A weekend in the Great Outdoors

Indescribable. But I'll try to sum it up in a few paragraphs. My dad flew in Thursday nite, and Friday morning we headed out to Rock Pile Mountain Wilderness Area. Apparently it is Missouri's smallest wilderness area and does not get the use it deserves. To that end, we have declared it "our wilderness." For good reason: we went first in May, and this was our second trip; between the two, we have covered all the designated trails and a lot of other, less walkable areas.

Rock Pile Mountain was named for the "mysterious" ring ...continued of rocks atop it; we give a simple explanation that someone long ago, be they natives or early settlers, made a giant bonfire and the rock pile was their fire ring. It was designated a wilderness area in 1980, so it will remain untouched by developers forever (hopefully). As a wilderness area, we love it--miles from the nearest "city," we drove for a good chunk on gravel roads before we hiked in 5 miles to set up camp. By our estimates, the camp sites get used once a month at best, and the trail may get used by only a few hikers each week.

When we went as a family of four in May, it was gorgeous. We set up camp near a stream that runs into the Cave Branch of the St. Francis River; the stream provided us with water for drinking and washing dishes, and the waterfall just a bit downstream provided spectacular views while a small pool nearby was great for bathing. This time around my dad and I were surprised to see that the stream had all but dried up: only a few little spring-fed pools remained. I didn't realize it had been dry enough to dry up a whole stream! We even got a picture of us pretending to wash where the bath had been--I'll post the "before and after" when I get a chance.

Also while in the park we located a geocache that was hidden. Geocaching is a combination of a treasure hunt and a techie game, where the seeker uses a GPS receiver to find a "cache" that somebody hid and posted clues online. It gives a great excuse for our otherwise sedentary society to get off our collectively lazy asses and out into some nature. If you have the money to get a GPS or have a friend with one, I highly recommend trying out geocaching as a hobby.

While hiking around the trails we adhered moderately to "Leave No Trace" in that we did have to clear the trail of hundreds of spider webs in order to not disturb the surrounding foliage, but we left the site cleaner than how we found it. We did make use of a few plants that we found along the way, thanks to my dad's recent Amazon acquisition of Peterson's Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants. We made a cold beverage out of Sumac berries (of course not the poison variety), cooked up a few pads of cactus, and dug up a Sassafras root to make some tea. Had there been water present we were looking forward to fish with dinner, but had no luck there.

A few generalizations crossed my mind while out there. For one, silence is rare. We were miles from civilization: we couldn't hear a road from anywhere in the park and we only once heard an airplane, but the frogs and locusts and crickets were almost deafening at nite. It was marvelous! Second, it takes a few strong characteristics to enjoy backpacking. Not just anyone who enjoys camping can have fun going backpacking; it takes a love of solitude, an appreciation of nature, and a will to overcome boredom and pain at times, as well as a lack of aversion to dirt, body odor, and bugs. Third, nature is truly awesome in her beauty, balance, adaptivity, and organization. The complex ways in which different beings interact, in which chemical machines have evolved into organizations and ecosystems, in which form and color and texture and depth and sound and motion all come together to bring you into a world that a camera can't capture, is difficult to comprehend.

So here I sit, hours after we've returned to civilization. My dad marvelled that, while we were there, the world could have changed completely--an earthquake, an attack, an assassination, anything--and we would not have known. I was so lost in wilderness that I didn't have time to dread checking my email when I got home. Fourteen voice messages (thirteen of which were friends pulling the old "drunk dial") and somewhere around thirty email messages later, I sit here blogging, scratching my shins and ankles until they bleed, having sped thru a slideshow of the photos we took. Already it seems far away. But it's not, really. It just takes a separation of mind to get there.