Big South Fork, KY

My girlfriend and I went down here to do some backpacking. The Big South Fork Natioanal River and Recreation area is a great place for some paddling, hiking, biking, or horseback riding. It's a good 5 hour trip from Indianapolis, which isn't bad. Until this trip I've only been down there paddling. The river has some good sections of class I & II rapids, which is about all I've had the balls the take my 14 ft kayak into as of yet. There are some sections that allow some more challenging waters, however. On this trip we went down to hike some of the trails. We started at Station Camp and made our way south to Leatherwood Ford. There is a road and foot bridge that can be used to cross the river at this point. From there we hiked north to Angel falls. We camped by Angel falls the second night and it rained from evening to morning. The night before we had enjoyed good weather and a fire. Nothing but hanging out in the tent on this second night. The river had risen quite a bit over the night when we awoke. We spent another day hiking up on top of some of the bluffs over looking the river. The third night we camped a mile or two inland from the river and again had a fireless night. It didn't rain much this night, just a little drizzle, but enough to make it hard to get a fire going with the crappy wood that was available around our campsite. We were going to stay another night, but opted to hump the last 12 miles out on the fourth day to get back to the car. It was nice and sunny again as we hiked out. We had originally planned to cross back to the car from the other side of the river at Station Camp. With the rain and the river level raised we decided to back track instead of running into the possibility of taking a little swim to get back across the river. It's good we did too, because when we got back to Station Camp the river was high enough that crossing could have been a little treacherous and definately would have been very wet. All in all it was a nice few days though; we got in about 30 miles of hiking and I got to see the area from the trail instead of the river.

Shirley Creek

John and I met at the horse camp around 1:30. I had a couple beers on the way down and we pounded some whiskey before we left. I was a little tooled before we started hiking. We went in about 2.5 miles and set up camp under some pines. We kept hitting the whiskey for the rest of the night with a nice big fire. It didn't get too cold that night, maybe high twenties. We had to sleep the whiskey off until about 11:00 the next morning. We both had about 2 ounces of water left. We hiked down the the stream bed, but it was bone dry. We had camped on top of Luke Knob back in December and there had been some water on the southeast slope. There was some water there again, luckily, maybe a spring or something. We cooked up some eggs, relaxed for a while and hiked back out the way we came in. Hopefully the next time we get out it'll be starting to warm up and get green. Probably should bring less whiskey next time too.