May 04, 2015 – Walking Stick

Monday, May 04, 2015 – Big Creek

When Andy turned on the radio at 0800, Dispatch and 118 were having a lengthy discussion, but we could not figure out what was going on.  Dispatch told 118 that he got a phone call from someone saying that other hikers had given someone some of their gear and he was hiking out to Gatlinburg.  Dispatch told 118 to stay on the trail.  118 replied that the next two days are his days off, but Dispatch said they wanted him to stay on the trail anyway. We don’t know what the problem was with the hiker or why poor 118 has to work on his weekend.

Mondays are usually a bit quieter in Big Creek. Here is Andy as we got underway this morning to walk around.

There were no people in the picnic area today that we saw. We did have six campsites occupied this morning. This yellow trillium is in the tent campground.

The ferns are beginning to unfurl.

The three men from Cincinnati in Site 5 are having such a good time that they decided to stay for another day or two.

Spence did not show up for a cup of coffee before we left to walk around the campground, but he did drive up on the Gator just as we finished walking around and chatting with the campers. He drove it down to our site for his cup of coffee after cleaning the toilet building at the campground.

I asked my scale model Andy to stand near these boulders along the campground road, but he was too far in front of them and they appear smaller than they really are, especially the big in back and center. I think it is as tall as Andy.

Our 23^rd anniversary was on May 2, but we don’t leave Big Creek on weekends.  We celebrated today by driving over to Pigeon Forge for a pizza at the Mellow Mushroom.  Down at the entrance to Big Creek, we saw two turkeys sitting on the bridge railing over the creek. As we drove up onto I-40, we saw a small truck pulled over onto the shoulder near what looked like an elk lying on the side of the highway. It was way too big to be a deer. A turkey walked across the road in front of us on the Foothills Parkway, but when it saw us, even though it was already to the middle of the road, it turned around and went back into the woods.

I took my computer and the Verizon Jetpack  and did a send/receive with the email while we waited for the pizza to arrive.  After we ate, I posted a couple of my logs onto my Big Creek Journal blog.  For some reason, the pictures did not copy so I had to paste them in.  It was tedious. Andy got tired of waiting so I did not finish the job.

We stopped in Walgreen’s to get a refill for Andy’s fluoride for his daily treatments. The young girl at the pharmacy asked him if he wanted jail and he replied, “No, I don’t want to go to jail”.  It took several tries, but he finally realized that she was saying the Tennessee version of gel. Of course, it is a tube of fluoride gel.

We spent some time hanging around the bridge over Big Creek after our evening walk around. I walked to the far bank and took this picture of the swimming hole below the bridge. The water below the little waterfall in waist to chest high on adults.  The little waterfall was about two feet high today.

This is the rock wall side of a mountain at the far end of the bridge.

I went over there to look for the orchid-looking flowers I saw a few days ago, but they had faded. I did find this flower I can’t identify.

Andy stayed on the bridge, playing it like a xylophone with his walking stick.

This Virginia Creeper is on a tree in the picnic area.

A group of three young men was just packing up their vehicle after three nights on a loop hike up the Baxter Creek trail and around the Big Creek watershed and back down the Big Creek Trail.  One of them had an amazing walking stick. He said his father had made it a long time ago.  It looked as though a vine was wrapped around it and fused to the branch.  I couldn’t tell if that was the case or he carved it to look like that.

If I had a walking stick like that, I would poke at least one of my eyes out.

As we walked on up the campground road, Andy expressed feelings of inadequacy because I was admiring someone else’s stick.