MtDews
New member
To look at our hands and faces today, you’d think we’d been in a life and death struggle with a pack of wolverines! We’ve discovered that one of the rewards of bushwhacking is the character building that comes with working through the pain.
Yesterday, my wife and I jumped from rookie bushwhacking status on Morgan Mt. to summiting Blue Ridge Mt. (by Hoffman) at high noon. I downloaded a topo map from the internet and used Microsoft Paint to plot the route we’d take, following contour features that would be easily identified on the trek. The first leg was up a ridge that skirted a brook which took us all the way to the knob just north of the summit. We intended to skirt the knob and cut straight for the summit, but the density of the spruce trees got us off course and we ended up on the top of the knob. It was a tangled mess of freeze-dried blowdown that was the biggest challenge yet. Getting to the summit seemed easy after that! We stood in one small bare spot surrounded by chest deep spruces that had some great views of the high peaks.
Our return to the valley was the toughest part. We wanted to backtrack while avoiding the gnarly knob. We did a lot of lateral drifting trying to find the route we took up and ran into the worst blowdown, dense growth and rock walls of the trip. It was an experience that took us to school!
In my earlier posts, someone replied that “If we learned that much from Morgan, we’d get our Doctorate on Blue Ridge!” I’d like to say that we did, but the truth is we can only lay claim to a Baccalaureate. We had some help from our professor RTSpoons who loaded the map into his GPS and did the hike with us. This bagged another peak for him and moved my wife’s comfort level from “freaked out” all the way to “guarded confidence.” We owe Ron a lot for going with us! We can now look forward to un-trailed hiking with confidence here in the Dacks, once our skin grows back!
