Trip Report: Overnight Hike along Thompson Creek
Sipsey Wilderness Area, Bankhead National Forest
October 6/7, 2016
Thomas and I took the dog for an overnight hike in the Sipsey Wilderness.
The hike started off well enough. Maizy was on her first ever backpacking expedition, and at first was timid and unsure. After about half a mile, though, she was hiking like she'd been doing it all her life, and loving it.
We parked at the Thompson Creek trailhead on the northwestern side of the Sipsey Wilderness. We crossed the creek on the old bridge. Well, we crossed the dry creek bed. It had been pretty dry in September when we were there hunting feral hogs, and a month of drought had left it even drier, if possible. After crossing the creek and passing the sign board, we found a way down to the creek bed and began following it north.
After some time of cris-crossing the dry creek, we happened to notice that we were following a fairly well-defined but unmarked trail. We followed it the rest of the day as it crossed and re-crossed the creek, into and out of the wilderness area. We stopped for lunch at The Narrows, a place where the bluffs move close together and rise higher than seemingly anything else in the forest.
The going was hard because the stream crossings were all rocky, and the rocks were unstable. I slipped and fell several times when a rock would move under my foot. It was exhausting.
At some point in the early afternoon, we came to a place where our trail split. I'd been watching for a split, but I was not sure if this was the right one. But we decided to take it anyway, reasoning that eventually we'd happen across the old logging road we'd been wanting. We followed it as it gently climbed the ridge until we reached a place we'd traversed last month while pig hunting. We'd found the right one!
We camped near, but not too near, the old Gum Pond Cemetery. Maizy was so full of energy that she wanted to play fetch, while Thomas and I could barely find the energy to eat supper. We went to bed early, long before the sun set.
Maybe it was my fatigue, and maybe it was being away from the family for the first time in a while, but I was pretty homesick. I don't remember being that upset. I felt bad for Thomas, because here I was wanting to go home already, and it wasn't even really bedtime.
We slept okay. I kept Maizy in the hammock with me, on my chest. This meant that, first, her elbows kept digging into me right as I'd drift off to sleep, and second her growling at every skittery, crunchy noise kept me awake, and third, I couldn't sleep on my side. But it worked out okay and we both got some sleep. I didn't take a sleeping bag, but had my Army poncho liner, and was snug in the mild overnight temperature.
The next morning we got up, packed up, and hit the trail. We discussed going to the big tree, as we had never actually made it there, but we were dangerously short on water and right about then a large chunk of the sole of my left shoe came off. We had hiked around to the Brazeal trailhead (mis-named, in my opinion -- it's next to Gum Pond, so why isn't it named Gum Pond? Makes no sense to me.) and were headed down the large horse trail that had once been the main eastern boundary for the wilderness area. We made the turn onto 208 and headed down the ridge back to the Thompson Creek trailhead and thus the truck.
It was a great outing, and we will definitely do the loop again sometime, preferably in dry conditions because of all the creek crossings. It would have been best if I had thought to stash water at the cemetery. It would also have been helpful if I had remembered to buy a filter cartridge for my water filter -- there were stagnant pools of water in the creek bed, but it was obvious that wild pigs and other disease-carrying critters had been using them.
