Sunday March 2 2025 -Tennessee road trip day 4 - Nathan Bedford Forest State Park near Camden TN - 1 hike, 6.9 miles and 710 feet elevation gain

We joined our friend John for breakfast at Cracker Barrel in Dickson TN.  Then we headed to Montgomery Bell State Park which is very near there.  I had never entered the park from the south end before and was surprised how long the road going through the park is.  We parked kind of randomly at one of the trail crossings and headed out.  Like home, it's still winter here and there are almost no leaves on the trees. The temperature was a brisk 37 and didn't go up more than a few degrees over the course of our long walk.

The trail system at Montgomery Bell has changed over the years and the parts we walked on this trip didn't seem familiar at all.  The best aspects of the hike were the water features which included a few streams and at least 2 large ponds.  At one point we ended up in a group camping area and the trail was close but at the bottom of a substantial knob.  We worked our way down the hill gradually but then realized there was a stream between us and the 'Spillway trail'.  We tried for about 20 minutes to find a spot along the creek where there were enough well placed rocks or a narrow enough spot to jump it or whatever.  We tried moving downed tree to help the crossing and finally we went to a spot where the rocks on the bottom of the creek were mostly big flat rocks and I took my shoes off to try going across on foot.  Surprisingly, the creek wasn't agonizingly cold but those big flat rocks were like black ice in terms of traction.  I took a few timid steps and then decided the chances of all 3 of us getting across without taking a spill were very low.  We walked back up a different steep hill and carried on as we should have originally but it gave us a lot of laughs.










 

After the hike, we parted ways with John until Tuesday when we'll have dinner with him at Rafferty's in Nashville.  We weren't very picky because we were quite hungry and Marco's pizza was one of the first places we drove by from the park so we ate there.  I'd never tried Marco's before and it was ok but nothing we need to rush back to.

Back at the cabin, I sat outside in the cold with a hoodie, watched the sunset and enjoyed a beer from the glider bench on the back porch of the cabin.  Including some other pics of our cabin which has been a lovely still and silent get-away.

 




and a video tour...


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 27, 2024 - Canadian Cruise Vacation Day 8 - Bar Harbor, Maine

Image
Bar Harbor was a gorgeous place to drop anchor.  And since it was the only port that was too small for us to directly dock at, we literally did drop anchor there. Unfortunately, the health issues continue to plague our group and I was the only one well enough to go on shore.  I enjoyed the shuttle trips both ways.  It’s really weird to walk from a very large boat to a relatively small one while neither is anywhere near a dock.  The trip TO Bar Harbor I was on a contracted dinner cruise type boat (good sized) but on the way back to the ship I was on one of our ship’s own tenders which are really fancy lifeboats but somewhat better equipped.  For lunch I ate at West Street Cafe and had a spicy chicken sandwich and coleslaw.  Though there are a few deep fried items on the ship, they seem few and far between so it hit the spot as did the blueberry mule.   Other than the trips to and from and the lunch, Bar Harbor wasn’t my favorite.  Far more than an...
Read more

Sunday March 24th - Saturday March 30th 2024 - Work trip to Las Vegas - many miles of walking but no ‘walks’

Image
What a week this has been.  At work I’ve been one of the more vocal team members advocating for a cautious and measured journey into the cloud hosted future.  For over a year it has been a rollercoaster of hearing that we were probably going to do a huge forklift style cloud migration then a few weeks later hearing we’d just stay at our current awful managed provider and then a few weeks later that we would probably buy and host our own server farm.  This decision cycle repeated a number of times and I did my best to be as  blasé  as I could be about it since it seemed like the process would go on forever. Then, with surprising rapidity, the decision was made and a lot of money spent buying our own equipment which we are going to operate out of a Las Vegas based datacenter that the West coast half of the pre-merger company has been using for a few years. This week was the week when the parts finally all shipped (there were a lot of delays from HP) and the trip t...
Read more

Sunday February 4th 2024 - Oak Rim/Power Pole/Explorer trails - Tug Hill state forest area near Rodman NY - 3 miles, just 223 feet elevation gain

Image
Link to our hike plot on Alltrails . Yesterday's hike was from ' 50 Hikes in Western NY ', the origin for this hike was the similar and often similarly challenging to follow ' 50 Hikes in Central NY ' book.  The book wrote up a whole series of different trails in the Tug Hill region as though it was a 2 day backpacking trip.  It is certainly possible to dissect those 2 day plans and work out the individual components but he absolutely doesn't make it easy since he doesn't really call out the breaks between the different trails.  Thankfully, Alltrails had a number of them plotted individually which is more useful for a day trip.  I thought Tug Hill was relatively close to home so I was kind of surprised when it came up at over a 2 hour long drive but we had time so we stuck with it.  The Tug hill region is pretty interesting.  It's a HUGE area (bigger than our 2 smallest US states) and very rural and known for heavy snowfall. Since this hike was  alm...
Read more