Fall Creek Falls

Lora and I did some exploring today. Back in October while hiking the Paw paw trail we came across a guy working on clearing trees. He told us that they were clearing the Upper and Lower loop trails and hoped to have it open by December. 

We found the new trailhead for the Lower loop trail across from the old school house. It is blazed but not signed. It goes to the Paw paw trail and is signed to head North where it is signed again, but a closed sign is still there. Lots of trees down in that area. Going back to the School house we found a red blazed trail out back and took it. It connects to the old Upper Loop trail and it is cleared. We hiked it to the Rockhouse Creek where the bridge is out. It is laying just down stream. We are assuming that the trail is most likely cleared all the way through, but we will have do some more investigating. 

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Lower Loop / Piney Mt. Bike Trail

Lower Loop trail: 6 miles
Lower Loop trail: 0.2
Piney Mt. Bike Trail: 3.7

Lora and I headed out to Fall Creek Falls State Park for an overnighter.  We started at the maintenance building and took the Lower Loop Trail.  It was a wet morning and still sprinkling.  We stopped at campsite 1 for lunch and then shortly afterwards met some backpackers from Nashville. The three of them had been hiking together all of there lives.  They were out for a two nighter.  We visited them for a while and they said that there next trail was going to be the Cumberland trail.  We told them how much we liked the trail and some of the work we have done on it.

After visiting, we headed down into the gulf which is rather slick in the damp weather.  There were lots of flowers starting to come up and some blooms.  We hiked up to campsite 2, scared off some deer and set up for the night. We listened to two different Gobblers talking while we gathered wood.

We got a warm fire going and enjoyed the evening around it.  We heard owls in the evening and the fog came and went.

The next morning we took the Piney Mt. bike trail down to group camp 2.  Neither of us had been on this trail.  It's an old roadbed through the woods.  We saw deer, turkey, and found eggs in the mud puddles and in a pond next to the trail.  We figured frogs and salamanders. There was two piles of eggs on the land next to the pong as well.

When we got to Group campsite 2, we found they had made a swimming pool out of the river. It had a diving board and everything.  Pretty cool!

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