The Ozark Trail

Last weekend Scott and I finally broke out our camping gear for the first time this season.  We decided to tackle the highest point in Missouri, Taum Sauk Mountain, located south of St. Louis (that's on the eastern border of the state).  After much deliberation we also decided to take Chloe with us.  Maggie had to remain home due to a bum knee and a healing spider bite wound.  Taking Chloe would prove to be quite a challenge since we forgot her remote and had to keep her on a leash for the entire trip-something she is not trained on and does not like.

And here we are, 400 or so meters into our hike.  What marker is this you ask?  Why it's the highest point in Missouri!  A whopping 1,772 ft above sea level.  We actually camped on top of the mountain and almost missed this as we started our hike.  There was nowhere to go but down from here...

Amazing how determined this tree was to survive.  A disease caused it to make a ninety degree turn and reaching for the sun created another ninety degree turn towards the sky.  I love nature.

These fabulously clear pools were fairly frequent along our hiking route.  Chloe loved mucking around in them and the cool drinks!

Some of the rock formations were a bit tricky.  Thank goodness Chloe came on this trip with a handle-haha!

This is Mina Tauk Falls.  132 feet from top to bottom.  We were pleasantly surprised to find water flowing down the falls since we were informed that generally the falls were only active after rains.  

The bottom of the falls

Chloe was not too excited to have to be on a leash the whole time.  

This is the Devil's Tollgate, a break in the rock formation about 30 ft high and 50 ft long created from a break in the rock during a volcanic eruption.

This erosion was beautiful.  The layers under Scott and Chloe were very thin and water dripped down through the rock and hanging moss.

A very fat lizard we found upon arrival to our campsite.  By this point we had hiked 8.5 miles or so and were camping in the middle of the woods, miles away from anyone.  Great for us however Chloe was a hot mess with all of the sounds and smells around and her being on a leash.

Scott found this little guy crossing the stream

The wildflowers that colored our hike were just beautiful!

Sometimes the trail was a little difficult to find, crossing streams, rocks, switchbacks, whatever.  The Ozark Trail marker was the golden ticket that we were on the right track :)

Group shot :)

Awwww...too cute

All in all the trip was a success.  We covered approximately 13 miles over two days in gorgeous weather.  We definitely carried more than we needed (minimalist campers we are not-haha) but for the distance it wasn't too bad.  One final note, on our drive out to Taum Sauk mountain and home again we crossed the Missouri river 7 times.  One would think that it might have saved us some time if we had just taken a boat...or maybe not.

Michigan...the end of an epic summer vacation

Writing the blog entries to our summer trip has been on my to do list since, well, last summer.  I have been pretty hard on myself about not finishing it (I felt that I wouldn't be able to do the postings justice if I was so far removed from the trip), which would in turn dishearten me and make me not want to even open my blog up.  So here I am.  March 3rd (my gram's birthday by the way) and I am finally sitting down to finish our trip.  And I have to say, it has made my grey Sunday afternoon a whole lot brighter to think back at the awesome adventures Scott and I had in 2012.  So let me get to it...
After leaving Baxter State Park, we drove 4.5 hours to my brother's house in New Hampshire.  Scott had never been there and I just love it so it was great to finally arrive.  What wasn't so great was that, after almost 10 hours of hiking, we had sat in a vehicle which caused lactic acid build up in our legs.  Couple that with the delayed onset muscle soreness from that massive hike and you have two very sore people.  By the time I stepped out of the truck I could hardly walk.  Ugh.  Wait, it gets better.  The next day we had another 9 hours to get to our next destination, Niagara Falls.  I hadn't been there since I was a baby (I don't remember it but apparently the story is that I got bored and crawled out to the 13th floor balcony for some fresh air...my parents were not impressed from what I can gather), and wanted to stop since we were headed that way.  In addition, Scott had never been to Canada so he was jazzed to get another stamp in his passport.  We arrived after dark to the hotel and, after a heartbreaking mishap with my coveted bottle of maple syrup, we settled into our room.  We were there for 2 days and I can safely say that I do not ever need to go back, nor would I recommend the trip to anyone else.  The falls themselves were impressive but the city of Niagara was a tourist trap filled with more haunted houses than I had ever seen in one place.  It was dingy, run down, over priced, and crowded.  And I thought that I would forget the details...huh.
If you do decide to go, the Canada side is facing the falls so you have a better view, but on the New York side you can get closer to the falls and it looked infinitely less developed.  In any case, we hobbled around (day 2 was worse than day 1 for me) but spent most of our time relaxing in our hotel room (not impressive but it did have a jacuzzi built for two).  After two weeks of mostly camping, we were so glad to get out of that city and back into the country!
We headed into the Michigan peninsula and camped at Manistee National Forest.  We had the place to ourselves (or so we thought).  That first night we found out that the raccoons from the movie The Great Outdoors had come to greet us.  They got into everything that wasn't hid in the truck.  We had all of our food in rubbermaid containers but those buggers kept us up trying to get in.  They even ripped open our wine and dragged it out across the campsite!  Scott was determined not to lose another night's sleep so he bought a toy gun that shot foam discs and the next night as soon as they showed up, he sent a barrage of foam in their general  direction.  Thankfully they got the hint and left (or it could've been that we hid everything in the truck).

