I’m still honing my compass navigation skills. I navigated pretty accurately through the woods to a landmark on the south side of Hillfield Road. Fred Bear was with me, so I do have a witness! I was off by roughly 75 feet over a distance of about a quarter mile. That isn’t great, but to be fair, I just estimated my azimuth because I knew it was a short distance. It’s still not terrible, since we had to navigate around some patches of thick undergrowth. In a real world situation, you’d set your sights on something that would be hard to miss, like a road or stream bed.
After my short navigation experiment, we set out to follow the trail down to Hunters Creek and back the the terminus on Hillfield. The trail was in pretty bad shape and it was hard to follow. I lost it and had to backtrack a few times. There were places where the blazes were either non-existent or confusing. I’m not sure if we’ve lost blazes or if the trail is just so covered in leaves it’s difficult to see a trail when the blazes are insufficient. I hate that the new trail and the old trail crisscross each other in so many places. It’s easy to switch trails. Of course, if you do follow the old trail, it will bring you back to the new trail in less than 100 meters.
Towards the end of our hike, it was dark and I lost the trail where the trail we were on comes pretty close to another section of the trail. In my search for the trail I was trying to follow, I found the other trail, and we ended up hiking out on a different route than I had planned. It did short-circuit part of our hike, but mostly I feel like a bit of a failure when I can’t follow a trail that I actually know pretty well.
I highly recommend the south side trail to anyone who wants a scenic and hilly hike, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you to take some kind of GPS to help you orient yourself if you lose the trail. Also, I don’t think I recommend night hiking on that trail, for now.
