A few weeks back, I was responding to questions on our trail assessments and one of the questions was "Do you find it harder going up or going down? and Why?" My response was "Duh, of course going up is harder." After last week's hike, I wanted to change my response and say that going down is just as hard if not harder.
We hiked the Coosa Backcountry trail near Blairsville, GA. The trail was 12.5 miles and it was absolutely beautiful. The trail starts at the Vogel State Park and loops through the Chattahoochee national Forest. It has two peaks namely Coosa Bald and Slaughter Mountain. The group was rather small. Light rain was forecast and that might have kept some indoors. It was raining on and off all day. We started the hike at about 9:30AM. A smaller group of 4 chose to hike the shorter Bear Hair trail. We chose to do the trail in the counter-clockwise direction.
The trail was pretty easy to start with... a lot of flat and gradual climbs giving us plenty of time to warm up. Once, the climb to Coosa Bald started, it was relentless. About a quarter of the way in, one person "bonked" and had to be escorted back to the visitor center. About a third of the way in, one of the mentors fell and broke her wrist and started back along with one more person who had had enough.
The others trudged up Coosa Bald. Half way up Sandy and John figured that the elevation profile provided on the map was inverted and while it had the clockwise profile going left to right, it actually mentioned that it was the profile for our counter-clockwise hike. After that was cleared up, we were able to pace the rest of the hike. We climbed Coosa bald and descended to Wolf Pen gap where we stopped for lunch. The descent was the first indication of how hard this trail was going down. It was steep and rocky and quite slippery at places. Highway 180 crossed the trail at Wolf Pen gap and was the bail-out point if someone wanted to before climbing Slaughter mountain.
The half-hour rest was sorely needed. We started back on the trail and it felt like we had not had any break at all. As we started the hike, the camera refused to fire and needed a hard reboot (remove the battery and pop it back in). Given that and the constant drizzle, it had remained inside the backpack most of the time allowing me to stay at the head of our little group. After lunch though, I just had to get it out since there were some pretty cool features that I couldn't just walk by. Rita Grayson pointed out Pink Lady's Slipper - Cypripedium acaule of which I didn't know anything about until just earlier that morning when these plants were discussed on a garden show on radio. I thought it was pretty cool. Flame Azaleas and Large-flowered Trilliums were in bloom as well.
The hike down from Slaughter Mountain was long, steep and the hardest yet. My legs were literally burning and I had to stop to rest a couple of times! My legs were still sore on Monday morning. By the time we hit the last couple of miles of the trail, the rain had stopped and most of the hike was along the side of a stream. This included a couple of stream crossings over rocks, etc.. which provided some good photo ops.
We got to the trail-head at about 5PM. We had completed the trail in a time of 7 hours and 34 minutes. The trail lived up to the "Back-country" label. The trail was narrow and one person could barely fit in in many places. It was identified with yellow blazes throughout. At all the other trails, you could see that someone with a chain-saw had neatly cleared a path through fallen trees. Here, we simply had to climb over and walk around or under fallen trees. There were not too many hikers. We only saw two other hikers on the entire trail.
Some of us drove to Dahlonega and had dinner at Wylie's. It was "eighth grade dance night" and it looked like everyone in the square and the restaurant were dressed up. Everyone except us that is. The restaurant didn't throw us out and the food was pretty good.
I guess the one thing that will be definitely be harder than the climb down from Slaughter mountain is the climb up to Slaughter Mountain on the clockwise direction... When you hike the trail in the clockwise direction, you hit the climb without much of a warm-up. Knowing our fearless hike captain Sandy, I am sure that is exactly what we will be doing when we head back to Coosa on 5/20.
According to the state park, this trail is rated "strenuous" and they expect the average hiker to complete this in 9 hours.. although they strongly recommend doing the hike over two days. They had us all register at the visitor center and gave us enough warnings. At the fork where the Bear Hair Trail and Coosa Trails split, they had a sign that said "More than a days hike".
Pictures from Coosa are here.
Fund Raising Update:
As of today, We have only $30 to go. Thank You all. If you have been planning to but just haven't gotten around to doing it, I would greatly appreciate if you could do it now. Your donation is needed. I will be finalizing the paperwork, etc on 5/23. Can you believe that I have only 3 more hikes to go before the big one?
If I were President:
Ok, this has nothing to do with the hike, but I just had to share it... maybe you will get a chuckle out of it like I did. Ashley recently worked on a project about US presidents. One of the things she had to do was write a paragraph about what she would do if she were President. Here is her manifesto..
"If I were President, there won't be taxes. Also, there will only be two days of school. Monday is recess all day. Tuesday is water-squirting day. There will be a school pool. For dinner, people will have lollipops. I will live in Kansas. I will let animals run out of the zoo. People can jump on sofas."
