Buck Creek Adventure, Part One....

Hello everyone!! We have been really busy lately with back to school shopping, and mom??? Let me be the first to say that I don't know how the heck you did it with four girls. And I am sorry that I was such a snot from ages 11- 17. And why am I cursed...I mean blessed...with two mini me's???? Enough said there....

I am also in the midst of actually writing that paper-you know, the one that I have been doing research for all summer long???-and only have this week to finish it, so bear with me folks. I will try to make it out to every one's blogs, but I am not very hopeful.....In the mean time, I wanted to share a little story with you; one about our little adventure in the back/high country of Buck Creek-and the surrounding area. Did I just say adventure????I thought we were just going on a little, old, trail ride???? It started out innocent enough. Amber said that she heard/read/thought that the trail systems in Buck Creek were loops, and that some were around one hour long, some were around two-three hours long, and that there was one that took the rider waaaaaaaay up, looped around the top of a foothill, and then came back down-oh yeah, and that particular trail was supposed to be around four hours long.

I also knew that there was a trail that connected Buck Creek to another area known as Huckleberry Creek, which is about 12-15 minutes NW of Buck Creek on the highway...traveling 60 mph. This trail ends at a place called Suntop, which is an old fire lookout station, and is really nowhere near Buck Creek.

Are you guys beginning to see where I am going with this story yet?????We really lucked out weather-wise too, as it was misting and raining off and on the whole way up to Buck Creek. Once there however, the sun came out, and....I'll get to the rest later. The first part of the trail took us through a lovely old growth forest, and then into a clear cut that had some wicked, steep, switchbacks.

In fact, they were so steep that we got off the poor horses-remember they had been off for about two months-and led them up the hills. We would lead them about one mile and then ride them one mile....We had only been riding one hour, when we came around a corner, and could see the airstrip that we had parked the trailer. See that small horizontal gray patch near the middle of the picture below??? That is the airstrip.Here...I zoomed in on it for you. The silver blob in the middle of the the strip-it was actually behind the strip, not on it!-was one of the travel trailers that was down there. We were parked to the extreme left of the strip. You can just make out a whitish blob down there.....At the top of the clear cut, we came to a logging road, but the trail continued on the other side, so into the woods we went. Let me just say that I had a hunch the whole time that we were not going in a loop, but Amber kept insisting that we were, and that at any minute, we were going to go around a corner and start descending...uh huh...yeah right!!!!While most of our ride was out in the open, there where a few areas that we went through that were magnificent in their stillness. Some spots were so tree choked, that absolutely no light made it to the forest floor below. It was so very quiet in these woods-we called them "dead" woods-and there were big clouds of mist/fog that kept coming down from an unseen sky, and blowing through the trees.
They were beautiful in their desolation, and we rode in silence to take in their full effect.

We were now maybe two hours into our ride, and I began to get a bit antsy. I just kept thinking that if the loop-that we were supposedly on-was four hours in length, then we should be heading back down at any time, right??? Then why were we continuing to go up???

To be continued......