Went hiking again today, this time at Chub Trail out west on 44. I think the park is actually called West Tyson. It was probably the toughest trail I've checked out so far-lots of hills and very rocky in places. Very beautiful but very muddy. Enough with the rain, seriously! About 2 hours in, I got to a point where I figured I'd head back before I got completely covered in mud. About 5 minutes after I do, I see these three little boys walking by themselves, heading in my direction. I stop, thinking I'll let the parents catch up with them and let the group get past me on the narrow trail but, when they saw me and started waving their arms like they needed help, it was obvious that something was up. Turned out that they'd wandered off on their own, walkie talkie in hand and had no idea how to get back to the trailhead. Poor things, the walkie talkie was out of range of their parents, they'd dropped and cracked open one of their bottles of water, leaving them with just one between the three of them. The oldest boy kept tearing up (but continuing to walk along at the same time) and the two younger ones, only wearing flip flops in all that mud, had given up and were going barefoot. I couldn't imagine what their parents were thinking, as I chatted with them, sort of shepherding them back toward the trailhead. Luckily, one of their parents met us coming back after we'd been walking about half an hour and, then, these little boys (I'm guessing the oldest was 9) just dissolved. That whole time, they'd done the stiff upper lip thing and held it together even though they'd been wandering, according to one of them, 'for a long, long time. Maybe an hour,' before I ran into them.
There's not really a point to this blog, I suppose, except for the fact that what I usually get out of my hikes is a sense that I'm doing something vaguely exercize-ish and getting to connect with nature and the chance to clear my head after accumulating a week's worth of crap at work. It was kind of nice to feel like there was a little something extra out there this week.
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