) contained a pretty big pine tree...

...and appeared to be bordered by the same fence line.

Past both of those, the road was a new level of overgrown, and there appeared to be yet another old field, and there were at least 2 spurs of the road that confused me, and I kept running into more of the old fenceline...

I eventually sorted it out, but I was quite confused for quite a while.

Oh yeah, I also ran into this gnarly old pitchfork tree.

Wild.

And, man, every time I'd want to give up and declare that I'd found the end of the old road, I'd wander around and find more of it, follow it for a while, find what would appear to have been another old field, and lose the trail again.

It was slow going, and though I found that fence, and all of those fields (maybe), I never found any ruins.

I did find an old paint bucket though.

And trash from the '80's, as evidenced by pull-tabs.

The road kept going beyond where the old map said it would. It crossed a creek at a point that appeared to have once had a bridge, and led up a little ridge. The branches there were super low.

My back got a little tired from hunching over to get under them.

Eventually I popped out on that road down from Puncheon Gap that I'd seen those blue blazes on earlier.

I didn't take it all the way out though. Instead, I whacked up to Coppermine Gap through some fairly open woods.

On the way up I found a spot where the Rangers might have had a shootout, ages ago. There were 4 ammo cans...

...a medicine bottle...

...and various other odds and ends strewn about. Glancing around, I just kept finding stuff, and ultimately piled it all up on top of that ammo can. If I'd wanted to, I literally didn't have enough space in my camelback to pack it all out.

Further up toward the gap, I saw what kind-of looked like they might be footings for some building. There was no road or trail to it in either direction though, and one of the footings appeared to be sitting on a big rock, like maybe the rock just cracked up and formed the pieces naturally. Also, the piles were fairly spread out. I eventually decided that it must be some natural formation and didn't even take a photo. When I got home though, I checked the maps, and the one from 1914 shows a structure at that exact location. No idea what it could have been though.

When I hit FS42 on the ridge it was thinking about getting dark.

But, as I hiked back, I noticed a little trail off to the right that I hadn't seen before.

It led all the way up to the peak of whatever unnamed knob that is to the east of Fryingpan Gap. Fryingpan Knob, maybe?

Oddly, it didn't appear to continue along the ridge, and there was no established-looking campsite up there. It was well trampled, but there weren't any fire-rings or anything.

Somebody goes up there just to be on the peak, for some reason. Maybe the Rangers do that.

From up there, I could almost see the sun.

But it was definitely setting. Time to go home.

Instead of taking the trail back down, I whacked down the southwest side of the knob, and man was that slippery. It was really rocky, and loose, wet leaves on wet granite is no good.

I survived the descent though, and made it back to the car before it was officially dark, but it was pretty dark before I got down off of the mountain.

I want to say I grabbed some dinner from Shane's Rib Shack in Ellijay. That seems right, at least.

Not the best time, actually. Though I made some discoveries, they were a little lackluster, and it was just so difficult to follow that old road. Man!

It wasn't awful though, just not great, and of course, there's always next time.

Randa

What the heck is Randa?

It can't be found on any modern map. And by modern, I mean any map which was current at any point in the past 140 years.

Before Nimblewill was Nimblewill, it was apparently called "Randa", or so say the historical topo maps of the general Bull Mountain area from the 1880's.

Since discovering those old maps, I've been exploring the old route from Nimblewill (AKA Randa) to Stock Hill (AKA that church at the bottom of Noontootla Creek Road), which includes many roads and trails still in use today, but which also has long sections that I would never have guessed were there.

During this particular adventure, which I now realize was weeks ago, dang time files, I explored the route from Nimblewill Church to Bull Mountain, and then some, and had a pretty great time of it.

The bridge over the Etowah River on Hwy 136 is set to be demolished and (presumably) replaced between February and August of 2017, but it was still a few days before the start date advertised on the blinking road sign, so I took Hwy 400 up to the Bull Mountain area.

...And since I was heading up 400, and had not eaten yet, a stop to the Dutch Monkey seemed in order.

That's one pre-Adventure doughnut, and one post-Adventure doughnut, right there.

I parked at Nimblewill Church and puzzled over how to find the road I was looking for. The map alleged that it ran up a ridge behind the church and eventually teed in to the existing Bull Mountain trail. I couldn't see the ridge from the road though, and it looked like private property in every direction. The road I was looking for must just be part of somebody's driveway these days, and its generally a bad idea to go walking up driveways in North Georgia without good reason.

(BTW "I'm exploring" doesn't count as good reason.)

After a bit of wandering around in the church parking lot, I eventually noticed bearing trees and WMA boundary signs in the woods behind it. A sliver of the National Forest apparently extended out to that point, and it became my access point.

The woods was initially dense, but quickly opened up.

Before long I found the little creek that had formed the valley below the ridge and I followed it for a while.

To my right, I spotted a big, unnatural-looking pile of dirt, and upon investigation, realized it had been dug out of what appeared to be a pond.

Or maybe a pit mine?

At a glance, it looked more like a pond though, maybe for watering cows. It wouldn't surprise me if that whole valley had been a pasture at one point. Sadly, the old maps don't show what land was woods and what land was cleared so I may never know for sure.

At a point I figured I ought to try to get up on the ridge, and the particular spur I picked to take me up there had a couple of interesting features.

This struck me as a well.

It might not have been, but it was definitely an old hole in the ground, and old holes of that size are often old wells, but it was still a dubious conclusion.

This struck me as a tree stand.

A far less dubious conclusion.

Then, I found the road, right on top of the ridge, as advertised.

It was clear as a bell at that point, as far as the eye could see in either direction.

