Tennessee State Park Fun: Natchez Trace State Park

Of all the parks that I am exploring, this is the one that nobody needs directions to. If you live in West Tennessee, you have driven through it hundreds or thousands of times. It is the stretch on Interstate 40 between Jackson and the Tennessee River where the farmland gives way to thick pine forests.  Just take exit 116, and go south. The ranger station is less than five minutes away.

For all the stomping around this state I have done, it is embarrassing to say, but I have only been there a couple of times in my life.  So in trying to come up with a new place for close to home adventures, it is hard to ignore that giant green blob on the map just to the east. We finally got a sunny Saturday a few weeks ago, so Brody and I headed that way. Here are a few observations....

1) The place is gi-normous. Besides the typical State Park campgrounds and cabins, there is an equestrian center, a shooting range, and an archery range. There are 4 lakes, including the 690 acre Pin Oak Lake, some with boat rental facilities. There are 50 miles of hiking trails which include a 40 mile loop with over night back country sites.  There are 50 miles of multi use trails for mountain bike, ATV, or horseback riding (these are essentially old fire roads), and there are 250 miles of dedicated horseback riding trails in the south end of the park.

While a 5 or 6 hour visit to most State Parks will allow you to cover the vast majority of what there is to see, you could go at least a dozen times to Natchez Trace and not cover the same ground twice.

2) The visitors are spread out too. The size of the place allows for easy access to solitude. Even if there are a lot of visitors, there is no real central area for people to congregate. Our visit was late in the morning on a Saturday with about the most ideal weather we ever get here, and for the most part we didn't encounter anyone until late in the afternoon. Yes, there were some birthday parties and we did see a Boy Scout troop toward the last parts of the trail, but compared to other parks I have visited, the crowds were thin. There were plenty of good spots on the bank of Cub Lake to fish, and I didn't see a single boat. The picnic area where I parked, had no cars in the morning, and one other car in the afternoon. 

There may have been two other people fishing on the whole lake.

3) It can be a little navigationally challenging. So the free map that you pick up from the ranger station, is a little hard to read, mostly because there are so many trails and roads that it is hard to pack it all into an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. The muti-use trails all have signs, but there are a lot of them and you really have to be careful not fly past them on the main road. There are parking areas everywhere and they are really hard to spot on the map. When Brody and I set out on our adventure, I could only vaguely discern where the Cub Lake Trail actually began and ended. We parked in a random looking picnic area, crossed the bridge across the lake, and worked our way west through the complex of cabins to eventually find the trail head. There was a sign stating that it was 5.9 miles long and that you needed to carry half a gallon of water per person and plan on 3 to 4 hours to complete it. That seemed a little over the top to me. It was a little before noon. We had two bottles of water and some chocolate chip cookies. I knew we would have lunch a little late but otherwise we would breeze through it. My main concern was that I really could not tell where the trail actually ended, but that worry was a good six miles away. 

The trail followed the lake shore, first south and then back north. Views of the water were plentiful and there was even a really nice back country shelter on the far eastern shore. Toward the end, there were some pretty extreme swampy parts that involved some technical stump jumps, but we emerged onto a road around 2:30. Of course I really had no idea where we were. 

So Brody got his first experience with my personal favorite game  in outdoor pursuits. I call it, "Find the Truck". This was an easy round of it. My favorite episodes of "Find the Truck" usually involve a winter night in on a secluded road in the Smokies. This time we just followed the road for a bit until I recognized the turnoff we had taken that morning, and the truck emerged!

The sign was for a birthday party but it was really appropriate.

So if you haven't been to Natchez Trace in a while, you should definitely give it a visit. Just remember to give yourself a little extra time for getting lost. But in reality, a little navigational uncertainty only helps with the feeling of discovery and adventure. And I have never lost a vehicle yet!

Tennessee State Park Fun: Pinson Mounds

I really don't remember how old I was, but I imagine around 12 or so. One summer morning, when my cousin from Pikeville was visiting, my grandfather took us to Pinson Mounds and turned us completely loose for most of the day. I don't think "helicopter parenting" was much of a term for his generation. Looking back, I guess he stayed in his truck or the museum, but we spent what seemed like the next few hours wandering around the woods in the stifling July heat. I remember honestly not knowing if we would ever find civilization again.

