Here's a little more light-hearted
Daniel Boone National Forest tale. I'm accompanied by one close friend. Our rock climbing "base camp" was high on Hatton's Ridge, seven miles up Indian Creek past the last possible spot to drive & park
any vehicle. We had set-up late Friday (barely before dark) & get surprised by a 5" snowfall at wake-up Saturday morning. It was one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever viewed coming out of a tent, nothing but pristine wilderness & untouched snow as far as we could see from atop a tall ridge in every direction, 360 degrees around. Whew!
Then...we see it. Smoke trailing up into the morning sky from someone
ELSE'S fire. We are mad
and getting madder
, we have busted our humps to get as far away from people, ALL people, as we can possibly get and now we spot their breakfast fire less than two miles away from our own personal slice of
isolationist heaven. We decided we simply HAD to recon the folks who were (almost) as determined & skilled as we were at disappearing into the rugged, rocky hills of Eastern Kentucky.
Early in the stalk we whisper guesses back & forth as to who these people are & how (in the heck) they
found this spot. We were still regularly finding pottery pieces from the last people to be here, hundreds of YEARS before. The relic hunters hadn't yet gotten in this deep. We had never run across a single sign of ANY(modern)BODY in dozens of weekend trips. No trash, no cans, nothing. As we got closer to the smoke, we quit even whispering & focused on our (laughingly limited)
sneaking-Indian skills. But we're getting quite near and
still there is no noise, no voices & no woodsmoke smell in the air? My buddy was the first to solve the mystery & began belly-laughing so loud & hard as to shake the very stillness of the morning. We had, for well over an hour, been sneakin' up on a Hot Spring! We hadn't ever seen it before because the new melting snow was making the steam we mistakenly believed to be smoke! The Hot Spring pooled into a 4 ft. wide rock bowl about 20" deep before the overflow ran into a nearby creek. If you've never soaked your bare feet in warm flowing water in the snowy wilderness while laughing uproariously with a close friend at how very STUPIDLY LUCKY y'all are just to be alive. Then you, my friends, have never stalked a Hot Spring.