The only thing I wanted to do in Michigan was to spend time at The Lake.  I had been to the Chicago shore a year ago and was impressed at how blue it was.  We took a ferry out to South Maintou Island, in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.  There weren't any amenities on the island so groups came to camp.  We didn't have time to camp but we did spend the day hiking around the island.   It was really hot that day and I loved being on the sand.  Until we hiked the 4 miles to the top of the dune which stands 400 feet over Lake Michigan.  The view was beautiful but I wasn't loving the sand so much anymore...
The National Park Service writes that, "South Manitou Island was once the center of civilization and commerce in the Manitou Passage.  Settlement of this area of Michigan actually began on this little island primarily because of it's protected natural deep-water harbor.  The island was densely forested, so when steamers began to sail the Great Lakes, it's strategic location between Chicago and the Straits of Mackinac, made it the best place to take on firewood for their boilers."
We saw the old light house, the ship Fransisco Morazan-a Liberian freighter that ran aground in 1960, and the patch of old growth cedar forrest.  We ate our lunch and made our way back just in time for me to be able to jump into the water before the ferry took us back.  It was an absolutely beautiful day!  Our last night of camping was happily uneventful as we ate the last s'mores and enjoyed our last fire.  We would be heading to Chicago for our last vacation night.  Scott had booked us into a swank downtown hotel (we were both laughing as we pulled up to the valet, smelling of woodsmoke and citronella).

The ginormous cedar roots

Fransisco Morazon

I am now, and forever
will be a tree hugger

Still smiling on the sand dune

Baxter State Park and Mt. Katahdin

As I sit down to FINALLY write this posting, the whole trip seems a little surreal.  Like it was a dream.  A really challenging and awesome dream, but a dream nonetheless.  I feel so blessed to have been able to take such trips like this, and experience the United States in a natural and un-commercialized way.  It breaks my heart to know that most people in our country do not take the time to appreciate the natural beauty that surrounds us, that they have embraced only the material side of life.  This especially holds true for the children.  Their lack of exposure and appreciation for the natural world will surely be more damaging than we have even imagined.  Sigh.  Okay, I'll jump down off of my soap box and get to the good stuff.

Baxter State Park sits in the center of Maine and is the result of the work of Percival Proctor Baxter, the governor of Maine during the early 1920s.  Thankfully he had the foresight to protect this land by creating a state park.  The placard to the left very clearly demonstrates his feelings about humans and their short-sightedness.  

Mt. Katahdin is the highest point within Baxter and also the state of Maine at 5789 ft.  It is the northern terminus, or starting point for the Appalachian Trail.  For those of you unfamiliar, the Appalachian Trail is one of the longest continuously marked footpaths in the world.  It measures roughly 2,180 miles in length and stretches over 14 states, ending at Springer Mountain, Georgia.  Approximately 2.3 million people hike a portion of the trail each year.  We just wanted to get to the starting point.  

For the rest of this posting, I have posted captions under the photos.  I hope you enjoy the view :)

This was a moose track near our camp.  We sat out for almost an hour and watched a young moose make his way around the edge of the lake.  It was Scott's first moose encounter & although we didn't get any good pics of the moose itself,  we were finally able check that off of Scott's bucket list

Our first clear view of Katahdin from the trail.

Because we made our reservations so late (apparently March is late for a July trip), we had to camp 3 miles from the base of the mountain.  This photo is us just arriving at Chimney Pond, at the base of the mountain.

And so it begins...

Along the left side you can see the ridge known as the Knife's Edge.  The name is self-sufficient.  
We did not hike there.

Seriously, this is the trail.

A little lichen for our trip (the green stuff in the forefront).  This stuff was everywhere on the granite and since we experienced a torrential downpour halfway up (we hunkered down & covered what we could),
climbing from that point on was even slower.  

Scrambling over granite...this was what it was like the whole way.

The view was so worth the effort!

We made it!

I imagine this must be what the coast of Ireland looks like.  Scott's bit of wisdom as we gazed out,
"Nope, wouldn''t be able to get a tank up here."

Mt. Hamlin, the second highest peak and a stop on our way down.

At a rest point, Scott left his camera on a rock.  This was his shot of me once he retrieved it.  

This was supposed to be the easy way down.  Notice the very narrow edge in front of me.
No real trail, just a lot of careful scrambling.  This would prove to be brutal on our knees...

More climbing anyone?

We finally reached the tree line on the way down but the trail was an
old stream bed and no easy task to descend.

We broke camp and left at sunup (we were on the trail at 0600) and 9.5 hours later
we finally reached the parking lot of our camp.  13 miles round trip.
Now we just had to drive 3.5 hours to get to my brother's house for the night...

