Savage Gulf and Snow
What a wonderful weekend!
I left Madisonville, heading toward Savage Gulf, around 10 am on Friday morning after finishing some errands that I needed to get done around town. By leaving that early I allowed myself ample time to bum around a number of camping stores for hours on end without having to listen to my wife ask me exactly how many hours we’re going to be walking around the same store.
The first place I went was Blue Ridge Mountain Sports. It was a fairly small store, but they seemed to have a lot of equipment there for hiking and backpacking. I ended up buying a Pack cover because it was raining at the time, and I knew it was supposed to rain or snow the rest of the weekend. Unfortunately I bought a cover for an external frame pack instead of the internal frame design that I have. I’m going to swap it out with dad so I can get one for my pack.
After there I went to Cumberland Transit. This is a large, two story store, with just about everything you could need for hiking, backpacking, climbing, mountain biking, and any other outdoor experiences you plan to tackle. I took almost an hour just walking around looking at everything they offered! I’d compare it to REI any day.
After these, I simply had to stop by REI. I found some awesome deals on clearanced equipment. Unfortunately, in my financially embarrassed state, I was only able to get a pair of nylon convertible pants, and boy am I glad I did! With the temperatures dropping into the teens on the trip, the cotton pants I had would have been miserable, and I probably would have come home with frostbite.
I was going to pick up a fellow hiker at the airport, but the weather delayed his flight, so it wasn’t until around 2:00 pm that I started heading to the campsite. I ended up getting to the campsite right when Wounded Knee, and Prosecutor pulled up from their trip to get their last caffeine fix for the weekend. We all found a campsite, and started unloading our gear and setting the tents up. I’m glad we got that finished fairly early because it wasn’t long after that the rain and sleet started falling steadily. The campfire kept us fairly warm when we could stand the rain long enough to huddle around it, but as the temperature dropped lower and lower into the 20’s, and with the wind blowing quite hard, the only thing to do was retreat to the tent and a hopefully warm sleeping bag.
See tomorrows blog for more on the trip to Savage Gulf!
