Bald Rock, Cheaha State Park

…you can see forever. Or so it seemed from the top of Cheaha Mountain, Alabama’s highest point at over 2700 feet. Yes, folks, we’re not in Florida here: a side trail, if you will, a diversion for a good cause: a weekend spent with the Alabama Hiking Trail Society at their Annual Conference at Bald Rock Lodge, Cheaha State Park in north-central Alabama. These folks are doing their best to provide the citizens of Alabama with a network of hiking footpaths, and in doing so to connect the Florida Trail with the Appalachian Trail. The Pinhoti Trail, blazed with turkey tracks, passes through the park, so we had an opportunity on a guided outing to plunge down the side of the mountain from Bald Rock to Blue Mountain Shelter. I’m glad I brought my hiking stick. With no leaves on the trees, the views are incredible.

From the lodge, a broad boardwalk makes the view from the top accessible to all ages and abilities; as we plunged down the rugged Bald Point Trail, my knees felt the elevation loss and my brain kept saying ‘what goes down, must come up!’ Tiny white wildflowers and bluets peered from beneath the cover of oak, hickory, and beech leaves on the forest floor; a spring trickled across the trail. We reached the Pinhoti Trail after a half mile of sheer downhill, and continued downhill to a streambed to the access trail to the shelter. It’s much like an Appalachian Trail shelter, with a cooking shelf and two tiers of sleeping-plush stuff for backpackers! While I’m tempted to try the Pinhoti sometime, I couldn’t help but think of how varied the vegetation (not the elevation) would be in Florida on the same length of hike. I think I’ve gotten spoiled.

The Conference was well-attended and provided some excellent workshops, including a don’t-miss discussion of Alabama wildflowers by Carolyn Dean and the recounting of a PCT thru-hike by our own 500-miler Dan Bedore, who plans to finish off the Florida Trail in bits and pieces. The AHTS crowd is a solid group of hard-core trail builders and maintainers who are building on their dream; after five years, I’m pleased to see how well they are doing as an organization. Keep it up, guys!

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Diversions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.