Flooded! - Day 80

  Yesterday's 1.3 inches of rain made a pretty big impact on today's hiking. We are now battling mud and swollen creeks. In fact, we had to find an alternate route to our start because a state highway was flooded for a long distance and closed.

You can see how far out of its banks this creek is.

Our verse for the day included the phrase, "Remove the obstacles out of the way of my people." Perfect!

And, we were happy to find very few fallen trees to get around today. That made progress much easier. We gave thanks at every bridge, especially road bridges, given the flooding. This, and the picture above, is Mud Fork.

This was our hardest crossing. The culvert had washed out (not recently). That's a 24 inch pipe, by the way.

And we had to use the bags to get across. One of mine leaked. It didn't really matter, since I went in mud over the top of the other shoe a few steps later. And was in mud most of the rest of the day. Frankly, I was a muddy mess when we finished. That will be our new normal for a while. Maybe until April. There is a lot of road walk coming up soon. We won't be too sorry to not be slip-sliding-slopping in the Ohio clay.

Small goodies tickled our fancy. Green moss, decorated with a few new snowflakes.

And an orange fungus with dinner-mint green lichen!

We could have done more miles, but we couln't have known that before we did them, and the logistics made it too hard to add on more today.

Miles today: 9.2. Total miles so far: 1008.3 Over 1000! and the pile of Ohio maps to go is smaller than the pile I have done.

See Transition Day