Of course that wasn't my first time going there. During elementary school, every other field trip seemed to take us to Pinson Mounds. The mob of kids would rush through the museum, bound up the stairs to Sauls Mounds, and spend the rest of the afternoon knocking each other off the twenty foot tall jungle gym on the playground (since made much more safe). This was some educational stuff. But soon the field trips and random summer adventures ended, and for probably 20 plus years, I didn't go back.

When Brody was five years old, and really starting to develop some hiking endurance, I re-discovered the place. Our first trip there was in October. After going up Sauls Mound, I wanted to really see how far we could go, so I led us down the Nature Trail, which is about 1.25 miles at most. We had quite the adventure, and for a while again, I wasn't sure if we were going to find civilization. He had a slight tumble down one of the steepest gullies (afterwards he would say that I "saved his life") and we encountered a really bad looking cotton mouth coiled up on the trail at the Earthworks trail junction. I cut a little branch off a tree with my pocket knife and poked the snake until he swam off in the creek. From Brody's perspective, we might as well have fought off a dragon. He still remembers the spot on the trail.

Since that day, we have continued to go back several times a year. It is about 20 miles away from home, so it makes for a quick trip. But besides being close to home, and full of neat historical stuff, it is just a really nice park for several reasons.

1) The trail system is very well developed and really has something for everyone. There are paved trails, gravel trails, dirt trails, and boardwalks. I have a hard time thinking of any other parks in this area with near the amount of varied types of walkways. Most other State Parks are either going to have single track hiking trails, or roads that you share with vehicles.  

Here is the map at the entrance, probably updated around Reagan's second term. But I would take a picture with my phone to be safe.

A WORD OF WARNING: Last weekend, Brody and I tried to go down the Hudson Branch trail, the only trail we had not been on. The trail is marked, but it is closed at the creek bottom crossing. The first bridge is washed out and the other bridges deeper into the swamp look pretty rough. We tried to use the alternate route on the map, but after crossing the pond levee and wandering around in circles for almost an hour, we could not find the trail. I ran into a Park Ranger later, and he said that it had become too expensive to keep that section open, but nobody could remember how long ago that was. If you want to try it, better wait till a very dry season, and bring your swamp boots, and GPS.

The boardwalk is very well maintained, and the Forked Deer River overlook is a great place for lunch. There are massive Cypress trees in the river bottom, some of the largest I have seen. Who knows how they escaped being logged. 

2) The place is a great fitness park. You can wear yourself out until your heart is content. You can ride your bike along the paved and gravel trails, then do a couple of miles of trail running, then run up the 125 steps to the top of Sauls Mound! And you won't be alone, even in pretty bad weather, you still see a lot of folks biking and running. 

These stairs are the only activity that I have ever seen get Brody out of breath.

3) There are always nice views. Yes, of course there is the view from Sauls Mound (the second tallest Indian mound in the U.S.), but one thing that really strikes me about this place is the large amount of open country. You just don't see this amount of large maintained fields in other nearby parks, such as Chickasaw or Natchez Trace. The majority of the trails wind in and out of these open fields. And a couple of years ago, all of the trees were removed off the major mounds and replaced with native grasses. In the spring and fall, you literally cannot take a bad picture. 

You can really go fly a kite here, and not just in the figurative sense.

Bonus Points: What many folks do not realize, is that the park borders State Forestry land. The gates leading from the main road are locked, but on foot, you can wander over into it. Just to the west of the park exit, there is a massive grove of 50 year old poplar trees, evenly spaced with wide grassy paths between them, perfect for mid October colors. I am pretty sure that hiking there is probably legal. And yes, these are the things you discover when you are trying to find a trail that hasn't existed in this century.

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It's September! Don't Sweat It!

