Herman Creek, Jul 25th

A.K.A the overnight that was not. For several weeks, Val and I were itching to go out and spend a night in the forest. Since our schedules this summer has been pretty tight, we were having a hard arranging some free time so in an almost desperate moment, we picked up a weekend and place to go spend one night. We needed the exercise and the relaxing outdoor activity. With that, we fixed our aim in Herman Creek. It’s close to town, you can go as far as you want as there’s multiple campsites everywhere and there’s plenty of water sources. It was a no brainer for us. They only thing we were not counting on was rain. Since the summer had been pretty dry and warm we almost didn’t look at the weather forecast up to the very last minute, and even then, the chance of rain didn’t dissuade us. So we got up, drove to the trailhead, got our packs on and started hiking up aiming to get to Cedar Swamp and spend the night there to then come back the same way or do a slightly larger and harder loop by coming down via Nick Eaton Ridge. We noticed that, on our drive there, we passed a rain front that was quite short so we thought we would get that for a bit and it would clear after that (which btw was the same thing noted on the forecast). As we were marching up, the rain started. It wasn’t hard but a constant drizzle. Enough to get you wet but not enough to make you turn around and change your plans. With that, I covered my camera (hence no pictures) and pushed towards our destination. Given we had our packs on our backs and hadn’t done any training hikes, we did pretty well as we got to Cedar swamp early in the afternoon. We saw a good campsite that was already taken by a big group with a tarp so it wasn’t very inviting for us at that point. Just for kicks, we decided to continue going up and check if there was other campsites further up. As we did, we noticed the rain coming and going but not stopping. It was not looking very promising. We started to doubt whether we would find a good campsite and neither wanted to deal with setting up and cooking in the rain. Furthermore, the forecast for Sunday did look less promising. Then we walked out of the forest into a meadow that is right north of Mud Lake and leads to it. At that same time, the rain started much harder and went from a drizzle to actual rain. We stopped, looked at each other, tuned around and started hiking back. Since we were already wet and didn’t want to deal with setting up in the cold, we just marched our way down, non-stop all the way back to the car, went home, took a hot shower and had a nice dinner… So the backpack ended up being a 17 mile hike with 3900’ elevation gain with fully loaded packs. Not bad for the lack of training.

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