The Hiking Adventures of Gadget & Goose

The icicles (look behind our heads) lined the rocks the whole way up the trail. On New Year's Day, we cooked up a fantastically delicious lunch of cubed steak with black-eyed peas, collards, and other fine Southern staples. 'They' say that every leafy green eaten on New Year's Day is a dollar earned in the new year, with every pea equating to one cent. We packed up our winter gear and headed north, blissfully hoping that each layer of clothing we wore would follow the old peas & greens New Year's superstition and bring something prosperous into 2016. Wagon Train Trail spurs off the summit trail for the highest peak in Georgia, Brasstown Bald (elevation 4,784 feet). I wish we would have discovered this trail much sooner. All the times over the years that Gadget and I have walked the summit trail (and paid the $5/person entrance fee at the parking lot), we were fools for not checking out this section of the park. I feel an undeniab...

Gadget, Lily & I hopped in the car on a cool, clear Sunday and drove up to Clayton, Georgia for some pre-Christmas hiking. Holcomb Creek Falls Trail is on a rough & bumpy forest service road, so if you're in a car, count on a slow, enjoyable ride through the forest. FS-86 gets closed to vehicles sometimes when the road washes out -- something Gadget & I discovered a few months ago when we planned to hike Three Forks Trail in the same area, but the road was closed, so we had to turn around. Folks, a map is impearative when you're riding these forest service roads in the North Georgia mountains. Phone service is non-existent out in these stickes, and a good ol' paper map can help get you where you're going if you hit a road closing and need to take a detour. Of course, my map reading skills are that of a fourth grader, so if all else fails, bring along a human GPS -- I bring my Gadget.  A bridge across Holcomb Creek serves as a viewing platform for t...

Every weekend, if not sooner, the urge hits to be away from people and into quiet bliss. On the weekend, I want to be out exploring nature, running my hands over the trees, smelling the wildflowers, feeling the crunch of leaves beneath my feet. Most particularly, on the weekends, I crave mountain vistas -- to the point that my loved ones likely think I'm shady because I visit the mountains more than I visit them.   But sometimes, our adult lives milk us dry of the want to travel long distances by the time Friday rolls around, so... we explore locally. Lucky for us, we live in a college town that has quite a few options for hiking. Granted, there's a lot of give and take for me and Gadget when we hike locally -- there's no two-hour drive involved as with our mountain hiking, but obviously, solitude and silence are harder to find in a park that lies smack dab in the middle of a city nicknamed "Little Atlanta".  Despite the contstant reminder that we weren...