Acadia National Park

If there was ever a natural place that I would recommend to families as a vacation destination, Mount Desert Island, Maine would be it.  Historically, this area of Maine was originally inhabited by the Wabanaki Indians (loosely translated it means "People of the Dawn" due to the area being one of the first places in North America to seeing the rising sun).  Explorers Giovanni de Verrazano and Samuel Champlain were the first to arrive on the rumor that there was a city of gold (not true of course).  By the early 1600s the Europeans came and, doing what Europeans did best at that time, they pillaged the resources and brought their diseases in to ultimately cause the Indian population to drop off.  In 1688 a young French lawyer named Antoine Laumet was granted 100,000 acres along the Maine coast by the King of France (why he was able to just give that land away-no idea)  Upon arriving to his newly acquired domain, Laumet decided to fabricate himself a much more noble sounding name-"Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac".  He created a coat of arms to complement his name and arrived, ready to enter the fast track of social mobility.  However, after only one summer he headed west (things were a little too desolate for him) and founded Detroit, Michigan.  Today his fake coat of arms still graces the cars that bear his fake name.  There are only two places in the United States where real estate titles can be traced back to the King of France...Louisiana and Mount Desert Island.
During the 1800s when American cities were facing the growing pains associated with the Industrial Revolution, there was an overwhelming demand for landscape paintings.  People wanted to escape their reality for awhile I guess.  Some of the paintings that came out of this time period were of Mount Desert Island and soon the rich tourists were flocking out to the wilderness to experience the life in the paintings.  By 1896 there were 200 mansions in Bar Harbor, and the area was changed forever.  One of the most famous residents was Joseph Pulitzer, whose idiosyncrasies were legendary (he built a tower of silence to combat the noise of nature-and everything else for that matter).  By the turn of the century there was a group of private citizens who were dedicated to preserving the island for future generations.    Over time, with a lot of help and money, Layfayette National Park was created (the name reflected America's pro-French sentiment at the time).  The first superintendent of the park received a salary of $1.00 per year.  In 1929 Layfayette National Park became Acadia National Park ( the family that donated a large peninsula did so with the stipulation that the park name be changed to something "less French".  Ironically, Acadia is French).
What makes Acadia such a great place is the accessibility of all of its natural aspects.  There is a free shuttle system that travels around the island stopping at all of the major sights (it is operated and funded by L.L. Bean), only two campgrounds on the island that are beautifully maintained and surprisingly quiet (we stayed during 04JULY and it was pleasantly peaceful), plenty of places to explore to include 56 miles of carriage roads that are not accessible by car (only on foot, by bike or horseback), and breathtaking natural scenery everywhere you turn.  It is also possible, even at the height of the season, to be completely alone.  This is the part that Scott & I loved best.
Of course we came to hike.  So on the morning of 04JULY we headed out.  We planned to hike the Bee Hive trail (guidebook describes it as strenuous, short, steep, and sweet) however once we reached the end of the trail, we got even more ambitious and decided to tackle Champlain Mtn (1,058 ft).  The view was very cool because of the fog that had rolled in.  We were feeling good and so....we got a little more ambitious.  We headed west along the Ladder trail up to Dorr Mtn (1,270 ft).  This had required us to descend completely back to road level and then up again.  We were toast but we could see Cadillac Mountain (the highest point on the island) across the horizon and stubbornly decided that we would trek it.  And so we did.  We reached the summit of Cadillac Mtn (1,530 ft) at 3:45pm.  This is important to know because the last shuttle was scheduled to leave the mountain at 4pm.  We hit the gift shop and bathrooms then looked around for the shuttle.  Inconveniently the shuttle stop was at the bottom of the mountain (yes, you could actually drive to the top which is always a little disappointing when you have hiked all that way) almost 2 miles away.  Thoroughly exhausted but thankful for a cell signal, we tracked down a taxi service who came all the way up the mountain and took us back to our starting point (Sand Beach).  It was cloudy and misty on the 4th of July so we headed back to our campsite, made some food and crashed.  Thank goodness for that taxi driver!
We spent one of our other days there riding our bikes around on the carriage roads.  We found our way to Jordan Pond, where there is a fantastic restaurant serving world famous popovers.  However my favorite part of our dining experience was the lemonade.  They served it unsweetened but then brought a mini pitcher of sugar syrup so you could sweeten to your liking.  Well done!  There were tables spread all over the lawn and it was fun to watch the people coming and going.  We also were able to take our time wandering around checking out some of the beautiful architecture.  I just love stonework and there was plenty to go around!  All in all, our trip to Acadia was fabulous.  We also ventured into Bar Harbor one afternoon.  And although some of the stores were really cute, I truly felt that this touristy haven was my least favorite part of our trip.
 

At the top of Cadillac Mtn

We have mad camping skills!

And Scott has mad grillin' skills!