Posts tagged hiking

Back of the Gorge

Owwwwwww. I’m extremely sore today. As in…I’m limping around the apartment and planning my day out so that I take the fewest number of trips up and down stairs as possible. Yesterday was the family reunion for my mom’s side of the family up at Whetstone Gulf state park and I had a really fun time.

After many changes of plans, we decided that I would head up really early to pick up my Mom so that we could go hiking in the morning around the rim of the gorge, about a 5 mile trail filled with lots of hills and a near constant cliff face off to one side. I planned on waking up at 5:30 so I could get ready to go, but I ended up gettig up just before 5 at which point I decided was close enough. So I got up and got ready and headed out to pick up my mom.

We arrived at Whetstone around 8ish and pulled into my aunt Stacy and Uncle Mike’s campsite. The family was occupying 3 campsites right next to each other, my uncle Dan and his (large) family in one and my Aunt Bette and her family in another one.

Walking Stick

We tried to get my uncle to walk the gorge trail with us, but he just laughed. More trail for us then! There’s two ways you can start the trail, the north side and the south side. The north side of the trail has a much steeper climb starting out, but it’s a lot shorter as far as sustained climbing goes. The south side contains the lookout tower and has a much longer, gradual climb to it. My mom decided that we’d start out on the north side because it had one big hill but then “was level”. HAH! It was true that it was level…for a while. We managed to get up the incline and started walking on a more level trail. My mom picked up a walking stick at this point.

Trust me...it's a hill.

The walking stick turned out to be a pretty good idea because no sooner had we rounded the next corner then we were brought face to face with a climb even steeper than the one we had just walked up. At points I was crawling up on my hands and knees. It was decided that we should find a walking stick for me at this point as well. After that there was a lot of flat walking. Except there wasn’t. Lots of hills! We brought along a couple bottles of water and some peanuts to much on, but we probably should have brought a couple more bottles of water looking back on it. We had to conserve a bit on the trip.

The Creek From Above

There’s some really neat scenery up on the gorge trail, and I don’t have room to put all the pictures here, so you should check my flickr account for more details. A bunch of the other family members were walking up the gorge floor and at one point, we think we hard them yelling out for us. We yelled back, but I don’t think anybody heard us.

We had fun for about 75% of the trip, but it stopped being fun the quarter…It was just a little too long. We were debating on if we wanted to hit the lookout point or not and we eventually decided to just go for it since we came all that way.

Lookout Tower

The lookout tower was located at the end of a very large dip in the trail, along with another big hill to climb, but we struggled up to get there anyway. The view was pretty nice, but I was hoping for more of a look down into the gorge. e did see some cool views of the surrounding country side though. We ate the rest of our food and headed back to start the trip down. That trip took the longer than expected. Going down really kills your knees, especially after having walked that long. to begin with.

The entire trip took us about 4 hours total to do. Not sure if I’ll be doing that again entirely, but I think it could be fun to do bits and pieces of it.

By the time we got back to the campsite, it was lunchtime and the rest of the family had pretty much arrived. Some grilled hot dogs and macaroni salad were on the menu. We were waiting for the group who were walking up the creek to return and for my grandparents to get there, but when the creek walkers came back we discovered that one of the kids had taken a pretty hard fall. After looking at it, they decided to take him to the nearest hospital’s ER to get it looked at. My grandparents waited to hear word from them before coming, so there was some downtime while we waited.

Dog Scooter

A group of us decided to cool off by heading to the swimming area and taking a short dip. The water was freaking cold, as per usual although I forgot exactly how cold it was since I had last gone there. It was a refreshing little swim, first time I had gone swimming in quite a while. Eventually, my grandparents arrived and we headed back to the campsites. It was one of my younger cousins birthdays so we had a little birthday party thing for him with everyone there.

My dad brought the dog up when he came around Noon and after a lot of running around, the dog got quickly tired out and spent the remainder of the day laying in my dad’s lap. Or, as the picture shows, getting driven around on a scooter.

Cooking Sweet Corn

One neat thing that should be mentioned is that my uncle Mike had a binder filled with handwritten pages. Apparently, my family has been having get-togethers at Whetsone Gulf since the 1930s. They had taken meeting minutes, with all the information like who was there at the reunion, who traveled the farthest, births and weddings during the year. It was really neat reading back through that stuff. Of course, we made an entry for the current gathering listing everybody who was there and everything.

The cousin who fell had returned with his arm in a sling just before dinner. It had gotten broken, but not terribly badly. Dinner went along well, with the traditional burgers, hot dogs and more macaroni salad. There was also some shrimp-kabobs that were grilled up by one of my uncles. Not to mention 40 ears of sweet corn (one of my cousins (Adam) decided that he wanted to have his with ketchup). All and all, a very good camping type dinner.

I stayed until around 9:00, eating peanuts by the fire and listening to my uncle and one of my cousins play banjo/guitar together. At one point a group of people pulled into the camp site next to us and we started taking bets on how long it would be before they decided that they wanted a different site.

I had a lot of fun and I probably left a lot of stuff out since so much happened. I’m hoping we do this again next year. It was cool heading up to the old campgrounds again with my family and just sitting around the camp fire hanging out and talking. Of course, like I mentioned, I can’t move now. But…it was entirely worth it.

Campfire At Night