The LBL Hike
Day One

On September 18th, myself, Steve Willis and his father O.W. left for the Land Between the Lakes in western Kentucky to hike The North-South Trail. These next few posts will be about that hike and everything that happened, and didn't happen on it.

We left at about 7 am and there was talk of rain but Mother Nature first looked like she was going to give us a break as we saw two rainbows that morning (one a double one) and patches of blue skies. But as we know Mama can throw us a curve once in a while and the farther west we went the heavier the rain got. We stopped for gas near Ft. Campbell, Ky and watch a giant C-5A Galaxy transport jet make its final landing approach. That brought memories back for me from my time in 1973-74 when I spent 16 months stationed there in the Army. After that we were on our way south again.

About an hour and a half later we finally got to LBL and got our backcountry permits at the North Welcome Station and left my truck behind to go to the South Station where we would begin. Just as we began to walk toward the trailhead Mother Nature unloaded on us but we marched on even though things got soggy in a hurry.

It stayed that way for most of the day but it didn't bother the deer, which were out in numbers. We walked up on one forkhorn buck who stood by the trail to figure out what we were before ducking for the trees. A little later a six-pointer and four does headed for the trees and shortly after that we walked up on a doe in the middle of the field getting some tasty trees in the green up grass.

We didn't start walking till 1:30 and we had 11.2 miles to get done before dark so we pushed pretty hard. It was made even tougher by the muddy path but that was okay....I wasn't after anything easy. We finally made it to our first shelter at about 7:30 pm. These shelters were different than I expected, being made out of sections of large drain pipe with pea gravel inside. But they were dry and just being able to take it easy made things better. I fixed myself some freeze-dried lasagna (which really went down well) and crashed in the sleeping bag. I didn't sleep that well though for a couple of reasons. One was a pack of coyotes that serenaded us all night and owls that were hootin' and hollerin'. I still don't know what that was all about.