I'm Daniel Boon and you are Sheela Queen of the Sods.

I know I was going to talk about vacation, and I am still planning on it, really, truly, promise, cross my heart and hope to die. Since vacation I've had just a single weekend to stop, hold my breath, count 3 Mississippi before I found myself bouncing off to somewhere else. Last weekend found SG, myself and friends doing yet again another test of wills as we attempted to finish yet another Nazi death march into and back out of mother nature. Truthfully there weren't any Nazi's, we weren't actually marching anywhere, no one died and there was no frost bite. There was however rain, hours upon hours of hiking over uneven rocky and bog like terrain followed by tantrums, tears and curses.

I'm not a terrible backpacker, I'm just not the best backpacker either. I chalk it up to the fact that when you only do it two to three times a year you get a little rusty and don't ever really come up with a very good system or checklist. Sure I could do a checklist and I actually think I have one, it's just not a very good one. Because of this the week leading up to every backpacking trip I find myself scrambling around buying food, rebuying food that I forgot to buy, buying gear that I knew I needed because of some lesson learned on the previous trip but was too cheap and/or lazy to buy it ahead of time. By the end of the week I find myself sitting amongst a pile of gear in the basement cursing backpacking and myself for ever agreeing to take time off from work to punish myself. Here's a little not so well known fact about outdoor hobbies, it is all about buying/owning the right gear and gear is all about the maintenance and maintenance is all about maintaining or paying someone else to maintain it. So when you backpack you spend a week prepping for it and once you are done you spend a week cleaning and maintaining your gear for the next trip. It was much better when I used my friend S's gear, he'd clean it, he'd hang the tent up to air out and he'd make sure everything was working. Going backpacking with S was kind of like the equivalent of taking a vacation with a tour group, no stress no work no pain.

This trip we found ourselves going to a nature/wildlife preserve in West Virginia called Dolly Sods. Dolly Sods has a strange sort of status as it isn't a state or federal park and it isn't private land. There are no rangers, no trails marked with blazes (think giant drippy paint mark placed on the trunk's of trees), no trash cans, no defined camp sites, no trucked in water and no latrines. If you have to crap, God help you, grab your handy trowel go 100 feet away from the campsite (or until your fellow campers can't see your big white butt) and any water source dig a hole six inches deep squat, poop and cover. In theory if you follow the "leave no trace" credo then you are supposed to then take your *used* toilet paper and hike this stuff out with you. By the end of your time communing with Mother Nature you will have a nice stinky trash bag filled full of aromatic shit paper strapped down to your pack not twelve inches from your body. Sounds like fun doesn't it? If that wasn't great enough due to the rockiness of the area digging a whole any deeper than 2" with a plastic trowel is synonymous to trying to dig under the great wall of china with a plastic spork. Alright back to this whole abridged Dolly Sods thing, the "Sods" as it is called is an area of land that was owned by a family named "Dolly" who cleared a bunch of land for their cattle which apparently they called a "Sod". I'm not sure what happened to the family but eventually it became a preserve after the army got tired of lobbing artillery shells during WWII.

Backpackers love it because it's climate and terrain is such that it is more like hiking in the woods of Canada than it is like hiking in the Appalachian mountains. Think alpine meadows. As it has no one to manage the area it's a bit rougher than most state and federal parks are which is a double bladed sword, the wild wild west of the backpacking world. As already mentioned there are no latrines, bathrooms, chamber pots or trash cans all water must be filtered from wherever you can find it and fires are prohibited however everyone lights them because there's no one to stop them but their conscience and those aren't all that loud. A trail is marked in the Sods by the use of a quaint and finicky thing called a "cairn". Rock cairns while blending very nicely with it's surroundings can sometimes blend TOO well into the surrounding rocks. Then there's the problem that rock cairns aren't exactly the works of architectural feats once performed by ancient Romans, nooooooo these are more of the rickety nature where one good fart and the whole thing comes a tumbling down humpty dumpty and all. I'm really making this sound much worse than it is as in the last few years nice legible signs have been added to all trail junctions to help tell you where you are. This doesn't stop you from getting lost in between the junctions however it is a great leap forward in the navigation of Dolly Sods.

