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Sunday, September 5th 2004 I've camped at Caledonia State Park a bunch of times, but it's always been a base camp for the battlefields. Having made some last minute plans with Patty, we took one of the few camp sites left in the state . . . at Caledonia. Not wanting to do the same old routine, we decided to try the AT, which runs through the park. The hike started out with a bushwhack from our campsite, since the trail was only a couple hundred feet from there, but oddly, no exisiting paths led to it. What we forgot to do was to mark our entry point, but I had my GPS and didn't think anything of it. We headed north on the AT, figuring on making a loop hike using the Hosack Run Trail and a touch of road walking to get back to the AT. The trail started out fairly steeply, but after a 500 foot climb (or so) things got interesting. Near the top of the hill are some ruins of an old pump station that was used to pump water from a spring. The area near the spring is lush with life with an abundance of rhododenron tunnels. The real treat was our discovery of "Quarry Gap Shelter". I've seen a few AT shelters before, but none that I would have considered sleeping in. What a difference with this one! The maintainer of this shelter not only kept it immaculately clean, he has hanging flowers and a touch of landscaping. A bench and several tent pads are available as well. Continuing on the trail and crossing another small spring, the Hosack Run Trail took us down and around the other side of the hill . . . what a difference between these two trails . . . Hosack Run Trail is very wild, and reminded me of some sections of the Mid State Trail. While the AT is wide and well worn, Hosack Run was narrow and wended its way around a lot of stuff. I got a second wind through this area and started hiking my '6 MPH' pace, which was good, because the sun was coming down a bit faster that day than we planned. After hitting the road and a deer enclosure, some road walking past a stinky old swamp took us back to the AT. I got a bit confused at the section, but we found it without a problem. The AT seemed longer on the way back, and my legs were getting kind of weak. By the time we hit the section where we started our bushwhack, I was ready to sit down and relax. Finding the area back to the camp site wasn't too hard, and the GPS worked well, but once in the pine woods, I stuck to instinct rather than the compass and GPS, and naturally this took us much further down the hill than I wanted :-( After traipsing back up the hill a hundred yards or so, we got back to the camp, and I think Patty could ahve done the whole thing over again . . .I was sore for three more days! |
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