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| On February 7, 2009, Troop 521
travelled to the South Cumberland Recreation Area to hike the Fiery
Gizzard Trail. Although it's only 4.5 miles to the Raven Point
campground, it is a challenging trail often involving scrambling
over rocks and along narrow sections above the Little Fiery Gizzard
creek. |
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I think we managed to find the two best hiking
days in February for this trek. We reached the trail head at
11:00 on Saturday morning and stopped to visit Sycamore Falls on the
early part of the trail. It was sunny and the temperature was
in the 60s. A week earlier it was freezing cold and snowing.
The solids walls of icicles hanging from the rocks was a reminder of
what we'd missed. We saw several pretty cool collapses of ice
chunks reported by some of the Scouts to be as big as cars.
Fortunately they were on the other side of the creek! |
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After stopping off at several additional scenic
side-trails, we reached the campgrounds at Raven Point by around
3:30 and, with and hour and a half of daylight remaining, set up our
tents and got gear squared away. Then it was time for the most
important task of the evening, fixing supper. When you're
really hungry, the 3 minutes it takes to boil water for a
freeze-dried meal seems like an hour. The 9 minutes it takes
for the meal to be ready is an eternity. The result may not be
gourmet food but there aren't too many leftovers. |
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| Believe it or not, everyone was in
their tents for the night by 6:00. We were up at 6:30 the next
morning, fixed our breakfast, and broke camp. The guys took
the 1 mile round trip out to Raven Point to have a look around and
then it was time to head back to the parking lot. Some of us
were convinced that they'd added at least 10 miles to the same 4.5
mile trail that we'd taken coming in. You'd be surprised just
how good a parking lot looks when it's at the end of a trail.
We stopped for lunch on the way home and arrived only 15 minutes
ahead of schedule. Just as an observation, it was really nice to
meet a fellow hiker on the trail who introduced himself as an Eagle
Scout. He critiqued the guys and complemented them on how good
they looked on the trail. He recognized them immediately as
Scouts. Happy Trails! |
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