BTA HQ- Day 77

  Mid-day today, we stopped in at the Buckeye Trail Headquarters in Shawnee, OH. I got to see two old friends, and met two staff members I had not previously known. We did pictures with the ones I know. Andrew Bashaw, the Executive Director, is on the far right. Next to him is Richard Lutz who is now the Buckeye Trail GIS Coordinator. I've known Richard a frightening number of years! The critter on Denali's shoulder is Todd T. Toad, the trail toad. He's seen a lot of trails! It was a lot of fun to visit with them.

I liked that there are blue blazes in the sidewalk to the building.

We had hiked a little bit in the morning before we went there. We had to use our garbage bags to get across another creek. It was quite wide and pretty. You'd think it would have a name, but apparently not.

In the afternoon, we walked another six miles of trail. There were lots and lots of trees down. Nothing we couldn't get through, but we didn't manage to even make quite 2 mph. We also had to do two more fords, one of which was fairly deep. Those chew up some time. There was a lot of ice that became slush later in the day. It was 12 degrees when we left the trailer this morning, and 45 at the warmest part of the day. So we also had to shed some layers of clothing as the day progressed.

Just at the end of the day we passed through this section. But thankfully, the machine operators had already all gone home for the night.

We did finish before dark, but not by much. We were pretty disappointed that we didn't get double digit mileage, but we have high hopes for tomorrow. Actually, we did hike more like 12 miles, but some of those didn't count. We missed one turn, and then we also could not get past a fallen tree on a road with the car, so we had to walk an extra mile + to get to our starting point.

Miles today: 9.8. Total miles so far: 986.9.

See Boch Hollow