Measuring Trails

I got a call a couple of weeks ago from Tony Hook, the man in charge of building the Cumberland Trail from Kentucky to Georgia. Approximately 170 miles of the proposed 300 mile trail are already complete.

Tony asked if I would hike about 18 miles of newly completed trail to map it with my GPS. I had done this for the Black Mountain segment of the trail and volunteered to do it for other sections. Gary Ruetenik eagerly agreed to hike with me.

We headed for Stony Fork Tennessee on Sunday afternoon for 2 days of hiking on Monday and Tuesday. It is only about 70 miles to Stony Fork but it takes about 2 hours because of the very curvy road. Volunteers and a few paid workers had been working on the trail in that area since early spring. They were in the final stages of adding signage and blazing the trees along the entire section with a white mark to make the trail easy to follow. All the was needed was a GPS track of the trail on a topographical map and an exact measurement of the trail. My GPS provided the map as we hiked and we pushed a measurement wheel to get the exact distance.

The trail is far from level as it crossed a couple of mountains and several streams. Uphill you are gasping for air and downhill your knees are screaming for a rest. But the trail is beautiful. We had some great mountain top vistas and traveled through hemlock and hardwood forests, grain fields and river bottoms. The GPS part is easy...it just travels on my pack strap and electronically does its thing by satellite. The wheel requires a little more effort. It has to be pushed every inch of the way. We took turns pushing the wheel but Gary did most of it.

Early on the first day I came within 12 inches of stepping on a skunk. Gary must have walked right past him and when I almost stepped on him I jumped about 6 feet off the trail. Mr. Skunk had some devious thoughts as he balanced on his front legs to get ready to defend himself chemically, but he took pity on me and moved on down the trail without incident. The picture that I snapped is understandably a little out of focus.

About half way through the first day we began to hear some distant thunder. Before long we were in the middle of a tremendous downpour with lightning crashing all around . It lasted almost an hour and we had no place to find any shelter....we just kept hiking through it, since we really had no other choice. But we survived and it was kind of fun once we realized that we didn't get zapped. A few miles away hail shredded leaves all over the road. It looked like someone weedeated the trees. Lucky for us we only had rain.

We hiked 11.54 miles the first day and 5.84 the second. We are used to hiking 5 or 6 miles but the 11+ was a challenge, especially with the unplanned shower. The GPS told us that we averaged 2.5 miles per hour while moving and 1.7 overall including stops for pictures and water.

We met Tony at the end of the trail and downloaded my GPS information onto his laptop and turned in the wheel measurements.

We had good fun, good food and slept well for a couple of nights as we recovered from the outdoor exercise.