Sure, technically we are now in meteorological Fall and astronomical Fall is less than three weeks away, but we all know Fall is an elusive critter. It is hotter outside than it was for most of July, and now the freaking pools are closed. Take heart though, things are changing quick. The poplar leaves are starting to turn yellow, the lily pads are turning brown, and we are seriously listening to people that say "the best offense is a good defense".

Yes, there are a million things to love about the coming fall, but since this is an outdoor blog, I will refrain from talking about Oktoberfest beer and pumpkin spice candles. We might still be a few weeks away from real fall weather, but there is still plenty to do.

1) Time to get back in the woods - For the past three months, if it didn't involve swimming, most outdoor activities were pretty miserable. Now the mornings and some of the afternoons are getting more bearable and the drier weather is making the bugs not quite as bad. I actually went on a trail run this past weekend. Fortunately there were mountain bikers on the same circuit. I thanked them for knocking down all the spider webs.

2) Filling out the calendar - Fall is always a busy time, and the weeks fill up quick. Once you start filling out the dates of football games, fall break trips, hunting seasons, and Halloween activities; the free weekends start looking pretty sparse.  So far I have managed to nail down some dates for a backpacking trip in November and a trail race in October. And remember on the backpacking trips, all of Tennessee State parks as well as the Smokies have gone to an online reservation system for permits. Because everyone else loves fall too (evidenced by the 500 people I saw on the AT last October), reserve your place as soon as possible.

3) Collecting fire pit firewood - In the fall, there is nothing like grilling and eating outside in the late afternoon/early evening.  And there is nothing that completes those afternoons and nights like a good fire pit. Those s'mores aren't going to make themselves. And you don't want to get caught making a wimpy little fire because you are low on firewood. Sure you can buy firewood, but why would you pay $6 for 4 sticks, when you can get it free? You don't need to fell a 100 foot tree with a chainsaw, all you need is a $20 bow saw and some sweat equity. You don't have to have a lot of trees in your yard, just keep your eyes open when you are driving. With the end of the summer storms, free firewood is piled on the side of the road everywhere. I have been "salvaging" limbs off this one blown down tree in our neighborhood for weeks, and nobody has called the police yet! Sure, you look like a deranged lumberjack when you are standing on the shoulder of the road, hacking at a pile of limbs with a saw, but you won't be running to Kroger in the middle of the night to keep your backyard campfire going.

This is barely two or three s'mores worth

So the frost is not quite on the pumpkins yet (and some years it never is), but this is a great time to turn off the TV and start to get outside again. The college football stuff is great, but it can get pretty repetitive. This weekend I heard several very highly paid analyst say about 100 times that Alabama was supposed to have a good football team this year. Who knew?

Say Cheese! Adventures in Outdoor Photography

One of the first digital pictures of our hiking trips, Mt. LeConte 2003

To anyone that knows me, it is very obvious that I am the lead planner/instigator in these outdoor shenanigans, but in addition I have also become the primary photographer for most of my trips. As soon as we get back, everyone wants to see the pictures. Especially in today's social media world, if you don't take pictures, what's the point? Joking aside, I really treasure my outdoor trip portfolio. Good pictures not only help you re-live the trip, but share it with others that were not there.  Even before social media and digital cameras, we always got "doubles" printed at Wal-Mart, and passed them around.

In reality, taking pictures in some of these conditions can be difficult. And typically the more difficult the situation is, the better the photo op. I am by no means an expert, but over many years of slinging off my pack or frantically digging through a cargo pocket for my camera when a good shot arose, I have developed a few ideas.

1) Your phone is the best and worst camera you have. Our phone cameras have become awesome. I remember when I first saw the first grainy pictures and video shot with a flip phone. I remember thinking, "The quality is so crappy. What is the point?" Today, we literally all walk around with the some of the best photography equipment in existence in our pocket. The only pieces that are missing are good optics. However; when it comes to outdoor photography, the main problem with a phone camera is that it is attached to your phone. Your phone costs about $800 to replace. I don't care what kind of LifeProof or OtterBox case you have, if you drop it in a river or off a mountain, it is gone, forever. Also, the money part aside, a working phone can very well save your life in an emergency. My usual rules with phones in the back country are to keep them fully charged, turned off, and well protected. It would be extremely unfortunate if you desperately needed rescuing and your phone GPS died early because you spent too much time Instagraming. And even a third negative for using a phone is that I have never really seen many good tripod attachments, which are usually necessary for group shots.