As far as maps go here's another kicker, up until about a month ago and keep in mind people have been backpacking the Sods for decades now there wasn't an official map. There are hand drawn maps which I have seen and printed that I thought were a joke until I was talking to some guys at a trail junction and the told me that it's actually pretty accurate and has most of the campsites listed on it. Who would have known. The other map source that is decent is the map created by the Army Corp of Engineers when they were doing their whole "let's clean up all these old unstable artillery shells laying in wait for some poor backpacker to kick by accident and blow themselves up" initiative. Remember how I said that the Army used to play pass the artillery shell in the Sods in the 40's well apparently some didn't explode and some they just sort of lost. So for awhile now they have been sweeping so many feet on either side of the known trails and campsites clearing and detonating these old artillery shells. In doing this they were able to come up with a pretty accurate topographic map, but the only problem with it is that it lacks the important things like where campsites are which tends to be important when you are trying to determine where to sleep for the night. So to navigate in the Sods you have in one hand the hand drawn map to show you campsites and landmarks and in the other hand you have the Army Corp of Engineers map as the reliable topographic map. Apparently you can buy really nice maps of Dolly sods that may actually be a combination of the the Army Corp of Engineers map, hand drawn maps and older park maps but you have to go pick one up at one of the two visitor centers which just so happen to be 30 miles or more from the actual Dolly Sods area in directions opposite from which we came. In a world that made sense you'd think that they would have come up with these maps years ago and made them available for purchase to the public instead of waiting till now. I can completely understand why they wouldn't want to make high quality maps on water proof paper that people could buy and help whoever it is finance the maintenance of Dolly Sods because that would make sense and making sense could be a sign of the end of the world, rapture, the anti-christ, Christians getting sucked up to heaven naked, the sign of the beast, and the movie Poseidon being a blockbuster hit.

The trip itself was good, we took Friday off and drove to Dolly Sods getting there at about 3:45pm. We were on the trail and hiking by 4:30pm under overcast grey skies with rain clouds spitting on us like a wheezing old impudent cobra. Our plan was to was to cross Red River creek on the Little Stonecoal Trail (552) and continue to Dunkenbarger trail (558) taking Dunkenbarger to Big Stonecoal trail and once we passed that junction to camp somewhere around there. The reality was that we passed the trail junction for Little Stonecoal trail thinking that we had come to it too fast and that the split in the trail that we saw was most likely a trail to a campsite. So instead we went up the Red Creek trail to the Big Stonecoal junction. There we crossed Red Creek and started a semi gruelling uphill hike that continued until we hit the trail junction for the Rocky Point trail (Which if you are curious will take you to Lions head). By the time we hit the trail junction for the Rocky Point trail it was nearing 7:15pm and we only had about twenty minutes left of daylight. This doesn't sound that bad when you talk about it however when you've been hiking for a few hours and it starts getting dark and you don't really know how much further you are going to have to go the fact that you could be stumbling around in the dark becomes a much bigger motivator. This wasn't that big of a deal this time as I had hiked this part of the trail twice before and knew that we were close to a camp site. By 7:30 or so we got to the campsite setup and started cooking as the light dwindled to the darkness that can only occur when there are no lights for miles around. Think inky black darkness, darkness so dark it's something beyond black, something where you look out and all you can see is more darkness to the point where you feel that this nothingness goes on forever and you get the idea. You really do tend to forget how dark things can get when you live in a city. In Dolly Sods that night if you turned your headlamp off you would be unable to see anything more than a foot or two in front of you. It really brings home the idea of how someone could get hurt or potentially die if they aren't careful and if nothing else being stuck in the middle of nowhere without a flashlight would be a long cold terrifying night.

