Post Your Mini-Trips and Short Outings

[ippon]

Hiking the Uintas 80 mile skyline trail is on our bucket list. That's interesting how it's one of the few east to west running mountain ranges in the country. They look awesome on Google Earth.
Have you taken trips higher up in the tundra when the snows melted ? The abundance of alpine lakes and high passes look gorgeous. Only downside I've read about is that the biting flies and mosquitos are wicked during the summer.

We went on a couple of overnighters the last two weekends. First we went on the Benton MacKaye Trail in the Big Frog / Cohutta wilderness with another couple. Pretty easy hike through lots of ferns and streams, about 8 mile overall out and back.
Found a really nice campsite by a stream with plenty of room for hammocks. I slept in my WBBB and set up a grand trunk ultralight for our friends to use and relax in.

Last hike was just the wife and myself. We hiked the Bartram Trail along the Trimont Ridge to Wayah Bald, NC, in the Nantahala N.F. camped at 5000' in our new zpacks tent. Brought the GTUL along for a relaxing seat while having dinner and breakfast. Even in the summer you still get some really nice open views on the eastern slope of Wayah. It was about an 8 mile total out and back, and the elevation gain on this one was, I think 1500' over 3 miles , which for our out of shape butts was quite a doozy.. but we're stronger now because of it and eager for more!

I'm at work on my phone and it's not letting me add pictures. Give me a minute to figure this out..IMG_20230529_095740528.jpg forgive me, i've been out of the forum world for awhile.
IMG_20230528_181047082.jpg

[Shug]

I would reckon a 2 night trip is a quasi-mini trip. On the North end of the Superior Hiking Trail.
Nice to be in the woods with no snow. Plenty of skeeters though. But I think I got on their nerves more than they got on mine.
Whooooo Buddy))))
Shug

[sideshowraheem]

Nice mini trip ippon! That picture of the clouds rolling in is fantastic.

Shug you caught the same skeeters we did last week! I had a thermacell going on our hikes next to my kid and didn’t have any bug complaints as a result. Those things work great. Was also surprised to see the creek as full as it was. Thank god we had a wet winter because we haven’t had any rain the past month at least it seems like.

[Bdh96]

20230610_195520.jpg20230610_195531.jpg20230610_195343.jpgOur trip to Rock Cut State Park was rescheduled due to some serious inclimate weather, so we decided to do a quick hang this last weekend at Weldon Springs State park in Illinois. Definitely my favorite park to hang, we stayed close to the car due to the further sites being taken but we ended up backpacking in and enjoying the quick trip.

Well, I should say I enjoyed the quick trip, my daughter who is almost an adult ended up having an ant in her hammock that she could not find and it freaked her out so she could not sleep. About 2 in the morning, I get the knock on the tarp and informed that she was going to finish her night in the car... HAHAHAHA That poor ant, she probably squished it without knowing. I also had a few ants in my hammock, but they were easily persuaded to leave.

Maybe I'll use Permethrin on her setup and stop that from happening in the future. Does anyone else have any other ideas - I'll post this question elsewhere to keep this forum clean? I've never had these issues with the fully enclosed bug net with our ENO hammocks so maybe it was just the area we were in. Not sure. (Current hammocks - Dutchware Chameleon with matching Bugnet and Superior Hammock with matching Bugnet)

I also have figured out that my experiment with a continuous ridgeline is mostly over, I think I'm going to take extra hanks of rope for those ridgeline ties and utilize that for my tarp when the weather is 100% for rain. That is until I get a new tarp that is a little larger.

LOVE seeing everyone else's trips!!! Keep posting

[Pennsy Camp and Canoe]

Here's a "1 minute short" of our overnight on the Minister Creek Trail. My wife, Laurie; my sisters Erin and I.

https://youtube.com/shorts/GxHGFNjdZn8?feature=share

4 hammocks, no rain, Erin's 1st backpacking trip, Molly's 2nd. Erin is an experienced day hiker in Arizona, Pennsylvania was a big change for her lol

[vermeire]

Boy child (15) and I did a one night shakedown of some new gear this past Sunday. He got a tarp & underquilt for Christmas and we both got new straps and set up a new tarp ridgeline system ala Dave Canterbury. We had to resort to plan B-2 to find a location but we succeeded.

The trees we selected were really too far apart; straps were tighter than they should have been. I have a fixed ridgeline so my hang was ok but my son was cocooned most of the night. That's why I call it a shakedown. I'll make the same trip with my daughter (16) next week but we will hang in a slightly different spot.

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[Crazytown3]

Vermeire that looks pretty good! Those hammock ridgelines do help, plus you can hang stuff on them. Your son is smiling, so it must not have been too bad .

[vermeire]

Daughter and I this week; a few hundred yards from where my son and I were. We found much better trees though. And I set up porch mode. It was really an attempt to keep my tarp from being flappy and it worked. I need to add a toggle or small biner to my ridgeline to keep the center of my tarp lifted to match the edges. It sags so the sides flap...

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[ippon]

Looks like you're getting some solid shakedown hikes done! Seems like every trip we do is a shakedown because we're always learning something new or a better way to do something.

We planned a two nighter this past weekend to shakedown some new gear in the rain and to reacquaint ourselves with rain hiking and camping.. ended up staying just one night because we finished the route early because I didn't really plan enough milage on the route.. but it was great, we were out there moving our bodies and using our gear in the wet and that's what we wanted.

Hung the WBBB and my 10x12 tarp and let my wife try it out for a bit. She's been a tenter the decade we've been together, but now she's full on gung ho into getting a hammock setup.

We slept in the tent but she is super excited to get into hammock sleeping soon when I can get more research time in on selecting all the pieces of gear she'll need.. its been fun listening to her ideas and what she wants in her setup.. she's going to end up having gear ten times nicer and newer then mine 😂

The fire flys were absolutely banging. I'd never seen anything like them on such a large scale and so many different unique species all doing their separate shows. Wow. i didn't get any footage of them it's something you just have to experience. We saw bioluminescent worms in the river too, never seen that before, probably becusee most of my backpacking is in the winter months. Highly recommended.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BRmVN17N3pw

[Hang Williams]

Had an uneventful overnighter to a north Georgia Trout stream. I like having a 15 lb pack (compared to the 40 lb pack I'm anticipating for my 8 day wind river trek at the end of August), but the bugs (found 2 ticks after we got back) and heat are practically unbearable this time of year down here so I'm probably just going to wait it out until October.

The excitement of the trip was on the stream itself; running into 3 hornet nests.