Saturday, September 08, 2007
Hikin’ w/ Buddies
Hiked the entire 8.5 miles from the Kentucky Falls trailhead south to the North Fork Smith River trailhead with buddies from church.
Chuck, Greg, Brian, Juan and I took in breakfast in Reedport to get carb’d up for the trek ahead. I dropped off my pickup at the North Fork Smith River trailhead and we headed to the Kentucky Falls trailhead. First, however, since we were introducing geocaching to Brian we made a short side trip to hunt a couple of nearby caches - Peace of Oregon and This Roman Knows.
Got geared up and started down the trail at 10:40am. Couldn’t have asked for better weather - sunny with a warm fall breeze.
At mile 2.0 we stopped to take in Lower Kentucky Falls and hunted the geocache hiding there. Moving along down the trail to a new geocache (A Giant Amongst Us) we dropped down to the upper reaches of the North Fork of the Smith River.
Now to this point my “promise” that the trail would be ALL DOWNHILL was holding true. It quickly became apparent, however, that the trail had a fair amount of up and down sections even though it was going downstream. They were giving us quite a workout. Each time we came to an uphill section one of the guys would chime in with a light-hearted “Good thing this trail is ALL DOWNHILL”.
Finally arrived at the third and final geocache on the trail (Too Too Tunies) and were looking forward to the trails end. Chuck and I were nursing our aching knees at this point and lagging behind the others a bit. They were gracious and stopped occasionally to let us catch up. Woohool, two more miles to the end of the trail!
Arrived at the trailhead at 3pm giving us a little over four hour trek. Chuck and I hopped (ok, it was more like a “plop”) into my pickup and we went back to get his vehicle while the others hung out at the trailhead until we got back. After picking up one last little micro cache right along side the road we headed home including a stop at Dairy Queen for milkshakes.
It seemed like everybody had a real enjoyable day. Some geocaches found - a good workout - getting to know some of the men in our church a little better. It doesn’t get any better than this! Well, it does but we’d have to die and go to heaven for that so this was a good second best!