Now, sometimes I do take my phone only for shorter day hikes. But if it is going to involve a longer time, involve water, or bad weather, it is better to leave them in your pack.   

2) The worst pictures are the ones you don't take, so you need to be able to get to your camera. Most of the time, it really is a pain to dig out a camera, but it is always worth it when you can make it work. My main camera on most trips for almost 10 years or so has been a Canon Powershot Digital Elph. It's just a small digital camera with a really good optical zoom. The downside is that it is not water proof or resistant at all and I really have to keep it in a case and inside a plastic bag to protect it. That makes it quite a chore to dig it out. With my new found hobby of river trips, I decided that I had to get something that I could take pictures with and not worry about getting wet. There are a ton of Go-Pro clones out there, but I choose a Lightdow HD. For $29 off Amazon, it came with the case and all the attachments. I am still experimenting with it, but I like it so far. It fits right in the pocket of my life jacket. I will still carry the Canon for some shots on the "big mountain" trips, but I really think I am going to like the convenience of the little knock off Go-Pro.

Say hello to my little friend!

3) Scale is everything. Pictures of mountains or anything at a distance will never even get close to doing it justice unless you get something in the foreground for scale. It doesn't matter if it is a person, a rock, or a tree branch, you need something to give the main subject depth and scale. Even though you obviously can't control them, clouds make a big difference as well. A mountain overlook with low hanging clouds or even swirling fog banks will make a much better shot than a blue clear sky ever will.

I would like to take credit, but on this early November trip in 2008 near Chattanooga, it was impossible to take a bad picture.

4) Fall foliage is really hard. No matter how good we think our cameras are, they don't come close to capturing what our eyes can. There have been more fall trips than I can count where I thought, "The colors are great. I bet I get some great shots." Then when I got home and really looked at the pictures they almost looked like they were either shot in summer or winter. To get good fall pictures, you have to not only hit the absolute peak time of the color for the trees around you (example, if you are surrounded by oaks, October won't work. If you are surrounded in hickories and maples, November won't work), but you have to hit the perfect light conditions as well. A cloudy morning or afternoon are the best. The more direct sunlight, the less likely the pictures will turn out.

This is a good example of needing to be in the right place. The fall colors only show in the right trees in the right light (October, Appalachian Trail).

5) A person will never act natural if they see you.  I love good action shots. If you line it up right, you also get a good subject to bring scale to the environment as well as capture what you are actually doing vs. posed shots. But you pretty much have to take the picture when no one is looking. That is why good action shots are from behind or above.

This image of me on of Longs Peak only looks slightly more terrifying because there is something to scale the ridiculousness to.

Anyway, with digital photography you can experiment as much as you want, and the more you experiment, the more you learn. When the moment comes though, you want to be ready. There is the old story of how Sir Edmund Hillary explained why most of the shots on the summit of Everest were of Tenzing Norgay (the Sherpa that was with Hillary)...."I wasn't sure if Tenzing knew how to work a camera. And the summit of Everest was not a good place to learn."

If It Ain't Broke....(An Ode to Old Gear)

WARNING: Every story told below pretty much sounds like Christopher Walken's presentation of the watch to young Butch in Pulp Fiction.

Anyone that knows me very well would agree that I am not a fan of spending money.  I tend to hold on to things for a long time, partly because I am kinda cheap, but also I am a pretty sentimental person.  I like it when items have a history.  I am NOT a hoarder.  I only hold onto things that I use and take care of.  Over the years I have accumulated a pretty decent collection of outdoor gear.  But if it is taking up space, I make sure that it gets used, by either me or the latest rookie participant/victim of one of my adventures.  Here are some of my favorite oldies but goodies:

1) Compass - 1996

One night on a family vacation in Gatlinburg, I bought this compass from a store called Acorns. The next day I carried it on a very long day hike with my dad up to Rocky Top and Spence Field.  This compass has stayed in my right pocket on just about every major outdoor trip since. I can count at least nine States. It has saved me from temporary directional uncertainty more times than I can count. 

