Shawnee State Forest - Friday

Friday, we hiked the 18 miles from Camp 2 to Camp 6. See map. The day didn't have a great start, because the rain soaked my clothes that were drying under a tarp. I warmed up to a decent temperature after the first hill. It got pretty nice later in the day, and it didn't rain in the afternoon. Here is a nice hemlock grove we came through.
Gorgeous hemlocks. (Photo from Andrew Irwin)

A beautiful waterfall through the hemlocks. (Photo from Rich Wathen)

A pretty stream Friday afternoon. (Photo from Andrew Irwin)

This crossing was tricky because the log you had to jump on was slanted, wet, and pretty high up. (I don't know why they cut it in the first place.)

Crossing the creek. (Photo from Andrew Irwin)

Goodyera

Rich

This is a log that Andrew got to know intimately. It was fairly slippery.

We were lucky that there were lots of downed logs for creek crossings. The major creeks were almost uncrossable without a bridge or a long log. We had to detour twice to avoid deeper creeks.

One challenging aspect of all the rain was ascending and descending steep, muddy slopes. Here we are descending a muddy slope. Extreme caution was required.

Camp 6 was one of the prettiest campsites that I have ever stayed at. It was in a hemlock grove and beside two rushing streams. (But still up high enough.) Technically, the camp was across the creek, but this site suited us just fine.

The firewood was still wet from the half inch of rain on Friday, but we still managed to get a fire started. That really made the evening nice. We could cook our meals and just warm up beside it. It was a clear night, so I slept in my hammock. It got below freezing, but I slept pretty well.

Ready for bed. (Photo from Rich Wathen)