Amateurs - Without a Doubt!

Yesterday I was so lucky to get to hike at Hueston Woods State Park with 3 fellow hikers: my friend, Cheryl, my daughter, Morgan, and my nephew, Ryan. It was sunny and 48 degrees.  I was pinching myself that we were able to get one of the longer hikes out of the way in January! The hike was about 5 miles long and the ground was much dryer than last week's hike.  I apologize to my fellow hikers for the title of this blog, but as I share with you our experiences of the day, I think you will agree that we are all most definitely amateurs (sorry, Ryan since you do have way more experience than the rest of us!)

Before heading out on this hike I had some concerns about being able to follow the trail.  The write up in the book and the map seemed slightly confusing to me. I will share some more about this later as a "lesson learned". We noticed right from the get-go that there were a lot of bridges on this hike. It was quite hilly and I think deserving of the moderate to difficult rating from the book. We hadn't gone far when we reached our first confusion about the trail. We hit one of the state park roads and had three different choices of where we could go - just to paint a picture we had the map from the book out, the map from the park kiosk and a compass. We made what we thought was the best choice and happily made it to our next landmark, the "Sugar Shack". This was a beautiful area as we got our first full view of the park's lake. However, it was also the site of one of our first big mistakes of the hike - we got back on the trail in the wrong spot and didn't end up following the lake like we wanted. So, again we ended up on one of the park's roadways.  We walked it for a distance, complaining that this wasn't hiking (the little voice in my head was telling me that this was not where we were supposed to be.) Since we could see the lake through the trees and we knew the desired trail ran along the lake, Ryan and I made the executive decision to go "off-road" and hike through the woods to try to find the trail. I was sure that we were breaking the first rule of hiking - DON'T EVER LEAVE THE TRAIL!!!!  Hiking through the woods without a trail isn't the easiest thing, but at least it was winter and we were able to get through and see where we were going.  When we approached the lake, SUCCESS, I saw the trail! This was the West Shore Trail that we were looking for and it was probably the best part of the hike. Walking along the lake was beautiful! Because of our mistakes along the hike so far and the distance on our various tracking tools, we knew that we had not traveled as far as we wanted, so when we reached the sign designating the border of Hueston Woods, we decided to continue along the lake following a trail that was a little less well kept. We saw several duck blinds along the lake and made jokes about how our noise might be annoying both the ducks and hunters alike. We hiked for about a half an hour this way and eventually turned around to head back the way we came.

When we got back to the Sugar Shack, we took a different path to loop back to the car, hoping that we would find the place where we had made our first error on the trail. This decision led us to a stretched out hill that had all of us breathing heavy. We were certainly getting some great exercise.  As we approached the spot on our hike where we had previously huddled with the compass and the maps, we better understood where we were, where we had been and had a better understanding of how all of the trails intertwined with each other.

The biggest lesson I learned from this hike is to listen to that little inner voice.  When I was confused about the map and the write up, I definitely should have studied both more. Maybe we wouldn't have struggled as much with determining where we were throughout the hike. In our defense, some of the paths were not clearly marked and it was at times difficult to tell where we were.

Thanks to Cheryl, Morgan and Ryan for coming along, keeping me entertained, and being such troopers through all of the confusion! It was certainly a great accomplishment for the weekend!