2) L.L. Bean Knife Edge Pack - 1999

On my 19th birthday, I asked for this backpack. Had I ever been backpacking before?  Of course not! But I had this crazy plan to go on my first trip that December. Why would you go on your first backpacking trip in December? See the above statement about having no experience. Why L.L. Bean? Because they used to really sell a lot of legit outdoor stuff and there was always a catalog laying around my parent's house. Catalogs were these things made out of paper, and you ordered things out of them.  This backpack was with me when I survived that first ridiculously planned backpacking trip.  Although I got a better bag a few years later, this backpack became my loaner bag for any newbie that I could talk into going on a trip. And even today I continue to take this bag on any trips that involve air travel because it just has one single massive compartment (a garbage can with straps).  Most recently it went to Colorado this past summer, and it hauled the heaviest load that I have ever hiked with.

3) CamelBak - 2001

When I was a Junior in college, my friend Andy talked me into becoming a mountain biker and the epicenter of our trips was Land Between the Lakes. I bought my bike from this guy named Bob, who owned Wood and Wave near Grand Rivers, Kentucky. Bob was a retired chemical engineer that transformed an old water ski shop into a legit bike store (just never changed the name). Bob knew his customer service. When you banged up your bike, he typically fixed it for free, right there in the store. As you waited, you typically spent no less than $50. CamelBaks were relatively new then, and I had never seen one. I am sure I bought this one while Bob was truing up a wheel on one of our bikes. Besides coming along on mountain biking and trail running trips, this CamelBak has also served as a quasi day pack of sorts. It has also been on the top of Estes Cone in Colorado and Old Rag in Virginia. This past winter I got a fancy new CamelBak with additional pockets and compression straps.  But I still like my original CamelBak, it is so old that it doesn't even have a pocket for a cell phone.....oh the humanity!!!!

4) Kelty Daypack - 2004

I got this pack as a present at my grandmother's house on Christmas Eve. On the previous year's trip to Colorado, I had summitted LaPlata Peak while carrying my old backpack from high school. Over the past 14 years, this bag has had quite a life. This pack has gone to the summit of Longs Peak, Grays Peak, Torreys Peak, Mt. Evans, and Mt. Bierstadt in Colorado. It has been to the summit of Mt Hood in Oregon.  For two years I used it as a school backpack for all of my graduate school classes. It has navigated the streets of Chicago and Nassau, Bahamas. This pack has served as a beach bag, hauling towels and beach toys in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and the Bahamas. It has spent some 16 hour days at Disney World. It has been on scuba diving trips, deep sea fishing trips, and ski boats on the Tennessee River. The side pockets are a little stretched out, but it is still going strong.

So, since I brought up the Pulp Fiction reference, the question has to be asked. If I lost any of this stuff, would I face off with Vincent Vega, Marsellus Wallace, Maynard, Zed, and the GIMP, just to get it back?  Of course I would!!!  I like my odds.

Pulp Non Fiction: All The Beauty and Truth You Can Stand for $9.99.

I have been wanting to try to write a book for a while now and the ideas for this project came along easy enough:

1) There really are very few books about the Cumberland Plateau.

2) I have a lot of adventure stories about the Cumberland Plateau, and I could mix them in with a lot of other educational facts like history and ecology lessons. Fun stuff!

3) I bet the book will pretty much just write itself.

I was right on the first two points anyway. Two years later, here we are. The really crazy thing is, because I write a detailed story about almost every hike anyway, the content was probably 50% finished before I even began.

I have had so many maps and notes spread out in the dining room that it looked like I was planning an invasion of Crossville.  There has been a cardboard box full of proofs, and drafts, and drafts of proofs, and proofs of drafts, sitting at my kitchen table for the better part of a year. I have named so many Word files and Adobe files that I am going to have to start using exponents. I have seriously worried that the mountains were going to erode into the ocean before I finished. But somehow or other, I got it done.  Here are some of the lessons I have learned along the way:

1) Yeah, it is nothing like writing a blog.  I can’t ever remember working for a month on formatting a blog post or worrying too much with sources. But I will have to give a shout out to my Amazon Overlord for making the process easier.

