Upper Buffalo Wilderness, Kapark Access 4-3-2009
I managed to sneak away again, this time for a one-nighter. I had some online assignments to do that didn't open until 5:00pm on Friday, so by the time I got to the Kapark access it was about midnight. I went ahead on Friday night so that I could spend the whole day Saturday hiking around. On Cave Mountain Road, which is the very neglected gravel road up to the access, I saw something I probably wouldn't have in the daytime: elk.
I know it looks kind of like a deer in this picture, but these guys were HUGE! There were four of them, but this is the only decent picture I got. He's a lot farther back from the fence that what it looks like.
There are two "maintained trails" in this area, but I think the Forest Service has a different definition of "maintained" than me. I found a couple of game trails in better shape. Overall, it isn't very important though, because the trails don't really go anywhere... all of the "sights" in this area are way off of the trail and you have to bushwhack to get to them. I headed off on one of them to find a place to bed down for the night. It was about 1:30am, so I didn't want to go very far. I turned a corner and BAM! Right in my path sat a black bear. Literally, he was sitting on his butt. I couldn't back away since the underbrush was so thick and I didn't want to turn my back on him, so I just stood there and made a lot of noise and flashed my light at him until he decided to amble off. I got a picture, but it's not very good. The flash on my camera was turned off, and I wasn't as worriedd about getting a picture as parting ways with him. You can make out the two eyes right in the middle of the picture.
The next morning I got started fairly early. The trail started down at the end of an old road bed. Once it got into the woods, it was either completely blocked or underwater almost the entire way.
It looks like things are starting to bud out in some of these pictures. The reality is that only the mayapples and the thorns were blooming. If it's green in these pictures, it probably has thorns.
After wading through mud and thorns, even this was welcome:
Further down the trail, I started to hit some little drainages that weren't even marked on my topo map. There were some fiddleheads coming up here, in addition to all the thorns.
I had found an area on my topo map where I was pretty sure there would be a waterfall, so I broke off of the trail after a couple of miles and started to bushwhack toward it. There was a scenery change just a little ways off the trail... all of the sudden I was in a mini cedar forest. This area was VERY thick, but I managed to work through it with only a few scratches. My sleeping pad was tied to the bottom of my pack and came out a little worse for wear, but other than that no problems.
About 50 feet into the cedar stand, I started seeing these odd piles of rocks that didn't look natural. There were quite a few of them. This might have been some sort of cool natural process, but from the looks and the number of them I got the impression that these were graves. It was hard to get good pictures of them because of all the branches, and in these pictures they look a bit more natural than they did in person.
After I had been squeezing through the cedar stand for what seemed like an eternity, I came to a very sharp drop off. My map says that was about 60 feet.
I was kind of disappointed, because I wanted to get down to the creek and it looked like there wasn't any way for me to do that without rappelling gear. I'm sure if I had hiked downstream along the edge of the bluff I would have eventually found a way down, but since I was operating with a limited amount of time I decided to stay above. I did find a few little waterfalls going over the bluff I was standing on.
I was pretty sure that the big creek had a falls in it somewhere around here, so I hiked upstream along the bluff and eventually found it.
I hung around the falls and had lunch, then headed upstream on the creek a ways to see if there were any other falls. I didn't make it very far before the bushwhacking got tough and I had to turn around.
Hiking back up to the trail wasn't easy, and finding the trail itself was even harder, especially since I was hiking up to it at a different place than where I broke off earlier. Much head-scratching and map-consulting ensued.
Ironically, I finally found the trail by looking in the most trashed-looking and thorn-covered area I could find.
On the way out, I stopped and took a picture near the area where I spotted the elk on the way in.
