Into the Wilderness We Go

Since my last Blog post detailed my escapades in the wilderness of Canada, I decided that this post would be about more outdoor adventures a little closer to home. Unfortunately, these adventures were not nearly as pleasant.

It was decided that, for a nice family day, we would go hiking at the state forest. The ride to the state forest wasn’t supposed to be very long. Some highway, back roads, and in a half hour we would be there, right? Wrong. It turns out, there are basically no roads that point the wary traveler in the right direction. There are, however, many farms. The farms thing kinda of makes it seem as if you are driving around the middle of nowhere. 

Finally, forty-five minutes after we should have reached our intended destination, we drove into the parking lot of the state forest. Even though the sky was overcast and kept threatening a downpour, optimistic families were cooking out and throwing horseshoes at each other, pretending that it was still summer and the concept of school was nonexistent. I wanted very badly to join them.

Since we arrived at the park late, we were of course starving. It was decided we would leave the park to find some sustenance, crossing our fingers we’d we able to find our way back. We figured the hike wouldn’t take us any longer than two hours, so we grabbed protein bars and made our way back to the start of an easy trail.

The trail turned out to be a little too easy, surprising since we are not very experienced hikers, so we decided to turn around and do the trail again. This seemed like a good idea, and it probably was. The problem came about when we decided to take a detour through a more difficult section, figuring it would link back to the easier trail soon enough and lead us back to some form of civilization.

The detour was not, in fact, a detour. We hiked and hiked up hills that were lined with loose rocks and black masses that looked from a distance to be black bears. Luckily they were not bears, but the threat of such an animal kept us on our toes. We ran out of water after only an hour, and soon we were all dripping with grimy sweat and wondering when we would get out of the humid forest.

Two hours later, we came across the first signpost. The post finally named the trail we were on, and it wasn’t until then that we realized the trail we were following was not the orange trail we assumed it to be, but actually a red trail. Red and orange paint look very similar when painted on rotting trees, so our mistake is understandable. However, the endpoint of the red trail did not meet up with the easier trail we had been on previously. Instead, the end point would drop us off on a main road 2.5 miles from where our car was parked. I pinched myself to make sure this wasn’t a bad dream.

We continued ahead, and when we made it to the road we trudged along hoping that some kind soul would take pity on us and drive us to our car. No such thing happened. We walked for another hour, blisters becoming larger and stomachs that were filled with remnants of a protein bar started to growl. We were dirty, sweaty, and probably looked like we had crawled out of a grave.

The story does have a happy ending. We reached the car, found more water in the cooler, and bought ice cream. We also learned that maybe hiking in an unknown place isn’t in the best of our interests.