I followed it down toward Nimblewill Gap Road, to see if I could figure out where it teed in. I eventually found a forest service style pipe gate and I could see that hundred feet or so further down it teed into a gravelly road. I could kind of make out a house through the woods to the right as well, so I figured that it was probably someone's driveway. I'd have to check the GPS data later to see exactly who's.

Taking the road the other way, I found that it climbed up along the ridge, exactly as alleged on the old map. It was easy to follow too. It clearly gets plenty of use by the locals. I'm sure in the summer time it's a singletrack tunnel through tall grass, but in winter it's wide open. And it was winter, so it was wide open.

...For a while.

Eventually it got a bit tight.

All that brush has thorns, BTW. Every bit of it.

There were 2 old clearings along the road. Both thoroughly overgrown with thorns. The old map alleged a structure of some kind up on the ridge, in the general vicinity of the first clearing, but the brush was so dense and thorny that there was just no way I was going to go poking around trying to find if there was anything left of it. For all I knew, the building on the map was just Nimblewill Church and somebody screwed up and put it in the wrong place.

Past the second old clearing, the old road was a lot more overgrown and clearly got a lot less traffic.

Somebody else had been up there though.

I'd never seen polka dot ribbon before!

For a while, the old road was overgrown, but the overgrowth cleared eventually and I just had to deal with a deadfall, below-grade trail, and a lot of braiding. I expected to find all of that though, so I wasn't disappointed.

I did find an old side road (and a few former routes of it) that led over to FS83, right at the gap where the 83 bypass tees in. I'm guessing that the trail that leads down to the Bull Mountain Parking lot was once part of that same road. Someone may have lived down there at some point. Or maybe the lot was one of their fields or something.

I eventually hit the Bull Mountain Trail, right where I expected to - about halfway into the old "Bull Mountain Spur", which is that section that used to only be closed to horses, if anyone remembers that.

There was a trail marker a bit uphill from there, and it looked like somebody had lost their chain nearby, at some point.

So, having confirmed the existence of the Old Randa Road, I had accomplished my primary mission, and with plenty of daylight left, I figured I'd try to get some older questions answered.

Question 1: Modern topo maps show a very different route for the Bull Mountain Trail, and Steve Houghton et al alleged that when they first tried to find the Bull Mountain Trail, they took that route, rather than the current route. I'd ridden past the alleged intersection literally hundreds of times and never seen it. But, once, while specifically looking for it, I thought I saw it. Does it really exist, and does it go where the map says it does?

Turns out yes.

And it leads down to this weird gap that looks like a fill at first glance, but upon further examination appears to have legitimately occurred naturally.

Across the gap there's a bearing tree with an old sign on it.

I had a vague recollection of Steve mentioning that sign once, but it could be a false memory. Who knows what it used to say? But, given the bearing trees, and the WMA Boundary sign lying on the ground nearby...

...I was guessing something like "stay on that side of this sign".

When I got home, I looked up "upside down, triangular road sign." Turns out they are universally warning signs, and I felt good that I had taken it as such.

Ok, question 1 answered.

From there, I took the Bull Mountain trail down to the Jones Creek Dam Road.

Ha! Who knew that the trail was yellow-blazed.

Apparently it is. I wonder how old those blazes are, and if there are more of them.

There is also a Christmas Tree on the side of the trail.

I'd actually seen that once before, I think when Walt and I were flagging a reroute way back.

Question 2: What's the deal with the various food plots between FS83 and Jones Creek Proper?

They might have been pastures or fields way back. If so, ruins may be found in their vicinities.

I hiked down to the first plot on the south side of the road and poked around there for a while. No trace of habitation remained, but I did find an very old road leading down along the creek nearby which basically led to someone's backyard. There's an inholding there along FS28, and it must have been the yard of someone who lives back in there. I think the name of the road that runs up through the inholding is Troutman Trace, but I'm not 100% sure, I've never been down it.

Along that old road, I found what may have been an old chimney.

A "chimney pile" I sometimes call that. It was in a decent looking spot for a house, and it might have been a chimney, but it was hard to say just looking at it.

Not relishing the idea of whacking back up along that old road, I whacked uphill to the Jones Creek Dam Road instead.

Or, actually, into another one of the food plots along the road. Again, it seemed really likely that this might have been someone's property at some point. The field was divided by hedges, some of which appeared to contain apple trees.

As I walked along one of the hedges, I noticed a trail cam tied to one of the trees.

I bet it has a photo of me taking a photo of it.

Whooo, it was getting dark. Time to skeedattle.

I'd have liked to have explored the heck out of that field, but that's no so effective in the dark, so I figured I'd better start heading out.

I took the roads back to the church. As I walked however many miles out that was, I remembered the first time I rode at Bull. On the drive in I thought that it would be epically miserable have to ride out on that road. Since then I've ridden in and out on that road dozens, maybe 100 times, and I never considered it miserable. That night I was walking out on it. The full length of it. In the dark. I laughed about the disparity between that first impression and what I was then voluntarily doing. I may even have laughed out loud.

I love walking out in the dark. I wish I knew why. I'd guess the novelty of it, if it wasn't such a regular occurrence. Maybe it still is the novelty. It's new every time. That kind of thing.

As I approached my car, a guy was driving out of the driveway to the east of the church, on the south side of the road. I crossed the drive when he was like 60 feet away. I imagine that I must have seemed quite suspicious - some random dude walking down the road in front of your place an hour and a half after dark. He spun a loop through the church parking lot to check me out and I gave him the nod and wave as I unlocked my car. I guess my demeanor was sufficiently reassuring though, because he didn't even pause, just drove calmly away to the east.

What a day. I didn't have that good whole-body tired, but I felt good and the day had most of the elements of a good Adventure.

The best part though, was the post-Adventure doughnut that I'd forgotten I had left myself in the car!

It was like finding $5 in the pocket of your jeans, except that the $5 is a doughnut.