2) All of those authors that churn out a book or more every year….they don’t have a team of proof readers and editors working behind the scenes, they have an ARMY.  On the final and 708^th review, I had about 78 errors to correct…on a 130 page book.  Is it perfect now?  HECK NO. It is in English. It is legible. I think.

3) It ain’t about the money.  Even I sold 1,000 copies, which is ridiculously unlikely, considering the time I have put in, my profit would work out to be about the hourly minimum wage, in 1795. 

So, in short, if you are looking for a quick-read piece of travel literature that will enrich your life beyond the bounds of your wildest imagination, look no further. It’s available on Amazon (Prime too!!!) at:

https://www.amazon.com/Seem-Have-Been-There-Before/dp/1543196691

Or just search Bill Parnell. I ain’t gonna lie.  It’s pretty cool to 

see your work pop up in an Amazon search.

So if you get a chance, buy a copy, or a few dozen! And don't forget those super positive Amazon reviews! Can you do a six star rating now? I didn’t include a critical review on the back cover, but if I had to write my own it would be something like…..

“Bill Parnell has once again pushed the limits of human artistic achievement. Seem To Have Been There Before possess both the humor of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods as well as the epic plot devices of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, all bound together with Shakespearean prose and really neat maps.”   

Reading Walden: Yes We Can!!!

Sometime in high school, every single one of us was told to turn to ___ page in our American Literature textbook and read a one or two paragraph exert from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”. Let’s be honest, most of us probably didn’t read it. Full disclosure, I loved high school English so much that I still read the same books for fun. But even for an appreciator of classic literature such as myself, when it came to Thoreau, I really didn’t get it. (Of course, never mind the absurdity of exposing 15 year old kids to some of the greatest works of human civilization, and then chastising them for not getting it.) So back in the fall when I read an article that discussed how Walden was Teddy Roosevelt’s and John Muir’s favorite book, I thought, “Hey, I have got to give that Thoreau another shot.” So for $6 on Amazon Prime, I got my copy of Walden and Civil Disobedience. I stuck it in my hunting gear bag, determined to read it slowly over the course of the fall while deer hunting. Because shouldn’t you read a book about being in the woods while you are actually in the woods?  By the end of the season, I still had a good 200 pages to go, so I finally sat down and finished it.  It was a little bit of a challenge in the beginning but soon I loved it so much that I would always have to have a highlighter or pen around to underline passages.  Here are a few observations for encouragement:

1) On the whole, it is actually easy to read.  Yes, there are some confusing tangents, but those are typically tied to cultural references that seemed very appropriate at the time.  He was writing this for an 1850’s audience. So imagine if you wrote something referencing the Kardashians today, wouldn’t it be confusing to a reader in 170 years?  WE HOPE TO GOD SO. 

2) Because there is really not much of a plot, it is easy to pick up and put down.  It is organized into chapters, but it really isn’t necessary to even read them in order.  Although the last part, titled Conclusion, should be read at the end. 

3) Don’t be surprised if it starts to affect your behavior. The simple living message got me to cut off my cable and cancel my satellite radio. Now sure, I still have HBO GO and unlimited cell phone data for music streaming, but I had those before!  I mean, I am not becoming a total Neanderthal.   

I will say it was funny that I made my first visit to Ikea after finishing the chapter called “Economy”. As I walked through the city of furniture, I kept thinking about Thoreau’s anti-furniture rant.  He only had three chairs, “One for solitude, two for company, three for society.”

Anyway, for $6, it is worth giving it a shot.  Stick it in your bag and bring it out when you are waiting in a deer stand, or an airport, or a doctor’s office.  At worst, you will at least look pretty smart.  At best, no matter the outcome of your initial activity, you can at least say, “Well, I did read five pages of Thoreau.” And you have won the day!