Saturday the weather cleared up and we got a good 7-8 miles in hiking up the rest of Big Stonecoal (513) trail stopping to each lunch at the trail junction of Breathed Mountain trail (553), Black Bird Knob (511) and Big Stonecoal Trail (513). After lunch we hiked all of the Breathed Mountain trail segment which turned out to be a nice easy rolling trail with the usual rock pastures and slightly boggy areas. Right at the end of Breathed Mountain trail it slopes steeply down to meet back up with the Red Creek Trail. Something to note here is that if you choose to instead go North (Or left for those like me who are cardinally point challenged.) on the Red Creek trail you will find campsites not much further up. We didn't know that until later in the day so instead we choose to hike south (right) on the Red Creek trail seeing a steady stream of backpackers hiking the opposite direction that we were going. The Red Creek Trail by the time we hit it at the Breathed Mountain trail junction is a continuously downhill trail with stretches of flat terrain so the rest of the day flew by and we found ourselves camped right along the Red Creek creek not 40 yards from the creek crossing on the Red Creek trail. For a change we had plenty of time to setup camp, cool off with a nice freezing dip in the creek make dinner, clean up and relax.

Sunday found us with only about 3-4 miles to hike out to the cars which we were able to do with only one momentary loss of direction where the Red Creek trail zig zagged up a hillside looking more like a stream run off than a trail. The trail on the last day had a few ups but it was mostly a gradual downhill as we hiked towards the Laneville trailhead. There are two very nice little waterfalls which can be seen on the topo map as little areas where the trail creates a nipple of sorts which was where the trail would briefly parallel the ravine created by the stream until you could get to a point where you could cross the the stream. Once you hit the trail junction for Big Stonecoal the trail stays level and tends to be wide enough in parts to make you realize that it was probably an access road at one point in time.

My only recommendations on this trip is that if you are considering hiking all the way up the Red Creek trail from the Laneville trailhead I would try to discourage you as all you are going to be doing is going up hill. If you like to go uphill for 6 miles with very few breaks then all the more power to you however I like to manage the miserableness in my backpacking as much as possible. Also the part of the Big Stonecoal trail that went from the creek up to the trail junction with Rocky Point wasn't all that enjoyable due to it's constant uphill and semi poorly marked trail though truthfully I'm not sure if my feelings on this are slightly influenced because we were hiking in continuously overcast spitting weather with time constraints to get to a campsite before dark. Once you hit the trail junction with Dunkerbarger trail on the Big Stonecoal trail it's a nice and level trail with beautiful meadows, serene pine forests and stream crossings of scenic bubbly streams.

The ride home was uneventful except for the fact that S's brother in law who happens to ship things for his families company was able to navigate us a much better route back. For those wanting to take a note or two and for me who can't remember his own parents birthdays unless they are written down I will document the route we took. From Columbus take 70-E to Cambridge and then take 77-S heading towards Marietta. Pass Marietta and head into West Virginia on 77-S until you get to Parkersburg. At Parkersburg take 50-E towards Clarksburg/Bridgeport and when you get to route 79 go south on 79 towards Charleston. When you get to a junction for 119/33 go east on it and stay on 119/33 until you get to Elkins. Follow 33-E out of Elkins and when you see a sign for 32 go east on it for about 9.5 miles. At some point while on 32-E you will see a little sign that says 'Dolly Sods next right' ignore this sign as the next right isn't the road you want and is still ~3 miles further up. East Laneville road will be on your right and once on it will take you ~20 minutes or so to get to the Laneville trailhead which in true Sods like fashion is not marked. The Laneville trailhead can be found right after you cross a one lane bridge and will be on the left as the gravel road curves right and goes up. Turn into this area and you will see old cabin like structures on your left and a large map welcoming you to Dolly Sods, explaining the do's and don'ts along with a book to sign in on. The other trailhead is the Red Creek Campground which can be reached if you continue further up the road and is something like another 15-30 minutes, I really don't know as the last time I went up that road it was 1:30am I was exhausted.